Placemaking ‘experiences’ during Covid-19

Abstract

This article explores the ways in which, during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, AirBnb’s successful place-based Experiences product was reimagined as a live online offering, marketed to would-be tourists living under ‘stay at home’ orders. Using online ethnographic and interpretive analysis of these new virtual experiences, we highlight a series of core placemaking strategies employed by hosts of the once in-situ experiences to show how they reemerge as interactive digital placemakers. In doing so, we elucidate how live, multimedia digital experiences become part of an evolution in the creation of ‘placemarkets’ that are now fundamental to both global mobility and globalized commercial exchange in the experience economy. Beyond the technological features used for these placemaking experiences, we find that the experience hosts and their manifold strategies to substantively engage participants – particularly through igniting their senses – are at the crux of digital placemaking; it is the affective labor of the hosts that most contributes to experiencing emplacement.

Keywords

Affective labor AirBnb Covid-19 digital placemaking embodiment experience economy mobility studies tourism virtual travel

A growing focus on curating experiences-for-sale, as part of the burgeoning ‘experience economy’ (Pine and Gilmore, 1998), has led to innovations in travel and tourism, wherein digital platforms increasingly help people learn about and purchase experiences based on geographic location. A standout example is the travel portal AirBnb, which has disrupted the travel industry and grown to a nearly 100 billion valuation (Carville et al., 2020) by selling the ability to ‘live like a local’ (Polson, 2018). In 2016, AirBnb expanded its reach beyond lodging, launching a product called ‘Experiences’ – bookable excursions hosted by ‘locals’ that range from touring thrift stores in Brooklyn to visiting an onsen in rural Japan. Seemingly targeted at the same travelers who would consider booking Airbnb’s accommodation offerings, Experiences promises unique insights into destinations through contact with local residents – something beyond a typical visit to the common tourist site.

In early March 2020, when Covid-19 was declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization, travel and tourism were swiftly halted along with other economic activities that required being in close proximity to others. AirBnb swiftly adapted its Experiences product by reaching out to successful hosts in a number of destinations and – according to the hosts we interviewed in this study – offered to assist in reworking their Experiences to be digitally mediated and delivered interactively through the video communications platform, Zoom, and to train them on the technology (software, use of mobile cameras, etc.). The product came to life just as travelers were beginning to wonder, as an article in National Geographic summarized, ‘what…to do when the next destination is a short hop to the kitchen or a long weekend in the living room?’ (Brown, 2020, para 1). A new category called ‘Online Experiences’ (referred to henceforth as ‘OE’) was added to the offerings on the AirBnb website with the tagline, ‘a new way to travel from home.’¹ The initial collection of two dozen or so OE listed in April grew to over 200 by late May, ranging in price but typically selling for around US$20 each. Offerings spanned making sangria with drag queens in Lisbon, cooking with a pro chef in Northern Thailand, and a very popular live tour following an 18th-century ‘plague doctor’ through Prague. Although some focus more on a general activity than specific location (e.g. Olympic athletes teaching success secrets, or artists leading drawing exercises), most OE are marketed around a cultural attribute associated with a given destination (e.g. pasta-making in Italy, flamenco dancing in Spain).

In the digital ethnography that follows, we show how the creation of interactive digital experiences represents both a particular response to the perceived market for maintaining connection to other places while travel and co-present interaction halted during the Covid-19 quarantines and broader efforts to build on the ways that placemaking has become key to the sale of experiences in the new economy. We first map out a digital placemaking framework that combines social relations, communication, embodiment, and personal and shared experience and then conduct participant/observation of OE to explore how and whether placemaking occurs. Notably, although AirBnb did not offer any of its original (apparently ‘off-line’) Experiences for sale during the pandemic, it still created an entirely separate page of the website for its new OE. During this time, the original Experiences page remained, but redirected visitors to the new page. The segregation of OE from Experiences seems to indicate the company’s belief that the ‘real’ experiences (needing no designation) occur co-presently in shared physical spaces, despite the many ways AirBnb and its hosts attempt to portray the online products as ‘authentic’ experiences. This tension is navigated by hosts as they wield a variety of strategies to digitally emplace participants; we categorize these as narrative, locative signs, sensory cues, formal properties, and virtual sociality. Our findings stress that it is the affective labor of the host, rather than any specific technological affordance, that allows OE to thrive as a way of engaging places in meaningful ways.

