Locative Media

Rowan Wilken, Gerard Goggin, Rowan Wilken, Gerard Goggin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134588725
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencia de la computación
• Subtopic: Medios digitales

Not only is locative media one of the fastest growing areas in digital technology, but questions of location and location-awareness are increasingly central to our contemporary engagements with online and mobile media, and indeed media and culture generally. This volume is a comprehensive account of the various location-based technologies, services, applications, and cultures, as media, with an aim to identify, inventory, explore, and critique their cultural, economic, political, social, and policy dimensions internationally. In particular, the collection is organized around the perception that the growth of locative media gives rise to a number of crucial questions concerning the areas of culture, economy, and policy.

1
Locative Media—Definitions, Histories, Theories

Rowan Wilken and Gerard Goggin

Introduction

In Seoul, a young woman uses the location-based social networking service Kakao in order to tag, upload, and share a photo just taken of their catch-up with friends. In Helsinki, a family plays Angry Birds together, as the app gathers information on their location via the smartphone and its location technologies and sensors. In Chongqing, middle-class café habitués are sharing contacts, messages, and photos via the networking application Jiepang (which now includes the trendy mobile app WeChat), popularized in cities like Shanghai. In rural United States, a child calls 911 emergency services for help, and the ambulance is dispatched using the location information available via their absent parents’ phone.

Every day, tens of millions of mobile users navigate and way-find using mobile maps that pinpoint their location. Around the world, men flirt, connect, and hook up with other men by using Grindr and other apps to scan for who is free and available in their vicinity. Crossing the border from Mexico to the United States, immigrants use GPS to find food, water, and help, while their movements trigger embedded sensors in the landscape, alerting authorities to their presence. Elsewhere in Mexico, law enforcement agents use geolocation data on a suspect’s whereabouts, provided by a mobile phone company.

In Africa, a mobile developer at a trade fair in Johannesburg pitches the virtues of locative mobile media, hoping to build on pioneering efforts in user-generated news and citizen journalism such as Ushahidi. Meanwhile, all across the African continent, users continue to routinely use text messaging on cheap mobiles to tell friends, family, and customers where they are. In New South Wales, Australia, a resident files a privacy complaint after he wakes up to the company of a drone hovering outside his bedroom window. In San Francisco, a tech enthusiast-cum-writer is assaulted in a bar for the offense of sporting her new Google Glass.

These vignettes indicate some of the growing range of technologies, features, uses, practices, meanings, emotions, and possibilities that are associated with locative media. Broadly speaking, locative media involves the use of information, data, sounds, and images about a location. In reality, as we shall discuss in this chapter and as will be borne out in this book, the definitions of both “locative” and “media” turn out to be much more complex, fabulous, prosaic, frustrating and disappointing than they might seem.

If the locative aspect is tricky to pin down, then, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, the media part of the couplet is expanding almost beyond comprehension. So locative media involve not just global positioning satellites (GPS), cellular mobile phones, location-based services (LBS), and apps. Locative media have gone well beyond mobile social software, social networking applications, and so-called check-in applications from Dodgeball and Foursquare, through Facebook Places, Twitter, and Weibo. It is turning out that locative media are the harbinger of the emergent media of our time, from big data to drones, from the Internet of Things to logistics, all with their urgent cultural, social, and political implications.

Hence this volume aims to provide a state-of-the-art snapshot and analysis of contemporary locative media, along with the ideas, technologies, practices, contexts, and power relations shaping them and the research underway that seeks to illuminate them. Accordingly, in this opening chapter, we provide an introduction to locative media. In the first two sections, we discuss the cardinal concept of location and chart the histories and development of locative media. In the third section, we provide an overview of the key theoretical tributaries feeding research into locative media, allowing us also to situate the various contributions to this volume.

The Concept of Location

The concept of location (like the related concepts of place and space) has developed according to a diverse and complicated set of etymological trajectories that include legal use (with location understood as the action of letting for hire) and grammatical use (where it refers to a particular case form).¹ It also refers to land settlement practices, as well as to processes of emplacement and “the action of discovering, or the ability to discover or determine, the position of a person or thing.”² It is these last two senses that constitute the general understanding of the term and that most inform how the term is employed in relation to mobile media technologies.

