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

Editorial
Locative media: From

specialized preoccupation
to mainstream fascination
Convergence: The International

Journal of Research into
New Media Technologies
18(3) 243-247
The Author(s) 2012
Reprints and permission:
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DOI: 10.1177/1354856512444375
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Rowan Wilken
Swinburne 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 networking service Foursquare became embroiled in its own controversy when it was revealed that
much of the traffic on their site was appearing on Please Rob Me.com, a website which streams
updates from various location-based networks that shows when users check-in to a geographical
location that is not their home.
These controversies are of note not just for the salutary lessons they offer about the risks
associated with digital data retention, privacy and security. At a more general level, they are
noteworthy in that they testify to the dramatically increased public awareness of, and mainstream
(especially press) exposure granted to, location-based media services. Such services are now well
established and booming commercially, with consumers accustomed to using sat nav devices in
their cars, Google maps on desktop and laptop computers and mobile devices, geoweb and geotagging and other mapping applications, and various apps on iPhones and smartphones that use location technologies. Not only do location-based services comprise the fastest growing sector in web
technology businesses (Gordon and de Souza e Silva, 2011: 9), questions of location and locationawareness 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 worlds data
(2011: 20); or, as McCullough (2006: 26) puts it, information is now coming to you . . . wherever
you are and is increasingly about where you are.
In this special issue,1 locative media is the term that is used to capture this diverse array of
location aware technologies and practices. The term locative media (that is, media of communication that are functionally bound to a location) is preferred for the precise reason that it is
economical and expansive but also precise. That is to say, it captures a lot in two words while also
retaining a sense of the terms very particular history, which is anchored within the field of new
media arts. For instance, various sources trace the origin of the term locative media back to Karlis
Kalnins, who is said to have first proposed it during the Art Communication Festival in Riga,
Corresponding author:
Rowan Wilken, Swinburne University of Technology, Swinburne Institute for Social Research, Mail 53, PO Box 218,
Hawthorn, 3122 Australia
Email: rwilken@swin.edu.au
Downloaded from con.sagepub.com by guest on February 1, 2013
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Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 18(3)
Latvia in 2003, and the crucial influence of the RIXC Centre for New Media Culture in Latvia
(see Zeffiro and Tuters this issue).
Whatever the precise origins of the term, it is fair to say that the field of new media arts has been
at the vanguard of exploring both the creative possibilities and critical implications of locative
media, and is where the bulk of the literature on locative media to date is found. Here, important
work has been done, to cite just two examples, in exploring how location-based services can generate new potentialities for facilitating forms of social appropriation, citizenship and (experimental) sociability (Lemos, 2009; Tarkka, 2010; in addition, see Licoppe and Inada, 2006), and in
examining the particularities, tensions and conflicts associated with urban space (Bambozzi,
2009; Salmond, 2010).
Outside of media arts, significant work has been done on locative media at the intersection of
research into mobile technologies, geography (particularly the sub-field of media geography, see
Thielman, 2010), and urban space and place. Taken up in this body of work are myriad considerations, which range across (to name only a few) analysis of how locative technologies mediate the
relationship between technology use and physical/digital spaces (Crawford and Goggin, 2009; de
Souza e Silva and Frith, 2010; de Souza e Silva and Sutko, 2011; Rosol, 2010; Wilken, 2008, 2011;
Wilken and Goggin, 2012a, 2012b; Willis, 2010), exploration of the representation of space and
spatial practice through locative media (Drakopoulou, 2010; Gazzard, 2011; Lapenta, 2011; Rueb,
2008) and concern for what might be described as questions of power and the politics of location
and locatability (Elmer, 2010; Tarkka, 2010). What the foregoing examples evidence, in short, is a
flowering of detailed, wider, interdisciplinary scholarship on and around locative media.
Within this emerging (pre-)history of locative media, the period between 2005 and 2009 can be
seen as especially significant in that it signaled an important turning point in the commercial
development of locative technologies. It was during this time that interest in locative media began
to shift. Initially a somewhat specialized pursuit or preoccupation, locative media is now very
much shaped by mainstream uptake and has become the focus of increased consumer fascination.
Two factors are crucial here. The first is Googles embrace of geolocation services. As Gordon and
de Souza e Silva (2011: 20) explain in relation to mapping technologies:
For many decades, the geolocation industry was focused on developing high-end geographic information system (GIS) software for market and social research, as well as military purposes. But when Google Maps launched in February 2005, and its application programming interface (API) was made
available to the public just a few months later, the specialized domain of GIS programmers became
the domain of everyday users.
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
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Wilken
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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 ones 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, Zeffiros 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 Zeffiros 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. Behrendts 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 Bluebrains US-based National Mall Project, Behrendt
