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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: DMS - Digital Media and Society
- Sprache: Englisch
Smartphone adoption has surpassed 50% of the population in more than 15 countries, and there are now more than one million mobile applications people can download to their phones. Many of these applications take advantage of smartphones as locative media, which is what allows smartphones to be located in physical space. Applications that take advantage of people’s location are called location-based services, and they are the focus of this book.
Smartphones as locative media raise important questions about how we understand the complicated relationship between the Internet and physical space. This book addresses these questions through an interdisciplinary theoretical framework and a detailed analysis of how various popular mobile applications including Google Maps, Facebook, Instagram, Yelp, and Foursquare use people’s location to provide information about their surrounding space.
The topics explored in this book are essential reading for anyone interested in how smartphones and location-based services have begun to impact the ways we navigate and engage with the physical world.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
1 From Atoms to Bits and Back Again
Communication media and the annihilation of space and place
The place of locative media
Notes
2 Mobilities and the Spatial Turn
The importance of the space and place
Mobile media and spatial experience
Conclusion
Notes
3 The Infrastructure of Locative Media
Location awareness
The generations of mobile networks
Open and closed:Google, Apple, and smartphone technology
Conclusion
Notes
4 Wayfi nding through Mobile Interfaces
The social production of mobile maps
Mobile wayfinding and flexible alignment
Spatial cognition and mobile maps
Conclusion
Notes
5 Location and Social Networks
A brief history of location-based social networks
Coordinating through location
Constructing identity through location
Sharing location and the future of public space
Conclusion
Notes
6 Writing and Archiving Space
Mobile composition:Layering stories, reviews, and tips
Mobile remembering: Composing memories in place
Conclusion
7 Market Forces and the Shaping of Location-based Services
Tracing Foursquare
The importance of venture capital
Conclusion
Notes
8 The Negotiation of Locational Privacy
Institutional locational privacy
Social privacy
Conclusion
Notes
Conclusion: The Future of Locative Media
Location-based services and the global South
The future of splintered space
Notes
References
Index
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Digital Media and Society Series
Nancy Baym, Personal Connections in the Digital Age
Jean Burgess and Joshua Green, YouTube
Mark Deuze, Media Work
Andrew Dubber, Radio in the Digital Age
Charles Ess, Digital Media Ethics 2nd edition
Alexander Halavais, Search Engine Society
Martin Hand, Ubiquitous Photography
Robert Hassan, The Information Society
Tim Jordan, Hacking
Graeme Kirkpatrick, Computer Games and the Social Imaginary
Leah Lievrouw, Alternative and Activist New Media
Rich Ling and Jonathan Donner, Mobile Communication
Donald Matheson and Stuart Allan, Digital War Reporting
Dhiraj Murthy, Twitter
Zizi A. Papacharissi, A Private Sphere: Democracy in a Digital Age
Jill Walker Rettberg, Blogging 2nd edition
Patrik Wikström, The Music Industry 2nd edition
Smartphones as Locative Media
Jordan Frith
polity
Copyright © Jordan Frith 2015
The right of Jordan Frith to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2015 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8504-5
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Frith, Jordan.
Smartphones as locative media / Jordan Frith.
pages cm. -- (Dms - digital media and society)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7456-8500-7 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-0-7456-8501-4 (paperback) 1. Location-based services. 2. Mobile computing. 3. Smartphones. 4. Location-based services--Social aspects. 5. Mobile computing--Social aspects. I. Title. TK5105.65.F78 2015
004.167--dc23
2014030411
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Dedication
For Lindsay, I hope we’re still going to Canada when we’re 80
Acknowledgments
This book has a single author on the cover page, but it is the result of years of collaboration. Six years ago, Adriana de Souza e Silva – the first professor I had in my PhD program – approached me and asked if I wanted to work with her on a project. Before that moment, I had never heard the term “locative media,” but luckily for me, Adriana got me interested in the topic. We ended up writing a couple articles and a book together, and I have been intrigued by the potential of locative media ever since. This project was born out of many of the ideas she and I worked on together through endless revisions, great conversations, and the kind of guidance any young scholar would be lucky to have.
