When Excluded Realities Become Phantoms

✉ ! "Share your experience"
You have arrived at an unfamiliar destination. What is the first thing you do? You open your digital map app, browse reviews, find your way, and plan your next itinerary. The endless stream of reviews and data in the digital map seems like a familiar guide. But a question arises: Who is writing all these reviews, and for what reason? Where do the experiences and sensations that failed to be recorded on the map disappear to? Driven by various questions, we track the reality excluded by map platform algorithms and gamification, collecting these invisible experiences to construct a new narrative.

The Essential App: Map Platforms

For modern people, digital maps are an indispensable necessity. Beyond simple navigation, they offer services across various industries, including real-time traffic information, estimated time of arrival, finding restaurants and facilities, and booking accommodation. Map platforms enable us to acquire experiences and information about a specific location without physically visiting it, through Street View and reviews. They even propose new experiences using a virtual world to achieve a sense of reality more vivid than reality itself. The world is constructed purely of images. Google Maps, which reproduces reality into an immaterial virtual world, has announced a feature called “Google Cloud Immersive Stream” to maximize realism, introducing technology that allows users to rotate a place seen only in 2D images by 360 degrees and even simulate the weather and time of the planned visit.
Based on the premise that the map is a real-time reality, it acts like a personal assistant, helping to minimize wasted time. When deciding which route to take, what to eat, whether there is a nearby shopping center, or what accommodation to book during a trip, the digital map suggests the optimal choices based on the vast data left by users. Digital map users look at reviews around a destination, forming an impression of a specific space and making a choice through the experiences of others.
The interesting point here is that the act of producing review information goes beyond mere reference data. According to interviews, reviewers feel satisfied that their writing can help other users, and this affective motivation enables continuous activity. However, in addition to the purpose of helping others, many reviewers cited a psychological motive to leave their own record and archive personal experiences. Specifically, the act of writing a review serves as an intersection between personal record and platform interaction, especially in terms of "digitizing one's own memories through reviews."
How does the process of uploading one's experience as a review proceed? Users convert their experience into text and images according to the rules and algorithms set by the platform, establishing a close connection with it. This extends to the concept of "embodiment of guidelines," emphasized by reviewers in the interviews. Expressions such as "Now, even without referring to a separate guide, I can naturally generate data suitable for the platform" suggest that the platform is increasingly standardizing users' experiences.

Data and Review System: Share Your Experience

From the past to the present, we have continuously moved to unknown places to find suitable locations. Driven by curiosity, we repeat moves in search of better environments. As we entered the technological society, these experiences of movement and exploration began to be recorded as data, and platform services emerged that create new experiences based on GPS technology. In 2005, early review platforms like Yelp appeared, initiating a culture where users record and share their experiences in text. In 2013, Google's City Expert program was successively launched, encouraging reviewers to produce high-quality data within small communities. As the potential for review content in the travel industry and local economy grew, Google expanded and reorganized City Expert into a "Local Guides" service where users worldwide could participate. Now, digital map users can freely share their experiences and even find and register new places not yet recorded on the map. The map encourages user participation and expands the size of the community by applying 'gamification' within the platform.
Activities such as writing reviews, uploading photos, and posting videos are assigned points, and the user's level increases with the accumulated score. This level system serves as a powerful incentive for users to participate continuously. To achieve a high rank of Level 6 or above, users must fulfill platform-set tasks, such as repeatedly uploading photos and writing reviews. As the level increases, a glamorous star-shaped badge icon is granted, through which users visualize their contributions and gain trust from other users. This system creates strong motivation among users, leading to the formation of a community where they share tips for reaching target levels and celebrate each other's achievements. Users are voluntarily induced to explore real-world places not included in the digital map, record information, and discover and guide new spaces. In this process, the user positions themselves as a Local Guide, a platform service user who simultaneously enriches the platform's data.

Gamification, however, is accompanied by the problem of user experiences being standardized by the platform's guidelines and algorithms. One interviewee mentioned that "front-facing photos that clearly identify the place are preferred over photo quality," and that "the platform algorithm either fails to reflect reviews that do not meet certain criteria or delays the upload time of reviews." This indicates a tendency for the platform to alienate personal sensibility and originality in the way it filters and refines data.
The gamification of digital maps encourages users to voluntarily become data producers for the platform, through which the platform accumulates vast amounts of data and further reinforces the services based on it. The standardization of data, the distortion of user experience, and the opacity of the algorithm that occur during this process present a new point of discussion in the digital age.

Excluded Realities Become Phantoms

1. How the Map Erases Virtuality
The map attempts to bring physical evidence into the virtual space to fill material absence. Location data (GPS) verification that a space was visited. Text, image, and video reviews linked to the user's location. The map constantly summons evidence from reality to prove the premise that all information within it is happening 'now.' Reality is newly constructed on the map with collected, processed, and selected data. Specific locations are emphasized based on reviews and GPS data, which forms the identity of the space. For instance, places with many reviews receive more attention than those without, directly influencing the consumption choices of travelers or local residents. In this way, the digital map overlays a new economic and social reality onto the physical reality..
However, examples such as "attempting to correct incorrect business hours information but failing to be reflected on the platform" and "the experience of a high-level account being deactivated by an unknown algorithm"have been shared in the Local Guides community. The reality experienced by the user can disappear on the map due to the algorithm. We also heard interviews mentioning that the platform selectively emphasizes certain data to reconstruct the user experience. Accounts with many reviews are prioritized for exposure, which accelerates the phenomenon of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. One interviewee mentioned that "their reviews, having written over 500, are always exposed at the top," pointing out that the algorithm is designed to reflect the experiences of specific users more heavily.

