This brief essay introduces the special issue on the topic of ‘digital placemaking’ – a concept describing the use of digital media to create a sense of place for oneself and/or others. As a broad framework that encompasses a variety of practices used to create emotional attachments to place through digital media use, digital placemaking can be examined across a variety of domains. The concept acknowledges that, at its core, a drive to create and control a sense of place is understood as primary to how social actors identify with each other and express their identities and how communities organize to build more meaningful and connected spaces. This idea runs through the articles in the issue, exploring the many ways people use digital media, under varied conditions, to negotiate differential mobilities and become placemakers – practices that may expose or amplify preexisting inequities, exclusions, or erasures in the ways that certain populations experience digital media in place and placemaking.
Drawing from ethnographic research of expatriates who use meetup.com and similar digitally based social organizing platforms to access events in Paris, this paper explores how on-and offline meet-up rhetoric and routines contribute to the production of a mobile "sense of place" for people who have relocated or traveled alone. By highlighting how participants may use digital media to create a sense of belonging to an "international community" extendable across a series of local places, this research diverges from earlier studies that have focused on how migrants use media to maintain connections to a "homeland" or to reconstitute the home abroad. Although the paper celebrates new agencies afforded by mobile place-making, particularly for women, I suggest that as professional labor trends increasingly assert the value of placeless-ness, tools that combine communication with location-based digital organizing will only grow in importance and the "support" provided by them should be continually interrogated.
Every major global human resources study over the past 5 years has noted a common trend: a dramatic increase in the number of women in the expatriate workforce, and increasingly these expats are single. Using ethnographic observations and interviews with female expats who moved alone to work in Bangalore -the 'Silicon Valley of India' -I discuss frictions faced as they negotiate a context where how to get around safely and comfortably in public is the central feature of their daily lives. Using Massey's concept of 'power geometry', the article considers contrasts between the ease of international movement and the obstacles to daily mobility on a local scale, and illustrates how location-based technologies and other strategies are employed to (re)assert control over mobility and space. KeywordsDigital place-making, expats, globalization, mobile elites, mobility and gender With globalization in full swing … a corporate version of wanderlust is on the rise. And the new expatriates are increasingly young, female and single.-J Smerd (2007), in 'Workforce Management' (para 1) Every major global human resources study over the past 5 years has noted a common trend: a dramatic increase in the number of women in the expatriate workforce. Smerd's use of the word 'wanderlust' in the quote above situates this growth in female expatriation
In this article, I draw from ethnographic research conducted in Paris to analyze how new class competencies based on cultural capital in the form of the ''authentically global'' are acquired, wielded, and reproduced in a global network of web-based groups that organize offline, local events for ''international people.'' Just as mass media such as radio, television, newsprint, and the novel have been implicated in the creation of national middle classes, new social media may be connected to the discursive production of a global middle class. Although the development of the national middle classes was key to the nation-building projects of modernity, the production of this global class is fundamental economically and culturally to expanding processes of neoliberal globalization.
This article explores the ways in which, during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, AirBnb’s successful place-based Experiences product was reimagined as a live online offering, marketed to would-be tourists living under ‘stay at home’ orders. Using online ethnographic and interpretive analysis of these new virtual experiences, we highlight a series of core placemaking strategies employed by hosts of the once in-situ experiences to show how they reemerge as interactive digital placemakers. In doing so, we elucidate how live, multimedia digital experiences become part of an evolution in the creation of ‘placemarkets’ that are now fundamental to both global mobility and globalized commercial exchange in the experience economy. Beyond the technological features used for these placemaking experiences, we find that the experience hosts and their manifold strategies to substantively engage participants – particularly through igniting their senses – are at the crux of digital placemaking; it is the affective labor of the hosts that most contributes to experiencing emplacement.
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