Convergence 18(3) (2012), Special Issue on Locative Media

Editorial

Locative media: Fromspecialized preoccupationto mainstream fascination

Rowan WilkenSwinburne University of Technology, Australia

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 net-

working 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 geotag-

ging and other mapping applications, and various apps on iPhones and smartphones that use loca-

tion 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 commu-

nication 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 þ Communication Festival in Riga,

Corresponding author:

Rowan Wilken, Swinburne University of Technology, Swinburne Institute for Social Research, Mail 53, PO Box 218,

Hawthorn, 3122 Australia

Email: [email protected]

Convergence: The InternationalJournal of Research intoNew Media Technologies18(3) 243-247ª The Author(s) 2012Reprints and permission:sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.navDOI: 10.1177/1354856512444375con.sagepub.com

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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 gen-

erate new potentialities for facilitating forms of social appropriation, citizenship and (experimen-

tal) 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 considera-

tions, 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 informa-

tion system (GIS) software for market and social research, as well as military purposes. But when Goo-

gle 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.

The second crucial factor was the release a few years later of the so-called smartphone, especially

the iconic Apple iPhone (see Hjorth et al., 2012). According to Goggin (2011: 181), the arrival of

the smartphone – the ‘iPhone moment’, as he refers to it – was significant in that it ‘galvanized users,

developers, industry, policy makers and a range of publics alike, to articulate their concerns and

desires regarding mobile media’ and facilitated the rapid wider take-up of locative media services.

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

244 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 18(3)

244



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-a-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 devel-

opment: 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

Wilken 245

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it is one thing to develop an effective mobile application, while it is quite another to engage indus-

try and ‘reorient the established journalistic procedures and textual conventions so that they effec-

tively 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 develop-

ing 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.

Notes

1. This special issue is an output of the Australian Research Council (ARC) funded project, ‘The Cultural

Economy of Locative Media’ (DE120102114). The idea for this special issue originated in a ‘Locative

Media’ workshop that I ran in late 2010 at the Journalism and Media Research Centre at the University

of New South Wales. I wish to thank the ARC funded Cultural Research Network (CRN) for supporting

this workshop, Gerard Goggin for his encouragement and active support of this event, and all the workshop

participants. I also wish to thank the editors of Convergence for supporting this special issue, the authors

who entrusted me with their articles, and the many (unnamed) referees for their vital contributions in read-

ing and reviewing the articles gathered here. Finally, I wish to thank Anthony McCosker and Karen Olsen

for their input and assistance.

References

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Media, Summer. Available at: http://wi.hexagram.ca/?p¼56 (accessed 8 June 2012).

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nal of Communication 36(1): 97–109.

de Souza e Silva A and Frith J (2010) Locative mobile social networks: Mapping communication and location

in urban spaces. Mobilities 5(4): 485–505.


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de Souza e Silva A and Sutko DM (2011) Theorizing locative media through philosophies of the virtual.

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63–76.

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March: 50–62.

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Article

A location of one’s own: Agenealogy of locativemedia

Andrea ZeffiroEmily Carr University of Art & Design, Canada

AbstractIn this article, I confront locative media not as a technology or thing, rather, as a field of culturalproduction, that is, as a field of forces, regulated by both power relations and symbolic struggles,which sustain or subvert the reproduction of a specific social order. The intent of the piece is toexpose the manner in which the field of locative media is constituted through multiple forces andstruggles. I trace its emergence through a genealogical lens, and revive and reintegrate olderdebates, so as to include these tensions in the ongoing conceptualization of locative media. Intracing the discursive events of the field, which encompass both formations and tensions, it will bemade apparent that locative media is not happenstance. Rather, it is a field of cultural productionthat is perpetually evolving and continuously reproduced vis-a-vis struggles between technologicalinterpretations and different visions of future use.

KeywordsBourdieu, cultural production, genealogy, locative media

In the September 2011 issue of Frieze, Lauren Cornell and Kazys Varnelis offer a sober appraisal

of the modes in which the art world has responded (or not) to technological transformations of the

last 20 years. Reflecting briefly on the state of locative media, Varnelis writes:

Locative media remained the stuff of demos and art-technology festivals until 2008 when Apple

released the GPS-enabled iPhone 3G. Paradoxically, the mass realization of locative media seems to

have taken the wind out of its sails as an art form. Although courses on writing apps proliferate in art

and architecture programmes, the promise of locative media seems to remain just that: a promise, its

transformational ambitions forever enshrined in William Gibson’s Spook Country (2007), a novel

which, tellingly, was set not in the future but in the recent past. (Cornell and Varnelis, 2011: §13)


Andrea Zeffiro, Emily Carr University of Art & Design, 1399 Johnston Street, Granville Island, Vancouver, BC V6H 3R9

Canada





Like Varnelis, I also recognize a disjuncture between recent commercial ‘locative media’ applica-

tions and what I encountered a few years ago. My indoctrination into locative media was shaped by

what I tend to think of as foundational literature, what Tarkka has characterized as ‘utopian and

dystopian reflections, playful and poetic manifestos as well as programs for design and policy

action’ (2005: 5). For the most part, locative media emerged from an insular milieu, and numerous

individuals active in its promotion, were active in its initiation. Yet, despite its discursive ties to a

relatively defined community, locative media continues to be redefined and reproduced across

varying social groups and institutions.

In what follows, I confront locative media not as a technology or thing, rather, as a field of

cultural production, that is, as a ‘site of struggles in which what is at stake is the power to impose

the dominant definition’, and ‘delimit the population of those entitled to take part in the struggle to

define’ (Bourdieu, 1994: 42). Locative media is constituted as a field of forces, regulated by both

power relations and symbolic struggles, which in turn, sustain or subvert the reproduction of a

specific social order (Bourdieu, 1992, 1993). My intent is to expose the manner in which locative

media is constituted through multiple forces and struggles, and by numerous individuals and

institutions. To actualize this, I trace its emergence through a genealogical lens (Foucault, 1984).

Genealogy

In ‘Nietzsche, genealogy, history’, Foucault (1984) aligns his project with Nietzsche’s repudiation

of the hunt for origins, in which history, as a totalizing force, assimilates or dissolves events.

Unlike history, genealogy is not an indicator of originative determinants. As Foucault clarifies, a

genealogical approach is ‘not opposed to history, only the search for origins’ (1984: 77). Char-

acterizing genealogy by two moments: descent (Herkunft) and emergence (Entstechung), Fou-

cault’s demonstrative aim is the configuration of ‘effective history’, which focuses on changes in

force relationships (Prado, 2000: 41), and excavates ‘a complex system of distinct and multiple

elements’ that elude synthesis (Prado, 2000: 39). Genealogy is concerned neither with an onto-

logical beginning (descent), nor a final end (emergence). A genealogical approach traces the

descent and emergence of concepts, ideas, and institutions (Prado, 2000: 38), and contests gov-

erning discursive norms. Genealogy, as Philip Goldstein (2005) adds, examines ‘internal conflicts

and external authority or social influence as well as the nexus or mutual elaboration of power and

knowledge’ (Goldstein, 2005: 44; see also Han, 1998: 123–127, 196–198; Poster, 1994: 39).

The material that forms the genealogy of this article was extracted within what Schneider and

Foot describe as a ‘web sphere’: ‘a set of dynamically defined digital resources spanning multiple

Web sites deemed relevant or related to a central event, concept, or theme’ (2006: 20–21, 27–35).

The information was derived from a synthesis of locative media literature, and an assessment of

websites, blogs, and listservs. Ethnographic research online can present a researcher with an ethical

dilemma, often articulated in terms of a researcher’s positioning as covert or overt in relation to the

particular group or community. If access is restricted, then a researcher should disclose their

identity and intentions to the group. Whereas in non-restricted communities, one’s identity and

research agenda do not have to be made known (Langer and Beckman, 2005). ‘The mode of com-

munication on listservs’, as Clegg Smith explicates, ‘is established for generalized distribution of

messages to participants who may or may not be present’1 (Clegg Smith, 2004: 226). My use of the

[Locative] Listserv and CRUMB archives pertained to ethnographic documentation. I was not a

subscriber to either community and both message archives were open, or public. In fact, the [Loca-

tive] Listserv had ceased operation in 2005 and by 2009 it could only be accessed through


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Wayback Machine (2010). Bearing in mind Derrida’s (1996: 18) decree that, ‘what is no longer

archived [in the same way] is no longer lived [in the same way]’, how can we anticipate future

possibilities or interrogate present contexts of locative media without an adequate assessment of

how it emerged? Fundamental questions concerning the archiving of the field, or, the lack thereof,

are concerns that I hope will transfer from the page.

In what follows, I begin by outlining the discursive formation of the field of locative media. The

first section, ‘Antecedents’, provides an overview of the emergence of locative media within the

larger field of media arts. What I offer is meant to evoke the traces of the emergence of the field, as

opposed to the field in its entirety. The individual or singular events are not of utmost importance.

Of consequence is the manner in which these moments constitute locative media at large. Fur-

thermore, it is of necessity that I clarify my research choices. I rely on primary documents in

particular, as opposed to interviews for example, in order to retrace the constitution of the field as it

happened. That is, the material informing analysis, which chronicles the various events and

debates, was produced as these events and moments occurred. Additionally, much of the literature

and projects I reference here, continue to be implemented as hallmarks of the field. Finally, my

window of analysis halts around 2006/2007 on account of the fact that the primary archive used –

the Locative Listserv – ceased operation in 2005. Additionally, I confined the time frame to the

pre-smartphone and social networking era, given the manner in which both innovations have influ-

enced the production and conceptualization of locative media.

In the second portion of the text, I unravel two discursive tensions, which centre on: (1) the

adoption of psychogeography as a theoretical paradigm; and (2) locative media practice(s). These

frictions are, in effect, struggles over meaning, specifically the ability to produce, preserve and/or

transform ‘locative media’. An analysis of these tensions further unveils locative media as a field

of cultural production that is perpetually evolving and continuously reproduced vis-a-vis struggles

between technological interpretations and different visions of future use.

Antecedents

Karlis Kalnins first proposed the term, ‘locative media’2 during the ArtþCommunication Festival,

16–17 May 2003, in Riga, Latvia (Tuters, 2004d, 2005; see also Bleeker and Knowlton, 2006;

Galloway, 2008; Galloway and Ward, 2006; Hemment, 2004c; Russell, 2004). The word ‘locative’

is derived from the locative noun case in the Latvian language, which indicates location, and

vaguely corresponds to the English prepositions ‘in’, ‘on’, ‘at’, ‘by’. The case declares a final

location of action, or a time of the action (Galloway and Ward, 2006; Kalnins, 2004; Tarkka, 2005;

Tuters and Varnelis, 2006). Reflecting on the inception, Kalnins explained: ‘The moniker and the

discourse of locative media arose . . . as we studied the Latvian language which does include this

locative case, as does Russian (as the prepositional case), Finnish, Sanskrit and Latin’ (Kalnins, 2004).

One month following the ArtþCommunication festival, the [Locative] Listserv was created,

and Rasa Smite circulated the first message on 25 June 2003 (Smite, 2003: §2). Smite stipulates

that the listserv was created to amass resources, such as ‘url’s about wireless, gps and mapping

projects’, ‘texts, interviews, project ideas’ that were ‘relevant to ‘‘locative media’’’, and could

potentially contribute to ‘developing ideas for and during the workshop’ (Smite, 2003). And from

16–36 July 2003, The Locative Media Workshop was held in Liepaja, Latvia. Organized by

RIXC,3 in collaboration with GPSter/Canada, the workshop, also referred to as ‘Longitude 21.00,

Latitude 56.55’, was sponsored by The Daniel Langlois Foundation for Arts, Science and Tech-

nology, the Latvian Cultural Capital Foundation, and the Nordic Cultural Foundation (Locative

Zeffiro 251

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Media, 2003). The workshop was hosted at the K@2 Culture and Information Centre, in Karosta,4

a neighbourhood5 in the north of Liepaja, in western Latvia by the Baltic Sea. The significance of

hosting the workshop in Karosta was, as clarified by organizers, twofold:

[A]s an explicit acknowledgment of Virilio’s idea that ‘one cannot understand the development of

information tech, without understanding the evolution of military strategy’; and, as an attempt to locate

the event outside of the global market from which these technologies have emerged (Locative Media,

2003: §7; Smite, 2003: §9).

The workshop, as Drew Hemment later wrote, united ‘many early practitioners and inspired much

of the current interest in locative media’ (2004c: §5). Rhetorically, the workshop focused on appro-

priating and retooling surveillance and control infrastructures, and distributing these technologies

beyond the ‘command and control infrastructure’ (Hemment, 2004b: §6). The objective of the

gathering, apart from a general exploration, and cementing of locative media,6 included develop-

ing a framework or ‘blueprint’ (Smite, 2003: §4), for a large-scale locative media event/installa-

tion, as a part of the [RAM]5 workshop series, which was to be held in Riga in May 2004

(Locative Media, 2003: §1).

Following the workshop, locative media circulated widely within the new media arts

community:7

Next 5 Minutes (N5 M): International Festival of Tactical Media (11–14 September 2003 – Amsterdam)

The N5M festival began in 1993, with the theme ‘camcorder revolution’, and this fourth instalment

focused on the potential for tactical appropriation of media technologies. A group meeting for subscri-

bers of the [Locative] Media listserv was organized and held on Saturday, 13 September 2003, at 7 pm.

The purpose of the meeting was to discuss discursive currents and future possibilities of the field, and, a

proposal was put forth for the formation of a non-profit entity around locative media. This materialized

into the short-lived Locative Media Lab.8

CRUMB (April 2004)

‘Exhibiting Locative Media’ was the topic of the month on the CRUMB (New Media Curating) listserv.

Drew Hemment selected respondents, and discussion converged around the query: ‘What are the prac-

tical challenges of exhibiting media which are international yet local, mobile yet grounded?’ (Graham,

2004). The special topic coincided with the upcoming Futuresonic04, one of the first international

events to feature locative and mobile media projects (Albert, 2004a).

Futuresonic04 (28 April–8 May 2004 – Manchester)

In his curatorial statement, Drew Hemment described Futuresonic04 as ‘the first major exhibition

worldwide on mobile, wireless and locative arts. It followed pioneering events and workshops by RIXC

in Latvia, and preceded Wireless Experience at ISEA2004’ (Futuresonic, 2004). Albert (2004a) cites

the festival as the, ‘first large public trial of locative media’, suggesting a more pronounced shift into

the larger field of digital media.

[RAM]5: Open Source Media Architecture (5–9 May 2004 – Riga, Latvia)

Organized by RIXC, the workshop investigated open source in relation to contemporary practices of

architecture, locative art and media streaming, and ‘turning closed systems into open-ended narratives’

(Smite, 2004: §30). The locative media portion of the workshop had evolved from, and was in part

determined by, the Locative Media Workshop (Locative Media, 2003; Smite, 2003, 2004).


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Transcultural Mapping Reader (2005)

During the summer of 2004, Rasa Smite from the Centre for New Media Culture, RIXC, with support

from the Culture 2000 Program of the European Union, co-organized the ‘Trans-Cultural Mapping’

workshops with K@2 (Latvia), Projekt Atol (Slovenia), Piknik Frequency (Finland), TEKS (Norway),

LORNA (Iceland), Ellipse (France). Each workshop focused on issues of locality in response to

European unionization (Bergaust, 2004; Tuters, 2004c; UNESCO, 2004). Following the workshops,

Smite and Marc Tuters circulated a call for papers and co-edited, Acoustic Space #5: Trans Cultural

Mapping. Shortly thereafter, Ben Russell amalgamated the unedited texts from Acoustic Space #5 and

produced, the Trans Cultural Mapping (TCM) Reader Online. As stipulated in Russell’s introductory

remarks, the TCM reader is to be read as establishing a few boundaries for the test category of locative

media (Russell, 2004). Tuters later revealed that the 2003 Locative Media Workshop served as a model

for TCM workshops (Tuters, 2004c).

Ars Electronica (1–6 September 2005 – Linz, Austria)

Esther Polak is awarded the Golden Nica for Interactive Art for the project, MILK. Polak had started the

project at the Locative Media Workshop, and presented an iteration of it at Next 5 Minutes (N5M):

International Festival of Tactical Media.

Spook Country (March, 2006)

William Gibson’s novel features locative media as a central current in its story line (Gibson, 2007).

Gibson had been alerted to the Locative Media Workshop by Bruce Sterling. On his blog Gibson wrote:

‘I have a special fondness for descriptions of places like this. They trigger ghost-dialog: ‘‘Forget it,

man, she’s *Karostan*. Latvian ‘alien’ passport. It’s not going to happen’’’ (Gibson, 2003).

Leonardo, Locative Media Special Issue (July, 2006)

Drew Hemment served as guest editor of the locative media themed issue. The issue included a

collaborative bibliography, project synopsis and numerous articles.

Almost Perfect (5 November–2 December 2006 – Banff, Alberta, Canada)

A ‘rapid prototyping’ residency sponsored by Hewlett-Packard and hosted by the Banff New Media

Institute. The residency provided an opportunity for individuals to conceptualize and prototype locative

media projects under the guidance of Hewlett-Packard’s (HP) Mediascape authoring toolkit.

Psychogeography

Formative locative media literature posits two defining moments of emergence. One is Karlis

Kalnin’s proposal of the term at the May 2003 ArtþCommunication Festival (Bleeker and

Knowlton, 2006; Galloway, 2008; Galloway and Ward, 2006; Hemment, 2004c; Russell, 2004;

Tuters, 2004b, 2004d). The other, which has been described as a precursor to locative media, is Ben

Russell’s (1999) Headmap Manifesto, which outlines the socio-technical potentials of location-

aware devices (Galloway, 2008; Hemment, 2006; Hemment et al., 2006; Lenz, 2004; Tuters,

2004a, 2004b; Tuters and Varnelis, 2006). The manifesto, as Russell explained, is an extensive

‘sequence of text fragments dealing with the social and cultural implications of location-aware

devices’ (Russell, 1999: 1). For the most part, the text focuses on the spatializing possibilities

of new emerging wireless digital technologies. As Russell details, these ‘location-aware’ devices

would interact within the physical world such that computational relationships would no longer be

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confined to the computer screen. For Russell, this shift in computing would simultaneously mark a shift

from an ‘inside’ view towards an ‘outside’ view, what Russell unapologetically describes as ‘a reco-

lonisation of the real world’, characterized by ‘computers becoming invisible, mobile, networked and

location-aware’ (Russell, 1999: 1). Russell amassed discourses of radical cultures of technology, pol-

itics, sexuality and community formations, in conveyance of a utopian future, in which everyday life is

cushioned and dynamically energized by location-aware devices. In the section, ‘Situations’, Russell

extrapolated9 fragments of text from, Leaving the 20th Century: The Incomplete Work of the Situation-

ist International (Gray, 1974), and interspersed Situationist’s musings with commentary.

Subsequent to Russell’s manifesto, psychogeography became a widely circulated descriptor

within the field (Chang and Goodman, 2006; Tuters 2004a, 2005; Tuters and Varnelis, 2006; van

Veen, 2004). According to David Pinder (2005: 408), its influence in the artistic take-up of

location-based digital technologies points towards how psychogeographical practices have been

reworked from paper maps to digital mapping technologies, such as GPS.10 Evidence of psycho-

geography is visible not only within projects, but events and festivals. For instance:

dot.walk

Wilfried HuJeBek, working under the guise of Socialfiction.org, won the 2004 Transmediale award for

the software project, dot.walk. Paradoxically, dot.walk refrains from the use of software. Directives or

instructions were printed on pieces of paper in Lite-C – a programming language used for multimedia

applications – and participants were required to translate the code (into English) and walk the city

according to the translated directives (socialfiction.org, 2002a, 2002b; Tuters and Varnelis, 2006; van

Veen, 2004). The ‘psychogeographic aim of the project’, as described by HuJeBek, ‘is to view the city

as a database, or switchboard’ (socialfiction.org, 2002b).

Psy.Geo.Conflux

From 8 to 11 May 2003, Psy.Geo.Conflux, which has since become Conflux, was organized by Glow-

lab founder and practising psychogeographer, Christina Ray. According to Ray and fellow organizer

Dave Mandl, a member of the Brooklyn Psychogeographical Association, the intention of organizing

the festival was to, ‘explore the various ways in which artists, writers, and theorists are interpreting

the idea of psychogeography today, at a time when the paper maps used in early derives have been

supplemented by mobile phones, GPS systems, and advanced field-recording techniques’ (Mandl et

al., 2003: §1). For Ray, the event encompassed ‘the meaning of living in a city’, finding one’s ‘own

path in the city’, and discovering ‘what patterns we generate’ (Ray, cited in Zimmerman, 2003: §5).

Pre/Amble

On 1 and 2 November 2003, Kate Armstrong organized Pre/amble, a festival of art and psychogeogra-

phy, which was held at the Western Front Artist Run Centre in Vancouver. Similar in scope and theme

to Conflux, Pre/amble also featured similar projects. Like the New York festival, the Vancouver one

was free and open to the public and explored methods of psychogeography in contemporary art prac-

tices, and featured both artist talks and walks. Pre/amble also occasioned a site-specific reworking of

[murmur] for Vancouver’s Chinatown, providing an aural history in both English and Chinese (Pre/

amble, 2003a, 2003b; Murmur Vancouver, 2010a, 2010b).

In as much as the aforementioned projects and festivals exemplify the presence of psychogeogra-

phy encircling the field, evidence of immersion within the scope of locative media is made appar-

ent by critical commentaries interrogating the coupling of Situationist International (SI) tactics,

with technological practices implicated within military and commercial infrastructures.


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In ‘The shape of locative media’, Simon Pope (2005) develops a critique of location-specific new

media practices. Attending to locative media works, the author argues that, despite the manner in which

many of these works are ‘advanced under the banner of psychogeography’, reconceptualization does

not necessarily align itself with the original Situationist International project. As Pope offers:

There’s a wilful skimming of the surface of psychogeography, taking it to mean an unconstrained

movement in the streets, and apparently less of an alignment with the wider project of anti-urbanism. This

can leave an impression of a practice whose relation to ‘the city’ is closer to the disinterestedness of

Conceptualism than the supposed engagement of the SI. (2005: 6, point 5)

Elsewhere, Brian Holmes (2004)11 engages in a critical assessment of the adoption of the derive

within locative media, suggesting that, although the ‘aesthetic form of the derive is everywhere’,

‘so is the hyper-rationalist grid of Imperial infrastructure’ (2004: §11). Citing ‘proponents of ‘loca-

tive media’ to be invested in a ‘new kind of locational humanism, tailored to the worldwide wan-

derer’ (2004: §2), Holmes’ critique attends to the ambiguities of projects that permit, ‘an

inscription of the individual, a geodetic tracery of individual difference’, and simultaneously prove

the, ‘infallible performance by the satellite mapping system’ (Holmes, 2004: §10).12 Echoing

Holmes’s sentiment, Saul Albert (2004a) cautions that Situationist International (SI) practices

need to be integrated critically, beyond terms of ‘wandering a city’, because locative media

experiences are highly contrived (Albert, 2004a: 1). Indeed, locative media experiences are

incredibly programmed and dependent on specific, or literally pre-programmed, paths, and

impromptu actions are non-negotiable for a user. These experiences rely on the recognizant cap-

abilities of location-aware technologies, devices that are pre-programmed to respond to location.

In questioning, on the one hand, why the SI framework is attractive, and on the other, obstacles

associated with its adoption, the critiques I have paraphrased, while important to the development

of a larger critical discourse of locative media, remain acritical of psychogeography in general. By

this, I am suggesting that two levels of critique are necessary. The first should account for the

adoption of psychogeography as a theoretical and conceptual framework within locative media

practice, and the second, needs to interrogate the paradigm itself. The psychogeographic project is

haunted by the spectre of the flaneur (Benjamin, 1983, 1999; Poe, 2008): a specific historical subject

coded as male/white/bourgeois, thus, a figure in possession of privilege (Buck-Morss, 1986; D’Souza

and McDonough, 2006; Friedberg, 1993; McDowell, 1999; Parsons, 2000; Wolff, 1985). The flaneur

is imbued with the authority to traverse multiple public spaces and in a multitude of ways, be it for

pleasure or protest. It is a body not made suspect. The acritical resurrection of psychogeography

necessarily revives a spirit of flaneurie that is disassociated from contemporary lived realities.

Locative practices

On the one hand, locative media emerged as an idiom for a concerted effort to disperse mobile,

location-aware and networking technology (devices and software) beyond command and control

infrastructures (Hemment, 2004b: §6; Tuters, 2004d). It was used to describe a ‘mobile media

movement’ (Tuters, 2005: §1), in which artists, theorists, activists, hackers, and software develo-

pers experimented with mobile, networked, location-aware computing devices. At the same time,

however, locative media, as Shirvanee (2006) has clarified, ‘can have broad meanings, from a

metaphorical expression representing a set of connections, to a descriptive term for information

and devices that are associated with a physical location and/or with one another’ (2006: §1). For

instance, Flanagan (2007: 1) observed how locative media also depicted a ‘genre of projects’ and

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‘set of tools and technologies involving computing, mobile technologies, physicality, and loca-

tion’. Lenz (2004) categorized locative projects as: art, storytelling, blogging, gaming, MoSoSo

(mobile social software), spatial annotation and geodrawing, and service. Similarly, Bleecker and

Knowlton (2006) devised a ‘GPS enabled locative media’ schema that included: geographic

space, map hacking, experiential mapping, cartographic legibility, mixed reality, and

hyphenation. And Lemos (2010) organized projects into four domains: electronic urban anno-

tations, mapping and geo-localization, location-based mobile games, and flash and smart

mobs. Examples of the myriad forms of locative media projects, some of which predate the

coining of the term, include:

Trace (1999)

Terri Rueb produced Trace, a ‘memorial environmental sound installation’ for a network of hiking

trails near the Burgess Shale fossil beds in Yoho National Park, British Columbia. Visitors were pro-

vided with a knapsack containing a small computer, headphones, and a global positioning satellite

(GPS) receiver. The computer and receiver worked in conjunction with a digital database of recordings,

and as participants walked the demarcated trails, sound recordings commemorating personal loss were

triggered via GPS (Rueb, 2004).

GPS Drawing (February 2000)

Jeremy Wood utilized GPS data to create ‘line drawings’, in the form of animals, symbols and words.

The drawings were generated by Wood’s movements through physical environments on land, water

and in the air. Using a GPS device, Woods created a sequence of plotted movements, similar to a ‘con-

nect the dots exercise’ (Hemment, 2004a: §5; Hight and van Dijk, 2006: §3; see: GPS Drawing, 2010).

Geocaching (May 2000)

The first ‘hide and seek’ activity using a GPS receiver took place on 3 May 2000, and was initiated by

Dave Ulmer in Oregon. Ulmer, who posted the location on the Usenet newsgroup sci.geo.satellite-nav,

identified the coordinates as N 45 17.460 W122 24.800, and described the cache as, ‘a black plastic

bucket buried most of the way in the ground’ (Ulmer, 2000). As noted in Ulmer’s post, the bucket con-

tained, ‘Delorme Topo USA software, videos, books, food, money, and a slingshot!’ (Ulmer, 2000).

Since then, numerous international geocaching associations have formed.

GPSter (November 2001)

Envisioned and prototyped by Karlis Kalnins and Marc Tuters, GPSter.net was conceived as a public

online database, to which anyone could add or search for waypoints.13 According to Kalnins (2002),

development was spurred by an interest in ‘building creative location-based projects’, and enabling the

general public and art communities to access location-based technology. The highly technical project

operated on a mySQL database that ran on a managed web server (Kalnins, 2002). GPSter received

ample support from numerous institutions and funding bodies including, Telefilm Canada, The Banff

Center, The University of Tennessee, GPS Central.ca (Calgary), Place Matters (New York), and E-Lab/

RIXC (Riga) (GPSter, 2003).

Urban Tapestries (April 2002)

A collaborative public authoring tool developed by Proboscis in partnership with the London School of

Economics, Birkbeck College, Orange, Hewlett-Packard Research labs, France Telecom R&D UK,

and Ordnance Survey (Urban Tapestries, 2008), Urban Tapestries enabled individuals to access and

author location-based content, such as text, audio and images.


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BotFighters (April 2002)

Produced by the Swedish Company, It’s Alive! the game operated in the physical world and online.

