Abstract
In 2010, Google generated global controversy when their Google Street View cars recorded data sourced from unsecured WiFi networks. While, in February of the same year, mobile social networking service Foursquare became embroiled in its own controversy when it was revealed that much of the traffic on their site was appearing on Please Rob Me.com, a website which streams updates from various location-based networks that shows when users check-in to a geographical location that is not their home.
These controversies are of note not just for the salutary lessons they offer about the risks associated with digital data retention, privacy and security. At a more general level, they are noteworthy in that they testify to the dramatically increased public awareness of, and mainstream (especially press) exposure granted to, location-based media services. Such services are now well established and booming commercially, with consumers accustomed to using sat nav devices in their cars, Google maps on desktop and laptop computers and mobile devices, geoweb and geotagging and other mapping applications, and various apps on iPhones and smartphones that use location technologies. Not only do location-based services ‘comprise the fastest growing sector in web technology businesses’ (Gordon and de Souza e Silva, 2011: 9), questions of location and location-awareness are increasingly central to our contemporary engagements with the internet and mobile media. Indeed, as Gordon and de Souza e Silva (2011: 19) suggest, ‘unlocated information will cease to be the norm’ and location will become a ‘near universal search string for the world’s data’ (2011: 20); or, as McCullough (2006: 26) puts it, information ‘is now coming to you … wherever you are’ and ‘is increasingly about where you are’.
In this special issue, 1 ‘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 precise reason that it is economical and expansive but also precise. That is to say, it captures a lot in two words while also retaining a sense of the term’s very particular history, which is anchored within the field of new media arts. For instance, various sources trace the origin of the term ‘locative media’ back to Karlis Kalnins, who is said to have first proposed it during the Art + Communication Festival in Riga, Latvia in 2003, and the crucial influence of the RIXC – Centre for New Media Culture in Latvia (see Zeffiro and Tuters this issue).
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 critical implications of locative media, and 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 forms of social appropriation, citizenship and (experimental) sociability (Lemos, 2009; Tarkka, 2010; in addition, see Licoppe and Inada, 2006), and in examining the ‘particularities, tensions and conflicts’ associated with urban space (Bambozzi, 2009; Salmond, 2010).
Outside of media arts, significant work has been done on locative media at the intersection of research into mobile technologies, geography (particularly the sub-field of media geography, see Thielman, 2010), 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 (Crawford and Goggin, 2009; de Souza e Silva and Frith, 2010; de Souza e Silva and Sutko, 2011; Rosol, 2010; Wilken, 2008, 2011; Wilken and Goggin, 2012a, 2012b; Willis, 2010), exploration of the representation of space and spatial practice through locative media (Drakopoulou, 2010; Gazzard, 2011; Lapenta, 2011; Rueb, 2008) and concern for what might be described as questions of power and the politics of location and locatability (Elmer, 2010; Tarkka, 2010). What the foregoing examples evidence, in short, is a flowering of detailed, wider, interdisciplinary scholarship on and around locative media.
Within this emerging (pre-)history of locative media, the period between 2005 and 2009 can be seen as especially significant in that it signaled an important turning point in the commercial development of locative technologies. It was during this time that interest in locative media began to shift. Initially a somewhat specialized pursuit or preoccupation, locative media is now very much shaped by mainstream uptake and has become the focus of increased consumer fascination. Two factors are crucial here. The first is Google’s embrace of geolocation services. As Gordon and de Souza e Silva (2011: 20) explain in relation to mapping technologies: For many decades, the geolocation industry was focused on developing high-end geographic information system (GIS) software for market and social research, as well as military purposes. But when Google Maps launched in February 2005, and its application programming interface (API) was made available to the public just a few months later, the specialized domain of GIS programmers became the domain of everyday users.
Both developments, in short, have had a profound impact in fostering the democratization of, and opening up of access to, geolocation services and associated infrastructure.
The articles in this special issue explore both phases of development: that associated with new media art (how locative media has been and continues to be understood within media arts), and its wider uptake (how locative media technologies have been taken up more broadly). All contribute valuable new knowledge to our understandings of and critical engagements with locative media, including responding to the aforementioned themes of the mediation between technology and physical/digital spaces, representational issues, and concerns regarding power and location. Respectively, these six articles: examine the historical and discursive development of locative media arts; speculate on possible future directions of locative media arts; respond to one particular ‘aporia’ or ‘critical blind-spot’ that is seen as characteristic of locative media as it has developed within new media arts (the privileging of sight over sound); test the possibilities of locative media for transforming journalistic practice; make a case for the merits of comparative analysis of quite distinct forms of engagement with locative media for understanding socio-spatial and socio-technical interactions; and contribute to the existing (rather sparse) scholarship on the political economic implications of locative media. More detailed summaries of each of these six contributions follow next.