develops the concept of placed-sounds: that is, user experience of certain locations via portable
media where the distribution of sound in space is pre-curated, and users create their own version or
remix of the service by choosing their path through the sounds.
The final three articles are very much anchored in the second phase of locative media development: the post-2005/2009 period of widespread adoption and use of smart phones and GPS and
other geolocational systems. In the fourth contribution, entitled Locative journalism, Lars Nye,
Solveig Bjrnestad, Bjrnar Tessem, and Kjetil Vaage ie, 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
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it is one thing to develop an effective mobile application, while it is quite another to engage industry and reorient the established journalistic procedures and textual conventions so that they effectively exploit the possibilities of the new medium.
The penultimate article, Navigating sociotechnical spaces, by Chris Chesher, develops an
extended comparison of spatial guidance and experiences of movement in the computer game
Grand Theft Auto IV and sat navs, such as Tom Tom Navigator. Cheshers 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 Googles location
platform Places, and combining thoughtful readings of corporate website data with analysis of
patent diagrams and other sources, Barreneche develops a fascinating (if somewhat troubling)
argument that location platforms are underpinned by a geo-demographical spatial ordering
according to which subjects are located for the purpose of economic government. Not only does
this article make a valuable contribution to established scholarship on power and place, it usefully
sheds light on how locative media services are being driven by private enterprise and are developing in ways that place them on the borders or outside of current media and communications and
other regulatory regimes. As such, locative media, it might be suggested, signal important shifts
in how we presently understand the political economy, consumption, and regulation of new media
services.
The aim of this special issue of Convergence is to open up conversations about the past, present
and possible future directions of locative media, both within the precise context of new media arts
as well as across their wider manifestations and contexts of use. It seeks to highlight the continued
importance of and need for ongoing and detailed critical engagement with locative media in all its
forms.
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 reading and reviewing the articles gathered here. Finally, I wish to thank Anthony McCosker and Karen Olsen
for their input and assistance.
References
Bambozzi AB (2009) Risky approximations between site-specific & locative arts. Wi: Journal of Mobile
Media, Summer. Available at: http://wi.hexagram.ca/?p56 (accessed 8 June 2012).
Crawford A and Goggin G (2009) Geomobile web: Locative technologies and mobile media. Australian Journal of Communication 36(1): 97109.
de Souza e Silva A and Frith J (2010) Locative mobile social networks: Mapping communication and location
in urban spaces. Mobilities 5(4): 485505.
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de Souza e Silva A and Sutko DM (2011) Theorizing locative media through philosophies of the virtual.
Communication Theory 21(1): 2342.
Drakopoulou S (2010) A moment of experimentation. Aether: The Journal of Media Geography 5A, March:
6376.
Elmer G (2010) Locative networking: Finding and being found. Aether: The Journal of Media Geography 5A,
March: 1826.
Gazzard A (2011) Location, location, location: Collecting space and place in mobile media. Convergence:
The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 17(4): 405417.
Goggin G (2011) Global Mobile Media. Routledge: London.
Gordon E and de Souza e Silva A (2011) Net Locality: Why Location Matters in a Networked World. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
Hjorth L, Burgess J and Richardson I (eds) (2012) Studying Mobile Media: Cultural Technologies, Mobile
Communication and the iPhone. New York: Routledge.
Lapenta F (2011) Locative media and the digital visualisation of space, place and information. Visual Studies
26(1): 13.
Lemos A (2009) Locative media in Brazil. Wi: Journal of Mobile Media, Summer. Available at: http://wi.
hexagram.ca/?p60 (accessed 8 June 2012).
Licoppe C and Inada Y (2006) Emergent uses of a multiplayer location-aware mobile game: The interactional
consequences of mediated encounters. Mobilities 1(1): 3961.
McCullough M (2006) On the urbanism of locative media. Places 18(2): 2629.
Rosol C (2010) From radar to reader: On the origin of RFID. Aether: The Journal of Media Geography 5A,
March: 3749.
Rueb T (2008) Shifting subjects in locative media. In: Hawk B, Rieder DM and Oviedo O (eds) Small Tech:
The Culture of Digital Tools. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 129133.
Salmond M (2010) The power of momentary communities: Locative media and (in)formal protest. Aether:
The Journal of Media Geography 5A, March: 90100.
Tarkka M (2010) Labours of Location. In: Crow B, Longford M and Sawchuk K (eds) The Wireless Spectrum:
The Politics, Practices, and Poetics of Mobile Media. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. 131145.
Thielman T (2010) Locative media and mediated localities: An introduction to media geography. Aether: The
Journal of Media Geography 5A, March: 117.
Wilken R (2008) Mobilizing place: Mobile media, peripatetics, and the renegotiation of urban places. Journal
of Urban Technology 15(3): 3955.
Wilken R (2011) Teletechnologies, Place and Community. New York: Routledge.
Wilken R and Goggin G (2012a) Mobilising place: Conceptual currents and controversies. In: Wilken R and
Goggin G (eds) Mobile Technology and Place. New York: Routledge, pp. 325.
Wilken R and Goggin G (eds) (2012b), Mobile Technology and Place. New York: Routledge.
Willis K (2010) Hidden treasure: Sharing local information. Aether: The Journal of Media Geography 5A,
March: 5062.
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Article
A location of ones own: A