Players used a mobile phone in the real world to locate – through text messaging – and destroy other

players (bots). If a player destroyed a target, they received credits and advanced on the score list. Play-

ers could track their progress, and create and update their robot (avatar) online (Sotama, 2002).

34North 118West (October 2002)

34N118W is a narrative experience covering four blocks in downtown Los Angeles near Sci-Arc, The

Southern California Institute of Architecture. Created by Jeff Knowlton, Naomi Spellman, and Jeremy

Hight, the walk offered in-situ historical narratives of the area. Participants were outfitted with a GPS

enabled slate laptop, and encountered sound files attached to ‘hotspots’ as they walked through the

demarcated space (Hight, 2006; 34 North 118 West, 2002).

[MURMUR] Toronto (March 2003)

Co-produced in 2003 by Shawn Micallef, Gabe Sawhney and James Roussel during a residency at the

Canadian Film Centre’s new media lab Habitat, [murmur] is a site-specific story-telling experience,

designed for fixed locations in Toronto. The sites are marked with a [murmur] sign, which alert a walker

to the presence of a story, and provide a phone number to call and receive the automated narrative. All of

the content is in audio format, as opposed to screen-based content, thereby enabling an individual to roam

the space uninhibited while listening to the narrative (Murmur Toronto, 2010a, 2010b).

Uncle Roy All Around You (June 2003)

A mixed reality game in which both online and real world players roam a city quadrant in search of

‘Uncle Roy’. Blast Theory and the Mixed Reality Lab collaborated on the project, and received support

from British Telecom, the Arts and Humanities Research Board, Equator and the Interdisciplinary Arts

Department of Arts Council England (Blast Theory, 2010b).

PAC Manhattan (April 2004)

PAC Manhattan is a large-scale version of the 1980s video game Pac-Man, which implemented the

New York City grid as game interface. Like many of the projects discussed thus far, it too was a mixed

reality encounter and consisted of five players (one Pac-Man and four ghosts) in the street, who were

paired with a player in the control room. The players were continuously in contact via cell phone; street

players updated their controller at every intersection; and, the controller would update the street player

as to their location in the game. The game employs mobile telephony, Wi-Fi, and custom software that

tracks ‘live’ players, and broadcasts their location over the internet. The game was developed at New

York University’s Interactive Telecommunications graduate program (Pac Manhattan, 2004).

I Like Frank (March 2004 – Adelaide, Australia)

I Like Frank was co-produced by Blast Theory, the Mixed Reality Lab and five local artists and scien-

tists during Blast Theory’s appointment as Adelaide Thinkers in Residence. Touted as ‘the world’s first

3G mixed reality game’ (Blast Theory, 2010c), online players and real world players collaborated using

the internet and mobile phones respectively. Online players directed real world players through the city

in search of postcards that provided directives for real world players to follow (Blast Theory, 2010a).

Drift (April 2004)

Terri Rueb presented Drift at Ohne Schnur/No Cord: Communication Art at the Interface between Art,

Technology and Society, an event organized by the Institute of Art History of Ludwig Maximilians

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University (LMU), in Munich (3–4 April at the Cuxhaven Art Association). Equipped with a Pocket

PC, GPS device and headphones, participants wandered the Watten seashore for sounds, which

included footsteps on different surfaces, and literature passages dealing with the theme of wandering,

being lost, and drifting were spoken in different languages. Covering approximately a 2 km � 2 km

range, the soundscape shifted according to location and time. At low tide, all the sounds were in one

location, and at another during high tide. As individuals roamed through the demarcated space, sounds

played automatically (Rueb, 2006). The software was created by Computer Science students under the

direction of Dr Zary Segall at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (see Rueb, 2006).

Shadows from Another Place: San Francisco <> Baghdad (May 2004)

Paula Levine transposed missile and bombed sites in Baghdad onto a map of San Francisco. The demar-

cated sites on the map of San Francisco corresponded to locations in Baghdad, and were replete with

photographs, maps and GPS coordinates of the original (bombed) site. Levine purposely integrated

GPS data and technology as a reflexive anecdote of its deployment by the US military in its attack

against Baghdad (Levine, 2010a).

The Tactical Sound Garden (March 2006)

First demonstrated at the Mobile Music Workshop in Brighton, The Tactical Sound Garden is primarily

a toolkit, that is, an open source platform to be utilized in the creation of public sound gardens. The

toolkit requires a dense WiFi zone, in which sounds are planted within a demarcated space. These

‘plantings’ are mapped onto spatial coordinates through a 3D audio engine, and sound files are dis-

persed within the predetermined space. In order to experience the sound garden, participants require

a mobile device with embedded sound files. As participants roam through the space, sound files are

triggered based on GPS coordinates that were previously determined in the 3D audio engine (Tactical

Sound Garden, 2006). The project was developed by Mark Shepard and in collaboration with Fiona

Murphy (field recording, sound production), Brian Diesel (programming), Aaron Flynt (programming),

Achint Thomas (programming), Viral Modi (programming), and Ajeya Krishnamurthy

(programming).

Signature (April 2006)

Paula Levine produced the project for the Force of Nature: Centennial Exhibition Commemorating the

1906 Bay Area Fire and Earthquake, Contemporary Project Space, at the Sonoma County Museum.

Much like Levine’s other work, Signature merged time and space through mapping. For this particular

piece, a contemporary image of Santa Rosa dissolves with the sounds of the 1906 earthquake to reveal

the presence of the Roger’s Creek Fault running silently beneath the city (Levine, 2010b).

The field of locative media is not only a site of struggles over the making of meanings (i.e.

discourse), debates also centre on form, and a form that has initiated much debate is gaming. In

a post circulated on CRUMB, Karlis Kalnins declared his opposition ‘to furthering locative based

gaming (LBG) initiatives applying a simple gaming rule-based fantasy upon the fractal, chaotic

and always relevant possibilities of the real world’. As Kalnins demands: ‘Do we wish to finally

sterilize our lives into a Hollywood-esqe perfect movie?’ (in Tuters, 2004e). For Kalnins, the

deployment of the specialized technological tools associated with locative media should necessa-

rily encourage a re-engagement with one’s imagination and surrounding environment (see Tuters,

2004c). As opposed to nurturing a gaming medium as the focus of a locative experience, Kalnins

envisions total immersion, in which everyday life serves as a medium for play. In this regard, tech-

nology is not the catalyst. Rather, it serves to augment the everyday. Saul Albert shares Kalnins’


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critiques of ‘hermetically sealed games’, or what Albert defines as the moment ‘where non-game logic

space becomes a kind of inconvenient distraction from the false goals and rules set up in gameland’

(Albert, 2004b). Yet, Albert also acknowledges the manner in which games can initiate levels of

engagement beyond game-based symbolism, and serve to challenge the ‘self-imposed rules and struc-

tures’ of the real world. Similarly, Mary Flanagan (2007) interrogates the ambiguous game experience

offered by locative games. Yet, in spite of a critique of locative games, Flanagan also considers the

potential for games to function as a tool for community mobilization and empowerment.

Kalnins, Albert and Flanagan maintain that locative media projects serve as catalysts of

intervention, be it for playful or overtly critical means, and within the real world. Despite the fact

that the authors home in on gaming, their criticisms are not rooted in the game form per se; their

focus is attuned to gaming practices.

Practices are the essential part of an experience within any field, and encompass the act of its

construction (Bourdieu, 1977, 1985). That is, the process of producing locative media experiences,

which involves the application and manipulation of changing technologies and relationships, is a

practice (Williams, 1977).14 Therefore, Kalnins, Albert and Flanagan are not suggesting that the

game form is unsuitable within the field of locative media. The authors interrogate the manner in

which many locative games have neglected to challenge gaming paradigms in general, and

therefore have offered little in terms of renegotiating the genre in relation to locative media. On the

one hand, examining the critiques and debates associated with locative media practices elucidate

instances of reproduction of the social order; that is, when social and mental structures are in

agreement and reinforce each other (Wacquant, 2007). When specific practices are reproduced, all

appears as common sense and self-evident (Bourdieu, 1989). On the other hand, unravelling ten-

sions, particularly when discordances arise, highlights the push for transformation, which often

results in innovation, crisis, and structural change (Wacquant, 2007). And the challenge for change

is necessary given that forms of locative media do not evolve by happenstance. Projects and works

emerge from social and institutional relations and practices. The scrutiny of locative media prac-

tices, be it gaming or otherwise, is also a mode of scrutinizing the structure of the field itself, which

not only includes the positions occupied by the producers, but also the positions occupied by those

invested in instances of consecration and legitimation that solidifies the field of locative media

(Johnson, 1993).

Conclusion

Indeed, much has changed since the publication of early locative media literature, when the field

was evolving within the larger field of media arts. Perhaps one of the more evident changes

concerns the proliferation of location-based commercial applications,15 such as Foursquare or

Gowalla, which have been deemed as locative media. These and similar applications stem from

the considerable evolution of location-based and location-aware technologies. Within the last few

years alone, mobile devices have become integrative companions within an altered communicative

landscape. And looming over this vista is Web 2.0 and social networking, which have assumed

ubiquity as digital phenomena, both technologically and within the popular vernacular. Yet, any

contemporary or renewed meaning of locative media cannot simply be derived from its technolo-

gical components. In following Stuart Hall (1981), the meaning of locative media as a cultural

form and ‘its place or position in the cultural field is not inscribed inside its form’. Rather, meaning

is derived ‘in part by the social field into which it is incorporated, the practices with which it articu-

lates and is made to resonate’ (1981: 235).

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In this sense, making visible the emergence of locative media, like any new media, is deeply

embedded within ongoing discursive formations, what Gitelman describes as ‘within the what,

who, how, and why of public memory, public knowledge, and public life’ (2006: 29). The history

of emergent media is, in part, ‘the history of history, of what (and who) gets preserved – written

down, printed up, recorded, filmed, taped, or scanned – and why’ (Gitelman, 2006: 26). Indeed,

even writing, as Denzin observed, ‘is not an innocent practice’ (2000, 898). To write is to sustain an

episteme, expressions of specific historical conditions, which delineate a field of knowledge and

demarcate the conditions in which a specific discourse is naturalized (Foucault, 1979). As a

genealogy of locative media, this work initiates an appraisal of the current landscape of locative

media by accentuating what Anna Munster has described as ‘the struggle of a relational complex of

forces’ (2006: 61). As a method of inquiry, genealogy imparted a technique to ascertain and

interrogate the emergence of discourses, and, a means to delineate the manner in which these

discursive events constituted knowledge and practices in the structuring of the field. Thus, while

the work itself is rooted in a history or sorts, it is not an historical account of the field. My

objective, therefore, has not been to delimit locative media. On the contrary, my intent is to forge

new relationships with familiar objects of knowledge (Weinbaum, 2004), challenge inherited

certainties, and, advance informed counter memories (Braidotti, 1994). And if there is anything to

learn from the emergence of the field, it is that locative media will continue to evolve at the

crossroads of technological innovations and interpretations of use.

Funding

This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes

1. Within this configuration, as Clegg Smith notes, ‘one is ‘‘speaking into cyberspace’’ to an invisible

audience of a potentially indeterminate size. The researcher is not ‘‘seen’’ to be intruding, and thus may

be less imposing on the interaction that is occurring’ (Clegg Smith, 2004: 226).

2. While the origin of the term is often traced to Kalnins, and much of the early literature attributes the

naming to him, Tuters (2010, 2011) has suggested that a more authentic description of the origins should

cite, at the very least, the role of RIXC Centre for New Media Culture, given its support of the concept via

events and platforms. I agree with Tuters in that ‘locative media’ was engendered by and within a nexus

of individuals and institutions.

3. RIXC is a centre for new media/culture in Riga, Latvia, and headed by Rasa and Raitis Smite. Formerly

known as Re-lab, the centre is recognized for pioneering work with streaming media (RIXC, 2010;

Tuters, 2006: §2).

4. From Kara Osta meaning War Port in Latvian.

5. Located 10 km from the centre of Liepaja, Karosta occupies the northern part of the city and was built by

order of the Russian Tsar Alexander III as a military port in the Baltic region. During the Soviet occu-

pation of Latvia, Karosta was a military base, housing some 25,000 soldiers and was closed to civilians

by a fortress wall that was built around the city. Following Latvian independence, the Soviet army evac-

uated Karosta in 1994, and the population dropped from 25,000 to 6000. Much of Karosta is now in ruins,

and many houses have been completely destroyed, along with the military infrastructure. These conse-

quences of the military exodus are compounded by mass unemployment (Locative Media, 2003: §9–

10; Smite, 2003: §11).

6. As stated in the call for projects, the workshop would explore, ‘the radically disorganizing potential

(social, spatial and temporal) of ad-hoc wireless networking, and use open-source mapping/positioning


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technologies to audiolize and visualize data in space’ (Locative Media, 2003: §2; Smite, 2003: §3). And

initial thematic explorations included:

[M]apping from below; creating context for mobile/digital art; mobile ad hoc social networks as

the next social revolution; text-messaging þ hyper-co-ordination; technologies of co-operation

amplification and the ‘wireless commons’ debate; netwar þ the appropriation of surveillance

technologies by tactical media; and the relation between new locative media and magic. (Loca-

tive Media 2003: §8; Smite, 2003: §10)

7. These examples are not exhaustive. Rather, the examples are demonstrative of the movement of locative

media within the field of media arts.

8. Following the brainstorming meeting at N5M in September, Ben Russell created a website for the group

at http://locative.net (Walsh, 2004). The website acted as a point of convergence, and it also highlighted

member projects and initiatives, and provided locative media resources. Saul Albert (2004a) later aligned

locative media with the ‘group of people who have been assembled under the banner of http://locative.

net’ (Albert, 2004a), or the Locative Media Lab (2004).

9. The subsections, ‘Drifting and Psychogeography’ and ‘Formula for a New City’, are the most dense.

10. Pinder provides the example of London-based group Proboscis, responsible for developing the ‘Urban

Tapestries’ software platform. The software enabled the authoring of virtual annotations of the city

through mobile phones and PDAs (Pinder, 2005: 408 n.18).

11. An initial version of this text was presented at the RIXC Media Architecture conference in Riga, 16–17

May 2003.

12. Despite his critique, Holmes does not completely debunk the possibility for the civilian appropriation of

military and commercial technology. The author lends support to media art mapping projects, some of

which are situated within the realm of locative media (Holmes, 2007).

13. Waypoints are a set of co-ordinates that identify a physical space and are used for navigation.

14. In ‘From Medium to Social Practice’ in Marxism and Literature, Raymond Williams (1977) outlines a

shift in the use of the word ‘medium’ to ‘practice’. Situating his analysis in the context of art history,

Williams implements ‘practice’ to encompass those technological developments that compel artists to

develop new skills and techniques. For Williams, the consequences of technological change include new

material forms and relationships in the process of production (1977: 153). ‘A new technique’, as Williams

explains, ‘has often been seen . . . as a new relationship, or as depending on a new relationship. Thus

what had been isolated as a medium, in many ways rightly as a way of emphasizing the material produc-

tion, which any art must be, came to be seen, inevitably, as social practice’ (1977: 163).

15. As of May 2011, approximately one in five smart-phone users have utilized location-based check-in

services, such as Foursquare and Gowalla (Whitney, 2011).

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Biography

Andrea Zeffiro received a PhD in Communication Studies from Concordia University, Montreal. She is an

instructor in the Faculty of Culture and Community at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Canada.


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Article

From manneristsituationism to situatedmedia

Marc TutersUniversity of Amsterdam, the Netherlands

AbstractA decade ago, the convergence of GPS with mobile telephony first allowed media artists to mapthe city’s psychogeography. With such technology having now become widespread, the artisticnovelty of this approach has somewhat diminished. While the field of ‘locative media’ has been andcontinues to be productive of both work and of critique, this essay questions some of its con-ceptual commitments and critical interpretations. As the technological assemblages upon whichlocative media are based are themselves constantly shifting, the essay considers adapting con-ceptual approaches accordingly. To this end, an argument is put forth for expanding the concept oflocative media, built upon Bruno Latour’s recent engagement with new media and design practiceswhich he characterizes in terms of the act of assembling rather than debunking. Drawing further onactor-network theory, an alternative interpretation of the metaphor of cognitive mapping is devel-oped in which a core concept of locativity, that of proximity, is redefined in terms of tracing theconnections of networked objects, this as opposed to the often repeated association of locativemedia with Situationist psychogeography. An assembly of practices are examined which trace logis-tics and give voice to multiple nonhuman ontologies.

KeywordsANT, cognitive mapping, locative media, Parliament of Nature, post-critical, proximity,Situationism

Introduction

Space is a primary preoccupation of cultural theory. Theorists and artists alike have long been

fascinated, for instance, by the performative act of drifting through a city’s streets in an attempt to


Marc Tuters, New Media & Digital Culture, University of Amsterdam, Turfdraagsterpad 9, 1012 XT, Amsterdam, the

Netherlands





reveal the unconscious ‘psychogeography’ of urban space (Benjamin, 1986 [1923]; McDonough,

2009). The convergence of location awareness with mobile networking in the early years of this

century, allowed media artists, often fluent in such theory, to develop locative media as a means to

map urban space from below. From its inception, this new community practice was thus connected

to a critical tradition associated with the radical thought and artistic practice of the Situationists,

who have been referred to as the last and ultimate avant-garde art movement (Wark, 2011). As was

also the case with much ‘theory’ of this sort, the degree of critical engagement of these practices

was however not only derivative but often rather superficial. And while the concepts and practices

developed out of what we might here refer to as the locative media discourse have been and will no

doubt continue to be quite productive, as a media art movement it must keep pace with change,

since ‘there is no such thing as inertia for technology’ (Latour, 1996: 86). Thus, as the technolo-

gical object of study has developed, too should the methods of analysis, from what Jaques Ranciere

(2006: 10) refers to as a Situationist tradition of critical thought that has degenerated into a ‘delib-

eration on mourning’, towards an appreciation of locative media as ‘tool[s] for a politics that

doesn’t yet exist’ (Bratton and Jeremijenko, 2008: 37).

As the technologies that make locative media possible themselves remain in a constant process

of change, this article argues for a reassessment of the theoretical frameworks which have

informed its study. We begin with a discussion and periodization of location-aware, primarily

GPS-enabled media arts practices designed for mobile devices, a phase associated both with

Situationist-influenced locative practice as well as with Situationist-type locative critique. The

essay then shifts to a focus on new media practices which develop the notion of thing-as-

gathering. These situated media are then considered through the lens of material semiotics, as

potential instances of how agency can be read as being distributed into the environment and subject

to design. Looking at Bruno Latour’s own engagement with new media, the article then goes on to

consider citizen science prototypes for an Internet of Things in which a variety of non-human

agents are rendered expressive of their own unique ontologies. Thus, as opposed to either delimit-

ing the object of study as geo-media or tying it to one particular critical tradition, an argument is

made for broadening the field through a consideration of related new media practices which

emphasize the process by which associations are traced.

Mannerist Situationism

Hundreds of people gather in a department store to contemplate a single item vanishing minutes

later leaving onlookers and attendants baffled; and thus a new and strange convergence of ad-hoc

community and urban space was born (Shirky, 2008: 165). Although they first appeared in 2003,

‘flash mobs’ still evoke fantasies of resistance as a kind of ‘post-Left space . . . interrupting the

smooth flow of our participation in the routines of daily life’ (Zizek, 2010: 363). This was also the

moment when the street, to paraphrase William Gibson, found its own uses for the convergence of

mobile technology and GPS, as media artists began to explore the ‘[c]artographic attributes of the

invisible’ in the form of locative art (Gibson, 2007: 19).

In his second novel to address the topic, Gibson (2010: 55) writes that ‘[l]ocative art probably

started in London, and there’s a lot of it’. Indeed, while the neologism itself emerged from a flurry

of activity within the media arts communities throughout Europe,1 the canonical work of this

period was likely Can You See Me Now by the London-based performance collective Blast Theory

(2002), who used GPS-enabled mobile devices to turn the city into a game board, for which they

were awarded the prestigious Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica for Interactive Art in 2003.


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Since its inception at the beginning of this century, there has been a fascination amongst many

locative practitioners with the Situationist concept of the derive, a technique of wandering the city

developed as a critique of urban control systems (Bleecker and Nova, 2009; Chang and Goodman,

2006; Flanagan, 2009; Greenfield and Shepard, 2007; McGarrigle, 2009; Mitew, 2008; Sant, 2006;

Tuters, 2004a). By the 2010s however, locative media’s Situationist rhetoric had been turned on its

head, with location-based services becoming a key tool in a corporate strategy to re-imagine the

city and ‘the social’ in terms of ‘gamification’.2 Indeed, Julian Dibbell’s (2006) notion of ludoca-

pitalism astutely questions a key assumption at the base of Situationist theory: that the domain of

play is somehow outside of capital. While this exceptionalist theory of play as ‘an occasion of pure

waste’ (Caillois, 2001 [1961]: 5) may have held under a rigid Fordist regime of accumulation, in

today’s new media landscape the idea of play as a mode of oppositional politics seems somewhat

nostalgic. Following Simon Critchley, we might thus refer to this legacy of locative media practice

as a kind of Mannerist Situationism ‘exaggerated . . . but ultimately decadent, compromised and

slightly nihilistic’ (Critchley, 2006).

The relationship between locative media and Situationism is paradoxical as this radical tradition

became both the inspiration for locative practice and the basis for its very critique. Thus, while

early locative projects like GPSter (2002–2005. See Figure 1),3 which sought to use GPS ‘to

connect pieces of digital information to a specific latitude–longitude coordinate’ (Lindgren and

Owens, 2007: 202), can be seen to have grown directly from the artists’ engagement with cultural

theory on urban space, to a number of art critics such projects seemed, metaphorically at least, to

inscribe the emancipatory project of said theory within a calculative logic largely determined by

Figure.1. ‘Songlines’ by GPSter, at Impakt Festival, Utrecht, the Netherlands, 2003.Photo: Pieter Kers

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this formerly military technology. Locative media, was associated with the emergence of a

‘machine-aided process of disciplinary attentiveness’ (Crandall, 2005), in which ‘the world is

actively constructed in terms of relational information systems . . . [with] an emphasis on data pat-

terns over essence’ (Crandall, 2006). In one such criticism, the GPSter project, along with Amster-

dam RealTime (Waag Society and Polak, 2002) – the latter of which crowd-sourced a GPS-traced

map of Amsterdam – were singled out as examples of how locative media co-opted the tactics of

Situationism, asking: ‘Has the ideology of our time not become an erratic, wavering pattern of

crisscrossing footsteps, traced in secure metric points on an abstract field? The aesthetic form

of the derive is everywhere. But so is the hyper-rationalist grid of Imperial infrastructure’ (Holmes,

2004). In the tradition of critical theory these critiques read locative media as an unwelcome

imposition of instrumental rationality, implying the possibility of an autonomous realm outside

(of capital, of techno-science, of unmediated reality).

Another line of critique, read locative media as the ‘avant-garde of the ‘‘society of control’’’

(see Tuters and Varnelis, 2006).4 In contradistinction to the former, this latter perspective might

be used to explain how current locative technologies, such as for example Foursquare, a mobile

social app which over-codes urban space with a simple game logic based on the accumulating

badges (Foursquare, 2011), can at once be enthusiastically embraced while at the same time being

read as a kind of bottom-up mode of control. Taken together the aforementioned locative practices

and their critiques can be seen as intertwined, the former providing an ideal object for the latter. In

this analysis locative media adapts, Zelig-like, to the intellectual fashion of its time, a criticism

from which the present essay is surely not exempt. So while the radical semiotic critique of the

Situationists developed into a linguistic preoccupation within the American academy of the

1970s (Cusset, 2008), the field of cultural analysis appears currently to be trending towards what

political philosopher Noortje Marres refers to as the ‘‘‘ontological’’ or ‘‘object-centred’’ perspec-

tive’ (2009: 199), as signified, in particular, by the ascendancy of actor-network theory (See also:

Farıas, 2010: 1–24). While deconstructionists argued that there was no outside of the text,5 the cur-

rent fashion in object-oriented philosophy would claim that there is simply no outside (Bryant

et al., 2011: 8). In an intellectual environment concerned with the philosophical import of things,

locative media seems ideally suited as the theory object of choice.

The post-critical

If we have identified locative practice thus far with a Mannerist Situationism in an attempt to move

beyond, then, following Jacques Ranciere, we might also do the same with locative critique, at

least in its more nostalgic variants. To this end Ranciere (2006: 9–10) discusses the effect of

Situationism on art in terms of a ‘fatal capture by discourse’, claiming that ‘the tradition of critical

thinking has metamorphosed into a deliberation on mourning’. In a recent issue of October, the

same journal in which Deleuze’s concept of the ‘society of control’ was first published, Hal Foster

(2012) identifies Ranciere as one of the two leading proponents of the current post-critical moment

in art theory, along with Bruno Latour. According to Foster, both Ranciere and Latour see critique

as unable to turn its own anti-fetishistic gaze back upon itself. In contemplating the role of criticism

today, Latour (2004c: 246), for his part, argues ‘(t)he critic is not the one who debunks, but the one

who assembles’, someone who adds to rather than subtracts from the reality of matters-of-fact.

Latour’s approach has been characterized as ‘object-oriented philosophy’ (Harman, 2009), a

type of metaphysics based on the fundamental principle that the world is made up of objects which

gain strength only through their alliances, which are linked through translation, and in which


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‘nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else’ (Latour, 1993: 158).

‘[R]eality’, for Latour, thus ‘grows to precisely the same extent as the work done to become

sensitive to differences’ (Latour, 2004b: 85). If we compare this type of thought with that, for

example, of the Situationist Guy Debord (1995 [1967]: 1), in whose critique ‘[a]ll that was once

directly lived has become mere representation’, the contrast could not be more stark. Not only

is Latour’s approach unconcerned with what is or is not ‘real’, he sees mediation as a means by

which to strengthen alliances. As such it is appropriate that actor-network theory is increasingly

considered a key concept in media studies (Gane and Beer, 2008: 27–31).

Following Latour I want to re-imagine the prospects for locative media after what I am calling

the object turn, with special attention to an emerging traceability genre at the intersection of media

art, industrial and system design. To this end, I will discuss how Latour’s theories and his recent

engagement with design practices might help us to situate these emerging practices in terms of

‘composition’ rather than critique.6 I will consider a locative epistemology, which sees objects

as composed of networks of associations, a concept of cognitive mapping that goes beyond geo-

graphy. This entails a shift, both technological and theoretical, to a more relational notion of place

defined in terms of proximity to local objects as opposed to the absolute system of reference.

Since the emergence of locative media, the notion of location-awareness has acquired an

increasingly finer granularity from satellites, to cell phone towers, to WiFi triangulation to

barcodes and RFID, all the while decentralizing and creating more alternatives. While the first

locative practitioners had to build these technologies for themselves, these capabilities are increas-

ingly black-boxed into contemporary mobile devices.7 In an attempt to reposition the discussion

around locative media, this theoretical move draws largely on actor-network theory according

to which ‘[i]ndividual agency is simply one possible form of agency, one that encompasses a wide

variety of possible forms’ (Callon, 2008: 37). Rather than again discussing locative media in terms

of ‘geo-media’ (Thielmann, 2010: 5), the argument is thus to consider these traceability practices

as material enactments of theories of distributed agency.

A survey of locative practices that replaces Situationism with actor-network theory as the

conceptual reference point will result in a quite different picture. The key difference between the

Situationist approach to locative media and the actor-network theory approach has to do with

expanding the concept of a political assembly from a cosmopolitan urban ideal, that tends to focus

exclusively on the human concerns, to the notion of what Latour calls ‘cosmopolitics’, in which

artists and designers give voice to mute non-human things each of which can be thought of as hav-

ing its own ontological reality. ‘Entities’ according to Latour (2004d: 452) may ‘all have the same

culture but do not acknowledge, do not perceive, do not live in, the same nature’. These multiple

natures populate the background against which we project culture ideals – Situationism being but

one of the more radical visions. As discussed later, with citizen science protoypes for an Parliament

of Nature, the Latourian approach to locative media attempts to give voice to these mute objects.8

Things-as-gatherings

This concept of multiple-ontologies grows out of science and technology studies work on scientific

epistemology, in which Latour’s pioneering contribution was to bring anthropological methods to

bear on the study of modern scientific, ‘fact producing’, institutions, through tracing the contingent

material practices therein (Latour and Woolgar, 1979). This is not, however, a theory of difference

in the post-Marxist sense. Latour’s project can be seen to be focused rather on what draws and

holds things together than what separates and keeps them apart. This leads him and his colleagues

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to their most controversial and at the same time commonsensical claim that objects, read in terms

of material-semiotics, can be profitably understood to exhibit degrees of agency in the world, such

as for example in the classic example of the speed bump which encodes a certain morality into the

built environment (Latour, 1992).

