Maps, volunteered geographic information (VGI) and the spatio-discursive construction of nature

Abstract

This paper interrogates the role that spatial media such as maps and Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) play in the construction and mobilisation of representations of nature. Drawing on poststructural political ecology, critical cartography, and GIScience, this article engages maps and VGI as discursive mechanisms that solidify and convey meanings and representations of nature tied to broader strategies of commodification. Particularly, we explore how spatial media reproduces and legitimises discursive strategies that rationalise the reconciliation of economic development and conservation through nature-based tourism by producing new ways of nature commodification. Drawing on evidence from Patagonia-Aysén, Chile, this paper examines the intersections between the discourse of nature encoded within institutional tourist maps and advertisements, and within the VGI platform for travellers, TripAdvisor. This illustrative case shows, firstly, how tourist maps and advertisements have contributed to normalising a discursive construction of nature as pristine, grandiose, sublime and wild that has not only secured aesthetics as ontological qualities of nature, but also as embedded values that protect ‘nature’ as a commodity to consume. Secondly, our findings evidence that TripAdvisor emerges out of this context as content that mobilises individual perceptions of and narratives about Patagonian nature that is already mediated by this dominant discourse. This dynamic suggests that VGI constitutes a new form of discursive power that digitally reproduces and mobilises a dominant discourse of nature, (re)producing what we term ‘discursive digital nature’.

Keywords

• VGI
• Digital representation of nature
• Discourse of nature
• Poststructuralism
• Critical GIScience