Digital placemaking and embodied experience

Drawing from concepts of space as a social product (Lefebvre, 1974) and place as being constituted through social relations (Massey, 1994) and, specifically, intense and dynamic forms of communication (Caldas-Coulthard and Iedema, 2008), researchers have considered how networked, geo-locative, and mobile media create new forms of space and place. For example, de Souza e Silva (2006) describes the ‘hybrid spaces’ that can arise when the use of mobile technologies brings online communities into what was previously considered ‘off-line’ space, while studies of mobile gaming find that such playful practices can lead to new forms of emplacing oneself and of performing place through engagement with ‘hybrid realities’ (Hjorth and Richardson, 2017). Others have considered how locative and digital media help people develop a ‘sense of place’ – a concept connected to feeling that one ‘belongs,’ whether by using geo-locative media to feel comfortable, in-the-know, and aware of surroundings when wending one’s way through unknown places (Halegoua, 2020) or by facilitating face-to-face interactions that enable mobile people to connect with a social scene in foreign cities (Polson, 2016). Yet another area of scholarship has focused on how a sense of place can be created by having a meaningful online experience (Plunkett, 2011) and undertaking shared projects with others online (Golub, 2010), although many scholars (e.g. Boellstorff, 2008; Dourish, 2006; Miller and Slater, 2000) point out that online places should not be considered as separate from the so-called physical space but, rather, should be seen as offering new ways for ‘people to encounter and appropriate existing spaces’ (Dourish, 2006: 6).

This brings us to note the importance of embodiment in conceiving of place and placemaking, and in particular the arguments for understanding embodiment as part of technological practice. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s (2002 [1945]) work on phenomenology brought the attention of social science and humanities scholars to a social constructionist approach that focused on the body’s lived experience in perceiving the world. Merleau-Ponty suggests that understandings of a place can be understood through several senses, such as ‘texture, color, smell, taste’ (summarized by Moya, 2019: 204). Arguing for the continued relevance of embodiment in a cyberculture too quick to abstract it from information processing, Katherine Hayles (1999) points out that even as embodied practice may change in relation to new technologies, it involves how (not whether) ‘people use their bodies and experience space and time’ (p. 205). This points to the final node in our framework: the role of experience in relation to place. In a study of how mobile storytelling projects make a given site’s invisible histories visible, Farman (2015) explores how mobile media may be used to produce a meaningful, embodied experience. He argues embodiment is not a result of how well a technology can simulate reality for a user, but rather stems from how, through mediated experience, users go beyond the screen to interact with (and experience) the places surrounding them. Cresswell (2020) points out a focus on experience ‘transforms a scientific notion of space into a relatively lived and meaningful notion of place’ (p. 119). He suggests a meaningful ‘sense of place’ might be based on either personal or shared experience, saying experience ‘is at the heart of what place means’ (p. 117).

It is this interweaving of meaning-making in relation to place, occurring through social relations, communication, embodiment, and personal and shared experience enacted via a digitally mediated platform, that we explore here as digital placemaking. In the sections that follow, we examine placemaking as sets of practices strategically deployed by individual entrepreneurs within the technosocial structures of AirBnb.

Research methods

This article is part of a larger project studying the role of digital media in the growth of the experience economy. We were beginning to study AirBnb Experiences through participant observation when the Covid-19 pandemic forced the immediate shutdown of travel and gathering in public spaces around the world. Meanwhile, AirBnb executives, facing an abrupt end to income streams from both in-home stays and in-person experiences, launched ‘OE’ within just a few weeks of the global lockdowns. Scholars have discussed the value of serendipity in ethnographic fieldwork (Rivoal and Salazar, 2013, Tilche and Simpson, 2017), and this consideration very much characterized the approach we developed in response to a world which no longer supported travel as we knew it.