Latour’s object-oriented philosophy emerges from his studies of the role of tools and mediation

in practice.9 In this approach the social in Latour’s (2005a: 5) words ‘does not designate a thing

among other things, like a black sheep among other white sheep, but a type of connection between

things that are not themselves social’. These networks are thus transient, relying on actors to repeat

the performance of their relations in order to sustain them, thus emphasizing the role of practice.

While his preoccupations have remained the same throughout his career, Latour’s sites of

investigation have changed, focusing increasingly in recent years, on media art and design as

exemplified by the Making Things Public exhibition which he curated in collaboration with Peter

Weibel at the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe and which sought to develop a concept

of ‘representation’ that connected politics, science and aesthetics (Latour, 2006: 6). In curating the

exhibition Latour applied Heidegger’s notion of das Ding as ‘a gathering’ to the objects of science

and technology which the philosopher of science traces: things-as-gatherings.

Latour’s interpretation of new media, as represented by the collection of works that were

displayed in this exhibition could be understood as an attempt to ground the non-foundational con-

cerns of post-structuralist philosophy in the pragma, or thing in its Greek etymology, of American

philosophical pragmatism.10 In this exhibition and in his more recent writings, he quite literally

envisions the ‘design of politics’ in pragmatist terms of ‘collective experimentation’, in which the

media arts11 could play an important role in how scientific matters-of-fact are rhetorically con-

structed so that they may be debated and decided upon for entry into the public sphere. For Latour

(2004b: 85) ‘[t]he more instruments proliferate, the more the arrangements become artificial, the

more capable we become of registering worlds.’ Thus objects are judged for entry into Latour’s

collective based on how well or how poorly they have been articulated. What Latour refers to

as ‘matters-of-concern’ are to be carefully composed by drawing on these three notions of repre-

sentation (political, scientific and aesthetic). For these things-as-gatherings then to gain entry into

his ‘parliament of things’, which he also refers to as a ‘parliament of nature’ (Latour, 2005b),

requires a ‘new eloquence’, in which fields of design and of the media arts play a pivotal role.12

Evocative illustration of Latour’s concept of a parliament of things, have emerged in years

subsequent to the Making Things Public exhibition in several critical design projects that seek to

portrays manufactured objects as a gathering of issues. One such project condenses all the products

made from a single pig after being shipped throughout the world – from chewing gum to

ammunition – into a single representation (Meindertsma, 2008). Another documents an individ-

ual’s attempt to manufacture a toaster from scratch – including mining and smelting the iron ore

(Thwaites, 2010). In assembling these miniature cartographies of globalized capital, this trace-

ability design genre suggests a kind of a technological solution to the metaphysical problem at the

base of Marx’s labour theory of value (1982 [1867]: 125–137) by offering a vision of commodities

connected to a representation of their means of production.13

Increasingly taking on the mantle of political philosopher in his recent work, Latour (2004a: 69)

claims that, ‘[h]alf of public life is found in laboratories’ a fact which scientists intuitively

understand, since complex matter-of-fact can not be assembled without the chains of reference

supplied by their instruments.14 Indeed, as media artists are themselves used to dealing with com-

plex technical instruments many are increasingly coming to frame their work in a Latourian man-

ner as public or citizen scientists (da Costa, 2008: 365–386). Thus while mainstream science is


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supported by and in turn supports a stable social and political order, citizen scientists are more like

Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987 [1980]: 362) ‘nomad science’, composing experiments which contest

the claims of ‘royal science’ and upset the established order.15 Contra Latour (2004c), it would

therefore seem as though critique amongst these citizen scientists appears not yet to have run out

of steam.

Parliament of Nature

While the concept of ubiquitous computing has been around since the early 1990s (Weiser, 1991),

new standardized communications protocols make it possible for every single object on the planet

to be part of an Internet of Things.16 The concept of the latter been embraced by interaction

designers as an alternative to the more centralized vision of the former (van Allen et al., 2007). It

has likewise piqued the interest amongst designers over non-human things acquiring the ability to

comment on their own environment, thereby affecting human behaviour and gaining a degree of

agency. A notable example is Beatriz da Costa’s PigeonBlog (USA, 2006) a project that equipped

pigeons with GPS-enabled electronic air pollution sensors in order to remotely map the air quality

of the city in real time to Google maps. In Julian Bleecker’s (2006: 5) enthusiastic reading Pigeon-

Blog signified a radical shift in perspective in which the pigeon went from ‘a disgusting menace, to

a participant in life and death discussions about the state of the micro-local environment’. The

same might also be said about Joshua Klein’s Crow Box (USA, 2008) that leverages the intelli-

gence of crows in order to get them to collect litter. When we consider John Berger’s (2003) claim

that modernity begins when people no longer directly depend on animals and they become

symbolic we can appreciate how such citizen science prototypes for a Parliament of Nature are

fundamentally Latourian in so far as they seem to be design iterations on his famous claim that

we have, in fact, never been modern (Latour, 1991).17

For Latour, concepts from ‘Nature’ to ‘the public’ do not exist a priori (nor for that matter does

‘space’), rather they are actively produced in relation to things-as-gatherings, for which the

challenge is to design them well. He thus criticizes any theory which takes ‘nature’ for granted

as the backdrop upon which politics takes place. To this way of thinking, there can be no settle-

ments based on a notion of ‘common nature,’ in which the full range of ontological antagonisms

are not acknowledged (Blok, 2010). Consider the failure of the 2009 Copenhagen talks on climate

change to achieve international consensus while bank bailouts were globally passed in spite of

seeming ideological and political differences. To Slavoj Zizek this signified the fact that it is easier

for us to imagine an environmental apocalypse than any real change in capitalist relations (Zizek,

2010: 334), while for Latour, the failure of Copenhagen stems from what he considers as the failure

of the idea of a ‘Nature’ itself (Latour, 2010: 473). He thus criticizes the ‘Green’ ideology of

mainstream ecology as using a romantic vision of nature apart from technology to, in fact, ‘abort

politics’ (Latour, 2004a: 19).18

A recently concluded pamphlets series of conversations on the topic of ‘situated technologies’,

published between 2006 and 2012 by the Architectural League of New York, framed the critical

discussion of locative media in terms of a Latourian cosmopolitical model of relations between

humans and non-humans (Bleecker and Nova, 2009; Bratton and Jeremijenko 2009; Frei and

Bohlen, 2010). One such exchange between the citizen scientist Natalie Jeremijenko and the archi-

tecture theorist Benjamin Bratton, for instance, framed the role of the artist as giving representa-

tional agency to things ‘that otherwise would not have a parliamentary representation’ (Bratton and

Jeremijenko, 2008: 36). Recalling Hal Foster’s pairing of Latour and Ranciere earlier in this essay,

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Bratton draws on Ranciere’s (2006: 37) notion of ‘the distribution of the sensible’,19 to interpret

Jeremijenko’s work. Ranciere (2006: 18) claims a historical constancy with respect to ‘the ways

that figures of community are aesthetically designed’, specifically ‘the level of the sensible deli-

mitations of what is common to all community, the forms of its visibility and of its organization’.

This interpretation is particularly apt when applied to Jeremijenko’s (2003) project OneTrees: An

Information Environment, which critiques the construction of nature as existing outside a network

of relations by planting genetically identical trees in various socio-economically different neigh-

bourhoods in order to question the logic of genetic determinism. While the trees themselves fea-

tured no sensors or actuators at all, they were effectively ‘visualization’ of the contingent

environment, by thriving in rich areas while struggling in poor neighbourhoods. This work thus

offers a way to think of locative media beyond the latest convergence of mobile networking and

context-aware technologies in much broader terms as a kind of epistemology through which to

examine, in the tradition of Deweyan/Latourian pragmatism, how habit is shaped by the environ-

ment, and how it can in turn be changed.

Conclusion: Situated media

In his critique of postmodern hyperspace, Fredric Jameson (1991: 38–45) famously questioned the

subject’s ability to position itself in relation to an externally mappable reality. In the postmodern

historical period Jameson considered architecture to be a privileged aesthetic form for its unme-

diated relationship to capital. Yet, he characterized our phenomenological experience, as one of

‘bewildering immersion’, a ‘mutation in the object unaccompanied as yet by any equivalent

mutation in the subject’, making wayfinding the key problem of cultural theory, and initiating a

debate across a great number of fields, though perhaps nowhere more so than in architecture

(Martin, 2010). As new media overcome space, they should permit us to rethink its design free

from recourse to Euclidean thinking according to which space is a pre-existing container for social

relations.

The idea of information seems fundamentally at odds to an embodied conception of being.

Locative media is therefore conceptually valuable in so far as it bridges the digital with the analog,

thereby seeming to give information a body. Yet while an entire discipline, namely human geo-

graphy, is premised on the distinction between abstract space and embodied place, from the

perspective of code, location is just another arbitrary value. Setting aside the vast environmental

impacts of computing, if the goal of locative media is to bring context to information, there is no

reason why it should remain wedded exclusively to location. In its approach to cartography,

actor-network theory does not especially privilege geography over other forms of connection.20

Cognitive mapping should thus think of proximity in terms of strengths of connections rather than

location as actors separated in space may always be more strongly connected in some other more

significant capacity. As a linguistic concept, locative media refers to a grammatical case corre-

sponding to notions of proximity, not absolute location in the Cartesian sense. As such, it should

not be misinterpreted as an overly instrumental reference to some abstract system of geographic

coordinates. If, however, locative media has become identified with the absolute space of GPS and

its critique within a media arts discourse, how then might we refer to a more relational concept of

location, in an environment where everything is in flux?

The projects explored earlier situate an actor in proximate relation to the network issues by

which they are effected, in order to generate affect. While locative media has been defined as

‘communication functionally bound to a location’21 the expanded conception explored in this


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essay would replace the concept of geographic location as the core concept of locativity, with the

more relational notion of proximity, not only in relation to place but also in relation to matters-of-

concern. What we termed situated media, refers to digital artefacts that represent agency as distrib-

uted in the built environment, thereby contributing to the ongoing dialogue between actor-network

theory and human–computer interaction design (Suchman, 2007). This could accommodate loca-

tive media’s traditional geographic concerns (the physical location of one’s body will always be

relevant), but also, traceability projects and citizen science prototypes for an Parliament of Nature,

in which information is functionally and meaningfully bound to the thing-as-gathering.

As location-awareness continues to develop and become standardized into our media devices

and embedded into the environment, what emerges is a much more relational notion of proximity

to objects. In addition to physically locating us in relation to them, objects become positioned in

relation to one another, and crucially, they become represented as gatherings of issues, in relation

to which we can formulate cognitive maps. Through the careful work of representation every

object could thus carry with it its own unique chains of reference, thereby revealing the substance

of ‘the local’ to be composed of an endless variation of scales.

Context in locative media has typically been defined in rather absolute terms as geographic

location. But ‘context is what actors constantly do’ (Latour, 2005a: 186), what is at issue, is the

position from which to measure.

Funding

This research was generously funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of

Canada.

Notes

1. A key moment associated with the emergence of the concept of locative media was the Cartographic

Congress, which took place in London over a six week period in May and June 2003 (Mute editors,

2003). The participants were photographed standing in front of the London Sailors’ Society in a tribute

to a photograph taken at the 4th Conference of the Situationist International in 1960 making blatant the

association between locative media and Situationism from the very beginning. The actual term ‘loca-

tive media’ was first publicly discussed on 17 May 2003 at the Art and Communication conference at

the RIXC Centre for New Media Culture in Riga Latvia in a set of panels whose participants included

Brian Holmes, Marko Peljhan, members of the Bureau d’etudes, the Waag Society and

0100101110101101.org (RIXC, 2003). It gained broader international attention with the first ‘locative

workshop’ that took place on 16–26 July in Karosta, Latvia (Tuters, 2003a), and upon which Gibson

commented at the time in his blog (Tuters, 2003b). This was followed by a series of subsequent locative

workshops coordinated by RIXC across Europe throughout 2004 (Tuters, 2004b). Additionally the con-

cept was much discussed at the major European media art festivals including a panel entitled ‘Mobi-

lotopia’ at Transmediale.04 Fly Utopia in Berlin on 2 February 2004, (Transmediale.04, 2004) at the

‘Locative Media Tactical Tool Fair’ as part of Futuresonic04 in Manchester on 1 May 2004 (Future-

sonic, 2004) and at the panels entitled ‘Mapping Space’ and ‘Tracing Space’ at ISEA 2004 in Helsinki

on 21 August 2004 (ISEA2004, 2004). Full disclosure: I co-organized or moderated many of these

events (see Tuters, 2011).

2. As illustrative of the commodification of locative media, consider the lecture by Jesse Schell (2010) one

of the most watched in the history of the seminars on Long Term Thinking, in which the game designer

describes a near future to Silicon Valley audience in which ubiquitous tracking embedded in the environ-

ment rewards players when, for instance, they recall ads placed by corporations into their dreams. While

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thinly disguised as satire, the presentation was indicative of the general enthusiasm around the concept of

‘gamification’ amongst internet entrepreneurs towards the beginning of the 2010s. (For an extensive and

up-to-date criticism of various attempts to capture ‘the social’ by a silicon valley insider, see Keen, 2012:

106–120)

3. Full disclosure: GPSter was my own locative project, which I mention here because of its relative time-

liness and position in relation to the emergence of the concept of locative media as such. A more cano-

nical and much more fully developed variant on this concept would be Social Tapestries by Proboscis

(2002–2009), produced in partnership with the London School of Economics, Birkbeck College, Orange,

HP Research labs, France Telecom R&D UK, and the Royal Ordnance Survey, and which allowed people

to associate data and stories with geographic space via mobile devices.

4. This particular critique of locative media references Deleuze’s (1992) interpretation of Foucault’s latter

work on governmentality. While that particular very short text is often cited within new media (Chun,

2006; Galloway, 2004; Galloway and Thacker, 2007), there has been a wave of new scholarship accom-

panying the recent English translation of Foucault’s College de France lectures that should prove

extremely applicable to this line of criticism. (See for example McNay, 2009).

5. My translation of the original French ‘il n’y a pas de hors-texte’ (Derrida, 1997 [1974]: 158).

6. Bruno Latour (2010: 484, 475) makes the distinction between having a future ‘un futur’ and having a pros-

pect ‘un avenir’: ‘What makes the times we are living in so interesting . . . is that . . . just at the time when

people despair at realizing that they might, in the end, have ‘no future’, we suddenly have many prospects’,

and he characterizes critique as having ‘all the limits of utopia: it relies on the certainty of the world beyond

this world. [while, b]y contrast, for composition, there is no world of beyond. It is all about immanence.’

7. Early projects such as ‘Songlines’, pictured in Figure 1, had to interface multiple hardware devices

in order to create a platform for location awareness. Global Positioning System (GPS) chips have,

however, become commonplace in smart devices since the 3G iPhone in 2008. As GPS requires

direct line of sight visibility of the sky, it is not however ideal for urban space, thus smart phones

use a combination of positioning technologies including WiFi triangulation. Similarly, this tech-

nique was initially explored by artists such as, for example, in the locative project Tactical Sound

Garden Toolkit (Shepard, 2006), that allows participants to ‘plant’ sounds within a positional audio

environment and which in turn drew on artistic research in locative media developed at the Banff

New Media Institute (GPSter et al., 2004). Alternative and even more fine-grain degrees of location-

awareness can be attained when hi-resolution camera chips are used as sensors through advances in

machine-vision algorithms in order to scan QR codes and barcodes. Given these latter ‘object-cen-

tric’ forms of location-awareness, the concept of locative media shades increasingly into that of the

Internet of Things (see Hayles, 2009).

8. I do not wish somehow to suggest in this section that critique is no longer valid, for example as applied to

actor-network theory, but rather to emphasize the conceptual resonance between the locative practice of

tracing associations, and Latour’s intellectual project. Indeed Latour’s notion ‘cosmopolitics’ in partic-

ular has been criticized for failing to recognize the marginalization of various subject positions by polit-

ical structures of representation (Watson, 2011).

9. One of the great contributions of actor-network theory has been to reveal how the practice of scientists

involves securing active involvement of social actors in the process of domesticating their theories into

matters-of-fact, an insight which can be traced back to their ethnographic studies of experimental science

in the 1980s and 1990s. In so doing scientists give us more than just new things, they contribute to the

reconfiguring of wider social–material relations through the practice of public experiment. Indeed as they

have shown, modern experimental science has developed as a genre of publicity since its inception (see

Shapin and Schaffer, 1989).


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10. A parallel can be drawn here between Latour’s theories about innovation and the concept of ‘design

thinking’, which seeks to engage with John Dewey’s (1997 [1916]) experiential theories of education,

a canonical example of which is IDEO’s (2002) study of a hospital as a network constantly being per-

formed and maintained by series experts, as opposed to an a priori material object.

11. A number of locative-type projects were featured in the Making Things Public exhibition including ‘Crowd

Compiler’ (Nold, 2004), ‘MapMover’ (DiSalvo et al., 2007) and the ‘MILKproject’ (Polak et al., 2003–

2005). Full disclosure: I produced two projects for the Making Things Public exhibition, ‘Issue Ticker’

(govcom.org, 2005a) and ‘The Places of Issues’ (govcom.org, 2005b).

12. It should be noted that Latour has been criticized here for his reliance on models of ‘politics-made, as

opposed to accounts of politics-in-the-making’, failing to acknowledge the divergence between abstract

theories of the common good and the contingent entities that science and technology studies has worked

so diligently to deconstruct (See Marres, 2005: 99–109).

13. The British popular science writer Matt Ridley (2010: 11) has mocked this latter project for what he per-

ceives to be its romantic stance against specialization and exchange. Ridley aligns himself politically here

with the neoliberal economist Leonard Read (2008 [1958]: 11), who famously argued that since it was

impossible to name all its antecedents that go into making a pencil, and because no single person there-

fore knew how to make one, then the ‘invisible hand’ should be left alone to do its magical work. By

contrast, in his design manifesto for the Internet of Things Bruce Sterling (2005: 23) makes the Latourian

claim that traceability has the capacity to make things public and in so doing, to render the invisible hand

of the market visible.

14. Matters become more problematic, however, when they spill over from the laboratories into democratic

society, which is not well adapted to dealing with objects that have no clear boundaries. Hence, the fiasco

of Climate Gate (Carrington, 2011), in which climatologists became the centre of controversy after thou-

sands of their emails were stolen and sifted through for evidence that their conclusions had been ‘con-

structed’. As compared with the slow composition of scientific method, it takes relatively little effort

to sow public doubt, as Oreskes and Conway (2010) demonstrate in their analysis of the ‘tobacco strat-

egy’ of corporate-funded government lobbyists. It is, indeed, for this very reason that Latour (2004c)

claims that critique, as a method, has ‘run out of steam’.

15. Pickering (2010: 24) makes a similar claim to the one I make later in this article regarding citizen scientists

in his discussion of the second-wave British cyberneticians whose performative as opposed to representa-

tional understanding of the brain, allowed them, to ‘take seriously a nonmodern ontology in all sorts of

fields’.

16. It has been remarked that the Internet of Things has 80,000 trillion possible addresses, when you consider

that the 10-digit Electronic Product Code that uniquely identifies each of these objects can generate 296

different numbers (see Hayles, 2009: 51).

17. We could arguably periodize the moment of transition from a Situationist to a Latourian locative practice

with the award of the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica for Interactive Art to the locative MILKproject

which visualized the path of Dutch cheese back to its origins from dairy cows in Latvia (Polak et al.,

2003–2005) two years after the award has gone to Blast Theory (2002).

18. The nation of Bolivia has drafted a new constitution that enshrines the rights of nature ‘to not be affected

by mega-infrastructure and development projects that affect the balance of ecosystems and the local

inhabitant communities’ (Vidal, 2011). However, in placing nature beyond humanity, where science and

technology can only discover matters-of-facts as opposed to composing matters-of-concern, Latour

(1991: 13–48) would diagnose their constitution as thoroughly modern in spite of the pre-modern spiri-

tual revival with which it is associated. This romantic, dualistic construction of mother nature and indi-

genous culture fails, for instance, to acknowledge that anthropogenic climate intervention was in fact

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practised by pre-Colombian indigenous people to a degree that archaeologists are only just beginning to

understand (Brand, 2009: 235–274).

19. Ranciere (2006: 18) claims a historical constancy with respect to ‘the ways that figures of community are

aesthetically designed’, specifically ‘the level of the sensible delimitations of what is common to all

community, the forms of its visibility and of its organization.’

20. When Latour and Yaneva (2008: 80–89) apply the actor-network approach to the study of architecture,

for instance, they consider buildings in terms of controversies unfolding over time which bring together a

variety of actors from architects to regulations to foam models.

21. This is the definition according to Wikipedia, which has remained more or less stable since the entry for

‘locative media’ was first created in 2005.

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Biography

Marc Tuters is a PhD candidate and lecturer in new media at the University of Amsterdam with a background

in media arts practice. He has two graduate degrees from Concordia (CDN) and the University of Southern

California (USA), and has worked as a researcher at organizations internationally including the Annenberg

Centre, National University of Singapore and Waseda University.


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Article

The sound of locativemedia

Frauke BehrendtUniversity of Brighton, UK

AbstractThis article develops an alternative perspective to the visual bias in locative media discourses byfocusing on the role of sound in locative media and related discussions. This sonic perspectiveallows us to understand the temporal, situated and embodied aspects of locative media. Informedby debates from sound studies and mobile media studies, a locative smart phone application whereusers experience specific sounds depending on their locations, is discussed. The concept of ‘PlacedSounds’ is introduced for a more detailed analysis of locative sound experiences. A framework foranalysis is developed to discuss how locative sound engages with the auditory aspects of our spatialperception, how immersion operates for locative media and sound, and also to consider the role ofsituated experience, the role of walking as remixing, and how agency and exclusion operate inlocative sound. This framework explains how walking operates in terms of interacting with locativemedia, and how we experience being immersed in physical and media contexts at once via sound.

KeywordsAuditory culture, locative, mobile media, mobile phone, mobility, music, sound studies

Introduction

Most locative media applications, and the discourses surrounding them, are heavily biased towards

visual, textual, and often map-based interactions: ‘Location-aware mobile media allow users to see

their locations on a map on their mobile phone screens’ (Sutko and de Souza Silva, 2011, my

emphasis). Sutko and de Souza Silva’s discussion of location-based mobile phone applications

is just one example of how the locative discourse is limiting itself to a visual perspective without

questioning screen interfaces and visual interactions. I argue that this visual focus needs to be

balanced by a multi-sensory approach, and this article contributes an auditory perspective. Putting

sound centre stage allows us to focus on the materiality and embodied actions entailed in using loca-

tive media in urban spaces. This approach moves away from a focus on devices and applications

towards situated activities.


Frauke Behrendt, University of Brighton, Media Studies, Watts Building, Lewes Road, Brighton, BN2 4GJ, UK





Sound in locative and mobile media cultures

We engage with locative media while walking, cycling, running, or waiting. In these busy

everyday environments, paying attention to the screens of our mobile devices is often challenging,

especially while being on the move. Hemment describes the screen-based problem of locative

media: ‘In place of the richness of embodied experience of the world, many projects offer the chal-

lenge of roaming the environment while squinting at a tiny screen and clunky menu, separated

from the world by a barrier of bad usability’ (Hemment, 2006: 351). Alternatives to the screen-

based interfaces and visual interaction paradigms that grew out of the PC and laptop era are called

for, and one of them is sonic interaction with locative and mobile media.1 Tarkka is one of the few

writers who mention sonification, and not just visualization of locative data: ‘Mixed or augmented

reality applications use data visualization techniques for layered representations, while the sonifi-

cation of locations may produce embodied sonic experience in urban settings’ (Tarkka, 2005: 15).

These examples notwithstanding, overall there has been little research around locative sound,

whereas the relationship between mobile media and sound has been a growing area of research

– with spoken word (telephony), music (mp3s) and alert sounds (ringtones) being established parts

of the mobile sonic repertoire of everyday life. Locative media discourses tend to focus on users’

relationships with specific locations, whereas those with a mobile focus tend to consider users’

mobility across locations – both perspectives are obviously related and need to inform one another.

Therefore considerations from the field of mobile sound are highly relevant in informing debates

around locative media and sound.

The mobile sound activities that have sustained the most scholarly attention are mobile music

listening (mp3, Walkman, iPod), ringtones and the politics of ‘private’ telephone conversations in

public spaces. Two examples of conceptualizing the auditory space of mobile phone conversations

are de Gournay’s (2002) discussion of the politics of supposedly private telephone conversations

taking place in public spaces and Bassett’s (2003) dialectical concept of attention/inattention,

where she discusses the role of sensory attention in how this dialectic operates, and how we tend to

prioritize auditory spaces in mobile phone culture. Mobile music listening has been researched

most prominently in Bull’s Walkman study (2000) and his iPod study (Bull, 2007) where he shows

how users listen to mobile music in order to manage their moods and experiences, a move that

warms up their own private space, but at the same time chills the environment for everybody else.

Other researchers review the differences in the reception of the Walkman and digital music

players (Ferguson, 2008), argue for understanding mobile music as part of the urban soundscape

(Beer, 2007), focus on the experience of control (Simun, 2009), discuss specific aspects such as

music sharing (Bickford, forthcoming; Bassoli et al., 2006; Hakansson et al., 2007), listening to

iPods in the workplace (Haake, 2006), the role of mobile music listening in solo travelling (Burns

and O’Regan, 2008), and educational uses of iPods and podcasts (Cooper et al., 2009). The wider

issues of the mp3 and of podcasting technologies that are behind mobile media listening are cri-

tically interrogated by Sterne (2006; Sterne et al., 2008). Ringtones have been researched to a

lesser degree than mobile music listening, but there has been a sustained discourse: Gopinath uses

ringtones for a critical reading of the ‘auditory logic of globalization’ (2005), issues around per-

formativity and identity of ringtones are discussed (Van Elferen and De Fries, 2007) and parallels

between music and ringtones in terms of identity and distinction for Finnish youth are drawn

(Uimonen, 2004).

There has also been a debate around the relationship between mobility and music, especially

asking how this can be exploited in creative ways. This interdisciplinary debate has largely focused


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on sound art and research and development projects, as the mobile devices and constant network

connections needed for these kinds of location-specific interactions has not gone mass market yet.

Under the umbrella term ‘mobile music’ a variety of projects and debates have taken place that are

relevant for discourses around locative sound. The field of mobile music is understood as: ‘con-

cerned with the urban environment as musical interface, for location-aware sound art, audio anno-

tation of physical space, and other creative applications’ (Kirisits et al., 2008: 7). While

technological innovation has been important for developing many mobile music projects, the dis-

cussions around them have also moved beyond technical descriptions and documentation of proj-

ects in order to address ‘relations between the body, space and sound, synchronicity, foreground/

background activities, and the social acceptance of new behaviours in public space’ (Kirisits et al.,

2008: 7). Informed by the detailed theoretical analysis from the areas of iPod and mobile phone

research mentioned earlier, and the more creative and technical discussions from the area of mobile

music and sound art, this article develops a framework for understanding how locative sound

‘apps’ – that are now in the process of moving into mainstream culture – operate. This framework

considers how locative sound engages with the auditory aspects of our spatial perception, how

immersion operates for locative media and sound, the role of situated experience and of walking

as remixing in this context, and finally, how agency and exclusion operate under these conditions.

This article also counterbalances the common descriptions of the most recent locative sound proj-

ects or products as ‘new’ by contextualizing them in larger trajectories of sound and media culture

and as part of a field of practice that has been developing for more than a decade.

