Yelp as a Site for Political Consumption?

Seattle.
Kathleen Kuehn is the next speaker at AoIR 2011; her paper is inspired by protest events against the apparently racist attitudes of the operators a local swimming pool which were conducted with the help of the local services consumer review site Yelp. Yelp provides a space for user-created reviews ; how is such consumer-reviewing perceived by users?

This work uses Alvin Toffler’s prosumption concept; consumer reviewing of local products and services can be described as a form of prosumption (and echoing the alternative explanation of ‘prosumption’, participating users may also be thought of as professional consumers). Ideas of consumer-citizenship – consumption as an expression of political will – also come into play here, of course.

Citizen-consumers have been thought of as fusing consumption with the political responsibilities of democratic citizenship; the customer-consumer, on the other hand, is seen to maximise personal economic interest in the marketplace as an empowered neoliberal citizen. Depending on which interpretation is used, by using a site like Yelp, one may therefore either reflect on the political-economic conditions of a specific product or service, or help other users to be more effective consumers.

Kathleen interviewed a range of Yelp users to understand their motivations for participation. Some saw the site as a public or community service: mostly enabling others simply to consume more effectively, but for some also enabling them to consume more ethically (some users reviewed government and other critical services, focussing more on the political aspects of these services rather than merely the quality of products and services). Some such users would also focus especially on local, independently owned businesses, for example, to promote cultural preservation and ‘buycotting’.

Other users didn’t see Yelp as a space for such political activities; they saw the site as a place to celebrate consumption, and focussed mainly on the fun, spectacular aspects of the site. Some even saw political themes as potentially interfering with the mission of the site – such respondents didn’t make the connection between localism and politics, or between consumption and politics, for example; an interesting cognitive disconnect between the perception of the businesses as corporate entities, and the perception of the products and services they provide, emerged here.

These latter perspectives accord with Yelp’s own reviewer guidelines, which actively exclude such more political activities; most users are unaware of these guidelines, however. Local Yelp lead users do strongly police the site according to these guidelines, however; many of the politicised reviews and comments criticising the pool, for example, were ultimately removed from the site. Yelp thus strips politics from the local.