Locative Social Media

Place in the Digital Age

L. Evans

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137456106
• eBook ISBN: 9781137456113
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Digital Marketing
• Index: Social Sciences

This book offers a critical analysis of the effect of usage of locative social media on the perceptions and phenomenal experience of lived in spaces and places. Drawing on users accounts of location-based social networking, a digital post-phenomenology of place is developed to explain how place is mediated in the digital age.

1

Introduction

The research underpinning the analysis and argument of this book originated from my interest in how technology interfaced with everyday life in science-fiction. I cannot think of any book that has such an influence on my perspective of the world as Neuromancer, the canonical novel of cyberspace and hackers by William Gibson, published in 1984. The book and the world that Gibson created in Neuromancer fascinates not just for precedence, but also for the uncomfortable, uncanny feeling that the present is reworked in a manner that estranges familiarity (see Kitchin and Kneale, 2005). Gibson’s vision is of a world where human beings and networked digital technology co-exist and perception of the world is dependent upon the co-existence and use of computational devices. The co-existence often borders on the hostile, but is also a way of understanding the how the world is made sense of by the characters in the book in a world imbued with and dominated by information, data and computer technology.

On reflection what was so striking about Neuromancer was the way that the place of action in the book – be that Chiba City, the Sprawl or cyberspace itself – was articulated by the writer. The book is challenging to understand, as the neologisms Gibson uses to create a sense of place in these locations are so jarringly new to the first time reader. The experience is disorientating; one struggles to understand and to form a mental picture of settings:

Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million megabytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in midtown Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year-old industrial parks ringing the old core of Atlanta. (Gibson, 1984: 43)

This is a description of the Sprawl, an endless city stretching from modern-day Boston down the East coast to Atlanta and beyond, but a city in the singular, one continuous urban landscape. Gibson forces the reader to understand the place of action through what was, at the time of his writing, an alien real-time cartographic technique, using pulses of data to represent place rather than the geographic features or gazetteers in maps one would have been accustomed to in 1984. In doing so, Gibson is using a heuristic technique to give the sense of scale of place quickly in the narrative, but the experience is one of estrangement for the reader and protagonist. The protagonist (Case, the anti-hero hacker at the centre of the narrative) attunes himself to this view as if it were normal (as one might now do, 30 years later). It is how Case sees places, understands them and dwells within them:

He looked around the deserted dead end street. A sheet of newsprint went cartwheeling past the intersection. Freak winds in the East side; something to do with convection, and an overlap in the domes. Case peered through the window at the dead sign. Her sprawl wasn’t his sprawl, he decided. She’d led him through a dozen bars and clubs he’d never seen before, taking care of business, usually with no more than a nod. Making connections. (Gibson, 1984: 8)

Here, Case is unfamiliar in a particular part of the vast Sprawl, while his companion Molly is at home, or familiar, with that place. That one can feel at home in the Sprawl is something that did not surprise me, as anyone that has lived in a city knows. You acquire familiarity with the places you frequent most often and a feeling of being at home in them without necessarily becoming familiar with the city as a whole. In the undifferentiated urban landscapes Gibson describes, people connect with people and places, such as bars and junk stores, as well as online. In these situations the characters go from the confusing and unsettlingly fast-paced Sprawl into familiar places that have a sense of place and community. Through a process of reading, thinking and empathising, the reader also becomes familiar, with both the urban and cyber landscapes that are described, as one becomes accustomed to the objects, things and technology that Gibson uses to describe his places. What appears bewildering is understood through the things that he uses to explain place. The entire place of the novel unfolds and makes sense once one understands the technology and objects Gibson uses to create place within the narrative (for further reading see Batty, 1997a; Concannon, 1998; Myers, 2001). The world in the book is not far removed from the world we find ourselves in today: an environment often dominated and defined by computational devices. Gibson offers a fictional view of how users could become attuned to a world that is populated by such devices, and how humans make sense of places in terms of their relationships mediated by such devices.

In 2007, I read (out of morbid curiosity) “Industrial Society and Its Future” by the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski (2005). His manifesto describes a system (of technological objects and technology) that “does not exist to satisfy human needs,” but rather “human behaviour has to be modified to fit the needs of the system.” The system described is not guided by ideology but by technological necessity, a form of technological determinism. In this description of technicity, when you engage with any part of the technological world you are not released by it; you are kept in a reserve by the technological world, having to use it again and use it more, and use other technology until you are absorbed by technology. While the Unabomber was judged to be insane, and his criminal campaign of murder thankfully ended, his vision of technology as a totalising, autonomous system is an influential idea not alien to the field of philosophy of technology. This book explores the notion of technological control and totalisation in a world filled with computational devices – but does not share the Unabomber’s scepticism. While there is no doubt that we live alongside and increasingly use technology (and here I refer to digital, computational technology) in our everyday living, I will argue that (even through the utilisation of philosophical ideas associated with technological control and domination) the use of digital technology in everyday navigation of the world can both deepen understanding of place and reduce place to commodity. The direction of this is a function of the mood of the user, rather than the technology itself.