Exploring a locative sound application

The National Mall is a recent example of locative sound; it is a smart phone application where the

music users listen to is determined by their location. This locative sound app for the iPhone was

released in Spring 2011 by the musical duo Bluebrain. Users are invited to download the app, and

then walk around an outdoor park area in Washington DC, and, depending on their location, they can

hear specific composed sounds and music that the musicians behind the project have ‘attached’ to

these locations. The location of the project, the National Mall is an outdoor space, a park stretching

from the Capitol Building to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC (not a shopping mall, as one

might think). The musicians explain their ‘location-aware album’ as follows (Bluebrain, 2011b):

The app is the work itself, designed to play exclusively within the physical boundaries of the national

mall in Washington DC, this is a sonic ‘choose your own adventure’. An album that does not progress

in a linear manner, but rather, evolved based on the user’s chosen walking path and pace, utilising the

devices built in GPS capabilities. Musical swells, arrangement shifts, rhythms and melodies all change

in accordance with the listener’s chosen route within miles of landscape. (Bluebrain, 2011b)

Hays and Ryan Holladay, the musician brothers behind Bluebrain, describe their music in an

online interview as ‘rang[ing] from the very abstract and ambient to orchestral and even very heavy

blast beat drumming’ (Ham, 2011). They give a further description of the sounds users of the app

experience in an interview with Wired.co.uk: ‘Approach a lake and a piano piece changes into a

harp. Or, as you get close to the children’s merry-go-round, the wooden horses come to life and you

hear sounds of real horses getting steadily louder based on your proximity’ (Geere, 2011).

The Washington Post blog has one of the most detailed reviews of experiencing this locative

sonic application, and notes that ‘the app contains nearly three hours of meticulously composed

music that transforms as you navigate 264 zones across the Mall’ (Chris, 2011). The role of

Behrendt 285

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walking in, exploring and remixing the sonic experience discussed in this review is another key

feature, and I will return to this later in this article:

If you stay put, the song remains the same — music will loop in intervals that last two to eight minutes,

depending on your position. The point is to keep moving. Approach the Capitol dome, and you’ll hear

an eerie drone. Climb the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and it’s twinkling harps and chiming bells. As

you wander from zone to zone, ambient washes dovetail into trip-hop beats and back again. The music

follows you without interruption, the way a soundtrack follows a protagonist through a movie or a

video game. When you leave the Mall, the sound evaporates into silence. (Chris, 2011)

In addition to this overview of experiencing this app, Chris also gives a more detailed description

of engaging with an obelisk in one particular area of the Mall, and the sounds that accompany his

exploration of this area:

Approach that crazy-looking thing while listening to ‘The National Mall’, and you’ll hear a keyboard

weep. Get closer and digital cellos begin to trace a regal melody. Closer. There’s percussion. Keep

going. The volume creeps up. The drums push toward anarchy. Walk right up to the monument, press

your hand against the cool, smooth stone and listen, as if the obelisk were a giant radio needle receiving

some riotous transmission from deep space. (Chris, 2011)

These reviews from the press and descriptions by the musicians give us some understanding of

what experiencing the National Mall is like. There is also a (promotional) video the musicians

made of someone walking around the site with headphones (Bluebrain, 2011b) that gives us some

impression of some of the sounds and the experience, but at the same time reminds us of the dif-

ficulties of documenting site-specific experience.2 You would have to visit the location in

Washington DC to be able to experience the National Mall yourself – this is questioning our media

culture expectations of anytime and anywhere access – and throughout this article I will return to

how this site-specificity operates.

Placed sounds

The taxonomy of mobile sound art that I developed elsewhere (Behrendt, 2010: 48–81) – with four

categories ‘placed sounds’, ‘sound platforms’, ‘sonifying mobility’ and ‘musical instruments’ (for

the latter, see also Behrendt, forthcoming a) – can also be applied to the wider area of mobile/

locative sound, taking the concept beyond the realm of media and sound art, into everyday media

culture. The National Mall can, then, be understood as an example of the locative/mobile media

category ‘Placed Sounds’, 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 sounds

and their locations are chosen by the designers of the application and the participants experience –

or co-create – their own version or remix of the piece, depending on their path and the time spent

with the service. Movement – often walking – acts as remixing. In locative media, all sorts of

media are distributed in space – in ‘Placed Sound’ the main or entire focus is on sound. Although

many set-ups are possible, most services work with GPS to locate sounds in space.

This category encompasses several themes: ‘One emerging theme in this category is a historic

perspective, overlaying a location with sounds and/or narratives of its history. Another emerging

theme is spatialized fictions, where a narrative (existing or new) is set in a specific physical

location’ (Behrendt, 2010: 49). Other projects have a musical focus, experimenting with placing

various (non-fictional) sounds and music in space.


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Before consumer media such as smart phones enabled and embraced locative applications, the

field of art and design practice has been engaging with the intersection of locative media and

sound/music since the late 1990s.3 Rueb (2004) and Symons (2004) have developed more abstract

sound works in the category of ‘Placed Sounds’; and Tanaka (2007) has explored more musical

projects. Other artists, such as Schemat (Isabella et al., 1999; Schemat, 2004), Cardiff (2004),

Garnicnig and Haider (2008), and Knowlton, Spellman and Hight (Futuresonic, 2004) have worked

in more narrative or fictional ways. The latter have also developed projects with a historic theme,

as have Rogers (2006) and Medosch (n.d.).

‘Placed Sound’ projects have slowly gone mainstream over the last few years, moving beyond

the field of media and sound art, into the everyday experiences of smartphone users. Historical

information about specific places is now available via tourist audio guide applications,4 spatialized

fiction projects are realized in 7scenes and others, and the National Mall is of course, an example

of music being overlaid on physical locations. When analysing ‘Placed Sound’ projects or ‘apps’

one key aspect is to consider how they engage with the auditory aspects of our spatial perception.

Listening to space

Spatial perception is traditionally understood as a visual phenomenon: space is perceived with the

eyes. The geometrical description of space enforces the visual dominance of space reception, as

Motte-Haber (1998) observes: ‘In our culture the original sense of perceptual space is increasingly

taken over, and thus diminished, by geometrically defined topologies, precisely because things that

can be measured are more easily communicated and because they can be precisely notated on a

chalkboard’. Visual perception as one aspect of perceiving space is responsible for judging

distances (Motte-Haber, 2002). But despite the heavy reliance on our eyes we cannot actually ‘see

space as such. Only light reflecting objects (and only those directly in front of us) are perceptible to

the human eye’ as Motte-Haber (2002: 34) observes.

Sound studies (with a more theoretical perspective) and sound art (often understood as practice-

based research) explore non-visual aspects of spatial perception, especially sonic ones. In everyday

life it is often overlooked ‘that hearing is what gives visual space its actual plastic quality’ (Schulz,

2002: 15). The non-visual aspects of spatial perception are ‘highlighted’ in situations where we

have to rely more on our ears, for example in the dark. We do not walk into walls and can ‘feel’

someone behind us. With our ears ‘we can see in the dark, because the reflection of sound sources

gives us information about the volume of a given space’ (Motte-Haber, 1998). Motte-Haber ques-

tions the dominance of the visual in spatial perception: ‘The ear is a much better analyst of space.

It conveys to the perceiver the volume of a space and gives clues about its qualities’ (Motte-Haber,

2002: 34). Toop (2004: 47) makes a relevant connection between acoustic spatial perception and

atmospheres: ‘We hear space all the time, not just its echoes and foreground signals but also its

subliminal undertow, the presence of atmosphere’. What we hear has an often-underestimated

impact on the atmosphere of places as well as on our mood, as the use of Muzak (Lanza, 1995)

and the Walkman (Bull, 2000) illustrate.

One example that shows how we can sonically design our atmosphere with locative media is

Tanaka’s Malleable Mobile Music where the increasing physical proximity of a friend (who is also

walking around town elsewhere) is represented by one of the music’s tracks (e.g. the bass)

becoming louder (Tanaka, 2004, 2005). Whereas, in the majority of locative applications, locations

of friends are represented visually (e.g. a coloured circle on a map), sound allows an alternative

way of creating spatial awareness of other people.

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Sound always travels over space in time, emanating from the source, distributed over space and

eventually fading. Sounds are essentially time-based, there is no sound without time. Every sound is

ephemeral: ‘One of the essential qualities of sound seems to be that it’s fading’ (Look, 2005: 89).

And Rueb suggests that a sonic understanding of space allows for ‘a space that’s more permeable

and doesn’t suggest the same kind of hard and fast boundaries of a visual construction of space’

(Breitsameter, 2004). I argue that it is especially the temporal quality of sound that is so productive

in moving beyond a visual analysis of mobile media interactions. In the National Mall, for example,

the sound of the application unfolds over time, as users walk around the park. Listeners need to spend

a considerable amount of time to experience the music, whereas most of our everyday interactions

with locative media only require a quick glance at the screen. Once the National Mall ‘users’ carry on

with their walk, the sounds they listened to are gone, and no trace of this experience remains in the

physical location, until the user returns to the location, or other users walk and listen in the same spot.

Immersed in media and sound

For locative sound – as opposed to visual applications – it is also important to consider how

sound’s relation to space and time is different to the one in the visual world of objects we see with

our eyes. Sound as an ‘object of sensual perception . . . differs fundamentally from visible and

tangible things that can be grasped from a distance as discrete objects’ (Look, 2005: 89). We are

immersed in sounds. If we look at objects we perceive space as being empty, only being ‘deco-

rated’ with objects. But, actually, the invisible, see-through space is full of sounds, and we are sur-

rounded by it. ‘The eye creates distance; the ear puts us at the centre of a dynamic energy-filled

realm. In our visual culture, space seems like an empty box’, as Schulz (2002: 15) puts it. Rueb

(2002) summarizes key aspects of sonic perception and immersion:

Sound presents us with a world in which hard and fast boundaries do not exist. We cannot clearly dis-

tinguish the edges of a sound as we might with objects and physical spaces. Sound is mutable, fleeting

and ephemeral. It bleeds, it leaks out, it attenuates and disappears. Sensually vibrant and immersive,

sound is almost tangible, yet ultimately invisible. Yet for all its elusiveness, sound is everywhere and

all encompassing. Unlike vision, which demands the proper orientation of our frontally located eyes,

we hear sound with our whole bodies, not just with our ears. (Rueb, 2002)

In a paragraph about the difference between oral and literary cultures, Walter Ong writes: ‘Sound

situates man in the middle of actuality and in simultaneity, whereas vision situates man in front of

things and in sequentiality’ (Ong, 2000: 128). In relation to screens and computers, this is also rel-

evant for mobile technology where we do not stare at the screen motionless, but we are embedded

in technology, carrying a potential and actual bubble of connectivity with us, and it is very much an

audio technology (Look, 2005: 89). We need to consider how immersion works in locative media,

where we are both ‘here’ and ‘there’ in hybrid spaces. The visual focus in the media world often

implies a distant observer – this does not work for sound and locative media as these rely on

immersion, not distance. In locative media, users are immersed in sound and media while at the

same time they are busy navigating their urban environment and experiencing their surroundings.

Situated experience

Whereas most smart phone applications in the area of locative media are supposed to be used in a

variety of situations, their design (and their screen-focused interactions) often build on traditional


288



desktop media interactions, rather than engaging with the actual situations of a smartphone user in

an urban (or rural) environment. A focus on sound in analysing locative media, such as the

National Mall, helps us to focus on how the situated context of the interactions constitutes the user

experience, including the design of the service/application, the physical and social context, the

individual user, the time of the day, the weather, and any number of other aspects jointly framing

the experience.

Despite the defining power of social and physical context for locative media, in actual locative

applications this very context often gets lost ‘in the reductive move from spaces to maps, places to

dots and sociality to links’, as Tarkka (2005: 22) observes for locative art, and I would argue

that this extends to locative media in general. Sonic analysis is productive for focusing on the

very activity of engaging with mobile media and the urban context at once, the multi-sensory,

embodied, spatio-temporal experience of the urban journey or encounter – situated experi-

ence. One of the ways we interact with locative media to create these situated experiences

is through walking.

Walking as remixing

Participants of locative media can be mobile in a variety of ways such as travelling in a car or taxi,

cycling, taking the train, tram or underground. These modes of mobility each have their own

aesthetics and specifics, such as speed, scale, infrastructure or social setting. The participants of the

National Mall and many other locative applications need to walk in order to experience the service

and interact with it. The choices each participant makes in terms of direction, length of the walk,

and time spent in specific locations, determine the participant’s experience of the service. Each

user makes his or her own version; walking becomes remixing. Galloway and Ward (2006), for

example, describe how, in locative art, this practice is ‘allowing for multiple readings’ of

‘narrative fragments [fixed] in physical space’. And when walking in the Washington park with

the National Mall, ‘each listener will explore the Mall in a different way and at a different pace,

experiences with the album will be unique in sequencing and in arrangement’ (Bluebrain,

2011a).

Hight (2006) contributes to the debate of walking as remixing in a text that focuses on locative

narratives, especially those with a historic context, and what he terms ‘Narrative Archeology’. If

the path of the participant determines the timeline of the experience, not only the order of the

locations depends on the path chosen, but also the time spent at each location or in each sound zone

is up to the participants: they can choose the pace, direction and duration of their walk. For his own

narrative pieces, Hight observes that:

In a sense, the ultimate end-author in locative narrative is the movement and patterns of the person

navigating the space. The narrative is dictated by their choices, aesthetic bias in the physical world

toward certain sections, buildings or objects to move toward and investigate and their duration and

breadth of movement. The narrative is composed in sections, but is edited by the movements of the

person with the locative device. (Hight, 2006: 3)

Returning to the National Mall, the website states that ‘a listener may choose not to visit the

Sculpture Garden and his or her experience with the album might not include those musical sec-

tions’ and listeners will each remix their own version of the ‘music that’s been composed and

carefully placed throughout’ by walking their own individual path through the Mall (Bluebrain,

2011a).

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Agency of locative listening in the Mall of America and the iPhone appthe National Mall

In ‘Sounds like the Mall of America’ Sterne also discusses the sonic experience of a US mall,

however it is a different kind of mall – an indoor shopping mall – and the sounds he discusses are

mainly programmed music, or Muzak (Sterne, 1997). Comparing his analysis to locative media

experiences such as the National Mall, poses some interesting questions regarding the agency of

the listener. One could argue that listening to Muzak also constitutes a locative sound experience in

as far as the sounds are physically attached (speakers, Muzak system) to specific locations (such as

specific shops or hallways) in the mall. These located sounds of Muzak are largely for ‘public’

consumption as they are experienced through speakers, whereas mobile sounds (Walkman, mp3

players) have been largely experienced via private headphone consumption (Bull, 2007). Locative

media listening draws on both of these modes of listening: the sound sources are located in physical

space (GPS location) but can only be heard by the person who has a smartphone with the app

downloaded and playing, and is wearing headphones – a more private form of listening.

In a shopping mall ‘listeners have to negotiate programmed music’ (Sterne, 1997: 43), and, in

addition to Sterne’s considerations, walking is also one of the ways in which this negotiation

happens. Mall visitors walk around the different sections of the mall – from shops to hallways, to

food court – and their trajectory (although often not consciously) is a way of interacting with the

music of these zones, of negotiating the foreground and background music of the mall. Drawing on

the earlier discussion of walking as remixing allows us to understand walking as one way for mall

visitors have some agency over the music.

However, shopping mall visitors do not have a choice over the kind of music played in each of

the mall’s locations – and this bears similarities to the listening experience in Bluebrain’s the

National Mall, as this is an example of ‘Placed Sound’. The users of this app listen to the music the

musicians chose to attach to each location: ‘Each position on the map has been carefully con-

sidered, the music composed and recorded to be heard in their specific place’ (Bluebrain, 2011a).

However, the listener still has more agency than visitors of a shopping mall. To escape the sound of

Muzak in a shopping mall you would have to leave the physical location of the mall, and you

cannot choose to experience the mall without the programmed music (you could, of course, choose

to listen to your iPod in the mall, and this takes us back to this initial discussion of how we use

mobile sound media to actively co-create our soundscapes). In the National Mall users have chosen

to play the app in the first place and can stop it at any time. Therefore, experiencing the app is one

of several choices for the visitors of the park, and the choices include to not listen to any media

(a choice not existent in the shopping mall).

In a shopping mall it is impossible, or at least difficult to replicate the sound/music in each

location, as the next time you enter the shop at a different time or on a different day, they will play a

different song. With locative apps you can replicate the sounds/music in the location (at least with

most of them – it depends how they are programmed – you have the potential to track if someone

has been in a certain location before and then to play different music to them if they re-enter that

location). In the National Mall – and most other locative sound projects – if you walk back to a

location, you will experience the same music or sound that you experienced there before, giving

you some (limited) agency over the kinds of sounds you hear. Choosing to revisit locations based

on the music associated with them operates more like a spatialized iPod, and in terms of audience

and taste culture more like a concept album, whereas a shopping mall’s foreground music draws on

its similarity to radio.


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The sound of locative exclusion

Sterne’s analysis of programmed music opens up a further interesting debate for locative apps such

as the National Mall if we ask how the music operates in terms of exclusion. Programmed music in

a shopping mall is interested in consumers, not people. The aim is to make people with money

spend more time in the mall, and to ultimately buy more (Sterne, 1997: 43). Sterne argues how

programmed music discriminates against those who do not fit this aim in multiple ways. How

would this operate for the app? The app is free, and its aim is not to make you buy anything. Its aim

is to make you spend time in the location, to spend time listening to the music. But the National

Mall also discriminates strongly – in terms of the technology used and in terms of the geographical

location you need to be in. Firstly, the National Mall discriminates in terms of the technology

needed to experience it. The app only works on iPhones, thus excluding anyone who does not own

this specific smart phone, with all the class implications of who owns iPhones and has data

contracts that would make it ‘free’ to download applications to their phones.

Secondly, the National Mall discriminates in terms of the geographical location of the user. You

have to be in the specific city (Washington DC), in this very park (the National Mall) to experience

the music – this highlights the highly locative nature of the service, and how site-specific these

experiences are.5 At the same time, it excludes people who would like to listen to the album, but

cannot travel to the location, for example because they do not have the means to do so. Other than

physically being in Washington, owning an iPhone, and downloading and playing the app, there is

no other way of experiencing these sounds. In addition to excluding people, this also illustrates the

tension between the anywhere/anytime promise of mobile media and locative media’s potential to

engage with very specific sites. The duo, Bluebrain, is also about to release a second location-

aware album, located in Central Park, New York City, and they are also planning another ‘one run-

ning the length of the Highway 1 coast road in California’ (Geere, 2011), and it will be interesting

to see how the musicians engage with these very different sites.

Conclusion

Experiencing locative sound such as the iPhone app the National Mall is enjoyable, memorable,

and has an almost ‘magic’ quality, as I recall from my own experiences of similar ‘placed sound’

projects in the past. With no need to navigate from a map, or to look at the screen, you easily forget

about the mobile device in your pocket. The located media – the different sounds or music – are in

your ears, your head, your body – allowing your eyes to look at your surroundings, your mind to

daydream, your body to walk. As the locations of specific sounds are unknown, you explore the

space, to discover the sounds and music distributed across space. This explorative mode, the

surprise element of what sound you will experience where, adds to the ‘magic’ quality of

the experience.

This article has developed a sonic framework for critical analysis of these locative media

experiences, such as the National Mall, to understand how this ‘magic’ quality operates. It con-

textualizes locative sound experience by drawing on the fields of mobile media, sound studies, and

sound art. Discussing the National Mall in the context of ‘Placed Sound’ – one of several ways that

locative/mobile media and sound can operate – illustrates how locative sound is not a ‘new’

phenomenon, but how these increasingly popular mobile phone ‘apps’ are part of a field of practice

that has been developing for more than a decade. Focusing on the spatial perception of sound has

highlighted how crucial the temporal dimension of locative media experience is, adding to the

Behrendt 291

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common focus on ‘location’ in analysing locative media. This focus on the temporal dimension

plays out in multiple ways, as it is not only the sound of the app that unfolds over time, but also the

walking of the participants. A focus on sound highlights how problematic it is to reduce locative

media experiences to a point or line on a map, a link, or a database entry. Locative media inter-

actions do not only happen in certain locations, they always unfold over time.

A further discussion of the spatial qualities of sonic perception explains how we experience

immersion in media and sound. Sound places us at the centre, and this is reinforced when we listen

with headphones, surrounded by sound, embedded in media experience. The spatial qualities of

sound explain how sonic media immersion operates differently to visual and screen-focused inter-

actions with locative media. Understanding sonic media immersion then allows us to place the

locative media experience of users centre stage, focusing on their situated experience. This situated

experience is framed by the various contexts locative media are used in, including the social, phys-

ical, media and sound context, and our embodied interactions with these. We are remixing the

National Mall and other locative sound apps by walking – an embodied, spatialized and temporal

way of interacting with media. While the role of walking is often overlooked in screen-focused

analysis of locative media, a sound-focused analysis allows us to pay close attention to the way

walking operates in engaging with them.

Walking is also one of the ways users have agency in locative sound, and this opens up a wider

debate regarding the particular kinds of interactions with the music the National Mall allows, and

how this agency relates to other forms of locative sound practices, such as negotiating programmed

music in a shopping mall. A further critical examination of these locative sound experiences also

reveals how exclusion operates in terms of the technology used, and the site-specificity of this

iPhone app.

The analysis of the iPhone app the National Mall in this article illustrates how a focus on sound

allows us to attend to the temporal, situated and embodied aspects of locative media and thus offers

an alternative way of conceptualizing these practices. This framework explains how walking

operates in terms of interacting with locative media, and how we experience being immersed in

physical and media contexts both at once via sound.

Funding

Some parts of this research have been generously funded by the DAAD.

Notes

1. For a definition of Sonic Interaction Design, see Rocchesso (2011). For examples of GPS sound walks, and

sonic iPad apps (amongst many others) see Behrendt and Lossius (2011).

2. For a discussion of the methodological challenges of researching mobile media and sound, see ‘Mobile and

sonic methodologies’ in Behrendt (2010: 82–101).

3. In the early days, these artists faced a number of technical challenges and had to develop custom hardware

and software, as there were no off-the shelf solutions available. Over time, the location-based technology

has developed and become part of consumer media, making the relevant technology much more ubiquitous

and accessible. Nowadays, GPS units and interfaces are not additional devices, or require programming

skills – they are integrated into existing devices such as mobile phones or cameras while the relevant data

integrates with existing software.

4. Examples can be found at http://www.lonelyplanet.com/mobile/apple/audio.php (Lonely Planet, 2011);

http://www.coolcitywalks.com/ (cool city walks, n.d.); http://mytoursapp.com/ (mytours, n.d.); and see

Mills (2009).


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5. Although I have experienced many locative sound pieces in the past (see Behrendt, 2004, 2008, 2010,

forthcoming b), I have not experienced the National Mall app myself yet.

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Uimonen H (2004) ‘Sorry, can’t hear you! I’m on a train!’ Ringing tones, meanings and the Finnish soundscape.

Popular Music 32(1): 51–62.

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cal ringtones. In: Proceedings of the 4th International Mobile Music Workshop, 6–8 May, Amsterdam, The

Netherlands: 38–43. Available at: http://www.mobilemusicworkshop.org/07/index.html (accessed 15

August 2011).

Biography

Frauke Behrendt PhD is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Brighton, UK. Her research

interests include digital cultures, sound studies, mobility, media theory and sustainable media, on which she

has published and lectured widely. She is leading the EPSRC-funded research project ‘Smart e-bikes’, has

curated an exhibition on ‘Sonic Interaction Design’ and organized the ‘International Workshops of Mobile

Music Technology’ (see http://www.fraukebehrendt.com).

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Article

Locative journalism:Designing a location-dependent news mediumfor smartphones

Lars Nyre, Solveig Bjørnestad and Bjørnar TessemUniversity of Bergen, Norway

Kjetil Vaage ØieVolda University College, Norway

AbstractThis article provides an account of the tensions between locative context-awareness and the act ofwriting journalistic copy for a mobile application. Based on the field trials of the interdisciplinaryLocaNews project, the article discusses locative media’s potential for spatially sensitive newsjournalism.

In 2009 researchers in Norway made a medium design called LocaNews, and tested it out withpre-planned procedures for the two fundamental activities: production and reception. Of thosewho participated, 12 people worked as journalists, editors, technicians, and they generated 93journalistic stories that were read and watched by 32 test-users who were interviewed. The pres-ent article deals with findings regarding the production of news content, and presents the strate-gies used to reinterpret the traditional news criteria of journalism to be fit for a GPS-equippedsmartphone. First, the article discusses the connection between journalism and cartography, andthen introduces the experimental method used for this research. The bulk of the article consists ofan evaluation of the experimental attempt at practising location-dependent journalism. It deals withfour issues: putting stories on the map, the characteristics of ‘zoom in stories’, the construction ofan implied position for the readers, and finally the formulation of news criteria that focus on spatialproximity instead of temporal actuality.

KeywordsCartography, experimental research, journalism, locative media, medium design, smart phone


Lars Nyre, University of Bergen, Department of Information Science and Media Studies, PO Box 7802, Bergen, 5020,

Norway





Introduction

This article deals with the potential of GPS-equipped phones in local journalism. While not

ordinarily considered a ‘locative medium’, local journalism is certainly a candidate, along

with other paper-based material like resort brochures, hiking maps, roadmaps and other direc-

tions for travel. Journalists annotate the public dimension of a town, landscape or a transport

infrastructure in a way that increases the citizen’s awareness and interpretation of his or her

surroundings. Furthermore, the printed local newspaper is often the lifeblood of a town. It

contains news often directly relevant for the reader, but nonetheless the content cannot change

with the reader’s movement through the environment that the paper writes about. This is to

say that local news is location-oriented, but not location-dependent. In contrast to the printed

newspaper, the smartphone allows the news to change as the readers move around in their

environment.

We wanted to test such location-dependence in a real setting. In 2009 we made a custom-made

design called LocaNews, and tested it out at the Extreme Sports Festival at Voss, Norway, a muni-

cipality with 14,000 people, and thousands more arriving for the week-long festival in June. The

LocaNews experimenters performed pre-planned procedures for the two basic activities: produc-

tion and reception. On the project, 12 people worked as journalists, editors, technicians, and they

generated 93 journalistic stories that were read and watched by 32 test-users. The present article

deals with the production of news content, and presents our strategies for how to reinterpret the

traditional local news logic as a smartphone application.

Before going into the production of news for the interface shown in Figure 1, we will first

discuss the persuasive powers of journalism and cartography, and establish the communicative link

between them. Then we will introduce the experimental method used for this research, which we

call ‘medium design’. The latter part of the article is an evaluation of our experimental attempt at

practising location-dependent journalism. It deals with four issues: putting stories on the map; the

characteristics of ‘zoom in stories’; the construction of an implied geographical position for the

readers; and finally, the importance of resisting the established news criteria in order to focus

Figure 1. Three screens from the LocaReader. First, the reader can choose between Here, Nearby and theRest of Voss. Second, after choosing Here, the reader gets a list of five stories within 100 m. Third, the readerclicks on one to read through.Source: authors.


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on proximity. We conclude that LocaNews was counter-intuitive for journalists, and our set-up is

unlikely to be attempted again.

Nevertheless, there is good reason to investigate location-dependent, hyperlocal technologies in

search of robust journalistic solutions for the future. National and regional newspapers suffer a

crisis because of falling subscriptions to paper versions, increased concentration of ownership, and

insufficient revenue from online versions. Although Norwegian local newspapers are still in a rel-

atively strong economic position, the falling rate of paper subscription is likely to eventually

weaken the local newspapers too. We propose that local journalism migrate to the mobile phone

because this platform allows local newsrooms to respond more sensitively than ever to the readers’

movements through their surroundings, and is likely to become more sustainable in the future.

Journalism: Short-term reporting of social information

While maps change relatively slowly, the journalistic profession deals profusely with the newest

events. At the level of social and political life, interesting variations take place in a matter of hours

and days, and journalism portrays it routinely.

Journalism’s greatest merit lies in the double-check quality control and professional norms,

which are sorely lacking in contemporary free-for-all forums such as blogs, Facebook profiles, and

Twitter streams. Some journalism researchers suggest that professional news can be trusted more

for its accuracy and objectivity than any other form of public communication, because of its strong

professional ethics and venerable history (see, for example, Keen, 2007).

Journalism consists of short-term reporting of social information that can be used to update the

reader on important issues and happenings in a given region of a country. It is mainly linguistic,

meaning that it relies on the written and spoken word to a very large extent. This verbal dimension

is expected to be truthful, well researched, autonomous, critical and relevant in a democratic way.

Papacharissi (2009: vii) states that ‘It is via association that citizens are able to perform their

democratic duties, and the press has been instrumental in providing citizens with the information,

venues, and tools needed to associate freely and for the common good of a democratic state’.