And of course this book owes a great deal to other scholars as well. The field of mobile media studies, especially the subfield of locative media studies, is thriving but still small. That size meant that I got to know many of the people cited in this book, and people such as Jason Farman, Lee Humphreys, Christian Licoppe, Gerard Goggin, and Rowan Wilken could not have been kinder when I approached them at conferences or contacted them through email. Without their work and the insights of their many publications, this book would not be possible.
I also want to thank a variety of people who do not work directly in research on locative media. Carolyn Miller taught me how to approach the dynamic field of digital media, Steve Wiley convinced me to pay attention to culture and not exaggerate the effects of technology, Carole Blair introduced me to research on space and place and responded quickly to every email I ever wrote her, Jason Swarts introduced me to theories of technology that implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) shape my work, and David Berube showed me how to approach a project in an organized fashion. Many other colleagues and friends – including Kathy Oswald, Jeff Swift, Jacob Dickerson, Rowan Wilken, Jason Kalin, and Jason Farman – also helped with the writing of this book by editing chapters and providing valuable feedback. The anonymous reviewers and especially Elen Griffiths – my editor at Polity – also gave me clear feedback that made the analysis in these pages so much stronger and clearer. I am thankful to all of you and know that this book is much stronger because of your help.
I also want to thank my family and friends. I never tell any of you what I’m working on, but you helped with this book more than you know. My mother was especially helpful because I could always call her up and talk about anything whenever I didn’t feel like writing. And Lindsay, I couldn’t have done this without you. You were there every step of the way, and you were the person I knew I could turn to whenever things got rough. Thank you for everything.
And finally, I want to thank Meagan, Daisy, and Hammond. They sat (mostly) patiently with me in my home office through all of my writing and went for walks with me whenever I got stuck. They’re dogs, and I know they can’t read, but just in case …
1From Atoms to Bits and Back Again
Writing about emerging media presents a unique set of challenges. Whatever one writes will take long enough to complete and publish that many of the emerging media technologies analyzed will have changed. In few areas is that truer than in the study of mobile applications. In June, 2008, the Apple app store was still a month from being released; the Google app store did not exist. Slightly more than half a decade has now passed, and the mobile ecosystem has changed. Apple’s app store has more than 1 million applications available for download, and the Android counterpart – the Google Play Store – now has over 1 million available applications that have been downloaded 50 billion times (Fiegerman, 2013).
Mobile applications are a key part of the move from basic feature phones to smartphones. Smartphones are mobile devices that allow people to place phone calls, send text messages, browse the Internet, use GPS and other forms of location awareness, and run third-party applications. Over half of all mobile phone users in at least 15 countries now own smartphones (Google, 2014), and the growth rates have been impressive. In the United States, 33 percent of the general population owned smartphones in 2011 compared to 56 percent just two years later (Smith, 2013); smartphone ownership rates in the UK nearly doubled over the same period (Ofcom, 2013). While many parts of the world have seen slower smartphone adoption, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) points out that “In developing countries, the number of mobile broadband subscriptions more than doubled from 2011 to 2013” (ITU, 2013: 6). The increasing adoption of these miniature computers impacts the time and place of the Internet. Many people no longer only use the Internet in certain places at certain times. Instead, the mobile Internet becomes intertwined with people’s everyday practices, operating in the background of many of their conversations and travels through physical space (Gordon and de Souza e Silva, 2011).
Smartphone usage does not represent a simple extension of older Internet practices. People do use their phones to accomplish many of the same tasks as they would with desktop and laptop computers. They check Facebook to see what their friends are doing; they go to Wikipedia to settle arguments; they browse their favorite websites. However, many smartphone applications add an important element to the way people interact with digital information: physical location. They do so because smartphones are examples of locative media. Locative media refers to any form of media – ranging from in-car GPS displays to RFID tags – that feature location awareness, which is a device’s ability to be located in physical space and provide users with information about their surroundings. As covered in chapter 2, smartphones rely on a variety of techniques for location awareness, and these techniques are what enable applications like Google Maps and Yelp to know where a smartphone is on a map of physical space. Not all mobile applications take advantage of smartphones as locative media, but many do, and these mobile applications are called location-based services. They are the focus of this book.