Over 10 days in early May 2020, we took part in seven distinct OE, two of them independently and five together, each connecting from different continents. Enumerated in Table 1, these comprised a guided meditation from the pen of a Scottish sheep farm (with Adair), a Flamenco dance lesson in Seville (with Eva), a tour of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster site punctuated by stops to feed stray dogs (with Lucas), a gnocchi-making lesson in a traditional Italian kitchen (with Chiara and her grandmother), a tour of an olive orchard in Croatia followed by oil tasting in the wine cellar (with Marin), and two interactive visual tours via Powerpoint – one of street art in Buenos Aires (with Flor) and one of the history and sites of Apartheid in Cape Town (with Ricky). Although ethnographic fieldwork has traditionally been carried out over longer periods of time, media scholars have increasingly drawn from ethnographic and participatory methods to understand more fleeting, temporally bound media practices (e.g. see Pink et al., 2015; Postill and Pink, 2012). In this project, there were numerous benefits to focusing our field on a truncated period at a particular moment in time.

Table 1.

Overview of AirBnb Online Experiences studied.

Experience title	Host	Location
Discover Street Art & Graffiti	Flor	Buenos Aires, Argentina
Farm to Table from the Mediterranean	Marin	Split, Croatia
Meet the Dogs of Chernobyl	Lucas	Pripyat, Ukraine
Pasta with the Grandmas	Chiara and grandmother	North of Rome, Italy
Lessons from Apartheid	Richard (Ricky)	Cape Town, South Africa
Flamenco Dance with Cool Spanish Dancer	Eva	Sevilla, Spain
Mediation with Sheep	Adair	Scottish Highlands

Immediately after the pandemic was declared, AirBnb reached out to successful Experience hosts around the world, encouraging them to take their Experiences ‘online.’ Participating just weeks after these had been launched, we saw placemaking in action precisely at the moment when hosts were in the process of coming up with strategies for recreating (or not) the affective relationships to cultural and geographic place that had made their original Experiences products so successful. By June 2020, as word spread that OE hosts could make thousands of US dollars (e.g. an article in Forbes declared that one host was earning US$150 K per month [Bloom, 2020]), dozens of new OEs appeared, ushering in a new phase of the product where many hosts had not previously run an ‘off-line’ Experience.

We registered and paid for the OEs on airbnb.com, e-mailing hosts to inform them about our aims to take part as participants and researchers and to obtain consent to take screenshots and audio record the session. Although one person asked that we not record, all hosts agreed we could participate as researchers and use images; five were available to participate in interviews after the OE was over. A pseudonym is used for one host, Adair. In these interactions, we learned about how these hosts came to rework their ‘off-line’ Experiences as OEs, as well as about various technical, social, and organization strategies they drew upon. Each OE we joined had between 3 and 10 participants, and we participated along with the other guests, taking detailed notes.

Then, reviewing notes we had taken before, during, and after our OEs, we created themes from the data, paying attention to both content and form (see Meyrowitz, 1998). In this case, ‘content’ included areas such as the language used to market the OEs, specific practices and information making up the OE, and specific things the hosts said during the session; ‘form’ included the method of delivering the OE (e.g. PowerPoint presentation, live demonstration or walk-through), technical devices used, and how the activities were structured across the allotted time. Following Baptiste’s (2001) suggestion that qualitative researchers use their interpretive lens to provide explanatory statements about their data, we drew from our framework to consider the strategies in relation to how social relations, communication, and embodiment might work to create an individual and shared, emplaced experience.

Place, experience, embodiment, and the ‘host’

When Experiences were co-present affairs, AirBnb’s website read, ‘One of a kind experiences, hosted by locals’ – a phrase pointing to the value of a local connection, while also reproducing normative notions of tourists being global and placeless, but hosts local and placebound. The local hosts and their in-the-know local expertise were marketed as the embodiments of authentic cultures, histories, and social belonging. For example, the few Experiences highlighted on the home page at the time included a DJ guiding a musical history tour of Havana, an ‘Indigenous Cook’ teaching how to make mole in Mexico City, and a ‘local guide’ hosting a desert adventure in Oman; each located a so-called authentic aspect of a culture in the body and abilities of the local ‘host.’ These so-called locals – whose localness was sold with beautiful photos, emotional language (‘passionate cooks,’ ‘intimate settings’), and an easy interface on the AirBnb website for making payments – helped paying guests connect to each locality.