In this article we are particularly concerned with the reporting typical of local journalism. Local

news is always about people and events in a sharply limited geographical area, and this has

implications for the news criteria. The national Oslo-based newspaper VG, with its 884,000 read-

ers, has a different news agenda from the 27,000 reader strong Hordaland, which covers the Voss

region. People and events are dealt with in a much closer perspective, for good and bad. The writers

live in the same community as the people they write for and about, which for example means that

the editor may be careful about criticizing the mayor, or may routinely refrain from writing about

tragic accidents in the same tabloid style as the capital newspaper.

Although regional newspapers have very precise local coverage, this information is accessible

wherever you are, and is also written in order to be potentially relevant for anybody. It seems ideal

to introduce smartphone-enabled cartographic technologies into local journalism because the rele-

vance of proximity is already so strong in the profession, and the journalists are already so familiar

with their local environment.

There are interesting examples of attempts at combining cartography and news. The sociologist

Robert Park in the 1920s worked with urban ecology studies, and studied cartography in order to

try out how news events related to each other when their location was plotted on a map. ‘We had a

diphtheria epidemic. I plotted the cases on a map of the city and in this way called attention to what

seemed the source of the infection, an open sewer’ (Baker, 1973: 254). The interest in collecting

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public (and journalistic) information on a mapped surface was tremendously strengthened with the

emergence of the internet. In the last decade, research in the field of geographical information

systems (GIS) has provided sophisticated examples of movement mapping, for instance by Neu-

haus (2010) and Mei-Po Kwan (2000). In relation to journalism, geo-tagging is a powerful tool.

Any kind of media content can be annotated on a web-based map. While maps previously had a

modest role in journalism, they have now become versatile, dynamic and very useful.

One renowned example of journalism and location-based news services is everyblock.com

(EveryBlock, 2012). EveryBlock combines public data that is geo-tagged, and the users can zoom

in on a map-based interface to see for example what kinds of crime are being perpetrated in their

neighbourhood. In 2009, EveryBlock released a mobile application that took into consideration the

users’ physical position. The application now also has a feature that allows you to draw your own

geographical boundaries, called ‘custom locations’.

However, it may be difficult to introduce location-dependent journalism into the practices of

local newspapers in the future. There are several reasons why this remediation process is slow,

or even unlikely. Local newspapers have been the same for hundreds of years, in that they consist

of printed paper and are distributed to houses and establishments by lorries and by other means, and

this age-old practice cannot be expected to leapfrog to the mobile phone platform just like that. The

most dramatic possibility is that local newspapers may not survive. Deuze (2007: 141) argues that

journalism is coming to an end. ‘The boundaries between journalism and other forms of public

communication – ranging from public relations or advertorials to weblogs and podcasts – are van-

ishing’. Deuze (2007), in particular, thinks that journalism is too nationalistic, ‘losing touch with a

society that is global as well as local’. We believe that local newspapers will lose touch with their

community and shrink in relevance if they do not take up the smartphone’s location awareness

alongside their traditional editorial remit.

In addition, there may be a genuine confusion about which methods of journalism will work best

in the new technological environment. There is a continuous introduction of new software and

platforms, and it further fragments the opportunities for innovation. Most prominently, social

media, based on the principle of locative information, have appeared in ever greater numbers since

approximately 2005, notably for the iPhone, Android and Symbian smart phones with GPS

(Goggin, 2011). You can now register your location in Facebook Places, Twitter, Google Latitude,

Foursquare, and a host of other services. Some of the social media are starting to integrate editorial

news in their cartographic applications, and in this way directly challenge local newspapers.

Foursquare has made an editorial partnership with the Canadian Metro News, and the national

coverage service includes restaurant reviews, city tips, to-dos and articles that mobile users can

stumble upon as they traverse the landscape.

All these cross-media opportunities are genuinely confusing for the practitioners of local jour-

nalism. The offer of online news is experimental and heterogeneous, and subject to the extremes of

international success and immediate obscurity. There is still no indigenous public sphere for these

media, like there is for radio or television, and local journalism is unlikely to be a driving force in

the innovation process. On this basis, it seems that researchers must create cartographic local jour-

nalism experimentally in order to study it at all.

Cartography: Long-term accumulation of locative information

Cartography is the skill of drawing a map, and maps in their turn are ‘graphical representations that

facilitate a spatial understanding of things, concepts, conditions, processes, or events in the human


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world’ (Harley and Woodward, 1987: xvi). Maps consist of long-term accumulation of physical

information that can be used for navigation and orientation in a landscape. The graphic design the-

orist Tufte is concerned about the visual ‘dimensionality and density of portrayals of information’

(Tufte, 1990: 9), and promotes maps as one of the most complex forms of visual instruction. Tufte

calls cartography ‘cognitive art’, and this art form involves large amounts of images that are

created and multiplied all over the world every year.

Both the photograph and the map in Figure 2 show the landscape of Voss. The map’s main

function is to describe the location and characteristics of physical structures that users can expect to

be there if they seek out the landscape in question (Glud et al., 2009).

Described in geographical terms, Voss is a landscape of river valleys with many mid-size rivers

coming together in a lake system where Lake Vangsvatnet is the biggest at 56 m above sea level.

Steep mountain slopes swing up from the valleys and the mountains peak at around 1,500 m. The

peaks create a continuous natural border between civilized, cultivated land and the cold, barren

mountains. In the valleys and by the lake shores wide pine forests stretch out on flat sandy ground,

and small-scale farms climb the sides of the valleys with grass production for sheep and milk cows.

A major road system runs from the regional centre of Bergen through Voss towards Oslo in the

east, and there are several road crossings towards Sognefjorden in the north and Hardangerfjorden

in the south. The railroad between Bergen and Oslo goes through Voss, and there is an airfield for

private planes. The rivers are too small to support boat traffic.

Figure 3 shows that there are at least six physical layers that can be mapped in territorial maps:

waterways/oceans, elevation, transport infrastructures, soil, terrain and land use. The six layers are

cut through by a coordinate system, and ‘projected’ as a complete map. Figure 3 presents the type

of information that is traditionally contained in paper maps, but it is important to stress that maps

can also contain various types of social and historical information.

In terms of information portrayal, a map makes use of the fundamental principle that Tufte

(1990: 32) calls ‘a sense of average and of variation about that average – the two fundamental

summary measures of statistical data’. Figure 3 allows for an understanding of the town of Voss

where the geology is expected to be very stable, while the changing weather creates seasonal

variations in the hydrography. The transportation infrastructures change quite slowly, but in

dramatic bursts when a new public building is erected or a new highway cuts through the land-

scape. In such cases, the map has to be reprinted in order to stay factual.

Territorial maps have a visual form that allows the user to navigate from point A to B without

previous knowledge about B, and this in turn makes for a highly realistic understanding of one’s

surroundings. Adams (2009: 193) refers to the ‘communication model’ of cartography, where a

map is considered ‘a linear flow of communication through a neutral conduit’. This conception is

widespread in relation to territorial maps. It is nevertheless important to remember that this realism

is carefully constructed by the cartographer. Critical cartographers such as Wood and Fels (1992)

and Kitchin and Dodge (2007) deconstruct assumptions about the neutrality and objectivity of

maps, and claim that they are socially biased just like written texts. This conception seems par-

ticularly reasonable in relation to choropleth maps, where thematic information is portrayed. For

example, different parts of a country can be shaded or patterned in proportion to the measurement

of the per capita income of the citizens living there. Representing human populations on maps is a

cartographic practice that has been deployed for many decades across a number of disciplines

including census geography, political geography and health studies. Since the advent of the Google

Maps API, there are also now plenty of online examples and mashups that use this thematic style of

mapping (Gordon and de Souza e Sliva, 2011).

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Figure 2. The same topographical perspective on Voss as represented in a photograph (a) and a web map (b).The X on the map shows the approximate position of the photographer.Source: Photo Wikimedia Commons (http://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fil:Voss2.jpg); map based on Google Maps.


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Medium design method

In an appeal for more empirical research on digital media, Gripsrud (2009: 15) writes that ‘the

web does not warrant mystification, uncritical celebration or prejudiced condemnations. It

deserves innumerable serious, theoretically informed, multifaceted, multi-method, empirical

investigations’.

Before the 1990s, there was little direct contact between design science and media studies, but

the increasing importance of journalism, music and video on the internet made a shared focus

inevitable. In the international literature, Bolter and Grusin (1999), Nielsen (2000) and Manovich

(2001) were influential in giving media students and academics a more practical understanding of

computers and their communicative potential. Murdock (2005) promotes an agenda called

‘building the digital commons’, where he gives advice about how best to make new media designs

for the old medium of broadcasting. Scheible, Tuulos and Ojala (2007) tested a mass participation

photo art project, where 184 participants walked around in Manhattan taking photos that were

shown on large public signs in Times Square. Liestøl (2009) designed an augmented reality tool for

portrayal of ancient structures (Viking burial mounds, Roman buildings) that are projected into the

landscape they once existed in, and Nyre (2007) designed procedures for a dialogic internet talk

radio for local and national elections. They are all representatives of a tendency for researchers to

shift emphasis from how artefacts ought instrumentally or rationally to function (engineering), to

Figure 3. Display of physical information through layering in geographical information systems (Bernhardsen,2006: 17, our translation).Source: Tor Bernhardsen and Vett & Viten.

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what they mean to those affected by them. This has also been dealt with theoretically as ‘the

semantic turn’ (Krippendorf, 2006), and it is practised in education and industry as ‘interaction

design’ (Sharp et al., 2007).

Scientific investigation implies that there is testing of hypotheses, monitoring and logging of

activities and qualities, and various types of systematic interpretation of the material, where the

aim is to draw conclusions and learn more about future options. The LocaNews project is governed

by the traditional expectation that social science should be useful in and for society, combined with

the constructive attitude of ‘interaction design’ (see Nyre, 2010, 2011). The core of media design is

that researchers have direct, experimental contact with reality. In some cases, as in the case of

locative journalism, researchers cannot analyse the ongoing events from a distance, or recapitulate

their historical development, they must actually propose concrete solutions, and make functional

prototypes of their proposed solutions. In the same way that a new internet banking system can be

designed, implemented and tested, a new media system can also be designed, implemented and

tested. And, most interestingly, since such a project deals with people and their communicative

interests, it is by definition a sociological project.

In LocaNews, the main sociological challenge was journalistic. Could we formulate a rea-

sonable instruction for the journalists working in the prototype medium? According to (Latour,

1994: 226) every technology contains a ‘program of action’, that is, a series of prescriptions for

behaviour that the user must adhere to (or ignore at their peril). We wanted to construct a spatially

oriented program of action. The design method for LocaNews can be summed up in three phases:

1. Build a functional medium design. The LocaNews project is based on two separate interfaces

specially tailored for journalists and readers respectively. The interfaces were called the Loca-

Writer and the LocaReader. The first is the editorial software for journalists, photographers and

editors (Stavelin, 2009), where all the text and photos are uploaded, and the layout is generated.

The second is the reader software for mobile phone users, where people select news stories and

scroll through, reading the news (Leirvag, 2009). The LocaReader was first programmed in the

Python programming language for Nokia Symbian smartphones, and then rewritten into the Cþþprogramming language to be run on the same phones. In newer versions, made after the 2009

experiments, the software runs on Android smartphones and is programmed in Java. This simple

structure of production-reception makes LocaNews a strictly one-way medium, without channels

for feedback from readers. The programming and design choices of LocaNews are analysed in

Bjørnestad, Tessem and Nyre (2011a).

2. Make procedures for content-production. LocaNews was organized to simulate the productive

capacity of an average Norwegian local newspaper. The staff consisted of 13 people, including

technicians, editors, journalists and photographers. Five journalists worked full time during the

week-long experiment, with an editor and technical support. All photos and journalistic copy were

published under the auspices of a responsible editor. Since our focus was the new type of locative

content and the news criteria associated with it, we made no attempt at being innovative at the

organizational level. LocaNews had a desk editor, journalists who worked in teams with a writer

and a press photographer, and the news was presented with a catchy headline, lead and journalistic

copy (see Deuze, 2011 for an overview of essential journalistic practices).

3. Evaluate the design in a public setting. It is valuable for the researcher to have members of the

general public trying out the design. LocaNews needed people who could function as readers of the


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news while moving in and around Voss. We exposed a sample of 32 people to the service, and

monitored their behaviour with a questionnaire and observation notes. We gave the users access to

the phone and the application for one-to-two hours. The participants had to conform to a certain set

of procedures that we were testing, but there were no limitations on their behaviour beyond this

(for interesting projects in the same vein, see Gjedde and Ingemann, 2008, and Elwood and Martin,

2000). The LocaNews user evaluations are analysed in Bjørnestad, Tessem and Nyre (2011b) and

Øie (2011).

It seems necessary to stress that LocaNews is not action research. This tradition is typically

conceived of as being active in the sense of improving the conditions for behaviour and experience

in an involved group. This can be making a business staff more efficient because they are made to

enjoy work more (Gustavsen, 2001), or teaching discriminated immigrants how to cope better with

their situation (Fals Borda, 2001). However, LocaNews only involved the participants for one

week at Voss, and the production unit was shut down permanently after the festival. LocaNews did

not aim to change the lives of any particular social group; we only wanted to learn about the

reactions of some individuals in order to assess the viability of our procedures for location-

dependent journalism.

Because of the large amount of data from LocaNews, we will specify that the following

analyses are based on four data types: summaries of exemplary news stories; statistical data about

the entire text corpus; screen shots from the two software programs; and, illustrations of carto-

graphic/navigational features. LocaNews is not just textual, but has also two important graphical

information types: photographs and positions and directions on maps. In this article the graphical

dimension is paramount, and the figures are essential to our report, and should be considered core

evidence. A partial goal in the following is to develop a vocabulary for analysing locative

journalism.

Procedures for journalistic location sensitivity

LocaNews introduces cartography in the journalistic practice in order to rehearse a skill that is

likely to become more important in the future, namely (professional) location sensitivity. For one

week in June 2009, the town of Voss was filled with thousands of athletes, volunteer staff,

onlookers and ordinary tourists, and for the same duration we made a special news service

appealing to their location sensitivity. The swollen population was a good test case for LocaNews,

and we established our newsroom in the morning on a Sunday, and packed it down on the fol-

lowing Saturday night.

We worked with three information types in order to cultivate location sensitivity among our

journalists: proximity to a location plotted on a map; photographs of people, places and events; and

descriptions and arguments written in journalistic form. Proximity was registered in the form of

GPS-signals generated by the movements of the users, which the researchers used to generate a

relevant priority of news. Photographs, descriptions and arguments were made more or less in

accordance with standard professional values, since this was not our main testing ground.

LocaNews mainly contained news from the centre of Voss, although some news locations were

further afield. The base-jumping events in Gudvangen and ski-railing competition at Vikafjell

were both at least 40 km away in different directions.

The analysis deals with four issues that turned out to be quite challenging for the research team:

putting stories on the map; creating the genre ‘zoom in stories’; constructing an implied position

for the readers; and, creating specifically locative (as opposed to temporal) news criteria.

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1: Putting stories on the map

How did LocaNews work? Imagine that you have a Nokia N95 in your hand. The software is

running and a menu appears. The LocaReader gives you a choice of stories from Here, Nearby and

Voss at large. If you choose ‘Here’ the stories that are located in a radius of 100 m from your

position will be filtered out and presented.

In fact LocaNews contains three versions of the same story. Whichever story you are reading in

the ‘here’ mode, there are two more versions that are not displayed in the software: one which is

only available if you are 100–500 m away, and one which is only available if you are more than

500 m away. These three proximity zones are illustrated in Figure 4. Owing to restrictions in the

software, the reader could only access the article that corresponded to his or her location within the

three-way division of geographical space. The LocaReader could have been constructed to give

access to all three versions at the same time, but we chose the mutually exclusive solution in order

to force a sense of context-dependency on users. The LocaReader had no help text that explained

this significant feature, and the readers could only discover the differentiation by moving around

and discovering that this would cause the story to be presented in different ways.

The three-version approach to journalism was the crucial context-aware feature of LocaNews,

because it follows movements ‘towards’ and ‘away from’ that are a constant of travelling and mov-

ing around. The journalists were supposed to work from a systematic differentiation between the

three scales of proximity, and to make this the fundamental distinguishing feature. News criteria,

types of photographs, choice of sources, writing style and so on would be tailored to the three-

levels of proximity distinction.

It turned out to be a real challenge to make rules for location-aware journalism. The newsroom

didn’t succeed in developing the analytic rigour required to distinguish systematically between

three areas of proximity to the event. For example, the same headline and picture was often used

Figure 4. Illustration of the three proximity zones. Note that although the outermost zone actually extendsendlessly in all directions, it is drawn up with boundaries for clarity.Source: authors, based on Google Maps.


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in all three stories although it was possible to differentiate, and this expressed relatively weak

location-sensitivity among the staff. Several topics were treated in the same writing style across

the three versions – especially the descriptive style where an arena, concert hall or town square

was presented in exactly the same way in all three versions. It was difficult to find good criteria

for differentiating between them in a journalistically relevant way. Furthermore, none of our news

writers were locals, and they lacked the familiarity with landscapes and social life bred from per-

manent habitation in Voss. These factors made it difficult for the journalists to become truly

attuned to nuances associated with life in Voss.

2: Zoom in stories

We learnt that there were ways of dramatizing the three-version story into simple narratives, and

developed one such narrative in a comprehensive way. Zoom in stories are written to encourage the

reader to walk or drive to a certain location in Voss because there is a particularly interesting thing

to see there. One story deals with a PR stunt related to the festival: The Bula clothes company has

hung a mock-up clothesline across a river canyon. It is more than a kilometre long, and the clothes

hang 40 to 60 m down in the gorge, and it is visible from parts of central Voss.

Regardless of how far away you are you can read the version called Voss at large. The planned

news criterion is that you cannot see the news location, and the news is written to be interesting for

anyone who is in Voss, or who approaches Voss on the roads or the railway. The two thick black

arrows in Figure 5 show the intended direction of travel. This far-away version should have a crit-

ical perspective and focus on decision makers and other powerful persons and organizations. This

version of the clothesline story contains critical opinions about the spectacle, in that several people

voice objections to the ugliness of the spectacle and argue that it should not have been allowed.

This presumably increases the curiosity of the readers, and makes them want to see it for

themselves.

You have to be nearer than 500 m to access the version called Nearby. You may be able to see

the news location, and maybe not. The planned news criterion was that this version is written to

capture the social mood in a given neighbourhood, and to write about its influence on the news

story in question. You can walk to the exact location of the story in a matter of minutes, if the story

captures your interest. The grey arrows in Figure 5 show the intended direction of travel. The

clothesline story is located in the neighbourhood where you can best see the clothesline from

across the lake. There are interviews with tourists, local people and cafe guests, who all have an

opinion about the clothesline. The best position for looking at it is described, and the reader is

encouraged to go there.

You have to be nearer than 100 m to read the version called Here. The black point in Figure 5

marks the reader’s implied position. The planned news criterion was that interviews and witness

reports are written in a personal way, to increase the sense of presence. Not only can you see the

news location, you are so close that you can touch and handle the news topic, walk around and look

at the context, and, by reading the story, learn what has happened or may happen right here in the

future. The ‘here’ version of the ‘Clothesline saga’ basically confirms that you have reached the best

visual position, and can now enjoy the recommended spectacle with maximum effect. The written

story contains background information on how they have stretched the wire across the canyon, and

other facts that presume the heightened interest of a person who is looking at it right now.

The zoom in procedure is the most explicitly ‘location dependent’ facet we were able to create

during the LocaNews experimental phase. It would work well, for example, for drawing tourists

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towards sights of public interest, like a waterfall, a special building or an installation artwork.

Based on the experimental procedures, we see that future iterations must have several different

narratives that are pre-planned, and which all help to differentiate better between the three levels of

proximity. There have to be intuitively graspable differences between the three levels if they are to

succeed in creating a realistic sense of context-awareness.

3: Constructing the implied position

The biggest challenge was that locative journalism requires a strong sense of location sensitivity in

order to realize its potential. The stories have to be written (and photographed) in a way that creates

good bearings for the readers, and the ‘here’ story should preferably create a sense of what

navigators call ‘point position’. This means that you know exactly where you are. ‘You can use that

knowledge to identify on the map any major feature that you can see in the landscape. You can also

identify in the landscape any major visible feature that is shown on the map’ (Burns and Burns,

2004: 47). We will discuss three practical dimensions of constructing the point position: finding

the interesting places and events to cover journalistically, taking photographs that give the right

sense of presence and display the reader’s position in relation to the location that the journalists are

describing (the implied or point position).

Figure 5. An illustration of the procedure for zoom in stories, using ‘Clothesline Saga’ as example.Source: authors, based on Google Maps.


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For the editorial staff, the job of locating the story on the map was a crucial part of its pro-

duction. The journalists used the hybrid and roadmap functions of Google Maps to find the best

location for the story. In technical terms this was an easy job.

We also supported a journalistic perspective on what has been ‘covered’ (Figure 6). The map in

the LocaWriter was progressively saturated with news stories represented by flags, with different

colours signifying the genres ‘news’, ‘culture’ and ‘sports’. Sometimes it was difficult for jour-

nalists to give the story a position because the map didn’t match the terrain, especially not at very

close range.

Figure 7 shows a photograph from a story about a paraglider crash. The photograph quite

realistically represents the point of view of somebody who was actually at the scene of events. The

journalist is a witness in the traditional sense, and the story constructs the reader as being present at

the scene. The news item in Figure 7 looks much like ordinary web journalism, except that the

reader is likely to read it hours or days after the accident happened and in the same place that it

happened.

It was very difficult to photograph the two outer zones in a meaningful way. Landscape and

overview photos were impractical on the small screen as all the details disappeared. The

quantitative analysis shows that the photos tend to represent social gatherings. The photo of a

man being carried on a stretcher is a good example. Only 8% of the photos were landscapes (and

3% were portrait photos); 68% of the first photos in a story deal with activities and persons in a

semi-total frame, which means that the bodies of several people are captured, along with features

such as cars, paragliders, bridges and so forth. Photos were overall the most successful feature of

Figure 6. The LocaWriter’s display of news stories. Half-way through the week there were 13 stories onthe map.Source: authors, based on Google Maps.

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our journalism, especially in the ‘here’ zone. They gave a strong sense of presence to the news

stories.

In LocaNews there is a positioning map at the bottom of all news stories, and the relationship

between the two marked positions has an important function. With yourself as a reference point

you can move around in this parallel journalistic sphere and see how the information density

increases or decreases with your movements. Notice that this differentiation required that the users

reload the story after relocating themselves; it displays the navigator’s position relative to the

various news stories in the vicinity.

Studying the map in Figure 8, the user can look around and identify geographical markers like

the road, the shoreline and the border zone between the park and the sand dunes. This is a topo-

logization of information where ‘mapping’ is not meant metaphorically as some form of com-

partmentalization of thoughts and ideas, but geographically as a placement of claims and facts in

suitable locations (Brennan-Horley et al., 2010).

The visualization of the reader’s position (D) in relation to the event (A) was generated auto-

matically, and was not actively used by the LocaNews production team. This directional map could

have had a more prominent function, for example as the main principle for organizing the articles

(instead of a list). The layout and typography of LocaNews resembled the designs of established

online news too much. The way of thinking and writing was dominated by the perceived need for a

snappy headline, short lead, and inverted pyramid report, and this made it even more difficult to

write with proximity as the main news criterion.

Figure 7. The LocaReader display of a photographfor the story ‘Paraglider crashes on lake shore’. Thecaption reads ‘The ambulance arrived quickly’.Source: authors.

Figure 8. The LocaReader’s display of your position(D) in relation to the news story (A). In the top leftcorner it reads ‘Return to front page’.Source: authors, based on Google Maps.


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4: Locative news criteria

LocaNews’s journalistic ambitions at the outset were to make the news criterion proximity

into the primary criterion for selection of news stories, and then to write three highly dif-

ferentiated versions of the news, where traditional writing styles and priorities were followed.

This has been described in detail earlier in this article. Along with the mobile display, this

strategy would presumably create a very high sense of relevance for readers. After the

completion of the experiment, we no longer have such ambitions. It turned out to be very

difficult to resist the established news criterion of temporal actuality in order to focus on

spatial proximity, and we encountered four problems in particular. They were confirmed by a

quantitative analysis of the 93 stories (Klausen, 2011).

1. Events, not structures. Since LocaNews deals with places, we registered the kinds of places identified

in the news stories. Of the stories, 26% took place by a riverbed, which can be explained by the many

events involving riverboats, and also by the welcoming flat terrain along the rivers and lakes, where

most of the infrastructure is located. A further 40% of the stories were located on mountain tops,

hillsides and along the lakes, which are also important venues for sports such as biking, skiing, kiting

among others. A meagre 20% of the stories took place in public places, buildings or in private homes.

2. Sociability, not politics. We rated the news stories according to what type of description was

dominant, and found that social surroundings and activities dominated in 46%, other people’s

action in 37.6%, and the larger geographical surroundings in only 7.5% of the stories. This reflects

the types of events that are considered newsworthy at a festival, where some hundreds of people

gather around a pivotal activity for a few hours, then disperse and gather anew at another venue.

Our journalists captured this laid-back migration through the landscape without using the first-

person perspective; only 5% of the stories were dominated by the journalist’s own experience.

3. Observation, not analysis. During the experimental production period the journalism turned out to

be observational rather than analytical. The statistics show that uncontroversial issues like outdoor

life, sports, tourism and entertainment make up 80% of the content, while journalism with a focus

on culture makes up an additional 13%. The bias towards colourful descriptions without back-

ground research is shown by the fact that the average number of photos in LocaNews was 2.8,

while the average number of interviewees was 0.9. A more investigative method would imply

talking to many people and checking many facts before writing the story, and this strategy would

have increased the average number of interviewees.

4. Positive, not negative bias. We rated all stories on the felt bias of the story, and 13% were strongly

positive, 46% positive, 40% neutral and only 1% raised a confrontational perspective on the given

topic. There was 0% coverage of presumably controversial issues like municipal economy, business

reports, agriculture and crime. The lack of investigative attitude also shows in the analysis of how

many sources the news stories had. A whopping 37% of the articles had no sources, while 26% were

festival organizers, 15% athletes, and 9% audience members. The rest was made up of business

people and media workers, but none of the locals were politicians, policemen or other officials.

These facts suggest that LocaNews became an information service for a festival instead of an

independent news organization. The news criteria of conflict and polarization were not at all

central to our journalism. This can partly be attributed to the enthusiastic ethos that the Extreme

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Sports Festival has in the public eye. Especially journalists and media professionals tend to like it a

lot, mainly because there are endless photo opportunities with dramatic sports action and beautiful

natural scenery. This visual abundance tends to undermine the motivation for writing properly

critical journalism about the arrangement and its local implications. There is an element of ad-hoc

loyalty at work, and it is even practised by presumably disinterested journalists who find them-

selves caught by the ‘good vibrations’, the wonderful weather and the smooth organization of

events. By the way, this kind of patriotism is typical of local Norwegian newspapers.

Conclusion

What did we learn from the LocaNews project? Although it may be easy to design a medium that

affords location-dependent journalism, it is very difficult to reorient the established journalistic

procedures and textual conventions so that they effectively exploit the possibilities of the new

medium. It is easier to design a new technology than to establish a new journalistic practice.

Locative journalism is a very different writing practice from traditional local journalism. Our

journalists had problems adapting to the news criteria related to the three levels of context-

awareness. It seemed to be almost counter-intuitive for journalists to work with news criteria based

on spatial proximity rather than temporal actuality. Brian Winston’s ‘law of suppression of radical

potential’ describes the social mechanism that we encountered in our own practices during the

LocaNews experiments. Constraints operate to reduce the level of unfamiliarity to a minimum, and

to ‘slow the rate of diffusion so that the social fabric in general can absorb the new machine and

essential formations such as business entities and other institutions can be protected and preserved’

(Winston, 1998: 9). Along the way the radical potential for location-dependent journalism is likely

to be watered down, and the public is left with a less sensitive conception of local space than it

could have had. Journalists need more precise knowledge of locations and their differences, and

the ability to use this knowledge in a critical way, something which can really only come about

through long-term education and adoption of locative journalism in the profession itself.