genealogy of locative
media

18(3) 249-266
The Author(s) 2012
DOI: 10.1177/1354856512441148
con.sagepub.com
Andrea Zeffiro
Emily Carr University of Art & Design, Canada
Abstract
In this article, I confront locative media not as a technology or thing, rather, as a field of cultural
production, 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 to
expose the manner in which the field of locative media is constituted through multiple forces and
struggles. I trace its emergence through a genealogical lens, and revive and reintegrate older
debates, so as to include these tensions in the ongoing conceptualization of locative media. In
tracing the discursive events of the field, which encompass both formations and tensions, it will be
made apparent that locative media is not happenstance. Rather, it is 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.
Keywords
Bourdieu, 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 Gibsons 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
Email: info@andreazeffiro.com
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Like Varnelis, I also recognize a disjuncture between recent commercial locative media applications 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 Nietzsches 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). Characterizing genealogy by two moments: descent (Herkunft) and emergence (Entstechung), Foucaults 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 ontological 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 governing 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: 123127, 196198; 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: 2021, 2735).
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 researchers 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, ones identity and
research agenda do not have to be made known (Langer and Beckman, 2005). The mode of communication on listservs, as Clegg Smith explicates, is established for generalized distribution of
messages to participants who may or may not be present1 (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 [Locative] 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 Derridas (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. Furthermore, 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 influenced 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 media2 during the ArtCommunication Festival,
1617 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 ArtCommunication 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 urls 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
1636 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 Technology, the Latvian Cultural Capital Foundation, and the Nordic Cultural Foundation (Locative
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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 Virilios 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 appropriating 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 developing a framework or blueprint (Smite, 2003: 4), for a large-scale locative media event/installation, 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 (1114 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 subscribers 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 practical 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 April8 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 (59 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 Russells 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 (16 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 Gibsons 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, shes *Karostan*. Latvian alien passport. Its 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 November2 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-Packards (HP) Mediascape authoring toolkit.
Psychogeography
Formative locative media literature posits two defining moments of emergence. One is Karlis
Kalnins proposal of the term at the May 2003 ArtCommunication 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
Russells (1999) Headmap Manifesto, which outlines the socio-technical potentials of locationaware 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 recolonisation 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, politics, 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 Situationist International (Gray, 1974), and interspersed Situationists musings with commentary.
Subsequent to Russells 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 psychogeography 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 Glowlab 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 ones 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 psychogeography, 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 practices, and featured both artist talks and walks. Pre/amble also occasioned a site-specific reworking of
[murmur] for Vancouvers 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 psychogeography encircling the field, evidence of immersion within the scope of locative media is made apparent 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:
Theres 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 locative media to be invested in a new kind of locational humanism, tailored to the worldwide wanderer (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
Holmess 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 capabilities 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; DSouza
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 developers 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 location. 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 annotations, 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 provided 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 Woods 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 connect 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 Ulmers post, the bucket contained, 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, Its 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. Players 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 Centres 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 Universitys 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 scientists during Blast Theorys appointment as Adelaide Thinkers in Residence. Touted as the worlds 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 (34 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 demarcated 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 dispersed 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 Levines 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 Rogers 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 necessarily encourage a re-engagement with ones 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, technology 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 structures 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 tensions, 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 practices, 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 technological 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 articulates 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 occupation 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 evacuated 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 consequences 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 hyper-co-ordination; technologies of co-operation
amplification and the wireless commons debate; netwar the appropriation of surveillance
technologies by tactical media; and the relation between new locative media and magic. (Locative 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, 1617
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 production, 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 mannerist
situationism to situated
media