Most OE hosts we met used earnings as a side job, although some made a living as hosts; many had specific uses for the extra income, such as supporting families in a village (in the case of Chiara) or funding their own Non-Governmental Organizations (in the case of Lucas and Ricky). Considering the blow of Covid-19 to tourism, hosts were highly motivated to succeed in the effort to ‘switch to online,’ as Chiara put it. Relying on their creative initiative (but also with some support from AirBnb), hosts worked to generate OEs that would effectively enable guests to feel as if, Chiara explained, they were all ‘there, together, in person.’ In this way, we imagined hosts taking on the role of a medium (e.g. becoming a ‘host’ in that they themselves mediated access to the place of experience), drawing from various strategies to create an emplaced experience for participants. We established five strategies which draw from communication, social relations, and embodiment in various ways in the making of place: narrative devices, locative signs, sensory cues, formal properties, and virtual sociality.

Storied spaces: Narrative devices

Two levels of narrative operated across the experiences: character backstories and situational storytelling. Together, these introduced participants to a foreign, unknown space and helped to overcome challenges of spatially (and socially) distanced interaction, humanizing a two-dimensional figure on-screen and the two-dimensional setting. In the first narrative, hosts gave short personal backstories explaining how they ended up in the destination and role from which they led the OE. For Flor, who led ‘Discover Street Art & Graffiti,’ she referred to her time spent in London getting to know Argentine painters; for Eva (‘Flamenco Dance with Cool Spanish Dancer’), it was a year as a Spanish exchange student in Cologne, where she learned flamenco for the first time; for Adair (‘Meditation with Sheep’), a move from London to Scotland to work in animal therapy and buying a sheep farm in the process; for Ricky (‘Lessons from Apartheid’), the journey from a precarious upbringing to becoming able to help uplift his community. Personal backstories located the host not just in a geographical location but at a certain point in their life course. As such, hosts used stories of arrival to their current social and geographical locations to create an initial emotional connection with participants. Some hosts also used their stories to introduce other characters involved, anthropomorphic or otherwise. Adair, for example, recounted in biographic detail the personal histories of her sheep, several of whom participants would soon meet. We learned that Lockie, a 1-year-old oblong ball of grey fluffy fur, was a descendant of a breed rescued from the brink of extinction by children’s author Beatrix Potter and bequeathed to the National Trust in the North of England. ‘I’ve had all of these sheep from being tiny,’ Adair told us, adding,

They were in need of rescuing, they were orphaned, their moms couldn’t look after them. I bottle-fed them and cuddled them on my lap for hours at a time, and discovered they were full of personality and character, kindness and affection.

The recounting of personal details about the past or present of people (or animals) who were taking part in the performance of the OE functioned as effective bridges that linked participants to place via affective human connection.

The second narrative device we encountered was the transportive, situational journey through which hosts led guests, embedding us as characters in a narrative of the entire OE. The spaces of each destination – geographically proximate and physical to hosts but virtual and only digitally kinetic to guests – were traversed by hosts on foot, by car, through imagination, or with a slide presentation. Lucas (‘Meet the Dogs of Chernobyl’) drove his station wagon through the countryside surrounding the Chernobyl reactor to show us the landscape and feed collections of street dogs along the way. At the beginning of the sheep meditation, Adair walked us from her farmhouse across the yard through a gate to the sheep’s pen. This gate (see Figure 1) served as a symbolic narrative device, transporting us from one physically delimited location to another, marked by a threshold necessitating the host’s physical contact for access. Near the beginning of the flamenco OE, Eva attempted to take us on an imaginative journey, instructing us to close our eyes before intoning: ‘Now I want you to picture that I am sending you a private jet. And this jet picks you up and brings you to Spain, to Sevilla, where you join me for a private attendance at the Féria de Sevilla.’

Figure 1.

One of several gates Adair walked us through to move from her farmhouse to the sheep pen. Source: Author screenshot.

