Cultural Economies of Locative Media

Abstract

Cultural Economies of Locative Media examines the manifold ways that location, location-awareness, and location data have all become familiar yet increasingly significant parts of our mobile-mediated experiences of everyday life. The book explores the complex of interrelationships that mutually define the new business models and economic factors that emerge around and structure locative media services, their diverse social uses and cultures of consumption, and their policy implications and impacts. It offers a detailed, in-depth account of how location-based services, such as GPS-enabled mobile smartphones and associated applications, are socially, culturally, economically, and politically produced and shaped, as much as technically designed and manufactured. The result is a rich, composite portrait of locative media in all its cultural economic complexity.

Filtered in/filtered out: Locative media and social accessibility in urban spaces

“…These apps can provide additional information about nearby strangers that can challenge the anonymity among strangers that is at the core of urban indifference to difference. However, locative media provide filters and other tools to their users to help them manage these new challenges to their social accessibility (Wilken, 2019). But careful consideration must be given to the ways in which these tools are programmed by locative media app developers, and the ways in which they are deployed by app users.…”

“…Positional information is also a core component of dating and hook-up apps. (Wilken, 2019, p. 7) A number of scholars (Sutko & de Souza e Silva, 2011;Wilken, 2019;Wilken & Goggin, 2015) include under the umbrella of locative media any mobile app that makes use of the device's location coordinates. In this instance, geotagging photos on Instagram or checking in on Facebook constitute locative media functionality.…”

“…And, as I discuss below, they can reinforce existing racisms and other prejudices. As locative media apps increase in popularity and use (Wilken, 2019), Licoppe (2016) warns about the implications of a city full of people accessing and sharing their location and other personal information through these apps. The sophistication and flexibility of apps' filtering capabilities will become of great importance in helping to manage the sensory overload that these apps can bring on in a way that can still allow for a city's diversity and city dwellers' indifference to difference.…”

“…But they also point out a case of digital divide: the people who frequent the bars, restaurants and other venues in these two neighbourhoods tend not to have smart devices and/or tend not to make use of locative media apps such as Yelp. Given the rise in popularity of locative media apps (Wilken, 2019), and the accompanying reliance on them to navigate both the city and social accessibility in the city, such absences serve to entrench and reify historical segregations, and confound efforts to achieve the indifference to difference that Tonkiss (2005) identifies as essential to the navigation of diversity in urban spaces.…”

Locative-Media Ethics: A Call for Protocols to Guide Interactions of People, Place, and Technologies

“…With location services often enabled as a default setting, locative media’s ubiquity cannot be underestimated (Wilken, 2019). The data trails made by locative media reflect both our conscious and unconscious ways of navigating everyday settings and their attendant emotional textures.…”