The focus of analysis is specifically concerned with mobile devices and the relatively new phenomenon of location-based social networking (LBSN). In 2011, IMS research predicted that 420 million smartphones – small, powerful mobile computing devices carried daily – would be sold in globally in 2011, rising to one billion in 2016, which would constitute half the global mobile phone market (IMS Research, 2011). In 2013, half of 12- to 17-year-olds in America owned a smartphone (Madden et al., 2013). This proliferation of mobile computing is creating a world of continual computational presence. Even Gibson had Case jacking into the Internet at a fixed console, and while the experience of the Internet is not totally embodied (as yet) as Gibson envisaged, the presence of information and computation on the move is certainly present for those that choose to use their smartphones or tablets. This is the technology that people are using more and more on a daily basis to access email, surf the Internet, use social networking and locate themselves in the world.¹

I originally questioned the value of embedding Global Positioning System technology (GPS) within mobile handsets. I began to understand their utility, however, with the emergent practices that coalesced around Foursquare and Gowalla, two LBSN platforms, particularly at the South by Southwest (SXSW) music festival in January 2010. SXSW seemed to be a focal point for an emergent use of GPS in phones, as people tagged themselves (or their devices) to a venue or band playing at that venue. Membership numbers on Foursquare and Gowalla at that time were exploding. What is of importance is what these programmes asked users to do. Twitter, Facebook and others already ask users to share their thoughts with the members of their social network and what they are doing and why they are doing it. Location-based social networks not only do this, but also ask the user to share the exact location of where they are doing this activity.

Location-based services (LBSs) are the fastest growing sector in web-based technology business (Gordon and de Souza e Silva, 2011: 9). These services, be they LBSN, satellite navigation devices in cars or augmented reality browsers as applications on mobile phones, open questions about the awareness of location and engagement with location for users. McCullogh (2006: 26) argues that LBSs are a channel or means of obtaining hyper-specialised information, in that the information reaching users is now about where they are, rather than decontextualised information with no relevance to their location. The use of LBSN is an extension of the use of GPS technology for everyday use, but whereas the GPS used in in-car systems is based on a database of places owned and licensed commercially by the manufacturer, LBSNs build their databases of places through the use of the service by the users themselves – crowdsourcing the database. Users “create” the place, they check in (denoting presence at a place through the application) and comment, creating gazetteers of location, type and personal opinion within an open and freely available network. As I began to use this technology in 2010, I firstly began to explore the gamification² of LBSN and the collection of ‘game’ points within the game.³ Moreover, when using the application Foursquare in unfamiliar places, for example when travelling to academic conferences or for weekends away, I found that I could use the recommendations and patterns of use of other users to inform my own movements. In effect, I was using the LBSN to navigate my way through unfamiliar space, and in doing this I was gaining familiarity – restaurants, bars, taxi ranks, places of interest, all became visible through the interface. On a trip to London in March 2010, unfamiliar spaces did become meaningful places largely through the use of the LBSN Foursquare. In using the LBSN in this way, I was using a user-generated map full of social gazetteers created entirely by other users and how they understood the places that were around me. My understanding of place was an orientation of myself to the understanding of place shared with me as a member of the LBSN, and mapped by other users.

This type of mapping is in agreement with Deleuze and Guattari’s (in Shaviro, 2010: 7) concepts of what maps are: tools for negotiating in and intervening in social space rather than static representations of territory. Maps therefore do not replicate the shape of a territory; rather they inflect and represent that territory in a particular way (see Chapter 2 of this volume) – a distinction between ontic and ontogenetic representation of space. LBSNs allow maps to be realised not just in creation but also in distribution to anyone that owns a suitable computational device using the Internet. With Foursquare installed, the user can use maps in negotiation with the environment, charting their movements and thoughts as an overlay on that map which is in itself an overlay over the physical territory. In this sense they are like Borges’ famous tale from “Of Exactitude in Science”:

In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such perfection that the Map of a single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of time, these extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the college of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the study of Cartography, succeeding generations came to judge a map of such magnitude cumbersome, and, not without irreverence, they abandoned it to the rigours of sun and rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the map are still to be found, sheltering an occasional beast or beggar; in the whole nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography. (Borges, 1998: 325)

My reading of Borges is that the map of the Empire cannot be used in a negotiation of the type that Deleuze and Guattari describe; when the map is purely a representation of the territory, it is an impossibility, instead requiring abstraction, generalisation, editing and “formatting” – in effect simplification. Mapping is a way of making inscriptions of meaning that assist in the navigation of the world, and this is what Foursquare and other LBSN encourage, in line with Verhoeff’s (2012: 13) argument that in a world where screens are ubiquitous, navigation becomes a primary trope in urban mobility and visibility.