You are here: Locative signs

A key part of emplacing participants into a narrative was the use of locative language, music, and imagery, which in some way directly referenced the place in which the OE occurred. Each host used a variation of this strategy to set participants within the scene. Flor began her street art tour by saying, ‘I’m here, in Buenos Aires,’ and then recounted the current weather (‘it’s starting to get Autumn here and it feels not so bad’) before sharing photos in a PowerPoint that showed the neighborhoods she would later discuss. To begin his ‘Farm to Table from the Mediterranean’ tour, Marin panned his mobile phone toward the horizon to present a postcard vista of the coast off his home city of Split (see Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Picture-perfect vista of Split from Marin’s olive orchard. Source: Author screenshot.

Ricky used a PowerPoint with maps and photographs to transport participants through the history of District 6, a vibrant multicultural neighborhood that became the epicenter of apartheid in Cape Town. On a slide whose title explicitly informed viewers where the OE was happening (‘Where does this take place?’), he began with a map, followed by a picture of a broad vista over the city, with which he located us through his own eyes: ‘This particular photo was taken from the top of Devil’s Peak…when you go onto it, you see…’ A later slide homed in on the neighborhood at street level –’When you look at the top right, this is the main arterial road,’ he explained – and then presented photos of individual buildings and their histories (see Figure 3). Ricky communicated a sense of place using the storytelling strategies of personal narration, detailed description, maps, and evocative imagery, instead of taking a mobile phone camera through the streets in real time.

Figure 3.

Ricky’s slide used maps and imagery to locate the OE. Source: Author screenshot.

When participants first logged into ‘Pasta-making with Grandma,’ Italian music was playing lightly in the background, mixed with sounds from various kitchen implements being moved around as hosts prepared. Chiara appeared and excitedly greeted us, saying ‘Ciao! Welcome!!’ before introducing herself and her nonna (grandmother). ‘We are a huge family,’ she said. ‘We are in the center of Italy, in the north of Rome…we are in the middle of the countryside, a natural park.’ Describing to guests the effort to create an OE, Chiara explained she and her nonna wanted to ‘open our windows, our technological windows, to you…I really hope that you can feel that you are here with me!’ This poignant statement from Chiara, already clearly well-versed in the performance, demonstrated how hosts understood the shift from ‘off-line’ to OEs. She added, ‘while you peel your potatoes, I want to show you something, like we are walking around…I want to show you what’s outside of our windows. Welcome in Italy!’ As the Zoom screen showed each participant in their small image box working to peel potatoes, she screen-shared a professionally edited video chronicling the Italian countryside, villages, and people, accompanied by the classic song, That’s Amore.

While Chiara’s video presentation built on known tropes (winding cobblestone streets, undulating hills, popular music) to situate us in rural Italy, Lucas drew from imagery of the infamous Chernobyl nuclear disaster to locate guests in place. Knowing guests were likely to have at least heard of the disaster, and that many had probably seen the popular 2019 HBO mini-series Chernobyl, he used locative signs to situate us not only in space, but in time. The OE began as we drove with Lucas in the car, camera panning quickly from his face to the view outside. Suddenly the car stopped and he got out to show us the plant where the reactor melted down 34 years prior. He pointed to the road and said, ‘this is the same road the firefighters used to reach the reactor,’ stating that if we had watched the HBO show, we would know this road.

‘Now taste it!’: Sensory cues

Hosts used a variety of sensory cues to transmit affective stimuli across Zoom, effectively augmenting an exclusively visual and sonic experience to something involving more bodily senses. Unlike the locative signs mentioned above, these more paced, seemingly impromptu moments occurred most often when hosts brought their own bodies into the frame, communicating an affective, corporeal relationship on the screen. Marin began his OE outside, immediately walking us through the dense trees of his family’s orchard. Over the next 20 min, he made concerted efforts to extend his body into the image, lightly touching the leaves on a tree or pointing toward a nearby mountain (see Figure 4). He ushered us haphazardly through his olive, grape, apple, apricot, and sour cherry trees, letting leaves softly brush against the camera lens. At one point, Marin stretched out his hand to brush his fingers across some of the germinating green buds, informing us that ‘bruised olives might get moldy more easily,’ before carrying on through the orchard. Pointing minutes later to another tree, he remarked, ‘if tree bark is wounded it could be bad for the olives.’

Figure 4.