18(3) 267-282
The Author(s) 2012
DOI: 10.1177/1354856512441149
con.sagepub.com
Marc Tuters
University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Abstract
A decade ago, the convergence of GPS with mobile telephony first allowed media artists to map
the citys psychogeography. With such technology having now become widespread, the artistic
novelty of this approach has somewhat diminished. While the field of locative media has been and
continues to be productive of both work and of critique, this essay questions some of its conceptual commitments and critical interpretations. As the technological assemblages upon which
locative media are based are themselves constantly shifting, the essay considers adapting conceptual approaches accordingly. To this end, an argument is put forth for expanding the concept of
locative media, built upon Bruno Latours recent engagement with new media and design practices
which he characterizes in terms of the act of assembling rather than debunking. Drawing further on
actor-network theory, an alternative interpretation of the metaphor of cognitive mapping is developed in which a core concept of locativity, that of proximity, is redefined in terms of tracing the
connections of networked objects, this as opposed to the often repeated association of locative
media with Situationist psychogeography. An assembly of practices are examined which trace logistics and give voice to multiple nonhuman ontologies.
Keywords
ANT, 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 citys streets in an attempt to
Marc Tuters, New Media & Digital Culture, University of Amsterdam, Turfdraagsterpad 9, 1012 XT, Amsterdam, the
Netherlands
Email: mtuters@gmail.com
268
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 technological object of study has developed, too should the methods of analysis, from what Jaques Rancie`re
(2006: 10) refers to as a Situationist tradition of critical thought that has degenerated into a deliberation on mourning, towards an appreciation of locative media as tool[s] for a politics that
doesnt 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-asgathering. 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 Latours 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 delimiting 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 theres 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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Figure.1. Songlines by GPSter, at Impakt Festival, Utrecht, the Netherlands, 2003.

Photo: Pieter Kers
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 medias 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 Dibbells (2006) notion of ludocapitalism 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
todays 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 (20022005. See Figure 1),3 which sought to use GPS to
connect pieces of digital information to a specific latitudelongitude 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
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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 patterns over essence (Crandall, 2006). In one such criticism, the GPSter project, along with Amsterdam 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 perspective (2009: 199), as signified, in particular, by the ascendancy of actor-network theory (See also:
Faras, 2010: 124). While deconstructionists argued that there was no outside of the text,5 the current 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 Rancie`re, we might also do the same with locative critique, at
least in its more nostalgic variants. To this end Rancie`re (2006: 910) 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 Deleuzes concept of the society of control was first published, Hal Foster
(2012) identifies Rancie`re as one of the two leading proponents of the current post-critical moment
in art theory, along with Bruno Latour. According to Foster, both Rancie`re 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.
Latours 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 Latours 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: 2731).
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 Latours 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 geography. 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 increasingly 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 having 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 Latours 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. Latours 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).
Latours object-oriented philosophy emerges from his studies of the role of tools and mediation
in practice.9 In this approach the social in Latours (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, Latours 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 Heideggers notion of das Ding as a gathering to the objects of science
and technology which the philosopher of science traces: things-as-gatherings.
Latours 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 concerns 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 constructed 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 Latours
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 representation (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 Latours 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 individuals 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 traceability design genre suggests a kind of a technological solution to the metaphysical problem at the
base of Marxs labour theory of value (1982 [1867]: 125137) 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 complex technical instruments many are increasingly coming to frame their work in a Latourian manner as public or citizen scientists (da Costa, 2008: 365386). 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 Guattaris (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 Costas 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 Bleeckers (2006: 5) enthusiastic reading PigeonBlog 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 Kleins Crow Box (USA, 2008) that leverages the intelligence of crows in order to get them to collect litter. When we consider John Bergers (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 settlements 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 architecture theorist Benjamin Bratton, for instance, framed the role of the artist as giving representational agency to things that otherwise would not have a parliamentary representation (Bratton and
Jeremijenko, 2008: 36). Recalling Hal Fosters pairing of Latour and Rancie`re earlier in this essay,
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Bratton draws on Rancie`res (2006: 37) notion of the distribution of the sensible,19 to interpret
Jeremijenkos work. Rancie`re (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.
This interpretation is particularly apt when applied to Jeremijenkos (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 neighbourhoods in order to question the logic of genetic determinism. While the trees themselves featured 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 environment, and how it can in turn be changed.
Conclusion: Situated media