Location-based services include everything from mapping services like Waze to popular social applications like Instagram that enable people to tag photos with location information. The applications are able to map different types of information because the pieces of digital information include latitude and longitude metadata, meaning they can be precisely placed on digital maps and positioned relationally to the location of the smartphone. Location is only one of many types of metadata included in the information with which users interact, but the argument throughout this book is that location data is an increasingly crucial piece of digital information (Gordon and de Souza e Silva, 2011). When people open up a smartphone application to provide them with information about their surroundings, they access digital information as an informational layer intertwined with the physical space they experience. Consequently, possibly the major social consequence of location-based services is that they not only impact the types of digital information people access, but they can also affect the way people navigate physical space and interact with those around them.
Smartphones as locative media show how physical places have begun to affect the mobile Internet and how the mobile Internet has begun to affect physical places. In some ways, the growth of location-based information seems like an obvious step in the maturation of the Internet. After all, why would people not use the information at their fingertips to learn more about the places they inhabit? However, to understand why smartphones as locative media represent a change in how the Internet is understood, it helps to examine how the Internet was originally conceived as “placeless.” As the next section shows, many people argued that the Internet would make place less important. People would move their social lives online, spend most of their time in virtual communities, work from home, and congregate in and travel through physical space less and less (Kellerman, 2006). The implicit assumption, still present in expressions like “in real life” that oppose the offline to the online, is that the Internet represents a separate space from the physical world. The examples of location-based services detailed throughout this book show why the conceptual separation of the physical and digital into two separate spheres is untenable. Instead, the digital and physical are being merged in new ways, and this chapter concludes by explaining how the intertwining of the digital and physical is addressed in the rest of the book.
Communication media and the annihilation of space and place
Human beings can only cover a limited distance with their physical bodies. If people attempt to communicate a message with no outside assistance, the distance they can communicate is limited by how loud they can yell. People overcome this limitation through media technologies. Written language allowed people to transcribe messages that were transported to other places. The printing press allowed for the mass distribution of the same communication across physical space (Eisenstein, 1979). People even experimented with non-textual, non-verbal media to overcome physical distance. For example, African tribes developed an intricate language of “talking drum” beats that allowed towns to communicate across distance using sound (Gleick, 2011).
The growth of electronic media, first with the telegraph and then the radio and telephone, also enabled messages to overcome great distances. The telegraph was an important development in communication media and represented the first instance of people sharing textual messages across physical space without the need for physical travel (Carey, 1989). To send a letter or distribute a book, a human body had to physically transport the document. Telegraphs removed bodies from the equation, and the importance of that change did not go unnoticed by contemporary observers. For instance, an 1844 article in the Baltimore Sun about the completion of the Washington– Baltimore telegraph line claimed that “Time and space has been completely annihilated” (Rosen, 2012). This same feeling – that space was being annihilated through new communication media – was later echoed when people could transmit their voices through the telephone (Fischer, 1994; Marvin, 1988), broadcast messages into homes using the radio (Peters, 1999), and watch live events taking place on the other side of the world on television (Meyrowitz, 1985; Parks, 2005). These media, along with physical transportation technologies such as the railroad and airplanes (Schivelbusch, 1986), all contributed to the experience that physical space was being overcome. The far was brought near, the absent made present.
The Internet contributed to the same feeling of the annihilation of physical space, possibly to an even greater degree. With the development of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s, people were able to create chat rooms and Multi-User Domains to build relationships with distant others (Baym, 2010), companies built global networks of information flows that lessened the importance of national borders (Castells, 2000), and many scholars and popular sources argued that the Web would lessen the importance of physical space (Gordon and de Souza e Silva, 2011). This sentiment can be seen in a famous 1994 MCI commercial about the Internet. The commercial featured a 12-year-old Anna Paquin describing the “Information Super Highway” as a road that will connect all points on the globe. The most famous statement from the commercial is when Paquin says this road “will not go from here to there. There will be no more there. We will all only be here” (“No More There,” 1994). Few quotes better encapsulate the belief that distinct places would be made meaningless by the new communication technology of the Internet. The Internet would allow people to be everywhere all at once, overcoming distance and lessening the importance of being in any one place at a given time.