2. The Rules to Maintain the Illusion
To realize the illusion (perfect virtuality), the "rules of the game" set by the platform must be followed. Users must satisfy the platform's guidelines when writing reviews, and the algorithm filters this to leave only the appropriate data. According to interviews, reviews that violate guidelines are deleted, and reviewers speculate on the cause of deletion and share information through the community. Since once-filtered reviews are never restored, reviewers are left to find the reasons for unannounced deletions themselves.

3. The Standardization of Communication
The users' efforts to avoid falling out of the virtual (illusion), to continue participating in the game, and above all, to avoid being excluded from the digital map, along with the platform's gamification to encourage this, lead to the standardization of communication within the digital map. Reviews are increasingly condensed into easily manageable data, and the flow of time, context, and sensory experiences are eliminated. For instance, one interviewee stated that "reviews are summarized by objective images and repetitive words of the place, and emotions are replaced by scores and data." This standardization reduces the individual's experience to a single data point within the digital map, converting reality into an objective and uniform image. Within the rigid rules of the game, organic data such as personal emotion and sensation are not recorded and flow away somewhere. What kind of experience are we sharing through reviews?

4.Affect Swallowed by the Virtual Space
The digital map platform focuses on using the affect (emotion and vitality) contained in reviews as an economic resource to further enrich the virtual space. The map fixes affect within its frame, to encourage users to stay on the platform and generate review content for as long as possible. Individuals refine their experiences according to rules proven safe to earn points, reach higher Local Guide levels, and pass safely through the black box. The most frequently repeated words are selected and fixed as keyword tags at the top of the review window. Users visiting the area will find the information they want without delay through the desired tags and move on.
Coupled with the reality of increasingly transparent platform labor, the existence and experiences of reviewers in the digital map, like workers on other contemporary digital assembly lines, become phantoms—one of countless data points that cannot be specified. The solidarity formed through exchanging memories and experiences with other users via the platform is less robust than the solidarity with the platform necessary for survival within the platform. It devolves from "sharing personal experience" to "survival within the platform." Experiences and sensations digitized to represent reality become increasingly standardized, and in the process, senses and affects that do not fit the map's frame are alienated. Where do these excluded experiences disappear to? Data that fails to remain on the map wanders like a phantom, pushed outside the boundary between reality and the virtual. The digital map's attempt to prove reality is accompanied by the phantomization of excluded reality.

Summoning Existence from Absence

1. Sensing the Place
The process of experiencing and understanding a place does not rely solely on visible information. Momentary sensations that are not digitized—such as geographical features, the felt scale of the place, the people who constitute the place, and the flow of air—form the identity of the place. The digital map asks us what experience we had, but sensory elements that are converted to data and cannot be clearly defined are gradually excluded.
The platform encourages users to update the current state of a place, with key updates including whether a store is open, its price range, and its congestion level. I once watched an interview with a Local Guide who ranked first in review views in a foreign country. They mentioned an instance where the Local Guide tried to upload a photo with the store's business hours, realized the displayed hours were incorrect, corrected them, and uploaded the corrected image, but it was not reflected due to AI filtering. This story shows how the platform rejects personal sensation and experience when it fails to be converted into "data that proves present-ness."
To what extent do the review-writing rules that state, "write down your real experience," apply? What meaning can data have when time is intermixed, connecting the past, present, and future? Can a review describing a past experience different from the present be accepted? Can personal memory be refined into the data format required by the platform?

2. The Circulation of Narrative
The individual memories left in reviews are fragmented and classified like grains based on their data utility, awaiting superficial narration.
While talking about the space described in a review, we once moved onto the topic of dreams about childhood neighborhoods. The place that always appeared in dreams was the space where I lived in very early childhood, whose streets could not be clearly drawn on a map. A space through sensory memory. The representation of the place circulates, is imagined, and evokes alternative memories. The space in memory is built up, then collapses again, and connects to a new world. The story continues.
I think about sensing a space through the stories of others. Experience before it is standardized into data. We recover sensation and imagine a new world through temporary and ambiguous fragments of memory.

3. Collecting Excluded Reality
We conducted direct interviews with Local Guides, collecting unstructured data such as gestures, tone of voice, and emotions that could not be seen in reviews. This attempt to capture elements that were excluded from the review ecosystem became the starting point for exploring experience as "raw data" within the work. We examined how users have digitized their senses and experiences through the map platform's review activities, questioning what was excluded and what was standardized in the process.
In particular, the interviews revealed how platform users unconsciously adapted to digitization, refining their senses and experiences. By abbreviating experiences to fit the "data that proves present-ness" required by the review system, it prompted us to reflect on what is being alienated. This work explores the possibilities of how excluded experiences and sensations wander outside the platform's frame while we increasingly standardize our senses to fit that frame.
The work creates new narratives outside the platform's framework, based on unstandardized data. Gestures, voices, and sensory memories restore a world that the platform does not visualize, leading us to imagine new spaces and temporalities. What can we recover through the phantoms of excluded reality?