Mobile testimony in the information age: The powers of travel reviews

Abstract

This article takes the proliferation of user-reviews on travel-planning websites as its empirical lens to explore some relations between mobility, affect and testimony. The aim of this article is twofold. First, the article considers what travel reviews have the capacity to do and how they perform in multiple ways. By moving beyond understandings that prioritize the representational status of travel reviews, the article considers how these narratives have an even greater capacity to intervene within the affective realm of life. With this in mind, the article moves forward to consider how these reviews might be imbricated within, and redraw assemblages of politico-economic power that are contingent on these affective relations. Second, the article considers how these reviews might also reveal something about the body’s capacity to affect and be affected by the physical event of travel. The final part of the article addresses this issue by considering the relationship between affect and testimony.