Even the dominant earlier metaphor of the Internet –cyberspace – showed how people viewed the online world as separate from physical spaces, so separate that it needed its own spatial metaphor to differentiate it from other parts of daily life. And some cultural critics went so far as to argue that cyberspaces would begin to replace the importance of physical spaces. One of the most famous thinkers to do so was Nicholas Negroponte (1995), the founder of the MIT Media Lab. Negroponte’s predictions opposed the world of atoms (the physical) to the world of bits (the digital). He argued that the future lay in bits not atoms, whether in the forms of digital spaces in which to socialize or digital spaces in which to trade (Morgan, 2004). As Negroponte claimed,
As we interconnect ourselves, many of the values of the nation-state will give way to those of both larger and smaller electronic communities. We will socialize in digital neighborhoods in which physical space will be irrelevant and time will play a different role. (Negroponte, 1995: 6)
Negroponte predicted that people would turn away from physical space to live their lives online.1 He was not alone in this line of thought. Futurists such as Hans Moravec (1990) imagined worlds in which people download their consciousness into wired mainframes. Philosopher Paul Virilio (1997) expressed fear that the age of instant access would lead to a future in which people would not even care about the physical world enough to meet up to have sex. People were supposedly heading toward a future in which the life of the body was replaced by life on a screen. As is fairly obvious, these predictions of the world of atoms being overcome by the world of bits never fully played out in reality.
Early Internet research did suggest that people who spent more time online tended to interact less offline (Kraut et al., 1998). However, these findings changed as more people went online and more scholars began studying the interactions between digital and physical sociability (Kraut et al., 2002). Sociologists Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman’s (2012) book Networked: The New Social Operating System is an excellent synthesis of statistical research that shows people who spend more time communicating online also tend to spend more time communicating with people offline in physical space. Research has also shown that, in contrast to predictions that people would turn to the Internet as a substitution for physical travel, people who use the Internet frequently do not travel significantly less (Kellerman, 2006). Rather than replacing the need for physical social interaction and mobility, the Internet has instead been enfolded into people’s everyday lives (Baym, 2010), and the online and offline “intersect with one another in a complex fashion” (Morgan, 2004: 5). People still travel to work, meet with friends, and walk city streets. They just now often do so in a way that intertwines the world of atoms with the world of bits.
While it is possible to look at oppositions of the digital and physical as outdated, strands of that thought survive today. People still use the phrase “in real life” (IRL) to compare interactions in the physical world to something that happens online, and best-sellers such as Sherry Turkle’s (2010) Alone Together still argue that online life is distracting people from the physical world. The implication is that individuals have a physical life (real life) and an online life (unreal life?). “In real life” implies that what happens online is somehow less important, despite the relationships people build online and the online resources they use to accomplish a variety of offline tasks (Baym, 2010). The separation becomes even more tenuous when analyzing the uses of smartphones as locative media. Offline interactions are increasingly permeated by digital data, particularly through the growth of location-based services that provide people with information about their surrounding spaces.
The place of locative media
The number of mobile applications has increased rapidly over the last half decade, with more than a million applications available on Android phones and iPhones. Many of the most popular applications are location-based services. A national survey in the United States found that 74 percent of adult smartphone users use their phone to get information about their surrounding space (Zickuhr, 2013), and a national survey in the UK found that 69 percent of smartphone users access maps through their device (Ofcom, 2013). That 69 percent likely underrepresents the number of people who use location-based services because these applications cover far more than just mapping services. Review sites like Yelp use location to provide people with information; Facebook allows people to tag their posts with location information; Instagram includes location information in the photos people share.
These examples all show why it is not analytically useful to keep trying to separate the physical and the digital. Instead, location-based services merge the two into what communication scholar Adriana de Souza e Silva (2006) calls a “hybrid space” – a key concept that forms part of the theoretical framework in the following chapters. Hybrid spaces are formed through a combination of three elements: social interaction, digital information, and physical space. The digital information people access in hybrid spaces is not exterior to the place; it becomes a part of that place for the user, just as a street sign or other physical informational becomes a part of a place. Hybrid space is a valuable conceptual tool because it refuses the urge to separate location-based digital information from the physical place it describes.2 Instead, the digital plays a role in shaping how people “read” physical places (de Souza e Silva and Frith, 2012). If people use their smartphones to pull up a list of nearby restaurants on the mobile application Yelp, other people’s reviews can impact how they read their surroundings and make choices about a place. If people report an accident on the highway using the mobile application Waze, they might encourage others to make an alternative mobility choice because of the merging of the digital and physical in the hybrid space. As sociologist Michael Hardey (2007) argued, digital location information “is providing new ways of seeing, experiencing and understanding the city” (p. 867).
