The spatiotemporal constitution of Dubai as a semiotically assembled touristscape

Abstract

Mobile technologies mark an increasing construct of heterogeneous semiotic resources which coexist in a networked symmetrical interrelations. This area of research is still understudied, especially in terms of demonstrating how app-mediated touristscapes are co-told, transduced, and augmented by networked assemblage between participants and mobile interfaces. Drawing on a pragma-semiotic approach, the present study aims to investigate the spatiotemporal constitution of Dubai as a mobile-mediated touristscape. We draw on a newly synthesized approach that combines Cooren and Matte’s (2010) model of constitutive pragmatics and Pennycook’s (2008, 2017) notion of “semiotic assemblages.” Such a methodological synergy has been applied to the Dubai Travel mobile app in a way that revealed how the touristscape of Dubai has been pragmatically constituted of the semiotic assemblage of heterogeneous figures in the app’s interface-human interaction. This form of techno-human interaction was demonstrated to be situated in three spacing practices: (i) presentifying or making materially present hybrid interactions of techno-human figures, (ii) ordering or systematizing the scripted trajectories of Dubai touristscape by creating more space and time across framed intervals, and (iii) accounting or linking spatiotemporal augmentation to affective semiotic assemblages. The study found that Dubai touristscape has been constituted via a human-non-human semiotic assemblage with augmented and multilayered spatiotemporal possibilities. The pragma-semiotic approach has thus helped in arguing against what accounts as a touristscape with fixed spatiotemporal properties. The study contributes to understanding the increasing role of networked communication through developing a dialogue with linguistic pragmatics.