With One ⭐ Review Tour, we look at how online rating systems shape the perception and experience of a place.
With One Star Review Tour, Selena Savić, Gordan Savičić and !Mediengruppe Bitnik look at how rating systems shape the perception and experience of a place. In contemporary data-driven environments, credit scores, social influence rankings and product/service reviews dictate choices regarding, for example, selecting a doctor, shopping or dining out. One of the most widely used evaluation schemes online is the five-star system. Its popularity stems from the ease of judgement it proposes, its implied clarity (five is better than one) and the way it transforms personal opinions into objective values by way of aggregation (individual reasoning doesn’t matter if many people come to the same conclusion).
While the reviews are often nothing more than personal opinions, their cumulative values have become a driving force for the service and tourist industries as well as many other sectors of the economy. For businesses, reviews have become a feared measure of success or bust.
Not all sites, services or products can align with conventional consumer requirements. To obtain the five-star rating, they must be easy to consume, readily available, impressive, fun or “instagrammable”. And while privately owned companies can fight bad online reviews, public spaces can hardly talk back or ask Google to leave them alone.
One ⭐ Review Tour on the island of Vis, 2023
Performance on the occasion of the Inaguration of ISSA - Island School for the Study of Autonomy on Vis, Croatia
8. September 2023
The first One ⭐ Review Tour was a city tour to visit the sites of one star reviews posted online about public places on the island of Vis. In a town highly dependend on tourism, we used the tour to talk about expectations the tourist industry sets towards what is seen as "attractions". We followed one star reviews placed online to draw a map of failed expectations: The public places rated in the reviews fall short when expected to perform as "attractions", but may signify something totally different to local people: They may be public meeting spaces or heritage sites for local history. However, they may lack the easy-to-consume quality of impressive backdrops and instagrammable settings.
The One ⭐ Review Tour is an excursion into the humour which emerges in the gap between failed expectations and the actual site. Not every place is able to align with conventional tourists' requirements. Especially when the expectations are exaggerated or completely miss the point.