These new ways of seeing and experiencing the city show why smartphones as locative media require an understanding of more than how people interact with their mobile screens; analyses need to examine how these interactions impact people’s experience of their surrounding space. The focus on the relationship between locative media and place is the major thread tying the following chapters together, and unlike some media studies approaches, this book draws from spatial thinkers to discuss how the growth of hybrid spaces may impact society. Chapter 2 introduces key concepts to understand the social impacts of locative media and begins by focusing on the importance of place in people’s social worlds before moving on to the mobilities turn, which focuses on the crucial role movement plays in people’s lives. After all, mobile media, ranging from the newspaper to the smartphone, are tools people use to exert control over their experience of physical movement (de Souza e Silva and Frith, 2012). And as shown in chapter 2, locative media represent a shift in the already complicated relationship between mobile media and place.
After establishing a conceptual framework in chapter 2, chapter 3 provides background on how location-based services work. The chapter explains location awareness by detailing GPS, Wi-Fi-enabled location, and cellular triangulation before moving on to an account of mobile “generations” to show how mobile telephony arrived at the 3G and 4G mobile connections so crucial to the growth of location-based services. The chapter concludes by discussing the two most popular smartphone operating systems – Android and iOS – and explaining how the growth of app stores has changed the mobile media landscape.
Chapters 4–6 analyze three types of location-based services: navigation applications, social networking applications, and applications that allow people to contribute and access geotagged information. Chapter 6 also mentions mobile gaming, though this book does not devote a chapter to mobile gaming because so much excellent research already exists on the topic (cf. Hjorth, 2011). Each of these chapters examines specific location-based services, but the focus is more on user practices and how location information impacts people’s experiences than on the design of any specific application. As digital media researcher Nancy Baym (2010) wrote,
Trying to list specific types of digital media is frustrating at best. Between this writing and your reading there are bound to be new developments, and things popular as I write will drop from vogue. Let this be a reminder to us of the importance of remaining focused on specific capabilities and consequences rather than the media themselves. (p. 13; italic emphasis added)
Baym’s advice applies to the study of location-based services. Some of the mobile applications discussed in this book might not exist by the time the book is published; other applications may be updated and look significantly different than they do now. For this reason, chapters 4–6 analyze the consequences and capabilities of location-based services rather than specific applications as a way to ensure the analysis in this book will remain useful regardless of the ways in which the mobile applications examined change.
The focus on practices rather than individual applications shifts in chapter 7, which moves away from user practices to instead discuss the location-based service Foursquare. The chapter uses Foursquare as a case study to explain how market forces can shape contemporary location-based services because Foursquare is an interesting example that split its features into two separate applications (Foursquare and Swarm) in part to address a shift in the developers’ overall goals. Some of the applications analyzed in chapters 4–6 are relatively new startups, and they must seek out funding sources and ways to monetize their service. By looking at how one specific application has managed the business side of mobile development, chapter 7 shows that these applications do not develop in a vacuum. They collect data and offer services with the goal of eventually becoming viable businesses. The discussion of location information as commercial data continues in chapter 8, which analyzes privacy issues that accompany the sharing of location information with other individuals, as well as the ways in which governments and law enforcement use location data.
The book ends with an eye to the future. Chapters 2–8 focus mostly on the industrialized world, both because of my research experience and because smartphones have not been as widely adopted in the global South; however, as discussed in the concluding chapter, that will likely change in the near future as cheaper smartphones hit the market and adoption increases in the developing world. The final chapter also raises questions about how the growth of hybrid spaces and the reliance on location-based services may lead to new forms of inequality, and the book concludes by discussing how the potential future of “The Internet of Things” may affect the ways people use smartphones as locative media.
The following chapters cover a variety of topics, but the central thread tying them together is the argument that smartphones as locative media have begun to shift how people experience physical place. Locative media show how online data now shapes offline experiences. As discussed above, the Internet was originally conceived of as placeless, but location-based services show that digital information is increasingly organized around physical locations. That shift is a major one, and it has contributed to a partial change in how spaces are produced and understood through digital information accessed through smartphone screens. People can never be sure what the future holds for emerging media, but they can attempt to capture the present moment in a way that will help them understand what comes next. The following chapters focus on theory and user practices that will help in analyzing the contemporary moment of locative media and the future impacts as location information further shapes interactions with both digital information and physical space.
