‘Come support the locals!’: mediating peripheral spaces on Google maps via user-generated content

Abstract

New media platforms offer diverse modes of mediation of every day and tourist places and communities. Spatial social media now augment older forms of mediation, partly by enabling contributions from ‘ordinary’ users, who create and share spatial discourses. This study examines the discursive construction of peripheral places, produced through user-generated content. Employing qualitative methodology, we sample and analyze 1,053 texts, shared on Google Maps in southern regions of Israel. The key conclusions suggest that compared to traditional media discourses depicting peripheral spaces in Israel, the findings demonstrate a shift from homogeneous depictions to more diverse and multilayered ones. Digital affordances result in more actors and stakeholders partaking in discursive construction, including private and institutional local players, visitors and tourists. Theoretical contributions are offered to the field of digital placemaking, by considering the subjective, evaluative and ideological layers that augment geographical data digital maps provide (‘bottom-up’ perspective), and to the fields of study of marginalized peripheral and rural communities and tourism crisis in peripheral (post-Coronavirus) locations.

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“… 19 , 20 In other words, these map services now make use of user-generated content to bring meaning, information and understanding of places and spaces. 21 Therefore, we summarise the following trend. (GIS) Trend #1: Spatial data providers and map data services are increasingly augmented with user-generated content including objective descriptive data as well as subjective individual perceptions of environments and services.…”

“… (GIS) Trend #2: Spatial data providers and map data services are offering spatial information with increasing fidelity resulting in real-world places being depicted on maps with increasing precision, levels of detail and real-world information. Together with user-generated content such as customer reviews being embedded in map services, 21 and the map data becoming available in higher fidelity, information about a specific geospatial entity is being recorded with increasing levels of detail. Instead of defining a spatially situated entity as a building, a park or a road, information with varying levels of granularity is being recorded and attached to these entities.…”

“…Together with user-generated content such as customer reviews being embedded in map services, 21 and the map data becoming available in higher fidelity, information about a specific geospatial entity is being recorded with increasing levels of detail. Instead of defining a spatially situated entity as a building, a park or a road, information with varying levels of granularity is being recorded and attached to these entities.…”