Hosts used their arms and hands to tactilely present sights, sites, and species. Source: Author screenshots.

In the Chernobyl exclusion zone, Lucas was extremely affectionate with the dogs, often rubbing them as he fed them. Even as he gave us an informative lecture about the disaster and its effect on the people, animals, and environment, we watched at least a dozen dogs cuddling, playing, eating, licking each other, and generally frolicking about with the sunny blue sky and dismal buildings behind them. Their faces often nudged the camera, seeking Lucas’s attention, and at one point he reached deep into the fur of a dog and pulled out a tick to show us, close up.

Taste and texture also engaged the senses. Marin had asked participants to have olive oil on hand for a tasting. After settling into his wine cellar, Marin prepared us to taste the oil, forewarning: ‘slurpy sounds, bodily sounds might occur, it’s part of the job.’ First, we deeply inhaled the scent of our oils. Marin asked us to describe their odors, saying, ‘You might find you are in the middle of a meadow, [with the] light, refreshing, purified smell of fresh cut grass.’ Author 1 described an aroma of grease and dirt, with none of the citronella or walnut notes Marin detected in his own oil. Low-quality oil, he told us, had a more musky smell like dirt after the rain and may contain ‘lardy notes.’ One participant, reporting from a cheery kitchen in California, found hers smelled like ‘fresh-cut grass, very curvaceous…kind of green.’ Marin then had each participant taste their oil and describe it. Such sensory descriptions contributed to a sense of emplacement among participants.

During gnocchi-making with Chiara and her nonna, we were constantly treated to close-ups of the batter’s texture and asked to provide close-ups of our own progress. ‘You see how soft it is?’ Chiara asked, showing us her smashed potato and flour mixture before saying to Author 2, ‘I see the flour is sticky on your hands. You need to wash them and then keep going.’ It was very effective – the feeling of the flour stuck to fingers mixed with her real-time intervention directing us to perform a physical action seemed to reduce the distance between us. Moreover, Chiara’s irreverent manner and the chaotic sensibility of the kitchen behind her encouraged an informality among participants; both Authors noted more open communication with other participants, evidenced, for example, in the frequent laughter and emotive noises (e.g. ‘Oh no!,’ ‘Oops!,’ and ‘Ah cool’) that began to flow among our devices as we worked.

Form as function: Formal properties

Many hosts engaged participants through conventions of visual media (e.g. lighting, camera work, multiple cameras, etc.) and narrative tempo. While productions were, overall, stable and technologically savvy, hosts frequently used the more frenzied broadcasting of handheld cameras and unpredictable environmental factors to create a sense of ‘being there.’ Chaos, itself, became a key formal technique, used very effectively by Chiara, who spoke in a lively fashion and kept us on our toes through the fast-paced pasta-making training. The mise-en-scène was made up of Chiara in the foreground and her grandmother in the stone kitchen’s background, wearing a mask and kneading dough into pasta. Chiara even explicitly drew on this generated chaotic ethos, inviting off-camera passersby into the kitchen, speaking and laughing with them in Italian while still at once engaging with guests in English. Her caution to us at the beginning, ‘I wanted to warn you that we are a little bit crazy, ok?!’ belied this important strategy for producing senses of movement, uncertainty, and drama. Indeed, over and over, we found in our notes reflections of an excited anxiety as we tried to keep up with what was happening in the OEs, moving along with the host, hoping that we wouldn’t lose the connection.

Marin guided us through his orchard in a rough cinema verité style, with shaky camera movements and low-fi quality on account of the unsteady mobile data connection. Although he used an Osmo, a handheld gimbal that stabilizes the wobbly camera footage often shot with mobile phones, his style of lumbering through the orchard nevertheless made the camerawork jittery. The sometimes weak data signals gave Author 1 some anxiety that Marin’s Zoom connection would drop out, leaving the participants stranded. After Marin arrived in his dimly lit wine cellar, surrounded by bottles of local rakija (schnapps), we saw the other side of the experience’s production: Marin removed the camera from the Osmo gimbal handle, affixed it onto a tripod and turned on two bright ring lights, typically used by professional photographers to illuminate a face for a portrait.