In his critique of postmodern hyperspace, Fredric Jameson (1991: 3845) famously questioned the
subjects 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 unmediated 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 geography, 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 corresponding 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 location21 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-ofconcern. What we termed situated media, refers to digital artefacts that represent agency as distributed in the built environment, thereby contributing to the ongoing dialogue between actor-network
theory and humancomputer interaction design (Suchman, 2007). This could accommodate locative medias traditional geographic concerns (the physical location of ones 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 locative 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 detudes, the Waag Society and
0100101110101101.org (RIXC, 2003). It gained broader international attention with the first locative
workshop that took place on 1626 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 concept was much discussed at the major European media art festivals including a panel entitled Mobilotopia 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 (Futuresonic, 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 environment rewards players when, for instance, they recall ads placed by corporations into their dreams. While
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3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
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:
106120)
Full disclosure: GPSter was my own locative project, which I mention here because of its relative timeliness and position in relation to the emergence of the concept of locative media as such. A more canonical and much more fully developed variant on this concept would be Social Tapestries by Proboscis
(20022009), 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.
This particular critique of locative media references Deleuzes (1992) interpretation of Foucaults 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 accompanying the recent English translation of Foucaults Colle`ge de France lectures that should prove
extremely applicable to this line of criticism. (See for example McNay, 2009).
My translation of the original French il ny a pas de hors-texte (Derrida, 1997 [1974]: 158).
Bruno Latour (2010: 484, 475) makes the distinction between having a future un futur and having a prospect 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.
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 technique 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 locationawareness 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-centric forms of location-awareness, the concept of locative media shades increasingly into that of the
Internet of Things (see Hayles, 2009).
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 Latours intellectual project. Indeed Latours notion cosmopolitics in particular has been criticized for failing to recognize the marginalization of various subject positions by political structures of representation (Watson, 2011).
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 socialmaterial 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 Latours theories about innovation and the concept of design
thinking, which seeks to engage with John Deweys (1997 [1916]) experiential theories of education,
a canonical example of which is IDEOs (2002) study of a hospital as a network constantly being performed 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: 99109).
13. The British popular science writer Matt Ridley (2010: 11) has mocked this latter project for what he perceives 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 therefore 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 thousands of their emails were stolen and sifted through for evidence that their conclusions had been constructed. 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 strategy 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 representational 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.,
20032005) 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: 1348) would diagnose their constitution as thoroughly modern in spite of the pre-modern spiritual revival with which it is associated. This romantic, dualistic construction of mother nature and indigenous 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: 235274).
19. Rancie`re (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: 8089) 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 locative

