Ett inverterat nöjesfält : kunskap, upplevelse och vara genom Google Maps användarrecensioner

Sammanfattning: This thesis attempts to show tangible ways in which commodification of experience expands into areas outside of direct commercial activity, in contemporary mind and society. The user reviews of Google Maps (URGM) regarding places that don't offer sales of goods and services are being studied empirically, through qualitative text analysis. Functional analysis is also used to study the functions of the medium generally. Results show that the grading system can be understood as an imitation of intuitive pre-language communication within a sensory network, where sensory data and economic figures merges in the form of (average) ratings. Raw sense information is mirrored to the reader but frozen, thereby unable to grow into knowledge. Also, experience and world is commodified through different forms of objectification and evaluation. The review form and the experience which it integrates, strengthens the structure of separation between subject (the consumer who experiences and reviews) and object (the world, that which is being consumed and reviewed) and also expands the object to include the experience of it. Experiences, as intuitive engagement with “the now”, (what Henri Bergson calls “duration”) are objectified by being turned into properties of places (objects), generating what is coined “duration objects”, a kind of delimited constructed fantasies about a certain contact with ‘now’ (to simplify it). As a conclusion, it can be said that URGM and its organization of experience is an example of how capitalism appropriates the immaterial, by dissolving old categories and blurring the line between sensation and knowledge, commodity and non-commodity, time and space etc., creating new kinds of objects ready to be consumed.