The first article, ‘A location of one’s own’, by Andrea Zeffiro, draws from the work of Foucault and Bourdieu to develop a ‘genealogy of locative media’. Zeffiro makes innovative use of the Wayback Machine as an archival research instrument to access the (locative) listserv and CRUMB archives in order to build and analyze the history of locative media up until 2007 (the point at which the listserv was no longer maintained, and just prior to the arrival of the smartphone). From this archival work, Zeffiro’s argument is that locative media is not a thing. Rather it is a field of cultural production, or field of forces, that is regulated by power relations and symbolic struggles, which work to sustain or subvert the reproduction of the social order. Her analysis of tensions inherent in the historical development of locative media as it has developed within new media arts reveals locative media as a field of cultural production, that is, in Zeffiro’s words, ‘perpetually evolving and continuously reproduced vis-à-vis struggles between technological interpretation and different visions of future use’.
In the second article, ‘From mannerist situationism to situated media’, Marc Tuters outlines one particular vision of future use – what he terms ‘an emerging (supra)genre of practice that situates agency in the environment by giving voice to nature and tracing the lifecycle of things’. In an attempt to think beyond the impasse created by locative practitioners functioning, in his terms, as ‘the avant-garde of a control society’, Tuters (drawing inspiration from Latour) sets out to ‘re-imagine the prospects for locative media after what [he calls] the object turn’. In so doing, Tuters examines projects by Beatriz da Costa, Joshua Klein and Natalie Jeremijenko as part of his consideration of ‘how a set of post-locative practices situate a “user” … but also an object, in proximate relation to the [in this case environmental] issues by which they are effected, in order to generate affect’.
‘The sound of locative media’, by Frauke Behrendt, the third article in this special issue, also examines locative media as it has been developed within media arts. Behrendt’s concern is, however, quite different from that of Zeffiro and Tuters. Her focus is questioning the visual bias that she believes structures much locative media discourse by focusing on the auditory quality of locative media. Through an examination of Bluebrain’s US-based National Mall Project, Behrendt develops the concept of ‘placed-sounds’: that is, user experience of certain locations via portable media ‘where the distribution of sound in space is pre-curated, and users create their own version or remix of the service by choosing their path through the sounds’.
The final three articles are very much anchored in the second phase of locative media development: the post-2005/2009 period of widespread adoption and use of smart phones and GPS and other geolocational systems. In the fourth contribution, entitled ‘Locative journalism’, Lars Nye, Solveig Bjørnestad, Bjørnar Tessem, and Kjetil Vaage Øie, introduce and reflect upon their LocaNews project: a 2009 Norwegian trial to develop an application to assist journalists with the production of location-sensitive news. In a candid assessment of the trial, the authors conclude that it is one thing to develop an effective mobile application, while it is quite another to engage industry and ‘reorient the established journalistic procedures and textual conventions so that they effectively exploit the possibilities of the new medium’.
The penultimate article, ‘Navigating sociotechnical spaces’, by Chris Chesher, develops an extended comparison of spatial guidance and experiences of movement in the computer game Grand Theft Auto IV and sat navs, such as Tom Tom Navigator. Chesher’s core argument, which is heavily informed by the work and ideas of Lefebvre, is that games and sat navs signal important shifts in ‘technosocial space’ and that a comparative analysis of Grand Theft Auto IV and in-car sat navs ‘show that critical understandings of social space need increasingly to incorporate readings of digitally mediated spatiality’.
The final article, ‘Governing the geocoded world’, by Carlos Barreneche, considers the impact of one of the corporate heavyweights in locative media: Google. Focusing on Google’s location platform Places, and combining thoughtful readings of corporate website data with analysis of patent diagrams and other sources, Barreneche develops a fascinating (if somewhat troubling) argument that ‘location platforms are underpinned by a geo-demographical spatial ordering according to which subjects are located for the purpose of economic government’. Not only does this article make a valuable contribution to established scholarship on power and place, it usefully sheds light on how locative media services are being driven by private enterprise and are developing in ways that place them on the borders or outside of current media and communications and other regulatory regimes. As such, locative media, it might be suggested, signal important shifts in how we presently understand the political economy, consumption, and regulation of new media services.
The aim of this special issue of Convergence is to open up conversations about the past, present and possible future directions of locative media, both within the precise context of new media arts as well as across their wider manifestations and contexts of use. It seeks to highlight the continued importance of and need for ongoing and detailed critical engagement with locative media in all its forms.