media

18(3) 283-295
The Author(s) 2012
DOI: 10.1177/1354856512441150
con.sagepub.com
Frauke Behrendt
University of Brighton, UK
Abstract
This article develops an alternative perspective to the visual bias in locative media discourses by
focusing on the role of sound in locative media and related discussions. This sonic perspective
allows us to understand the temporal, situated and embodied aspects of locative media. Informed
by debates from sound studies and mobile media studies, a locative smart phone application where
users experience specific sounds depending on their locations, is discussed. The concept of Placed
Sounds is introduced for a more detailed analysis of locative sound experiences. A framework for
analysis is developed to discuss how locative sound engages with the auditory aspects of our spatial
perception, how immersion operates for locative media and sound, and also to consider the role of
situated experience, the role of walking as remixing, and how agency and exclusion operate in
locative sound. This framework explains how walking operates in terms of interacting with locative
media, and how we experience being immersed in physical and media contexts at once via sound.
Keywords
Auditory 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 Silvas 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 locative 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
Email: F.Behrendt@brighton.ac.uk
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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 challenge 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 screenbased 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 sonification 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 Gournays (2002) discussion of the politics of supposedly private telephone conversations
taking place in public spaces and Bassetts (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 Bulls 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 ORegan, 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 critically 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 performativity 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: concerned with the urban environment as musical interface, for location-aware sound art, audio annotation 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 discussions around them have also moved beyond technical descriptions and documentation of projects 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 projects 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 users 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 listeners 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 childrens 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
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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 youll hear
an eerie drone. Climb the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and its 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 youll hear a keyboard
weep. Get closer and digital cellos begin to trace a regal melody. Closer. Theres 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 difficulties 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: 4881) 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 practicebased 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 questions 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
Tanakas Malleable Mobile Music where the increasing physical proximity of a friend (who is also
walking around town elsewhere) is represented by one of the musics 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 its fading (Look, 2005: 89).
And Rueb suggests that a sonic understanding of space allows for a space thats more permeable
and doesnt 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
sounds 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 decorated with objects. But, actually, the invisible, see-through space is full of sounds, and we are surrounded 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 distinguish 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 relevant 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
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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 experience. 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 participants 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 sections and listeners will each remix their own version of the music thats 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 app
the 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 Sternes 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 malls locations and this bears similarities to the listening experience in Bluebrains 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 considered, 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 malls foreground music draws on
its similarity to radio.
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The sound of locative exclusion

Sternes 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 medias potential to
engage with very specific sites. The duo, Bluebrain, is also about to release a second locationaware album, located in Central Park, New York City, and they are also planning another one running 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 contextualizes 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
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292
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 interactions 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 interactions 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, physical, 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: 82101).
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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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
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Article
Locative journalism:
Designing a locationdependent news medium
for smartphones

18(3) 297-314
The Author(s) 2012
DOI: 10.1177/1354856512441151
con.sagepub.com
Lars Nyre, Solveig Bjrnestad and Bjrnar Tessem

University of Bergen, Norway
Kjetil Vaage ie
Volda University College, Norway
Abstract
This article provides an account of the tensions between locative context-awareness and the act of
writing journalistic copy for a mobile application. Based on the field trials of the interdisciplinary
LocaNews project, the article discusses locative medias potential for spatially sensitive news
journalism.
In 2009 researchers in Norway made a medium design called LocaNews, and tested it out with
pre-planned procedures for the two fundamental activities: production and reception. Of those
who participated, 12 people worked as journalists, editors, technicians, and they generated 93
journalistic stories that were read and watched by 32 test-users who were interviewed. The present article deals with findings regarding the production of news content, and presents the strategies used to reinterpret the traditional news criteria of journalism to be fit for a GPS-equipped
smartphone. First, the article discusses the connection between journalism and cartography, and
then introduces the experimental method used for this research. The bulk of the article consists of
an evaluation of the 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 position for the readers, and finally the formulation of news criteria that focus on spatial
proximity instead of temporal actuality.
Keywords
Cartography, 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
Email: Lars.Nyre@infomedia.uib.no
298
Figure 1. Three screens from the LocaReader. First, the reader can choose between Here, Nearby and the
Rest of Voss. Second, after choosing Here, the reader gets a list of five stories within 100 m. Third, the reader
clicks on one to read through.
Source: authors.
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 directions for travel. Journalists annotate the public dimension of a town, landscape or a transport
infrastructure in a way that increases the citizens 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 readers 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 municipality 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: production 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
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299
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 relatively 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.
Journalisms 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 readers, 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 relevance 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 Neuhaus (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 vanishing. 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 smartphones 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 journalism. 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 journalism 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 theorist 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 maps 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 landscape. 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 ones
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 particularly 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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Figure 3. Display of physical information through layering in geographical information systems (Bernhardsen,
2006: 17, our translation).
Source: Tor Bernhardsen and Vett & Viten.
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. Liestl (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
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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 reasonable 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 LocaWriter 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 C
programming 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
Bjrnestad, 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 Bjrnestad, Tessem and Nyre (2011b) and
ie (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 locationdependent 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 cartographic/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 following 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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Figure 4. Illustration of the three proximity zones. Note that although the outermost zone actually extends
endlessly in all directions, it is drawn up with boundaries for clarity.
Source: authors, based on Google Maps.
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 100500 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 moving 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 threelevels of proximity distinction.
It turned out to be a real challenge to make rules for location-aware journalism. The newsroom
didnt 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
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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 permanent 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 critical 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 readers 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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Figure 5. An illustration of the procedure for zoom in stories, using Clothesline Saga as example.
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 readers position in relation to the location that the journalists are
describing (the implied or point position).
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Figure 6. The LocaWriters display of news stories. Half-way through the week there were 13 stories on
the map.
For the editorial staff, the job of locating the story on the map was a crucial part of its production. 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 journalists to give the story a position because the map didnt 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
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Figure 7. The LocaReader display of a photograph Figure 8. The LocaReaders display of your position
for the story Paraglider crashes on lake shore. The (D) in relation to the news story (A). In the top left
caption reads The ambulance arrived quickly.
corner it reads Return to front page.
Source: authors.
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 navigators 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 topologization of information where mapping is not meant metaphorically as some form of compartmentalization 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 readers position (D) in relation to the event (A) was generated automatically, 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.
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4: Locative news criteria