In addition to its rich etymological history, location is also a foundational concept in classical geography, where it is considered to act as a unifying concept.³ As Fred Lukermann explains, for classical geographers, “the essence of all the methods is location”; it is the umbrella term that unifies geography, chorography, and topography.⁴ For instance, in the philosophy of Aristotle, Lukermann writes that “place or space description is simply an analysis of relative location.”⁵ For Strabo, “what seemed in the past to be either divergent self-contained trends are brought together into comprehension around the central thesis of location.”⁶ Location is also a concept, Lukermann asserts, that carries important general significance. From the Ancient Greek poets onward, he writes, “how to describe ‘where something is’ becomes idiomatic in Western culture.”⁷

Nevertheless, location has since come to be understood as a subsidiary concern to the more encompassing concept of place. This is a perspective that is captured in Ed Relph’s description of place as “location plus everything that occupies that location seen as an integrated and meaningful phenomenon.”⁸ More recently, however—and commensurate with the rise of location-enabled mobile communications technologies—location is viewed as having taken on increased (or renewed) conceptual importance in its own right. Adriana de Souza e Silva and Jordan Frith encapsulate this renewal of interest in the concept of location as follows:

The popularization of location-aware mobile technologies not only highlights the importance of location, but also forces us to re-think how location has been traditionally conceptualized. Locations are still defined by fixed geographical coordinates, but they now acquire dynamic meaning as a consequence of the constantly changing location-based information that is attached to them.⁹

Thus, they argue, where locations were once seen as “places deprived of meaning” (or perhaps, whose meaning was dependent on other concepts and phenomena), they can now be seen as taking on “complex, multifaceted identities that expand and shift according to the information ascribed to them.”¹⁰

The efficacy of the term “locative media” in describing recent developments in mobile media technologies, as Minna Tarkka notes, is also a product of the meanings carried by it.¹¹ For instance, media arts theorist Karlis Kalnins, the person generally credited with coining the term “locative media” (broadly defined as media of communication that are functionally bound to a location), is understood to have been drawn to the word “locative” based on his knowledge of “languages such as Latvian and Finnish with their several locative cases corresponding roughly to the preposition ‘in,’ ‘at,’ or ‘by,’ and indicating a final location of action or a time of the action.”¹² This etymological preference on Kalnins’ part is more than mere semantics; it is deliberate insofar as, for him, it strategically repositions media arts practice by shifting the emphasis off the site of action (actual places or locations) and onto the agency and actions of subjects and onto the temporal dimensions of these actions. Our perspective is slightly different. Although continuing to use the term “locative media,” we acknowledge the significance of Kalnins’ linguistic preference for “locative” over “location;” our preference is that the two—actions and the sites in which these temporally based actions occur—be kept in a productive tension that also accounts for the various technological (cellphone towers, radio signals, handsets, Wi-Fi, etc.) and other infrastructures (not the least of these being corporate arrangements) that mediate our locationally situated technosocial interactions.¹³

Histories and Development of Locative Media

Location technologies have experienced a relatively long and complex incubation. The satellite-based global positioning system (GPS) commenced life as a military technology before finding its way into wider commercial and consumer uses (not least of which is being used in mobile phones, along with triangulation of cellular networks for such services as enhanced emergency calling). Location-based services for cellular mobile networks and devices were the subject of much experiment and anticipation in the 1990s. Mobile social networking applications first emerged in the 1990s, with the celebrated Lovegety gadget in Japan, and pioneering efforts such as Dodgeball in North America. Technologies predicated on location were also pieced together through telecommunications, the Internet, and web-based friendship, dating, and hooking-up services and sites such as Gaydar.

The early 2000s witnessed a wave of location-based experimentation with location and mobile devices across art, urban design, ubiquitous and pervasive computing, and strands of gaming cultures. These experiments included locative art, performances, activist interventions, location-aware fiction, location-based games (famously those of Blast Theory), annotation, and storytelling. As mobile phones developed into full-fledged media devices, various affordances led to new kinds of sociotechnical marshaling of location. The ubiquity of camera phones allowed innovative visual and textual instantiations and representations of place. Cross-platform game developments increasingly relied on locative media as a key part of integrated, transmedia forms. Music and sound moved to the foreground of media, which were imaginatively yoked to location.

In this book, “locative media” is the term that is used to capture this diverse array of location-aware technologies and practices. The term “locative media” (that is, media of communication that are functionally bound to a location) is preferred for the simple reason that it is economical and expansive but also precise. That is to say, it captures a lot in two words while retaining a sense of the term’s very particular history, which is anchored in the field of new media arts.¹⁴

Whatever the precise origins of the term, it is fair to say that the field of new media arts has been at the vanguard of exploring both the creative possibilities and the critical implications of locative media, and it is where the bulk of the literature on locative media to date is found. Here, important work has been done, to cite just two examples, in exploring how location-based services can generate new potentialities for facilitating the forms of social appropriation, citizenship, and (experimental) sociability¹⁵ and in examining the “particularities, tensions and conflicts” associated with urban space.¹⁶

Outside of media arts, significant work has been done on locative media at the intersection of research into mobile technologies, geography (particularly the subfield of media geography),¹⁷ and urban space and place. Taken up in this body of work are myriad considerations, which range across (to name only a few) analysis of how locative technologies mediate the relationship between technology use and physical/digital spaces;¹⁸ exploration of the representation of space and spatial practice through locative media;¹⁹ and concern for what might be described as questions of power and the politics of location and locatability.²⁰ What these examples evidence, in short, is a flowering of detailed, wider, interdisciplinary scholarship on and around locative media.

Nowadays, not only do ...