Compared to Marin who sat for over an hour in his dank wine cellar, Lucas was constantly on the move, driving around Pripyat and past the power station, stopping at points to feed the dogs, as promised. Lucas’s shaky camerawork offered a more personal look than the many professional video tours of the Chernobyl area produced by media companies. This also created a sense of precarity: knowing Lucas was connecting via 3G from rural spaces conveyed a sense the call could drop at any moment. His assistant held the camera while Lucas grabbed a bag of food from the back of the station wagon, allowing us to view the dogs before being passed back to Lucas pouring food onto the side of the road for the excitedly approaching animals.

Up in the Scottish Highlands, Adair had three cameras streaming images on Zoom: one held herself, a webcam pointed at a rainy mountainscape in the distance, and an anamorphic ‘barn cam,’ which made the sheep look like participants on television programs such as Big Brother (see Figure 5). Despite three remote cameras, Adair’s own shaky camerawork, unstable and weak mobile Wi-Fi signal, and strong gusts of wind blowing into an unprotected microphone canceled out any sense that this was a professional production. As she walked across the field toward the pen, she flipped her camera to the self-facing lens, showing the farmhouse behind her as she looked past us and headed toward the sheep’s shelter. This everyday way of using the device, a practice familiar to many smartphone users, allowed us to spontaneously engage the site through Adair’s movements.

Figure 5.

Adair ‘barn cam.’ Source: Author screenshot.

The effectiveness of these formal properties can be seen in comparison with the hosts who mainly talked participants through PowerPoint presentations. While rich in images, information, and personal stories, in the Argentine Street Art and Cape Town Apartheid tours, we felt more connected to the hosts themselves than to the places making up the focus of their OEs. Relying on these static formats, it took significant narrative resources from the hosts (such as the personal narratives and locative imagery mentioned earlier) to keep things flowing; we felt it necessary to perform our own imaginative labor to stay present in the moment the host was trying to create.

Placing connections: Virtual sociality

A small number of participants took part in each OE and, considering the novelty of OEs in conjunction with the unusual context of the pandemic, interest was palpable. Hosts had us briefly introduce ourselves, stating names, locations, and some aspect of past experience with or interest in the topic. The majority of guests were women over 40, joining from countries such as the United States, Spain, Hong Kong, South Africa, Canada, and Ukraine; everyone communicated in English. Each host commented in some way about how we were far apart, yet coming together through the OE. Hosts endeavored to create a sense of intimacy among guests by asking questions, encouraging conversation and interactivity, and even teasing (as Chiara did about those whose potatoes were lumpy).

Adair assigned each participant the name of a Scottish clan. She addressed us by these names throughout the experience and even asked that we edit our public profiles on Zoom so the Scottish names were displayed under our faces. Adair informed Author 1,

Your new name is ‘Rab.’ And that’s a Whiskey. What month were you born? That’s ‘Maclochie’…Now, imagine you’re all wearing a kilt, with a dagger down your sock, dancing over swords, to protect your new clan chiefdom. So you’ve all just pledged lifetime allegiance to a sheep!

Asking us to use our imaginations regarding outfits, clan associations, and even names (and drawing on the ability to quickly change names on Zoom) was a unique way of connecting guests to an “anthropological place” (Augé, 1995), a shared location for understanding common social and cultural senses of belonging (Appadurai, 1996).

Flor asked participants whether they were familiar with street art, and she solicited our opinions about various artists and styles. She adeptly put the participants in conversation with one another, something which clearly made an impact on some of the participants. For example, at the end of the hour-long street art tour, one woman said to the rest of us, ‘this was so great – we should all keep in touch!’ In fact, all hosts fostered the idea of establishing longer relationships. In their own way, each remarked that hopefully one day we might meet in person and many suggested that we be in touch if we ever were to come ‘here,’ centering the relationship in their geographic location. Many hosts followed up with long e-mails to participants, all of which were largely pro forma but which had personalized introductions. Flor sent links to additional artists and street art videos, while Eva sent links to various Flamenco resources, including her own YouTube channel, Facebook page, website, e-mail, and phone number. Although attempts to remain in contact were clearly aimed at promoting the OEs and nurturing a business relationship, the e-mails were written in informal language that suggested friendship, connection, and some degree of intimacy.