LocaNewss 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 differentiated 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 peoples
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 firstperson perspective; only 5% of the stories were dominated by the journalists 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 background 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 themselves 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 contextawareness. It seemed to be almost counter-intuitive for journalists to work with news criteria based
on spatial proximity rather than temporal actuality. Brian Winstons 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
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Article
Navigating sociotechnical
spaces: Comparing
computer games and
sat navs as digital
spatial media

18(3) 315-330
The Author(s) 2012
DOI: 10.1177/1354856512442762
con.sagepub.com
Chris Chesher
University of Sydney, Australia
Abstract
Digital media increasingly mediate everyday spatial and navigational practices. From in-car satellite
navigation (sat navs) to computer games, overpowered gadgets are combining multiple sources of
abstract information to give users spatial guidance and experiences of movement. For example, open
world computer games such as Grand Theft Auto IV render rich fictional spaces, and include intricate
maps and indicators that allow players to navigate large gamespaces. Sat navs such as the TomTom
Navigator follow similar practices of automated navigation in helping to guide cars through actual
spaces. Their calculated routes display on personalized maps, including live data and visualizations
that complement, or even override, what the driver sees through the windscreen. Games and sat
navs are harbingers of historical shifts in technosocial space, suggesting that Henri Lefebvres
(1991) influential critical analysis of space deserves to be revised. Digital spatial media open up
abstract 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 real
time, and open up new political and aesthetic questions. The article examines three characteristics of
navigation with digital spatial media: (1) they reify routes as persuasive data and procedures; (2) their
maps become subjective and privatized; and (3) they offer an array of spatial information that become
incorporated into the users perceived space. These examples show that critical understandings of
social space need increasingly to incorporate readings of digitally mediated spatiality.
Keywords
Computer 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
Email: chris.chesher@sydney.edu.au
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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 topdown map of the whole city, and then uses the controller to walk or drive Niko across town.
Throughout, he (lets assume a male player) consults an array of live information devices, including 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 systems to personal smartphones. This article interrogates the significance of an accelerating proliferation 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 positioning system satellites to sense the vehicles 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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Chesher
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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 conceived (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 unexpected 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 composition 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 psychogeography. 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).
Lefebvres 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 surveillance 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 strategies. 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 irreducible 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 wrappings. (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 movement, 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 Lefebvres (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 Lefebvres 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 suspect 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 Lefebvres 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 representational space, from conceived to lived space. (Conrad, 2006: 3)
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In spite of his critical view of technicity, Lefebvres 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 necessarily 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 colonization 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 practice, 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 Aarseths 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 designers choices structure the possibilities for play through
the combination of fiction and rules. Some features constrain (corridors, narrow roads, coastline, 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. Stockburgers
(2006) analysis of spatial practices in games goes beyond the fiction rule binary by drawing on
Lefebvres (1991) and Sojas (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 actionbased 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 audiovisual 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 players 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 (20072009) or Mortal Kombat (19922011) and sports games, for example, take place in closed
arenas, in line with Huizingas (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 Entertainment, 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 recalling Lefebvres 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 floating next to the car that indicates the direction of the current destination. Icons of police heads indicate 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 importantly, 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 parodies 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-theordinary (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, Lefebvres 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 introduced 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 information 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 others 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 IVs 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 collection 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 neogeographers, 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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Table 1. Comparing mediations of spatial practices in GTA IV and sat navs.
1. Digital routes
2. Subjective viewpoint
3. Information overlays
Open world games (GTA IV)
In-car satellite navigation
Cut scenes present scripted