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Biographies

Lars Nyre is Professor in Media Studies at the University of Bergen, Norway. His research has been oriented

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perspective.


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Article

Navigating sociotechnicalspaces: Comparingcomputer games andsat navs as digitalspatial media

Chris ChesherUniversity of Sydney, Australia

AbstractDigital media increasingly mediate everyday spatial and navigational practices. From in-car satellitenavigation (sat navs) to computer games, overpowered gadgets are combining multiple sources ofabstract information to give users spatial guidance and experiences of movement. For example, openworld computer games such as Grand Theft Auto IV render rich fictional spaces, and include intricatemaps and indicators that allow players to navigate large gamespaces. Sat navs such as the TomTomNavigator follow similar practices of automated navigation in helping to guide cars through actualspaces. Their calculated routes display on personalized maps, including live data and visualizationsthat complement, or even override, what the driver sees through the windscreen. Games and satnavs are harbingers of historical shifts in technosocial space, suggesting that Henri Lefebvre’s(1991) influential critical analysis of space deserves to be revised. Digital spatial media open upabstract relationships to space, but not from the distance that Lefebvre associates with ‘conceived’spaces. Instead, they work in ‘lived space’, which is becoming dominant. They calculate space in realtime, and open up new political and aesthetic questions. The article examines three characteristics ofnavigation with digital spatial media: (1) they reify routes as persuasive data and procedures; (2) theirmaps become subjective and privatized; and (3) they offer an array of spatial information that becomeincorporated into the user’s ‘perceived’ space. These examples show that critical understandings ofsocial space need increasingly to incorporate readings of digitally mediated spatiality.

KeywordsComputer games, digital media, global positioning systems, Grand Theft Auto, Lefebvre, space,spatiality


Chris Chesher, University of Sydney, School of Letters, Art, and Media, A20 Woolley S314, Sydney, NSW 20, Australia





Introduction

When Niko Bellic, the central character in the PC and console game Grand Theft Auto IV (GTA IV

Rockstar Games, 2008 – for reference listing of computer games and mobile applications, see

Gameography), struts out into Liberty City, he has constant access to informational guidance. As a

sophisticated avatar inhabitant of the fictionalized New York City, Niko has in-game gadgets to

help find his way around. On a typical ‘mission’, Niko has to drive across town to locate some

character to murder. To get Niko to that destination, the player controlling him consults a top-

down map of the whole city, and then uses the controller to walk or drive Niko across town.

Throughout, he (let’s assume a male player) consults an array of live information devices, includ-

ing a mini-map, mobile phone, computers and satellite navigation to get around the game world.

Devices such as these are becoming ubiquitous in everyday life — from global information sys-

tems to personal smartphones. This article interrogates the significance of an accelerating prolif-

eration of more powerful digital spatial media in both gamespace and social space.

When the player of GTA IV finishes a mission, he wants something to eat: perhaps something

Italian. To find a restaurant, he Google searches on the satellite navigation device (sat nav) in his

car. The search quickly locates some nearby restaurants, and calculates a route to the selected

establishment. He calls a friend and arranges to meet there. Turn-by-turn, the sat nav guides him to

the restaurant. The sat nav performs in the physical world navigational procedures similar to those

in the gamespace. But where GTA IV world is a world simulation, the sat nav uses global position-

ing system satellites to sense the vehicle’s position on the planet, and presents game-like interfaces

to guide the driver. Both these devices illustrate the importance of developing critical readings of

the range of translations and reconfigurations of technical, human and spatial components at play

in the heterogeneous range of digital interventions in spatiality.

This article will limit itself to examining digital navigation in two mediated spaces — the playful

fictional world in GTA IV, and the spatial representations and guidance of a sat nav in actual space.

These products alone have been distributed globally on a large scale. GTA IV sold 22 million units

(Orland, 2011) and TomToms sold over 14 million units in 2008. Sales of dedicated sat navs have

since dropped off, but digital spatial media more widely have proliferated in smartphones and

ubiquitous computing devices, to an extent that Adam Greenfield (2006) refers to it, appropriately, as

‘Everyware’. Games and devices with GPS have annual sales of many millions.

I will identify three characteristic features in both media that tend to structure user perception

and movement in space. First, reified routes displace ad hoc spatial practices to make route plans

increasingly concrete. Second, digital maps in both games and sat navs have become privatized,

oriented to a subjective perspective, and primed for consumption. Third, these devices juxtapose

real time information about the space against space itself. Most users experience digital guidance

as a convenience, but these practices do change the sites and methods of influence on bodies in

movement.

How space has changed since the 20th century

Digital spatial media are among many contributors to new logics of spatiality in late capitalism.

Spatial practices are changing as many disruptive changes appear in the mediation of space: from

megamalls to superhighways. Henri Lefebvre (1971, 1991) is the benchmark for a critical

understanding of the technosocial production of space in the 20th century. For Lefebvre, the

configuration of social space is always historically specific. He identifies a key moment around


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1911 when space changed for the 20th century. Ford and Einstein, the Great War and cubism were

characteristic of the structuring of space with greater abstraction and technocratic force, but also

with new possibilities for change in revolutionary movements.

How do we determine whether new media are contributing to another historical spatial singularity in

the early 21st century? In this article my two main examples of new media serve as exemplars of this

emerging spatial paradigm. I will argue that space is dominated less by what Lefebvre calls the ‘con-

ceived’ (1991: 34), and (paradoxically) is becoming dominated by ‘lived space’ (1991: 361). Conceived

space is highly formal, distant from everyday life. The technologies of conceived space are remote and

dominating. Digital media today are more approachable, light and even potentially subversive. As

gadgets and games have made technologies more accessible, the everyday lived spaces of real time

mapping and spatial information have come to play new roles in spatial practices and pleasures.

Lefebvre, and those influenced by his work, propose that spatial configurations in a society are

staged through dialectical struggles between practice, thought and imagination (Shields, 1998).

Social spaces are simultaneously real and imagined, and also historically specific (Elden, 2004).

When the everyday (perceived) space of communities is disrupted by the intervention of abstracted

(conceived) spaces, less determined ‘lived’ spaces emerge. Lived spaces are imbued with unex-

pected meanings and social complexity.

In his classic book, The Production of Space, Lefebvre (1991) contends that space is a dynamic

participant in everyday practices, and not simply a passive container. Space is always socially

produced: ‘every society . . . produces a space, its own space’ (Lefebvre, 1991), and the com-

position of space betrays the action of historical forces. As these forces change, space itself also

changes. Lefebvre describes the processes by which space is being produced through a dialectic, or

trialectic (Soja, 1996), between three forms of space: perceived, conceived and lived space.

Perceived space — the space of everyday life, is patterned by the ways that people encounter it.

It is a space that supposedly precedes calculation. Pathways and networks emerge over time simply

as reinforcements of regular spatial practices. These pathways are both physical — the traces of

thousands of footsteps — and psychic — the habits and associations that constitute psychogeo-

graphy. Perceived space is already marked by power relationships and by the spatial practices of

work, family and other institutions. However, perceived space operates without any consistency or

overarching strategy (Lefebvre, 1991).

Lefebvre’s conceived space is ‘conceptualised space, the space of scientists, planners, urbanists,

technocratic subdividers’ (1991: 38), and is ontologically distinct from perceived space. Professions

work with ‘representations of space’ (1991: 38), informed by the traditions of perspective, geometry

and other formalisms. Lefebvre argues that people treat these representations as real, with an

‘objectivity’ that tends to be detached and alienated from actual space. He argues that conceived

space is always the dominant and dominating form of space. Those working with kind of space

consider their understanding to be superior to perceived space. Computers embodied conceived

space. In the mid to late 20th century, most computers were mainframes, managed by corporations,

military and the state. Information technologies operated in secure clean rooms, imposing surveil-

lance and domination — in the popular imagination as much as in actual operation. For those

excluded from conceived space, this abstracted space seemed lethal, alienating. For Lefebvre, the

agents of domination are large-scale institutions: ‘armies, war, the state and political power’ (1991:

166). He foresaw a condition approaching when ‘the domination of space is becoming dominant’

(1991: 164).

In the third kind of space, lived space, it is possible for space to unfold less predictably. These

spaces of conflict, contestation and change emerge from the struggle between perceived and

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conceived spaces. Lived spaces are incommensurably different from the other two, as ‘a produced

difference presupposes the shattering of a system; it emerges from the chasm opened up when a

closed universe ruptures’ (1991: 372). Lived space is populated by ‘users’ and ‘inhabitants’ (1991:

364), whose subjective experiences produce a space redolent with meanings, conflicts and stra-

tegies. Lived space, or what Soja (1996) calls ‘Thirdspace’, has greater complexity than the other

levels. It is the space of utopias, heterotopias, and other forms of complex spatiality, each irre-

ducible to the ‘too close’ level of perceived and ‘too distant’ level of conceived. This space is

paradoxical, sometimes liberating, sometimes dominated. It is the space inhabited by users of sat

navs and players of computer games.

Lefebvre almost always casts technology as a distant and dominating force, aligned with

conceived spaces. As the Cold War paradigm of technology began to soften he only shifts his

attitude slightly. I can identify two examples of Lefebvre adjusting to changing technological

paradigms. First, he creates a binary between the serious and dangerous technologies of the state

against the trivial gadgets to which people get access:

We saw the discrepancy between (state technologies) and the technical trivialities of everyday life,

between the importance of real technical constructs and the petty gadgets with their ideological wrap-

pings. (Lefebvre, 1971: 57)

He dismisses gadgets as ‘trivial’ (1971: 54), ‘petty’ (1971: 57) and ‘ideological’ (1971: 57). His

depiction of technology as a monolithic agent is characteristic of this era of Marxist thought. Like

all binaries, though, it tends to dismiss all differences among phenomena on the opposite side.

Since the 1980s, readings of class politics, ideology, technology and popular culture have become

more complex, particularly in cultural studies and other newer disciplines. Some fields have

analysed the active roles of consumers in creating their own meanings (Paterson, 2006). Games

have been recognized for their rhetorical and persuasive power (Bogost, 2010). Digital spatial

media devices have matured and become more powerful and widely accessible, even supporting

experiments in art and activism. Many artists using these devices invoke the situationist move-

ment, a group of French urban activists who aimed to disrupt conventional space. Lefebvre was

involved with this group in the 1960s (Flanagan, 2007).

The style of Lefebvre’s (1991) second response to modern computers seems more open to

interrogating the spaces of new technologies, if he remained very cautious. What comes through

most clearly in Lefebvre’s words is a sense that he is entering a space with which he is highly

unfamiliar.

How is computer technology deployed and whom does it serve? We know enough in this area to sus-

pect the existence of a space peculiar to information science, but not enough to describe that space,

much less to claim close acquaintanceship with it. (Lefebvre, 1991: 86)

Since Lefebvre’s death in 1991, user experiences with computer games and sat nav devices have

made that ‘space peculiar to information science’ very much a part of everyday life. Information

technologies no longer operate purely as technocratic domination. Even if they inherit the research

legacies of the military, the state and capital, these devices have been domesticated as user-friendly

commodities, objects of desire and information utilities. They offer the interactive pleasures of

knowledge and mastery.

Embodied interaction moves the design of computing systems from representations of space to repre-

sentational space, from conceived to lived space. (Conrad, 2006: 3)


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In spite of his critical view of technicity, Lefebvre’s work on the paradoxes of spatiality has been

significant for games scholars. Understanding the interplay between experience, formal rules and

structured play is crucial in critical work on computer games (Aarseth, 2007; Apperley, 2010;

Flynn, 2003, 2004; Magnet, 2006; Ryan and Nichols, 2006; Stockburger, 2006; Taylor, 2002).

Navigating games spaces

The status of game space is contentious in the academic field of games studies: Is game space an

illusion based on formalisms, or a real spatiality, as measured by gamer experience? For example,

Espen Aarseth draws on Lefebvre to argue that spatial representations in games are not spatial at

all: rather they are ‘a reductive operation leading to a representation of space that is not spatial’

(Aarseth, 2007). Games are rule-bound allegories of space quite unlike actual space, as they neces-

sarily sacrifice complete openness in order to be playable.

By contrast, Lammes (2008) argues that games enhance our experience of space: they are

‘playgrounds, where gamers can find an intensified space to express, and give meaning to, spatial

regimes and spatial confusions that are part of our daily life’ (Lammes, 2008: 264). Games can

be critical sketches of possible spatialities. With their capacities to escape geometricality

and formalism, they define explorations of space as meaningful, refiguring memories of colo-

nization as play.

Computer games exist by simultaneously and automatically employing formalisms of space

(3D models begin as conceived spaces), and activating in everyday play (perceived spatial prac-

tice, even if those spaces are fictional). Aarseth and Lammes emphasize two different features of

games’ spatial logic.

Jesper Juul (2005) proposes a distinction that brings Aarseth’s and Lammes’ arguments

together: that games use both formal abstractions and playful expression, or what he calls ‘rules’

and ‘fiction’. Games are make-believe spaces bound by formal constraints. This pairing positions

space as a synthesis of the fictional and the rule-bound:

Space in games is a special case. The level design of a game world can present a fictional world and

determine what players can and cannot do at the same time. In this way, space in games can work as a

combination of rules and fiction. (Juul, 2005: 1505)

By this construction, a game level designer’s choices structure the possibilities for play through

the combination of fiction and rules. Some features constrain (corridors, narrow roads, coast-

line, dangers) and others enhance (high ground, ramps) the players’ capacities and interactions.

The level designs (known, confusingly, as ‘maps’) heavily influence the flow of game action.

Nitsche (2009) provides an extended reading of formal features of media, narrative and play in

game spaces.

However, game space is certainly more complex than levels that inform the play. Stockburger’s

(2006) analysis of spatial practices in games goes beyond the fiction – rule binary by drawing on

Lefebvre’s (1991) and Soja’s (1996) concepts around the spatial triad: perceived – conceived –

lived. He analyses game play dynamics when spatial foundations underlying the game are taken up

in spaces of play:

[T]here are elements, which act as foundations, as basic spatial conceptions, for the fluid and action-

based directly experienced (played) space of the moment, resulting in a coherent ‘spatial practice’.

(Stockburger, 2006: 80)

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Stockburger extends his analysis of the spatial practices in particular games by extending these

elements to include multiple types of space in operation simultaneously. In a hypothetical arcade

‘space shooter’, he notes that:

[I]t is taking place in a specific user space (a public game arcade where the player is watched by others)

and it involves representations of space such as narrative space (transporting valuable cargo that has

to be brought to the next space station in order to advance the narrative) and rule space (avoiding the

asteroids and shots from opposing space ships, but moving over power-up icons) as well as the audio-

visual representational aspects (the pixels representing an advancing or retreating asteroid, the sound

made by advancing shots) and finally the kinaesthetic modality (the link between the player’s body,

via the joystick to the avatar/space-ship) that makes the game a directly lived, visceral experience.

(Stockburger, 2006: 82)

Different games genres allow for different possibilities for spatial practices. In some genres, the

narrative and rule space representations are highly constrained. Beat ’em up games such as Tekken

6 (2007–2009) or Mortal Kombat (1992–2011) and sports games, for example, take place in closed

arenas, in line with Huizinga’s (1955) conception that play tends to take place in a ‘magic circle’.

Other games allow the character some movement through space, but constrain avatars to particular

pathways, a technique known as putting a game ‘on rails’ (for example, Half Life, Sierra Enter-

tainment, 1998).

Open world games, by contrast, support apparently unconstrained movement within available

game spaces. To support this freedom of movement in narrative, audiovisual representational and

kinaesthetic spaces, designers must offer both extensive, detailed level design, and interface

devices that give players an awareness of where they are in space, and in the game narratives. The

lived space of open world games seems to celebrate ideologies of freedom and individualism. It

supports random acts of violence, and of consumption. At the same time, games such as GTA IV are

satirical not only at the level of content, but also of spatial practices. The non-playing characters

are distributed in ways that affect the suburban variations. Some open world games can be read as

complex critical essays in mediated spatiality.

The most influential open world games series is Grand Theft Auto (GTA), developed by

Rockstar Games (Loguidice and Barton, 2009). The first in the series, Grand Theft Auto (DMA

Design, 1997) was for fifth-generation platforms (Playstation and personal computers – PCs), not

yet capable of 3D space. The game featured a top-down viewpoint onto a city, a perspective recal-

ling Lefebvre’s conceived space. But far from presenting cold abstractions, the game sends players

on a frenzied, if ironic, crime spree, in which the avatar runs, drives and shoots his way through a

busy city. In the midst of this chaos, the game offers informational cues, including an arrow float-

ing next to the car that indicates the direction of the current destination. Icons of police heads indi-

cate the intensity of police attention. The game combines world data (image and wild sounds) with

informational metadata (graphs, flags, subtitles and so on).

In recent iterations of GTA, the fictional worlds have become increasingly photorealistic,

rendered in three dimensions in GTA III (2001 on Playstation 2) and in high definition in GTA IV

(2008 on Playstation 3). The game world aesthetics of these later versions are more detailed, with

day and night, changing weather, and streets inhabited by chatting pedestrians. Just as impor-

tantly, GTA IV gives players more information about the wider gamespace, including a mobile

phone, a sat nav-like animated mapping system in cars, and computers with websites and email.

These devices give Niko ways of perceiving and interacting in spaces beyond what is

immediately visible to him.


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Open world games in particular need to give players spatial information to connect the

perceived (‘real life’ in the fictional world) with the conceived spaces of rules, states of play, health

levels and so forth. GTA portrays and parodies a world of meaningful lived space, a space of

calculation and meaning in which ‘users’ are the universal identities. Ironically, among the most

persistent features in the GTA gamespace are the in-game gadgets for mediating space.

Playing GTA IV is typically associated with leisure spaces, in which subversive meanings are

possible. Therefore, it is not unusual that the gamespaces are ripe with satirical content, including

an absurd in-game conservative TV channel called Weazel news, a city scape saturated with paro-

dies of advertising, and a story line that accentuates class, race and political corruption. Lefebvre

observes that, while leisure space may seem to have potential to be disruptive and transgressive,

like a public carnival where normal roles break down, this hope is barren:

The space of leisure tends — but it is no more than a tendency, a tension, a transgression of ‘users’ in

search of a way forward — to surmount divisions: the division between social and mental, the division

between sensory and intellectual, and also the division between the everyday and the out-of-the-

ordinary (festival). (Lefebvre, 1991: 383)

Lefebvre concludes that this disruptive potential of leisure is only an illusion: ‘The case against

leisure is quite simply closed – and the verdict is irreversible: leisure is as alienated and alienating

as labour’ (1991: 383). Lefebvre dismisses the subjectivity of the ‘user’ as politically silent and

abstracted. Unfortunately, Lefebvre’s rigid distinctions provide little scope within the category of

the ‘lived’ for critical attention to the spatial regimes brought up by digital spatial media.

The analysis of gamespaces given earlier has established a starting point for understanding

changing digital spatial practices. It drew attention to two spaces: a live gameworld, and spatial

media that help the character (and the player) navigate in that world. The sat nav is a device that

shares a lot in common with the in-game maps of that latter space. However, it belongs not in a

game world, but in everyday space. The story of its emergence as a consumer product brings it

in contact with secret military projects and computer games.

Satellite navigation: From military to commodity

The early story of sat navs is embedded in 1970s militarism, and its conceived spaces of command

and control. In the depth of the Cold War, the USA secretly launched 24 Navstar satellites to create

the global positioning system (GPS) infrastructure. The synchronized GPS signals allowed US

military units anywhere in the world to discover their own location almost instantly. GPS remained

secret until 1983, when Russian fighters shot down Korean Air Flight 007 for straying into USSR

air space. President Reagan used this event to justify opening up access to GPS for civil and

commercial uses (Jacobson, 2007). Commercial sat navs would surface a decade later, bringing

with them very different spatial practices.

Early GPS users could read their location information as coordinates, but they needed training

to use the device effectively. This spatial practice represented a significant change from calculating

location using maps, landmarks, compass readings and other observations. With GPS, the

mechanics of location-finding are freed from thought. Live spatial information became observable

alongside space itself, but until the 1990s, only within military contexts.

For GPS devices to become a media platform that provides live spatial information in consumer

electronics devices, they would need to be released from conceived space. Portable computer

games became clearly a model for sat navs. They used cheap displays, rechargeable batteries,

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accessible controls and visually rich screen interfaces. Among the developers of these devices was

an Amsterdam-based business software and games company, which became TomTom, and intro-

duced its first Navigator product in 2001.

Sat navs render maps from databases as cartoonish views of the space of navigation. The map

data contains not only roads and street names, but ‘traffic signs, prohibited manoeuvres, vehicle

restrictions, post/zip codes, house number ranges, points of interest, tourist information, speed

camera data, and much more’ (TomTom International, 2009). Just as the game player has access to

live in-game information, users of sat navs have their experience of space augmented by informa-

tion on databases, and even live data.

The worlds of sat navs and computer games overlap. Games and sat nav developers share

similar educational backgrounds, combining engineering with design and computer science. They

are likely to have experience with each other’s work: playing the others’ games or using sat navs.

Consumers have expectations and ‘training’ from playing games that sets their expectations about

the look and feel of consumer electronics devices. The devices share similar graphical computers,

software algorithms and powerful CPUs – central processing units (Shepherd and Bleasdale

Shepherd, 2009). While patents are more commonly used in GPS engineering, there are occasional

overlaps in patents for global information systems and games (Uhlir et al., 2004).

The practices of making game levels and making maps for sat navs share some commonalities

because they use similar digital tools and spatial data capture techniques. In games development,

level design has much more fictional detail than sat nav diagrams. GTA IV’s level is loosely

modelled on New York City, and research on the game began with thousands of stills and videos of

the space (Goldstein, 2008). Level design involves several ways of modelling space: contour maps,

vector maps, wireframes, texture maps, bump-maps and so on.

Like games, sat nav maps are composites, stitched together from multiple sources,

including official records and vehicles on the road. TomTom combines their own data col-

lection with community data posted deliberately and automatically by drivers about the

spaces they are navigating. Controversially, TomTom was discovered selling on data about

routes and travel times gathered from private sat nav devices. Police in the Netherlands used

such data to place speed cameras in places where drivers’ own records show that cars have been

speeding (Ramli, 2011). TomTom faces substantial competition over digital mapping data, not

only from commercial companies such as Google and Microsoft, but also community neo-

geographers, who have become significant actors in a new knowledge politics of space

(Elwood, 2010; McFedries, 2007). However, most drivers adopt the maps bundled with their

own proprietary devices.

Transformed into part entertainment platform, and part instrumental device, sat navs took a

driving position in many cars. In the remainder of this article, I discuss three features of digital

spatial navigators found in different forms in computer games and in sat navs (Table 1): routes

become reified; maps become subjective; and, information is overlaid onto perceived space.

Digital routes

Digital spatial media reify routes as procedural information. The gadget presents each route with

rhetorical force, with multiple strategies to persuade the driver to take certain paths. These routes,

in combination, may contribute to producing different spaces, actual and imaginary. Both sat navs

and games generate and follow the routes. In doing so, they define and enact traces of possibility

across a space.


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The typical driver almost always gets into her car with an informal plan, and a wider set of

meanings motivating the trip (pick up a book from a shop in Leichhardt, visit a friend in Bondi and so

on). When she enters the name of a destination into a sat nav, though, the device generates a route as

reified information - as representations of space (Lefebvre, 1991: 38), as on-screen images and spo-

ken instructions. That route has more actuality and force than a street directory flopped open on the

passenger seat, and more precision than directions scrawled on a scrap of paper. Where a route may

be created in conversation with a human navigator, routes are increasingly constructed in automatic

conversation with others outside the car, such as Vehicle Ad Hoc Networks (Dornbush and Joshi,

2007) that use local networking between cars to balance traffic flows.

In a game world, narrative spaces (Stockberger, 2006: 107) provide meanings, while rule spaces

(2006: 117) define formal constraints on the game avatar’s actions. GTA IV players encounter

space in a staged series of main missions, with many subsidiary missions and tasks. Each mission

typically opens with a ‘cut scene’, a cinematic narrative animation that introduces the setting for

the gameplay. This set-up justifies the acts of audiovisual violence that Niko is urged to commit,

and provides some, typically unreliable, instructions about what to do. As each mission starts,

points in space are marked as destinations. Players can also add their own destination points using

the sat nav. As the GTA series has developed, the designers have introduced more guidance for

users. The additions make navigation and play easier, reflecting Rockstar’s strategy to expand their

market beyond traditional hard-core gamers. Across many games, these developments have built a

conventional spatial lexicon.

The mission structure in GTA IV has a parallel in sat navs, as drivers move through the road

system. Just as new missions in GTA IV generate routes to checkpoints, the TomTom projects

destinations into routes almost instantly. The narrative of the journey is as a race, with checkpoints

and a chequered flag at the end. While drivers can disobey the instructions, or even switch it off,

there is a rule-like power to the insistent audiovisual voice and image interpellating the disobedient

driver: ‘Please make a U-turn when possible’. This is not the planner’s conceived space (in the

actual shape of the road or the road signage), but a lived space brought to life as a voice and map

inside the car. When this guiding force is paired with spatial control systems such as ‘Autohabits’,

it becomes less game-like and more surveillant, allowing a boss or parent to use the car’s computer,

GPS and mobile data to trace and record the movements of drivers (Autohabits, 2011).

The mission structure characteristic of games is also in play with spatially locative games in

physical spaces that became popular in the 1990s. Players of geocaching, for example, try to hide,

Table 1. Comparing mediations of spatial practices in GTA IV and sat navs.

Open world games (GTA IV) In-car satellite navigation

1. Digital routes ‘Cut scenes’ present scriptedintroductions followed by guidednavigation in live game space.

Nav calculates routes, visualizes pathson a map, and gives instructions untilreaching a destination.

2. Subjective viewpoint The privileged virtual cameras align theview of the world to a subjectiveperspective.

Personalized map view is aligned to thevehicle’s direction of movement anddecision-making.

3. Information overlays GTA updates information on the stateof play (missions completed,character health etc.).

Constant updates of live informationabout the space around: time todestination; safety camera warnings.

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and find, small packages using a GPS device (De Souza e Silva and Hjorth, 2009). These practices

became more popular when smartphones and services, such as Foursquare, made spatial practices

much more accessible. Such devices have driven the marketing fashion for ‘gamification’

(Deterding et al., 2011), porting games practices and conventions into everyday life.

Subjective perspectives

Digital spatial media have translated maps from public to private signs, from objective to sub-

jective perspectives, and from multiple navigational components to totalizing systems. Traditional

paper maps are public images implying a universal perspective. They are reference material that

takes work to interpret. Navigators must consult indexes, find pages, and trace coordinates to a

location. They may draw on a number of documents and instructions. Matching the map location

with a current location in space requires constant work.

By contrast, sat nav images are constantly regenerated as the vehicle moves through space.

These are private images, tuned to the sites at which they are created. As digital outputs, they are

evanescent, but always available, until the battery goes flat. Their visual perspective is aligned to

the driver’s viewpoint, and their operation is in real-time movement of lived space. The signifi-

cance of this alignment of kinaesthetics and viewpoint is heightened when the car goes around

a corner, and the driver’s perspective on the space, and the route simulation, are held in alignment.

The subjective perspective in GTA IV is both an exemplar and a playful parody of the spatial

regime of digital media. It illustrates well the historical change from the ‘conceived space’ of maps

and models to the lived spaces in digital maps that are immanent to subjective perception. The live

information anticipates the player’s needs, but withholds complete accuracy to keep the game

challenging. The game only reveals a part of the world at each point in the game.

GTA IV’s view onto its simulated game world is oriented to subjective action The game’s

default ‘third person over-the-shoulder’ perspective moves around the avatar to line up with the

aim of the current weapon. This floating camera view combines cinematic composition conven-

tions with an orientation to game action (Christie and Normand, 2005). This viewpoint allows

players to make sense of the world, enjoy the game spectacle, and act against threats. Managing the

players’ viewpoints is critical, because 3D space can be disorienting and incoherent. The game

illustrates this potential for disorientation with the optional cinematic camera, which cuts between

random camera positions, counterpointing the ‘natural’ subjective points of view. This view offers

a parodic challenge for players, because it is almost impossible to control the car.