Notes
1
. The tendency to oppose the virtual to the physical also often ignored the huge amount of physical infrastructure on which digital networks rely. See Andrew Blum’s (2013)
Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet
for an excellent account of that infrastructure.
2
. Hybrid space is not the only concept that views digital location-based information as intertwined with physical space. Lev Manovich’s (2006) concept of augmented reality and Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge’s (2011) concept of code/space also refuse the urge to separate the two. While I focus on hybrid space throughout the book, both these works provide similar analyses of the ways in which digital information is increasingly shaping how people experience the physical world.
2Mobilities and the Spatial Turn
This chapter might be read as part of a printed book. It might be read on an eReader, on a tablet computer, or on a mobile phone. Regardless of how the chapter is accessed, the person reading it is in place. The place might be a dorm room or a library, an apartment or a coffee shop. The reader might be able to glance around the room and remember things that happened there, or she might have no particular attachment to the place at all. Either way, she is still occupying a physical place reading this text. This chapter is about that place and so many others.
“Place” is a term used all the time. People ask friends if they want to come over to their place. Family members talk about the places they visited over the summer. If two friends feel homesick right now or wish they were somewhere else, they long for one place over another. Place structures much of individuals’ thought and memory, yet despite how commonly people use the term, “place is clearly a complicated concept” (Cresswell, 2004: 50). But it is a concept that remains centrally important to the world and raises questions about how the experience of place changes with the introduction of emerging media. As a thought experiment on why place has such a complex relationship to media usage, return to the first paragraph. As this chapter is read, the reader is physically in place somewhere. However, imagine for a second that rather than reading this academic book, the reader is fully engrossed in the narrative of her favorite novel. That novel likely has a physical setting, for example the nineteenth-century English countryside of Jane Austen or George R. R. Martin’s Westeroos. Those are both places even though they are not physical places like a dorm room or a coffee shop. The “imagined places” of novels raise an important question for media studies scholars (Jansson and Falkheimer, 2006), particularly those that study mobile technologies: are people still “in place” in a dorm room or library if they are also engrossed in the imagined place of the novel? Some variation of that question has shaped much of the analysis of mobile media, ranging from the Walkman to the mobile phone (de Souza e Silva and Frith, 2012). When people call someone or engage with their mobile phone screen, are they still fully present in the physical place they move through? How are the answers to these questions impacted by locative media?
To best address these questions, it is important to explore how people understand place. To do so, this chapter first discusses the “spatial turn” and the “mobilities turn” in the humanities and social sciences, which are two related theoretical movements that shed light on the prominent position of place in the social world. The chapter then analyzes how people use older forms of mobile media, such as the book, the Walkman, and the mobile phone, to exert some control over their experience of movement, and it concludes by explaining how locative media shift the relationship between mobile media and place.
The importance of the space and place
Social theory is filled with binaries people use to understand the social world. Academic thought has absence/presence, virtual/ physical, and private/public to name a few. One of the dominant binaries throughout much social theory of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was space and time. Time was often seen as the more important of the two (Massey, 2005). Time was viewed as dynamic and progressive and was used to mark the “stages” or “eras” of human development, seen notably in Marshall McLuhan’s media eras or Karl Marx’s stages of history. Space and place, on the other hand, have often been viewed “as a location on a surface where things ‘just happen’ rather than the more holistic view of places as the geographical context for the mediation of physical, social and economic processes” (Agnew, 2011: 317). As geographers John Agnew and James Duncan (1989) claimed, “the concept of place has been marginalized within the discourse of modern social science and history” (p. 2).
Space and place began to see a resurgence in academic thought in the 1970s and 1980s with the “spatial turn” in the humanities and social sciences. Human geographers Yi Fu Tuan (1977) and Edward Relph (1976) developed influential work that focused on how people experience place. Philosophers Michel de Certeau (1988) and Henri Lefebvre (1991) analyzed how spaces are socially produced and how that production shapes the lived experience of individuals. Lefebvre and de Certeau also dealt explicitly with the role space and place play in producing and reproducing power structures, a focus adopted by important cultural geographers such as David Harvey (1991), Doreen Massey (1994), and Edward Soja (1996). These thinkers all raised different questions about space and place, and they came from different disciplinary backgrounds. However, what united the work of the major thinkers mentioned above was an agreement that space and place play a key role in how people experience the world.