The situation is that the technology available to us – inexpensive, easy to use and with free and open mapping technology – has allowed almost anyone to use maps to negotiate and navigate a world, and to contribute to the navigation practices of others. There is a shift in the role of cartographer from skilled mapmaker to digital database manager, through the triangulation of LBSN, technology and user. The technology facilitates the urge to map through its presence and the practices of doing so offers an understanding of place for the user that is different from the use of a traditional map. Jameson (1991: 89–92) understood the need for maps as a technology that enables the understanding of the world. Citing Lynch’s (1960) The Image of the City, Jameson argues that spaces that people become unable to map are alienated spaces; spaces that cannot be understood in the minds of people. Jameson understands social cartography as having the consequence of endowing the individual subject with a heightened sense of place in the global system ( Jameson, 1991: 90). Social cartography is not understood in this context as a reorganisation of older forms of mapping, but as a means of understanding and regaining a capacity to act in a world that the modern subject is spatially confused by through the neutralisation of spatiality through technological representation. The cognitive mapping that Jameson advocates is a form of taking up place through practices that are attuned to social behaviours and understanding of place through the social and practical aspects of place. Particular practices of being involved with technology produce a poetic understanding of place. This is not to say that technological representations of place cannot lead to instrumental understandings of place, however. Ultimately, the argument I advance aims to understand what practices of use are indicative of and essential to deeper understandings of place or instrumental understandings in the digital age through an exploration of location-based social media usage.

Space and place

The concepts of space and place are obviously important in this project. Newton distinguished between two kinds of space: absolute space and relative space. Absolute space is always the same and immutable, without reference of any other points of reference and with no requirement for anything to fill that space ( Jacobson, 2006: 15). Absolute space has no secondary qualities such as colour, shape or extension, and as such has no substance or recognisable quality that allows for human comprehension through the senses. In contrast, relative space – marked-off portions of absolute space – has the kind of features for spatial understanding that humans have in everyday epistemology. A university campus for example would be relative space, with discernible boundaries, and something that could be divided further to signify other spaces within that larger relative space e.g. a building, a lecture theatre, an office, a storage cupboard. The number of possible relative spaces is limitless, and these spaces can overlap one another e.g. one has an office (a relative space) within a building (another relative space) ( Jacobson, 2006: 16).

For Newton, space exists independently of human beings, and is not dependent upon human beings for its existence or intelligibility. Newton’s reasons for this view were to provide an objective foundation for spatiality through which his laws of motion could be made intelligible and understandable through mathematical principles, which is why absolute space is necessarily apart from human interpretation or action. Humans cannot perceive an object’s position in absolute space because absolute space cannot be understood through perception, only through notions of Euclidian space and mathematical principles ( Jacobson, 2006: 18). In this view, then, humans are not directly in contact with absolute space at all, only interpreting that absolute space relatively through cognitive processes. Relative space becomes a function of the understanding of points between objects and therefore subjective and dependent upon sensation. What we might term place – that is, sites of human activity such as the building or office – is the use of the intellect to make sense of space in a meaningful way. Here, I use Heidegger’s notion of place as a meaningful existential locale made up of a referential totality of things in that location that gives meaning to the location, rather than an undifferentiated locale which would be space. This position is explained at length in Chapter 3.

Descartes’ concept of spatiality is similar to Newton’s, but also differs in some significant ways. Most significantly, for Descartes there cannot be empty spaces as all space is filled with extended bodies, or res extensa ( Jacobson, 2006: 23), and space is the accumulation of these bodies (Descartes, 1997: 49). Space is extension and matter is indistinguishable from space, and therefore all space must necessarily be filled with matter. For Descartes all space can be is matter, and nothing else.⁴ This difference between Descartes and Newton has significance as it allows for the possibility of a space that is defined by things that constitute that space, and that space itself and the space that is perceived are the same thing ( Jacobson, 2006: 24). Descartes qualifies this difference in his analysis of the senses in the Meditations (1997: 38). Famously, Descartes claims that the senses can deceive as part of his attempt to defeat scepticism and find a ground for certainty. As a stick can appear bent in water (through refraction) we must not (according to Descartes) trust the senses at all. This line of argument eventually concludes in the cogito as the only certainty that Descartes can have against scepticism, and the eventual substance dualism that separates extended matter from mental substance (the mind) ontologically in Descartes philosophy. This is critical for the understanding of space in Descartes’ philosophy. Space, as matter, cannot be encountered directly even though things and matter constitute this space.

So, in these conceptions of space, space is something that is perceived by the mind through the senses and body that is also material but which the mind “inhabits” – albeit, in a confusing way.⁵ The contact between the thinking thing (a human) and space is not only indirect but also subject to error and misjudgement from using senses that can deceive, and therefore knowledge of space itself is uncertain. By making the mind necessarily separate from matter, Descartes orders the importance of spatiality and non-extended substance. Space is only extension, and while the body is part of that extension it is of secondary importance to the intellect in understanding extension; Descartes was certain that he exists and his role as a thinking thing is to think and understand the world. Understanding emerges from the operation of the intellect through the deduction of mathematical truths about space. While Descartes is willing to admit that space consists of something, unlike Newton, both theories contend that space is understood only as rational proofs and truths derived by the intellect that is necessarily separate from that space, and therefore cannot understand space through an engagement with or emergence within space.

In these theories, spa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 A (Brief) History of Understanding Space and Place
• 3 The Phenomenology of Place
• 4 The Mobile Device as a Thing: The Gathering of Place Digitally
• 5 Sharing Location with Locative Social Media
• 6 The Social Capital of Locative Social Media
• 7 Conclusions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index