Alongside the camera view, a circular mini-map head-up display (HUD) gives a compact

visualization of salient features in Niko’s own immediate world. There is a graph of health

and armour, and, around the perimeter, icons representing features beyond the mini-map, such

as home bases, weapons stores, friends and enemies. In the top right corner of the screen are

indicators of the current weapon and ammunition level. As Gunzel observes, a game map ‘is

not a picture of the gamespace, but a representation of what is known about the gamespace’

(2007: 447).

The information-rich GTA mini-map has something in common with a driver’s view and expe-

rience of the road, which even before the GPS was already overcoded and information saturated

(Thrift and French, 2002). Driving involves constant interplay between car and driver agencies.

As Thrift (2004: 49) observes: ‘automobiles become more and more like hybrid entities in which

intelligence and intentionality are distributed between human and non-human’. The dashboard dis-

play, and the road itself, demand constant attention as complementary modes of information.


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However, unlike leisurely game players, drivers are likely to become either stressed by driving

challenges, or bored by the long trip. Much driving is not voluntary, and the road presents real

risks to the driver’s body. The very constrained interfaces of windscreen, dashboard, wheel and

accelerator define the driver’s possible relationships to space. Line markings divide zones of

driveable and non-driveable space. At night, the road is illuminated by colour coded lights:

blinking orange; steady white; intermittent red; and, flashing blue. Inside and outside the car,

salient and distracting information proliferate and compete to a point that compromises driving

performance (Wu and Liu, 2007).

The goal of designing sat navs is to provide information about one’s surroundings with

live-refreshed information displays that counteract these common indecisions and distractions.

TomTom’s standard ‘Driving View’ (TomTom International, 2006) updates information about the

vehicle’s location along the route, geared to the driver’s immediate needs. Unlike 3D games, Tom-

Tom images are symbolic rather than naturalistic, since the actual space is already visible through

the windscreen. The device regularly recalculates a simplified perspectival map view to show

street patterns, names, and selected points of interest. The map image is occasionally interrupted

by timely new information, such as graphics to suggest which lane to take. The map is also overlaid

with a multitude of icons and readings about the current states of affairs: speed, remaining journey

time, battery level, and next instructions.

Therefore, sat navs operate by different conventions about modulating the user’s cognitive and

affective load than computer games. When a computer game challenges a player with a new mission,

the design aims to intensify the playing experience. The sat nav is designed to enhance the driver’s

capacity to control the vehicle and make judgements to avoid risks. In calculating directions and

offering timely instructions, sat nav designers aim to reduce the cognitive and affective demands on

drivers. For example, research on taxi drivers in Barcelona using sat navs reported that these devices

allow them to relax, particularly in unfamiliar new suburbs, or bad weather. It also reassures pas-

sengers that the drivers know where they are going (Girardin and Blat, 2010). Others report improved

personal relationships as sat navs reduce fights over directions (English, 2009).

On the other hand, the sat nav is not always a reliable guide to the road. Even if engineers aim

to ensure accurate calibration between the actual and map space, accuracy is notoriously poor.

Errors of up to 20 m are commonplace. In addition, ‘human factors’ designers often introduce

design flaws that actually make human error more likely (Heron et al., 1997). The instructions

are often hard to follow, let alone in the noisy environment of a family car. Some argue that using

sat navs detaches drivers from their awareness of the road: ‘they demand less skill and attention

by providing orientation and navigation as a commodity, with instant availability, ubiquity,

safety, and ease of use, resulting in loss of engagement with the environment and others’ (Leshed

et al., 2008: 1675). Furthermore, digital map information quickly goes out of date, and updates

are expensive. There are special risks when a supposedly total system gradually becomes prone

to error.

Information overlays

Among common features of digital spatial media are read-outs that summarize current local infor-

mation for the driver/player: representational spaces in Lefebvre’s terms. If there is a salient

change in surrounding states of affairs, the device marks the subjective map and alerts the user.

This information is displayed directly alongside the perceived space visible through the wind-

screen. The dataspace is the space of the Lefebvre’s ‘user’ - not the spatiotemporally distant space

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of planners, but the lived space of live data. In most cases, Lefebvre’s ambivalence about the polit-

ical value of these spatial overlays is borne out. The content of GTA IV is a high satire of capitalism

and political corruption, and the gameplay is only partly a parody of masculine violence. The spa-

tial information available to drivers on their sat navs is oriented towards calculating travel metrics,

and movement towards sites of consumption.

Digital spatial media often bring abstractions for domination into lived space, a practice most

evident in games fictions. At many points in GTA IV, information overlays drive the player’s

experience. Particular regions of space become privileged in the mini-map, showing an opportu-

nity or a threat. For example, one ongoing goal of the game is to steal good cars. If stealing a car

attracts police attention, the player becomes ‘wanted’, and a star on screen signifies that the state of

the game has changed. The higher the ‘wanted’ level, the more stars appear. This symbolic change

manifests in gameplay as more aggressive police pursuit. The character has undergone an incor-

poreal transformation, from free to wanted (Chesher, 1997). The ‘wanted’ state of affairs has much

in common with the legal and operational abstractions that police actually use, in combination

police band radio to coordinate actions against suspects. As Niko is pursued, a circle on the mini

map on screen shows a hot zone in which the player will attract attention. He must escape that cir-

cle to reduce or evade the attention of police. Alternatively, he can find a paint shop to respray the

car so the police no longer recognize him (the non playing characters take on the cliched role as

dumb cops).

Drivers on the road with sat navs also become ‘users’, as their information space is populated by

databases and live information. Manufacturers promise this will give them greater command over

the road: if there is traffic ahead, live traffic information will suggest changes to the route. Read off

the on-road display equivalent to health, fuel and direction indicators in computer games. Find the

cheapest petrol nearby, great food and shopping. Watch the estimated distance and time to desti-

nation, and live information. In each way that users open themselves to more information, they can

open themselves to influences of advertising, tracking and other forces.

The range of information overlaid on space is even greater in smartphones. For example, the

iPhone’s ‘Find my friends’ (2011) app locates registered friends nearby on a map. Augmented

reality apps such as Layar bring information from the network to overlay labels onto the camera

image. Real time navigation features seem to fulfil long-standing futuristic promises of technol-

ogy. However, they also represent opportunities for advertisers to coerce drivers towards their

clients, integrate location-specific advertising (Froeberg, 2003) and impose other commercial

intrusions.

Conclusions

In the 1980s, Lefebvre critiqued the domination of space by remote, abstract planners. Since then,

the power of conceived space has been rivalled by new practices of ambivalent domination in

lived space. Still working with abstractions, the lived spaces of users become immanent to

perceived space. With technological mediation, a kind of automatic lived space increasingly

structures everyday spaces in heterogeneous ways (this is neither a universal, nor a univocal

spatial transformation).

In this article, I have looked at spatial practices mediated by computer games and sat navs. Each

artefact implies its own distinctive spatial imaginary, and positions its users in relation to new

spatial practices. GTA IV, like many games, is both an allegory of a space, and a simulation of

spatiality. The detail of the world presents an urban landscape alienated and indifferent, while the


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vehicles and weapons offer a kinaesthetics of speed and destruction. The TomTom is also a media

phenomenon, with celebrity voices (from Homer Simpson to Darth Vader) present in the car as

persuasive companions with knowledge of the city.

In analysing these two examples of contemporary spatial mediation, I have shown that there are

significant mutual influences between games and sat navs. While gamespaces and roads are

different spaces, the practices of navigation are broadly similar. The computer automatically

reifies routes with a tangible authority. Both devices influence navigation in real time (this

spatial logic is also apparent in the way that non-playing characters approach Niko in GTA IV).

The intellectual properties from entertainment industries (Simpsons and Lucasfilm) cross over in

an open media market. The sat nav spatial logic anticipates the emergence of self-driving vehi-

cles, such as Google’s robot car, which promises to translate lived space routes directly into

autonomous road users (Markoff, 2010).

Contemporary social space is increasingly structured by the capacities of digital spatial media,

translating the wider political and economic forces of consumption in technospatial terms. These new

media are oriented to subjective spaces, in contrast to public maps. Generating custom maps on the

fly, spatial navigation is increasingly personalized for implied subjects and real-time conditions.

These devices typically default to mediating relationships between mobile consumers, public spaces

and local companies. More drastically, spatial systems can turn surveillant, perhaps offering the lure

of cheaper insurance or discounts for drivers to disclose their movements (Iqbal and Lim, 2010). On

the other hand, artistic and activist applications may open up more public and collaborative modes of

mediating spatiality (Crang and Graham, 2007). Personal information spaces are overlaid by a grow-

ing array of information nodes, informing subjects about surrounding spaces. As these technosocial

phenomena become more intimately embedded in everyday life, the hermeneutics of the technical,

social and political forces, both ‘trivial’ and power-laden, must be taken seriously.

Gameography

Computer games

Grand Theft Auto (1997) DMA Design: BMG Interactive (Playstation 1, Windows, DOS and Nintendo Game

Boy Color).

Grand Theft Auto IV (2008) Rockstar Toronto: Rockstar Games (PS3, Xbox 360, PC).

Half Life (1998) Sierra Entertainment (PC, Playstation 2).

Mortal Kombat Games series (1992–2011) NetherRealm Studios (formerly Midway Games Chicago):

Midway Games; Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment (2009-present).

Tekken 6 (2007–2009) Namco Bandai: Namco Bandai (Arcade, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PlayStation

Portable).

Mobile applications

Find my Friends (2011), Apple (iPhone).

Foursquare (2009 onwards) Foursquare (iPhone, Android, Blackberry, OVI, Palm, Windows Phone).

Layar (2009 onwards) Layar (Android, iPhone, Symbian and BlackBerry 7).

TomTom Navigator (various models) TomTom (TomTom).

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Biography

Chris Chesher is Senior Lecturer in Digital Cultures in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Sydney,

Australia. His research draws on media studies and technology studies to examine interplays between

technical systems and artefacts and cultural meanings and practices.


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Article

Governing the geocodedworld: Environmentalityand the politics of locationplatforms

Carlos BarrenecheUniversity of Westminster, UK

AbstractAs location and the nearby environment become increasingly prominent for our communications,filtering flows of information and shaping our networks, geolocation technology and emergentforms of usage to govern information and visualize populations raise important questions as to howlocative media could be used as tools of governmentality. Using Google’s location platform Placesas a primary example, this article will argue that location platforms are underpinned by a geode-mographical spatial ordering according to which subjects are located for the purpose of economicgovernment. Particular attention is paid to the political economy of location platforms and the roleof their underlying algorithms and databases in rendering social space subject to novel forms ofcommodification. Drawing on Foucault’s governmentality analytic framework, the article con-cludes by delineating a critical framework to assess the mentalities and strategies of governmentthat the generalized geocoding of information is giving rise to.

KeywordsEnvironmentality, Foucault, Google, location, locative media, mobile, mobility

Introduction

Past years have seen the rapid rise of the so-called geoweb fuelled mainly by the proliferation and

social adoption of mapping and location-based services. Today, media objects are commonly

tagged with geographic information (geocoding or geotagging) and mapped. Geocoding informa-

tion has become part of the webmasters’ protocol of best practices of search engine optimization,

while our location-enabled devices (the majority of smartphones) automatically geocode our


Carlos Barreneche, Communication and Media Research Institute, School of Media, Arts and Design, University of

Westminster, Watford Road, Northwick Park, Middlesex, HA1 3TP, UK





media products. The following estimate figures are indicative of the current prominence of geo-

coded objects in our informational milieu: half a million geotagged places in Wikipedia, 10 million

annotations in WikiMapia, 800 million GPS contributed to OpenStreetMap, 10 million Google’s

placemarks, 200 million geotagged photos in Flickr (Graham and Zook, 2011), and a billion Four-

square check-ins. This increasing and seamless integration of geocoding into our everyday com-

munications may make location a default protocol setting of communication, and soon a taken-

for-granted dimension of our media experience (or ‘technological unconscious’ – Thrift, 2004),

to the point of rendering the prefix ‘geo’ in geomedia superfluous.

The significance of location is far greater than just the access of information through online maps.

Location and the nearby environment are becoming prominent for our communications at different

levels. At a protological level, location is claimed to constitute even a data subsystem (O’Reilly,

2010), an organizing principle for information in its own right. Gordon and de Souza e Silva argue that

‘the new organizational logic of the web is based on physical location’ (2011: 7). Accordingly location

governs information: for example, Geo IP can determine a visitor’s geographical location, deliver

locally targeted content, and even set access privileges to information (see Google Inc., 2009a, 2010a,

2010g). In a similar way location can be used to comply with specific copyright laws by country.

Furthermore, location data constitutes a component of security devices. Examples include the use of

the location patterns of a given user to prevent security breaches to information in the case of someone

trying to get access from an unknown location (Backstrom et al., 2010). Conversely, our data is also

used to locate ourselves. In Greg Elmer’s (2010) view, ‘the locative’ enacts a double logic of finding

and being found that is indeed inherent to networked media. To illustrate, take the way that Google

can refine or enhance our location position by extracting geographical information out of our data (e.g.

email archives, calendar entries, search history, map history and so on – Google Inc., 2009d. See

Figure 1). And, the way in which ‘socially predicted location’ can estimate the likely location of a

given user based on the disclosed location of his/her social network (Backstrom et al., 2010).

Through the geotagging of media objects, ‘people have the power to document their memories,

feelings, biases and reactions to places and share them with the world’ (Graham et al., 2011),

resulting in a new ‘synergistic relationship’ between people, places and information flows

(Hardey, 2007) that is becoming part of our experience of the city. At the same time, this pro-

liferation of geocoded media objects represents a generalized spatial annotation in which media as

such constitutes a form of metadata about the world in as much as geocoding establishes an

indexical relationship between a media object and location.

Additionally, the move towards a geocoded world also comprehends a related trend: the tagging

of real space using technologies such as QR codes, RFID tags, or near field communication tags

(NFC). The end result of these converging trends is the ‘informational overcoding of environments’

(Crang and Graham, 2007). In this context of data-intensive environments, information is becoming

a vector shaping urban places while at the same time we are witnessing ‘the movement of computa-

tion out of the box and into the environment’ (Hayles in Gane et al., 2007: 349). The technical pos-

sibility of linking data to the environment in such a way enables what Stiegler (2003) – drawing from

Simondon – calls the creation of ‘associated technical milieus’ or ‘techno-geographical milieus’,

through which the environment is converted into a technical function. More precisely, it is invested

with navigational capabilities (November et al., 2010; Stiegler, 2003). In this frame, mobile phones

and other portable devices equipped with sensors (e.g. GPS, compass, accelerometer, micro-

phone, code readers) are able to locate us in the environment and react to environmental data.

In such an assemblage of space, code, geocoded databases, and sensing devices, we should

expect environmental forms of media to thrive (e.g. augmented reality, location-enabled games).


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Figure 1. Google’s patent illustration of a geolocation module performing a location correction process.Source: Google Inc. ‘Refining Location Estimates and Reverse Geocoding Based on a User Profile. US Patent 20100287178.

Barreneche 333

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Given that our immediate environmental surroundings are gaining agency, capable now of

performing calculations in a feedback relation with our portable sensing devices, even undertaking

autonomous actions – ‘automated management’ – (Kitchin and Dodge, 2011), a critical analysis of

the emerging forms of environmental media is most needed. Drawing from Foucault’s govern-

mentality analytic framework we could call this endeavour an environmentality critique (Foucault,

2008: 259–261; Massumi, 2005, 2009), which would entail analysing the human–nonhuman

assemblages that compose these environments (techno-geographical milieus), and particularly

interrogating how they frame the agency of users and modulate socio-spatial relations.

The article will mainly focus on Google’s approach to geolocation, examining its location

platform as an ‘environmental technology’ (Foucault, 2008) in order to shed light on some of the

modes of governance at work in locative media. It will argue that when the ordering logic of

Google’s algorithms is put to work to sort out the physical world, new power compositions are

cultivated, which may potentially affect the population mobility flows in urban spaces.

Locative platforms as geodemographic systems

In a 1999 article, JC Spohrer, an IBM researcher, presented the concept of a WorldBoard. In that

article, Spohrer suggested the possibility of building a ‘global infrastructure to associate infor-

mation with places’ that would allow anyone to ‘post and read messages associated with any place

. . . on a planetary scale and as a natural part of everyday life’ (Spohrer, 1999: 602–604). Parallel

with the development of locative media within the arts over the last half-decade, the WorldBoard

idea would begin to take shape with the launch of commercial mapping services, above all

Google’s location platforms in 2005, and their subsequent broad adoption.

In the present article, I will focus on Google’s embodiment of the WorldBoard idea, particularly

Google’s location platform, Places, although the analysis is complemented with and extended to

other location-based services and location-enabled platforms.

According to Google, ‘a Place Page is a web page for every place in the world, organizing all the

world’s information for that place. And we really mean every place: there are Place Pages for

businesses, points of interest, transit stations, landmarks, and cities all over the world’ (Google

Inc., 2009b). In the API documentation, Google defines a place as ‘an establishment, a geographic

location, or prominent point of interest’ (Google Inc., 2011d). The basic layout of a place page

includes: information about the place (address, telephone, opening hours, website), events, photos

uploaded by the owner, geotagged user-generated content, related places, mapping tools, Web cita-

tions, personalized recommendations, a reviews section, and as with any other Google service,

advertising. The core component of place pages is, nevertheless, the reviews section, which

include at the same time different components: ratings, ‘reviews from around the web’, ‘reviews

by Google users’, and ‘what people are saying’. In this light, a place page is a truly ‘virtual palimp-

sest of place’ (Graham, 2010). It is worth noting that as a local media form, Places should be con-

sidered in a media lineage that spans yellow pages to online business directories and review

websites.

At the macro level, Places is a database incorporated into Google’s mapping platform as a

nested content layer for searching for nearby locations based on what a given user is looking for

(find the place that meets user’s needs) rather than simply providing navigating directions. It is the

Places database (or Points of Interest database) that underlies its local search technology. In its

basic workings, the Places API takes location data in the form of geographical coordinates as input

and returns a list of named locations. With Places, Google integrates two originally separated


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services: location search and local search.1 This is an integration particularly critical for mobile

search where users need both information targeted to their specific location (e.g. nearby cafes) and

search for content specific to a location (e.g. best cafes in Soho).

The rise of mobile location-based services is making critical the availability of comprehensive

and rich places databases into which developers can build their applications. In fact, the main cur-

rent social media players have incorporated geolocation already, turning their respective platforms

into location-enabled services (e.g. Twitter released its geotagging API in August, 2009, and Face-

book its Places API in August, 2010). The collection of data to build these places databases takes

different strategies, however. To illustrate, Facebook Places harnesses its social graph to collect

local/location data, Foursquare uses a crowd-sourced approach that relies on game dynamics, and

Google Places deploys a mixed strategy using controlled data (e.g. Streetview, Maps, Local Busi-

ness Center), listing providers’ licensed data, online directories, and user-generated data.

More specifically, in the case of Google, a place page is an assemblage of local/location data

produced out of Google’s own databases and dispersed data on the web. A patent application

describes the method whereby these assemblages of structured information about places are

algorithmically generated: Google’s web crawling looks for unique business/address/phone groups

in order to create data clustering modules into which all data about a place is finally collected

(Google Inc., 2010b).

The key political questions remain, nevertheless, how does Google structure its geoindex (the

index of geo-coded data) to make information searchable by place? And, in this ordering, ‘what

counts as ‘‘near’’ or ‘‘local’’’? (Thrift, 2005: 471) Patent applications dating as far back as 2004

(Google Inc., 2010d) already show the importance that Google has given to location as indexation

criteria for information. This is, however, today even more important as the search engine now dis-

plays local information to users even when the queries have no explicit geographical terms. In this

case Google determines implicit local intent using other signals including GPS data, geo IP, search

history, or language of the query (Google Inc., 2011f). Furthermore, Google has merged its previ-

ously distinct local and general search results increasing, as a consequence, the visibility of infor-

mation that could only be reached before through its local services (from Google Local to Maps).

Google’s criterion for ranking places is not strictly geographical as such. A given place is

ranked considering not only the ‘distance from the geographic identifier in the search term’ but

mainly through the calculation of its non-cartographic attributes, namely, its online presence (or

PageRank score. See Zook and Graham, 2007b). Google’s local algorithm PlaceRank patent reads

as follows:

Place rank is computed based on the weighted contributions of various non-cartographic meta attributes

about a geospatial entity. Rather than directly measuring a characteristic of a physical place . . . these

attributes reflect traits of abstractions or representations associated with the geospatial entity. (Google

Inc, 2011b)

Among those non-cartographic attributes, one stands out from the algorithm’s patent documenta-

tion: georeferences. In local search, georeferences are the equivalent of the inbound links that

search engines use to calculate a website popularity. They refer specifically to citations or men-

tions of a place tied to a particular locale, or as it is stated in another of Google’s patents, they are

documents that are associated with a location . . . A document may include, for example, an e-mail, a

web site, a business listing, a file, a combination of files, one or more files with embedded links to other

files, a news group posting, a blog, a web advertisement, etc. (Google Inc., 2004)

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This is how georeferences influence place ranking:

When multiple entities are clustered in a relatively small geographical region, this signifies that authors

of the entities have indicated a geographical region of elevated interest. From this it can be assumed

that an entity with an elevated density of neighboring entities has a greater value than would otherwise

be the case. This is implemented in an embodiment of the ranking system described herein by adding or

otherwise providing a rank bonus based on the number of other entities within a defined area that

includes an entity’s location. (Google Inc, 2011b)

Georeferences function, then, as the alleged one link equals one vote of the PageRank system. This

way, as Google Places offers a ranking bonus based on the flow of check-ins to a given place, the

number of check-ins represents the spatial equivalent of a clickstream, and a measurement of atten-

tion value in real-time.

Another important ranking factor to consider not only in place ranking but also in Google’s

search technology at large is personalization:2

A rankings premium may be assigned to geospatial entities based on the user’s interest or preferences.

User data collected at a client may be stored in the memory of the entity ranking module and used by

the ranking engine to generate entity rankings that are personal to the user. (Google Inc, 2011b)

Google may extract location clues mainly from users’ search history, as well as previous reviews,

ratings and recommendations of places made by the user and his social network.

There are, furthermore, more variables determining local search that are not included in the

PlaceRank patent but are nevertheless prominent in the orderings of places. Particularly, and along

with georeferences, of great importance is the volume of documents with reviews of the place on

the web as well as their specific quality (Google Inc., 2010f). The quality of reviews is algor-

ithmically measured using what is called sentiment, that is, opinions or affective states that signal

the attitude of users towards a given place. Sentiment analysis in fact lays the base of a platform

that aggregates dispersed data about places and delivers it in the form of reviews.

Google’s sentiment analysis technology basically looks for different attributes of a particular

place that could be rated by users (e.g. location, service, food, experience, value, ambience and so

forth) in order to aggregate opinion expression about them. In order to do so, the algorithm breaks

down phrases to sort words according to lexicons to understand their meanings in context, then

subjects them to quantificational procedures to determine the strength of the sentiment expressed,

and finally assembles review summaries expressing the sentiment for the different attributes

(Google Inc., 2008. See Figure 2).

It can be argued that an affective dimension is indeed already built into the platform via an

algorithm capable of measuring affectivity. Through this process of a ‘grammatization of affects’

(Stiegler, 2010),3 the sentiment algorithm then captures the ‘affective labour’ (Hardt, 1999) produced

in these communication exchanges: beliefs, desires, feelings, opinions towards places (Google Inc,

2007), using the resulting data to refine and improve local search and place recommendations. The

regulation of the population becomes in this way the management of the public. According to

Foucault (2007: 105), ‘the public . . . is the population seen under the aspect of its opinions, ways of

doing things, forms of behaviour, customs, fears, prejudices, and requirements’. In this light, the

public in Google’s platform amounts to the aggregate behaviour of individual users. It is a statistical

trend in the population, never static but in continuous variation (Lazzarato, 2006: 74). At stake in the

platform’s use of sentiment analysis is a form of ‘environmental power’ that works as a modulation


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of the relationship between the user and his/her environment through ‘affective calculation’ and the

modulation of affectivity – perception of place (Massumi, 2009; see also: Grusin, 2010).

A spatial ontology is always a ‘way of describing spatial entities from one perspective or

knowledge system’ (Schuurman, 2009: 377). That is to say, a spatial ontology embodies an

ordering that is always a product of a specific ‘way of knowing the world’ (Schuurman, 2009: 377).

In Google, this ordering is not as much based on geographical distance as it is on the collective

symbolic capital of social spaces as accumulated and sorted by Google’s algorithms. In this

process, Google imposes its ‘PageRank epistemology’ onto the world. That is, it sorts spatial

entities according to the measurement of media-driven attention (attention capital): the quantity

(e.g. number of georeferences) and quality (e.g. sentiment of reviews, authority, ratings and so

on) of the online media presence of places. The major issue of concern is that the power law of

information that gives shape to the asymmetrical and centralized topology of the internet, whereby

the most heavily linked sources rule the network (‘googlearchy’ – Hindman et al., 2003), could be

reproduced in the topology of population flows in urban places.

Media geography scholarship has investigated this relationship between software, space and

society, describing the myriad of ways by which code produces everyday spatiality (see Dodge and

Kitchin 2005; Dodge et al., 2009; Graham, 2005; Kitchin and Dodge, 2011; Thrift and French,

2002; Zook and Graham, 2007a, 2007b). Further, Burrows and Gane (2006) have stressed that

coded spaces are not simply geographical but also social in nature. In this light, the manner in

which location platforms organize space should be understood as essentially geodemographical in

as much as at play is the sorting of places according to the cultural capital and collective desire

attached to them. Building, therefore, on Burrows and Gane’s proposition, the argument I want to

put forward is that there is a specific geodemographic ontology underlying the logic of spatial

ordering in location platforms.

A geodemographic system is an information technology that combines databases on consumers’

data and geographic information systems (GIS) in order to enable ‘marketers to predict beha-

vioural responses of consumers based on statistical models of identity and residential location’

(Goss, 1995, 171). These systems are built upon the sociological assumption that location, par-

ticularly where we live, signals social and cultural characteristics of a given population. The

origins of geodemographic systems could be traced back to the end of the 19th century with the

surveys of life and labour in London (see Burrows and Gane, 2006; Parker et al., 2007), though its

discursive foundations are to be found in the 1920s with the Chicago School of Sociology’s ideas

of ‘urban ecology’ as the city’s principle of socio-spatial organization (see Ashby et al., 2008;

Figure 2. Google Places – Sentiment analysis of a restaurant.Source: Google Places search query.

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Burrows and Gane, 2006; Uprichard et al., 2009). Modern computer-based geodemographics did

not appear until the early 1970s, though. The first models basically combined public census data

with private consumption surveys (Burrows and Gane, 2006: 794; Philips and Curry, 2002: 143–

144) to sort populations by postcodes using cluster-analysis methods. Even though, in its inception,

this technology intended to serve urban policy purposes, in their current form commercial geode-

mographic systems produce socio-cultural spatial classifications based on an even wider range of

data (consumer credit and purchase data, life-style surveys, electoral rolls, property valuations,

house sell prices and so on) in order to sort the city into life-style areas to serve mainly market

calculations. In the internet era, geodemographics migrated online and were made available to the

public in the form of internet-based neighbourhood information systems (e.g. Upmystreet). They

basically offer neighbourhood profiles and real estate prices for people to compare, which repre-

sented a significant development since making geodemographic data publicly available encour-

aged people to sort themselves as they were able to make informed decisions on which

neighbourhoods to move to (Burrows et al., 2005). The last generation of geodemographic systems

already incorporates segmentations based on online behaviour using data from ISP providers. For

example, Experian, the prime supplier of geodemographic services in the UK, offers geodemo-

graphic profiling of websites’ visitors that allows its clients to identify which postal regions send most

traffic to their respective websites and compare this with store locations and their customer databases.

Ultimately, geodemographics could be thought of as a biopolitical technology inasmuch as these sys-

tems have historically facilitated the ordering of modes of life for economic governance purposes.