Conclusion: The virtual experience ‘place-market’

Christensen (2014) argues the growing global middle classes, having fulfilled basic material needs, increasingly focus on ‘personal development and self-realization’ (p. 25); he claims experience industries emerged in relation to capitalism’s ever-expanding reach into areas of life connected to feelings and emotions. Similarly, in their original explication of the experience economy, Pine and Gilmore (1998) explained that while ‘commodities are fungible, goods tangible, and services intangible, experiences are memorable’ (para 6; emphasis in original). In that the onus is very much on Airbnb OE hosts to create that ‘memorable experience,’ we see theirs as a form of ‘affective labor’ (Lazzarato, 1996), explained by Hardt and Negri (2004) as labor which must produce or maintain feelings ‘of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, or passion’ (p. 108). Additionally, hosts worked to produce in guests a feeling of ‘being there’ – an affective metric we might compare to ‘authenticity,’ a key characteristic of commercially successful experiences (Gilmore and Pine, 2007).

Through the strategies discussed above, hosts tried to approximate, surpass, or create a proxy for an in-situ experience. Of note in this case study is both the role of the host as medium – extending guests into localities – and the ways hosts helped guests gain a ‘sense of place,’ literally through their senses. Biocca (1997) considers the importance of sensory and motor engagement in embodied interaction with technology, drawing attention to how senses such as taste, smell, and touch are disadvantaged, while visual and auditory senses are often heightened. Hosts invented their own means of enhancing both sensory and motor engagement to build a feeling of connection with the place of experience. As Chiara chirped in Italian and English, frantically shepherding us from one gnocchi-making step to the next, she evoked the stereotypical chaos of Italy (‘We’re all crazy here!’); as the soft ‘ba-boom’ of Eva’s bare feet echoed on her apartment floor, while she explained to us that flamenco shoes were too loud for her downstairs neighbors, we became attentive to her surroundings. The bodies of the hosts were affectively deployed to immerse us in the moment. As we smelled our olive oil or stuck our fingers into sticky potato dough, hosts mobilized our senses as transportation.

This article focuses largely on digital placemaking strategies employed by hosts, rather than the experiences of the other guests. Although we did not interview participants and cannot speak to their own feelings, we did note that participation mattered to everyone for creating a shared experience. For example, at the beginning of the experiences, all hosts implored us to turn our cameras on, and both authors perceived that the guests who turned off their cameras left a void. When one participant in the Dogs of Chernobyl was seen lounging on a couch in pajamas, eating popcorn – as if passively watching a movie rather than actively participating – both authors noted in our logs that it was jarring. Further research that ethnographically engages participants would allow for more considered explorations of what we have begun to glimpse: how hosts and guests work together to co-construct place.

Despite suggestions that new forms of mobile travel such as OEs might help alleviate the over-tourism problems plaguing the world’s most popular destinations, the place-market is predicted to recover (see Cheer et al., 2020). Still, there is some sense that what has been learned and experienced during Covid-19 may lead to new, hybrid, more inclusive forms of travel – of potential interest for those who are otherwise immobilized, whether due to finances, citizenship regimes, or disabilities that limit travel. Thus, the current moment and the innovative practices it has inspired have important implications for understandings of digital placemaking.

Wilken and Goggin (2012) emphasize that place is ‘central to how embodied, technologically mediated mobile social practice is understood’ (p. 18). Our analysis of AirBnb’s OE demonstrates the inverse, as well: embodied, technologically mediated, mobile social practice is just as central to how place is understood (and even created). As arbiters of these moments of ephemeral encounter, the hosts and their manifold strategies to substantively engage participants – particularly through their senses – are at the crux of digital placemaking, and their affective labor contributes to digital experiences of emplacement. While technology is indeed the conduit, the hosts are the gateways, the mediums, the media.

Footnotes

Authors' note

Authorship is listed alphabetically and both authors made equal contributions to this article.

Acknowledgement

This research was supported by the ERA.Net RUS Plus programme under award number RUS_ST2019-055 for the consortium CONTOURS: Conservation, Tourism, Remoteness.

ORCID iD

Erika Polson

Note

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