Arguably, location platforms share the core components of geodemographic systems: (1) A GIS

technology: for instance, Google possesses a comprehensive set of mapping technologies; (2) A

database on consumer identity behaviour: location platforms collect not only demographic data but

also behavioural data to determine the location patterns of users (Google Inc., 2009d); (3) Use of

cluster analysis to produce segmentation classifications: even though such classifications are not

visible for the user, it could be hypothesized that they are black-boxed in the algorithms. Such seg-

mentations would operate, then, in a similar way to how recommendation systems sort cultural

goods (Amazon, Last.fm) or social contacts (Facebook SocialGraph):

Our system automatically compares the places you’ve rated against the places rated by other Google

Places users, and identifies people whose taste overlap — meaning you both tend to like and dislike the

same places. Now, you can see all the places that people who are ‘like-minded’ with you enjoy, since

there’s a very good chance you’re going to love them too. (Google Inc., 2011a)

Even though Google Places does not provide a rich description of its places recommendation sys-

tem, looking at other location platforms could shed light on the basic workings of such systems.

For instance, Where Inc.’s place recommendation algorithm, PlaceGraph, produces a ‘global map-

ping of places and how they are related with each other for a particular user’ (Where Inc., 2011a).

PlaceGraph works by mapping relations between places to produce similarity clusters based on

location, general business listings and user inputs data (e.g. ratings, reviews, check-ins and so

on) to match them with user profiles (Where Inc., 2011b).

These systems change our basic understanding of places. Instead of distinct locations, ‘we are

now dealing with places in the form of a network of relations and connections’ (Thielmann,

2010: 6) woven by the socio-spatial behaviour and lifestyle characteristics of individuals.4 Overall,

the spatial epistemology of geodemographics – that is, ‘the spatial orderings of life-styles’ (Goss,

1995: 191) – still holds in location platforms.


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Nonetheless, location platforms introduce new geodemographic variables. While traditional

geodemographics is built on residency, in location platforms households are not the basic unit of

consumption any more, instead they include places (or the so-called ‘venues’). Whereas the house-

hold was important because it represented the node connecting people with the marketing network,

under this new guise this connection is established instead directly through the mobile phone. In

the traditional geodemographic systems framework, ‘you are where you live’, to borrow the slogan

of a geodemographics company (Claritas). In the framework of location platforms, where the

user’s patterns of mobility can be recorded and tracked, ‘you are where you go’, to borrow this

time the slogan of a location platform (Whrrl). This is well exemplified in location sharing: the

check-in has less to do with position in space than with what being in a certain place expresses

about who you are. To put it in Giddens’ terms, ‘spatially located activity becomes more and more

bound up with the reflexive project of the self’ (1991: 147).

Put differently, this is a form of geodemographic profiling that uses the data-mining of records

of location trails to produce the socio-spatial patterns that make up the segmentations that enable

making inferences about users’ identity and behaviour. Paraphrasing Bourdieu (1989), we could

think of this operation as the mapping of the ‘space of lifestyles’. For instance, the record of a given

user’s visits to different locations may be used to build a consumer profile based on the character-

istics of the places this person has gone to and their respective periodical patterns – such as fre-

quency, date, time (see Gidofalvi et al., 2008).

Moreover, traditional geodemographics uses stable classifications that are unable to respond to

population mobility, mainly because they are built upon census data and the limited work of

professional geodemographers. On the other hand, our current socio-technical system makes pos-

sible the tracking of mobile individuals, allowing, thus, an automatic and crowd-sourced collection

of a wider set of data that is dynamically fed back to users. This is, I claim, a form of real-time

geodemographics where every check-in, every review, every rating, every place recommendation

represents a permanent survey and profiling of social spaces, algorithmically sorted in terms of

heterogeneity rather than in terms of fixed ontologies. In this sense, the resulting spatiality is not

only automated but also ontogenetic as it is in constant becoming (Kitchin and Dodge, 2011).

User management in location platforms unfolds, therefore, in a media environment ‘open to

fluctuating processes’ (Foucault, 2008: 259) in which users themselves participate in their own

mediation. There is a feedback loop at work whereby the aggregate behaviour of individual users

feeds the platform, which is algorithmically mined to incorporate differences as trend patterns and

continually inserted back into the user experience as a metastable order. An emergent spatial

ordering that incorporates difference, as it will be argued later, turns out to be an effective

mechanism to govern the flows of information, people and commodities in the city. Power would

mainly lie here precisely in ‘the emergent non-linear socio-technical systems that channel, block

and connect the flows’ (Lash, 2007: 67).

In as much as geodemographics has proven successful in targeting populations for marketing

and political campaigns, these new socio-technical configurations raise questions in regards to the

geodemographic modelling of the information that reaches us, that is, the ‘software-sorting’

(Graham, 2005) of the information we get depending on our socio-spatial profiles. Google is

advancing mobile search towards this direction under what they term contextual discovery. In

an interview, Vanessa Mayer, the Vice President of Location and Local Services at Google,

explains how location may be used to push information to people (Siegler, 2010). When we are

on the mobile phone, she explains, context is ‘where you are in the physical world’; this way,

‘we can figure out where the next most useful information is’ (Siegler, 2010). In an embodiment

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of a techno-geographical milieu invested with agency, contextual discovery, Mayer takes ‘users’

location as a piece of context for finding what (users) want without them actually searching for

anything’ (Siegler, 2010). This is ‘Google results without the search’, Mayer concludes. We may

not be in that world yet, but forms of content geotargeting are already fully operative thanks to the

default personalization of search results (see Feuz et al., 2011).

Market research sponsored by Google has shown how mobile searches are characterized by an

immediate need. That is to say, users tend to take action immediately (or within a few hours) after

performing a mobile search query. Google (2011e) claims that nine out of ten mobile search users

take some action, with over half leading to an act of consumption. Considering this action-oriented

behavioural pattern, geodemographic segmentation represents a commodity inasmuch as it facil-

itates the exploitation of people’s spatial propensities to engage in the consumption of particular

goods and services. Location targeting value for local commerce lies, thus, in its potential capacity

to convert data traffic into foot traffic to local retailers. In this light, contextual search would put in

place what Nigel Thrift calls ‘the engineering of propensity’ (2009): ‘Google’s overriding goal in

local advertising’, Vanessa Mayer continues, is to anticipate what people might want – a nearby

restaurant, theatre, or mechanic depending on their location, search history and other data – before

they actually know it’ (Siegler, 2010).

In short, location platforms provide users with a form of secured environment that delineates a

horizon of possibility that frames experience. This way, they create a predisposition of a field of

possible actions, ‘certain anticipatory readiness about the world’ (Thrift, 2008: 38), even to the

extent of pre-empting agency as such. To paraphrase Lazzarato, platforms do not create users but

the environment within which they exist (Lazzarato cited in Langlois et al., 2009). Unlike disci-

pline, apparatuses of security put into practice ‘not a standardizing, identificatory, hierarchical

individualization, but an enviromentalism [or environmentality]’ (Foucault, 2008: 261).

Google plays monopoly: The political economy of places databases

As the trend towards location-enabled smartphone adoption continues, along with mobile network

technology development (3G and 4G), we are witnessing the exponential growth of the mobile web

and the parallel emergence of a new search market.5 Coupled with these technological trends, there

is a social trend worth noting: mobile users’ demand for real-time local information.6 Former Goo-

gle CEO Eric Schmidt has also pointed to the centrality of local/location data in the mobile media

environment remarking that, ‘one in three queries from smartphones is about where I am’; that is,

they are related to the user’s local environment. Microsoft, Google’s main search competitor, esti-

mates that ‘local intent’ – implicit local queries – represents even slightly above half of all mobile

queries. These usage trends show both the pre-eminence of location in the mobile media experi-

ence and the extent to which people use mobile devices to navigate the physical world.

Currently, Google has an even more dominant market share in mobile search than it does in

desktop search.7 The available market research data suggests that the main opportunity for Google

to capitalize this market lies in location advertising.8 In fact, as a Google executive has been

reported to claim, the company is directing its mobile strategy precisely to location-based services,

particularly to local advertising and location-aware offers (coupons) (Butcher, 2010). This comes

as no surprise, though, as Google’s economy relies almost exclusively on advertising revenue

(96.7% in 2010), and the company’s success has depended precisely upon innovation on advertis-

ing technology. More broadly, this market opportunity also comprehends most location-based ser-

vices. What is at stake with the rise of these new services is a competition for a piece of the local


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advertising market, whose sales channels span from newspapers, radio, yellow pages and city

directories, to online search. It is market competition that could collapse the already weakened

local news and hyper-local media business models as advertising budgets redistribute among more

market players.

As early as 2004, patent applications already showed how Google was willing to give marketers

the option of targeting users by ‘geographic location’ (Google Inc., 2005, 2010a). By way of

illustration, Google’s key location-based advertising patent (Google Inc., 2010a) describes proce-

dures to determine advertisement relevancy using location, as well as allowing businesses to do

price arbitration according to potential customers’ locations by figuring out prices nearby to offer

deals. At present, location targeting is embedded in Google’s advertising system, comprising,

among other options, specifying a point on a map with a radius or a polygon marking a geographi-

cal area within which ads are targeted.

Geolocation technology renders users more easy to segment and target for marketers, and part

of mobile advertising value resides precisely in this efficacy:

What interests us a lot is not just more queries via mobile, but we know who you are and where you are

. . . If you go to Google on your handset, we ask would you like to share your location for more

relevant results, here’s what’s nearby now . . . If you search for something and the result is nearby,

the click-through rates (CTR) are astronomically higher. (Mike Steib, Google director of emergent

platforms cited in Butcher, 2010)

Some available metrics may also point to the value that location-targeting has for Google. The cost

pay by marketers and publishers to search engines (cost per click) is higher in mobile search than

on desktop search (Efficient Frontier, 2011). If the advertising replies (CTR) are effectively higher

at the local level, as the Google executive suggests, an ad targeted at a country level would be

worth less than one more accurately targeted at the city, neighbourhood or even street level. Local

players would be therefore more likely to raise the bids paid for ads competing for these valuable

clicks, generating as a result more profits for Google’s advertising system. For that reason, owning

the database of places (local/location data) constitutes a crucial economic asset in as much as map-

ping and profiling the locations from which users are searching, updating their status or checking-

in is necessary to target ads more effectively at the more profitable local level. Nonetheless, it still

remains to be seen whether the so far ‘rather hesitant adoption of mobile advertising’ owing to the

conflicting interests of the groups involved – telcos, handset manufacturers, content providers –

(Wilken and Sinclair, 2009), as well as users’ current wariness toward location services9 will

continue to pose limits to such business potential.

Google’s power must be understood first and foremost from the perspective of value production

(Pasquinelli, 2009). The company has broadly two strategies of value production at play in its

location platform: either directly enticing publishers and merchants to advertise as delineated

earlier, or more indirectly channelling users’ production to enrich its place database. The latter is

unfolded at various levels according to different users’ categories: business owners, developers,

and users at large.

At a large scale, with its algorithmic-generated place pages, Google collects the information

available about places on the web along with the local knowledge implicit in users’ spatial annota-

tions (e.g. reviews, geotagged media, user-generated maps and so forth). That is to say, it captures

the ‘collective symbolic capital’ (Harvey, 2002) of places in its database. In order to do this,

Google has been gradually enabling its platforms to better capture user-generated content. In June

2007 it allowed users to add reviews to its business listings. Later on that year it started indexing

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user-contributed spatial annotations and showing the results in Maps. MyMaps and Map Maker

services followed allowing users to contribute mapping data. In 2008, the option of adding new

places was incorporated. Subsequently, rating places (2008), editing place pages information

(2010) and uploading photos directly to them (2011), are made available to the public to help in

building the index of places.

Broadly, Google Places captures user-contributed metadata about the world to create place pro-

files and repackage it basically in the form of reviews. The weight of reviews in the platform lies in

their specific influence over offline economic behaviour. Research on the impact of user-generated

reviews on offline consumption (ComScore, 2007) showed that one out of every four internet users

reads reviews online before buying offline. Besides, findings pointed to users’ willingness to pay

more for a better-rated product or service. In terms of Gabriel Tarde’s economic psychology it

could be concluded that ‘there is no economic relationship between men that is not first accompa-

nied by an exchange of words, whether verbal, written, printed, telegraphed, or telephoned’

(quoted by Latour and Lepinay, 2010: 49). By the same token, the economy of reviews has

spawned new forms of ‘evil media’. That is to say, ‘media practices of trickery, deception and

manipulation’ (Fuller and Goffey, 2009), such as local spam and ‘bad’ search engine optimization

practices, which are being exploited mainly by reputation management companies that offer ser-

vices including posting fake reviews or the elimination of negative reviews in order to deceive

Google’s local algorithm.

On another level, in as much as Place Pages are automatically generated, every business owner

is compelled to enrol in Google’s platform at risk of not being able to have any control over his/her

business web presence. According to Google Places statistics there are approximately 50 million

Place Pages, out of which business owners have claimed more than 4 million already. Once a Place

page is claimed, its owner is subjected to a regulatory regime that encompasses a set of rules over

content (e.g. prohibition of spam, sexually explicit material, the use of offensive language and

certain words including the word Google), and a proposed set of protocols (e.g. use of micro-

formats such as hCard or hReview) to make that content better suitable for Google’s indexing tech-

nology. And at the level of the representational, it imposes a set of categories, a form of template,

as to how places are represented online. Google also polices the database through its guidelines and

discussion forums to make sure users adjust to good search engine optimization practices. A failure

to comply with this regime may result in disciplining measures: rejection of a listing, suspensions,

denial of access to the listing, or its complete deletion.

Business owners are made responsible for collecting local data, structuring content according to

guidelines, policing reviews, creating ads and coupons, and tracking users’ search behaviour to

optimize the place profile and advertising. All the labour put into this data maintenance makes the

database more robust and more valuable, while decreasing the value of ever less relevant business

websites. In fact, there is well-founded concern that Google may be trying to divert traffic from

local business websites by placing its Places pages in a prominent position in the organic search

results (which include basic contact information such as telephone, address, and map directions

that could make irrelevant a visit to a business webpage), in order to become an obligatory inter-

mediary between potential customers and local businesses. At play here is a form of capturing the

online presence of places and the expropriation of the possibility of monetizing data traffic.

Google’s approach with Places is similar to its Maps strategy that made that service become the

de facto mapping platform of the internet: offering a free-of-charge platform with an open API to

attract developers, build audiences, collect the metadata resulting from its usage, test technologies

and services, all in order to foster an ‘ecosystem’ around the resulting database. Thus, aiming to


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become the underlying database of a location-enabled world, Google opens up its places database

(Places API) for free for developers to build their services upon. However, this comes at the

expense of capturing them within its advertising regime. According to Places API documentation,

in order to get access to the database a developer must ‘provide a valid Adsense publisher id’ (Google

Inc., n.d.). The document also adds: ‘calculation of Place information may generate . . . advertising

which must be displayed to the user in some fashion’ (Google Inc., n.d.). The logic of value creation

here is twofold. On the one hand, Google enriches its database with the incoming data generated by

third party apps; and, on the other hand, it extends the reach of its advertising program to new

platforms.

This model entails a database economy whereby value is extracted out of the collection and

mining of the data produced in Google’s different services. Through the aforementioned forms of

capturing users’ distributed-labour, therefore, Google manages to set up a circuit of database co-

production that continuously feeds back into a cycle of production as the data contributed by users

makes Google’s place database more valuable, attracting, as a consequence, larger audiences

(including developers) and making it more necessary for small businesses to get incorporated.

In this mode of production local businesses are then both captured as customers of Google’s adver-

tising programs and producers of local/location data.

More broadly, Google Places can be also understood in the light of a process of commoditi-

zation of the online presence of places and the social relations that map them in different ways.

Akin to the Monopoly board game, by owning the database of places, that is, by expanding a

monopoly over the world’s metadata, Google gets to charge rents out of the accumulated value

produced by users, local business owners and developers through its advertising system. The

‘expropriation of the commons through the rent’, as Negri and Vercellone argue (cited in Pasquinelli,

2008: 94), constitutes the main mechanism of valorization of the contemporary economy. In this

light, Google exploits social spaces by extracting profit out of the access to the cultural commons of

places its platform encloses.

Locative platforms’ spatial rationality: Locationing, locationalmarketing and the mobilization of bodies in the city

The increasing production of geocoded data is rendering the city a platform for aggregation of

information, and a new navigation interface in its own right. This raises questions as to what degree

the attention economy, responsible to a great extent for the creation of value in the regime of the

digital, can be put into effect in the experience of the city. The broadcasting of location, for

instance, has already made it possible to link latitude–longitude coordinates to social spaces

allowing platforms to turn numerical data into attention value, thus becoming one of the main

mechanisms to measure the social desirability of places as it aids tracking where people are going

(hot spots or places trending). This way, geocoded media as metadata about the world is put to

work to measure the value of socio-spatial relations.

Locational marketing is founded on controlling attention by using geolocation technology to

drive populations to desired places. In this respect, the technical capacity to measure attention

allows location platforms to work as marketing platforms themselves. In fact, there is a double

nature to their operations. All the main location platforms offer local businesses services to manage

users (CRM – customer relationship management) with the aim of turning them into potential

customers. In the case of Google Places, it offers analytics to help business owners in monitoring

what kind of searches are performed to find their businesses so they can fine-tune metatags and

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listing descriptions accordingly to attract more traffic. The platform also provides time and

demographic data about visitors to assist targeting coupons. Moreover, it offers the functionality

‘where driving directions come from’, which maps out the post code areas of visitors that request

directions; a tool of great value when it comes to identifying the geography of consumption for a

business, including spotting zones to target campaigns or locate potential new businesses. In

short, what is offered to marketers is a platform of database marketing that taps into Google’s

data in order to modulate spatial behaviour (see Manzerolle, 2011), or, put in marketing terms,

by bringing customers to the ‘point of sale’.

Yet, among the technologies of locational marketing available today, none seems to have the

potential of enabling the management of users’ attention as persistent location does. This tech-

nology, unlike the check-in that requires the active participation of the user, extracts location data

passively from mobile phones on a continuous basis and uses it to push geo-targeted content.10 Per-

sistent location entails a spatial ordering of the city in which precise geographic boundaries are set

up, the so-called ‘geo-fences’, which trigger communication (notifications) based on the user rela-

tionship to the predefined space. Its implementation enables an experience of the city that resembles

that of the current internet, since as users navigate the city their spatial movements expose them to

context-targeted content (advertising). The variables used in fine targeting users may also include

previous records of urban mobility patterns, time of the day, ‘dwell time’ within the geo-fence, and

other types of environmental data, such as weather conditions.

In these locational forms of marketing, we are presented with ‘the power of code enacted

spatially in the processes of governmentality’ (Dodge et al., 2009: 1290) to open up urban space to

marketing government. Unlike sovereign or disciplinary forms of governing space, the interven-

tion does not entail establishing territorial restrictions (Foucault, 2007: 51), but an envir-

onmentality that administers a ‘space in which a series of uncertain elements unfold’ (Foucault,

2007: 35) with the aim of fostering the circulation of people and commodities. Power is exercised,

therefore, as an ‘environmental type of intervention’ (Foucault, 2008: 260) through the mediation

at a variety of points of the relationship between users and the environmental surroundings.

With the technical possibility of tying information, people and objects to location setting the

conditions of the emergence of new forms of governing the arrangements of bodies in space,

location-enabled socio-technical systems can be understood, thus, in the light of governmentality

as ‘the right disposition of things’ (Foucault, 1991: 93). ‘The right disposition’ of bodies in space is

the problem ‘of knowing what relations of proximity, what type of storage, circulation, mapping

. . . and classification of human elements should be adopted in a given situation to achieve a given

end’ (Foucault cited in Huxley, 2008: 1646). As I tried to demonstrate with Google Places, location

platforms entail a geodemographical spatial ordering according to which subjects are located, or

better, locate themselves, for the purpose of marketing government.

An environmentality analysis should also interrogate ‘the ways space and environment can be

seen as rationalities of government’ (Huxley, 2007: 185; see also Osborne and Rose, 1999). To

address this problem we have to examine firstly the discourses underlying the organization and

practice of space in location platforms. Interestingly, the majority of the main location platforms,

particularly location sharing platforms, are all characterized by a promotional discourse of dis-

covery and empowerment: ‘Discover new places to go from people like you’ (Whirll); ‘Unlock

your City’ (Foursquare); ‘Discover the world around you’ (Loopt); and, ‘discover the extraordi-

nary in the world around you’ (Gowalla). It is worth noting that this logic of discovery also

underpins most location-based games (e.g. geocaching), and the fact that, in many location-based

services, participation, and hence the mobilization of people, is driven by game mechanics. Here,


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these platforms mirror the neoliberal model of markets whereby social participation is conceived

as competition and enterprise (Lazzarato, 2009). In its basic workings, users broadcast their loca-

tion (check-in to places) in exchange for social capital (e.g. being a ‘mayor’ of a place, ‘regular’, or

‘VIP’) or gains in the form of points (e.g. virtual badges) or offers (as in their close predecessor,

loyalty marketing programs). The experience of the city, like eating in a restaurant or visiting a

museum, is, this way, turned into a game in which subjectivity is produced as lifestyle by associ-

ation with places and their symbolic capital founded upon a competition for status and rewards.

Hence the slogan, ‘you are where you go’. More precisely, what is at stake is the gamification

of spatial consumption practices as such. In this sense, gamification operates as a biopolitical form

of marketing that ‘insert[s] the object for sale deeply into the social fabric of life itself’ (Zwick and

Ozalp, 2011: 238).

In their double nature as marketing technologies, location platforms actualize neoliberal forms

of governmentality. Under this discursive regime movement, social interactions and economic

transactions in the city are stimulated. Consequently, as mobility multiplies so does the database of

location trails mined to produce the socio-spatial patterns that enable the tracking and modulation

of population flows in the city.

Nevertheless, and despite the ‘discovery’ rhetoric, place encounters are rather driven by a

geodemographic logic. Roughly put, the exploration of the new is rather the recognition of the

same. Users are presented instead with a phenomenological experience of the world that – as Thrift

suggests – is ‘much closer to a staged performance in which to perceive the environment is also to

perceive oneself’ (2008: 94) – in short, echoing the Google Places slogan, ‘connecting you with the

places you love’. The neoliberal rationality involved here is the calculation of individual self-

interest (Massumi, 2009).

Similar to risk management strategies, the automatic production of social spaces at work in

location platforms might rather produce forms of securitized environments that pre-empt negativ-

ity from the experience of the city – that is, bad and unexpected encounters – while enabling and

fostering positive economically productive encounters (meeting friends, visiting recommended

places or grabbing good deals). The tracking and modulation of material flows of people to max-

imize consumption constitutes for this reason a biopolitical project. At stake is the spatial govern-

ance of the population: ‘the organization of encounters in the metropolis is not only a political

matter but also immediately an economic one. Joyful encounters are economically significant acts

and, in fact, are in many respects the pinnacle of the biopolitical economy’ (Hardt and Negri, 2009:

256).

What location platforms are offering us is a new mechanism to orientate us in the world and,

ultimately, governing access to space as such (see Stiegler, 2003). According to the press release

launching Google Places, the aim of the platform is precisely ‘to help people make more informed

decisions about where to go’ (Google Inc., 2010e). The spatial rationality underpinning these

mechanisms of orientation, as I have argued here, entails a worldview in which social space is

stratified in such a way as to better suit the mode of capture of the attention economy, and socio-

spatial relations are mediated according to a logic of maximization of consumption (reviews, ratings,

recommendations, coupons and so forth). From Thrift’s standpoint, this is ‘a new ‘‘post-

phenomenological’’ commodity architecture . . . that can combine interactive systems . . . and com-

modities with the spaces and times of everyday life’ (2008: 43). It is important, then, to differentiate

this form of governmental power from arbitrary and disciplinary attempts to control users of these

services. Location platforms should be framed within forms of ‘institutional control’ (Lianos,

2003) characteristic of neoliberal service economies and governmentalities. At play is a managerial

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rationality that within an economic frame (business model) privileges the most efficient processing

of information to deliver services according to the calculation of self-interest. From this standpoint,

users are not disenfranchised as such, inasmuch as choosing to use these platforms the services

provided are perceived as maximizing the agent’s interest.

It remains to be investigated, nevertheless, whether such spatial rationality may be reproduced

in the experience of the city at other levels and, as a consequence, affect its political economy.

Particularly, whether the affective labour of users geotagging content, rating, reviewing, recom-

mending, and checking in to places – in short, the world’s metadata – may play a role in real estate

speculation and affect the value of physical places. In terms of real estate economics, we might

face the possibility of a place’s online presence (place pages or place profiles) working as a mark of

distinction, and coming into play as an externality susceptible of being capitalized at a material

level. Similar to the logic of gentrification,11 the accumulation of the collective symbolic capital of

places in publicly searchable databases may potentially constitute another vector of valorization of

places shaping the future city. Conversely, if places’ visibility as determined by the ranking criteria

of these socio-technical systems has, as Graham argues, ‘effects on cultural, economic and political

processes’ (2010: 431), media underrepresented places may be obscured by these very same algo-

rithmic logics exercising, as a consequence, new forms of economic exclusion.

Conclusion

I have identified in this article the main program underlying location platforms whereby social

spaces, and hence modes of life, are ordered according to a geodemographic spatial rationality, as

well as analysing how geocoding renders space subject to novel forms of government and thus

contributing further to the commodification of social spaces. Finally, it is critical to keep questioning

the ‘naturalization’ of techno-geographical milieus, as Crandall (2010: 71) proposes, especially their

‘congealment into a standardized or ‘‘default’’ space’. Location-enabled socio-technical systems, and

the power relations they embody, are not fixed. They are ‘temporary stabilizations of ongoing

negotiations between social and technical agencies’ (Rohle, 2009), including programmers, venture

capitalists, marketers, regulators and users among others, that necessitate continual remapping if we

are to understand the conditions of production of contemporary forms of consumption of places.

Funding

The author gratefully acknowledges funding support from the University of Westminster’s Com-

munication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI), which made this research possible.

Notes

1. In 2004, Google first integrated its local business listing service with mapping and called it Google Local,

to rename it in 2006 as Google Maps. Finally, in 2010 Google Maps’ Local Business Center was rebranded

as Google Places. Google Places was previously known therefore as Google Local, then Google Maps and

Local Business Center (see Google Inc., 2011c).

2. Since December 2009, Google extended personalization to all its search technologies (see Google Inc.,

2009c).

3. Stiegler (2010: 31) understands grammatization as ‘the process through which the flows and continuities

which weave our existence are discretized’.

4. For a phenomenological account on how everyday mobile media practices impact the experience of places

and urban sociability, see Wilken (2008), de Souza e Silva (2004), and Sutko and de Souza e Silva (2011).


346



5. Google (2010c) claims 1 billion mobile gross revenue.

6. In the USA, the social trend in mobile usage indicates that nearly half of all users search in mobile

platforms for ‘information that is practical and in real time’ (47%), including mainly weather updates

(42%) and local business information (37%. See Purcell et al., 2011).

7. As of April, 2011, Google had a market share of roughly 98% in mobile search, according to StatCounter

(see Miller, 2011).

8. Market research company BIA/Kesley reported in 2010 that location targeted mobile advertising repre-

sents 51% of overall US mobile advertising spending and predicts it will account for 69% of US mobile

advertising by 2014. Search ads and location ads (paid-for positioning on maps and augmented reality

apps) in particular are expected to deliver the highest revenue, reported Gartner Inc. in 2011.

9. Research commissioned by Microsoft in 2011, and carried out in the USA, UK, Japan, Canada and

Germany, found that, despite the percieved usefulness of location-based services being relatively high, users

are still very concerned about potential issues such as unauthorized location sharing, personal information

theft, loss of privacy and security threats (see Microsoft, 2011).

10. For a detailed technical description of this technology, see Where Inc. (2010).

11. For a detailed biopolitical critique of the relationship between cultural production and capital accumula-

tion in the contemporary metropolis see Pasquinelli (2010).

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Biography

Carlos Barreneche is a researcher based at the University of Westminster’s Communication and Media

Research Institute (CAMRI), UK. His current doctoral research involves examining the articulations of

geocoded media within informational, cultural and commercial dynamics.

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Corrigendum

Corrigendum to the Debate ‘Preserving digital narratives in an age of present-mindedness’

by Kamilla Pietrzyk, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media

Technologies, DOI: 10.1177/1354856511433689, published in May 2012, 18(2) 127-133.

The information below should have been included in the Acknowledgment on page 131.

‘A version of this article was presented at the MIT7: Media in Transition conference, held at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, 13–15 May 2011.’

Convergence: The InternationalJournal of Research intoNew Media Technologies18(3) 353ª The Author(s) 2012Reprints and permission:sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.navDOI: 10.1177/1354856512447186con.sagepub.com



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