introductions followed by guided
navigation in live game space.
The privileged virtual cameras align the
view of the world to a subjective
perspective.
GTA updates information on the state
of play (missions completed,
character health etc.).
Nav calculates routes, visualizes paths

on a map, and gives instructions until
reaching a destination.
Personalized map view is aligned to the
vehicles direction of movement and
decision-making.
Constant updates of live information
about the space around: time to
destination; safety camera warnings.
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 spoken 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 avatars 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 Rockstars 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 planners 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 cars 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,
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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 subjective 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 drivers viewpoint, and their operation is in real-time movement of lived space. The significance of this alignment of kinaesthetics and viewpoint is heightened when the car goes around
a corner, and the drivers 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 players 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 IVs view onto its simulated game world is oriented to subjective action The games
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 conventions 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 Nikos 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 drivers view and experience 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 display, 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 drivers body. The very constrained interfaces of windscreen, dashboard, wheel and
accelerator define the drivers 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 ones surroundings with
live-refreshed information displays that counteract these common indecisions and distractions.
TomToms standard Driving View (TomTom International, 2006) updates information about the
vehicles location along the route, geared to the drivers immediate needs. Unlike 3D games, TomTom 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 users 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 drivers
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 passengers 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 information for the driver/player: representational spaces in Lefebvres 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 windscreen. The dataspace is the space of the Lefebvres user - not the spatiotemporally distant space
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of planners, but the lived space of live data. In most cases, Lefebvres ambivalence about the political 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 spatial 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 players
experience. Particular regions of space become privileged in the mini-map, showing an opportunity 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 incorporeal 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 circle 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 destination, 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
iPhones 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 technology. 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 vehicles, such as Googles 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 growing 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 (19922011) NetherRealm Studios (formerly Midway Games Chicago):
Midway Games; Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment (2009-present).
Tekken 6 (20072009) 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 geocoded

world: Environmentality
and the politics of location
platforms

18(3) 331-351
The Author(s) 2012
DOI: 10.1177/1354856512442764
con.sagepub.com
Carlos Barreneche
University of Westminster, UK
Abstract
As location and the nearby environment become increasingly prominent for our communications,
filtering flows of information and shaping our networks, geolocation technology and emergent
forms of usage to govern information and visualize populations raise important questions as to how
locative media could be used as tools of governmentality. Using Googles location platform Places
as a primary example, this article will argue that location platforms are underpinned by a geodemographical spatial ordering according to which subjects are located for the purpose of economic
government. Particular attention is paid to the political economy of location platforms and the role
of their underlying algorithms and databases in rendering social space subject to novel forms of
commodification. Drawing on Foucaults governmentality analytic framework, the article concludes by delineating a critical framework to assess the mentalities and strategies of government
that the generalized geocoding of information is giving rise to.
Keywords
Environmentality, 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 information 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
Email: carlos.barreneche@gmail.com
332
media products. The following estimate figures are indicative of the current prominence of geocoded 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 Googles
placemarks, 200 million geotagged photos in Flickr (Graham and Zook, 2011), and a billion Foursquare check-ins. This increasing and seamless integration of geocoding into our everyday communications may make location a default protocol setting of communication, and soon a takenfor-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 (OReilly,
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 visitors 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 Elmers (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 proliferation 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 computation out of the box and into the environment (Hayles in Gane et al., 2007: 349). The technical possibility 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, microphone, 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. Googles 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.
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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 Foucaults governmentality analytic framework we could call this endeavour an environmentality critique (Foucault,
2008: 259261; Massumi, 2005, 2009), which would entail analysing the humannonhuman
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 Googles 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
Googles 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 information 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: 602604). 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
Googles location platforms in 2005, and their subsequent broad adoption.
In the present article, I will focus on Googles embodiment of the WorldBoard idea, particularly
Googles 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
worlds 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 citations, 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 palimpsest of place (Graham, 2010). It is worth noting that as a local media form, Places should be considered 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 Googles 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 users 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 current 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 Facebook 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 Business 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 Googles 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: Googles 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 displays 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 previously distinct local and general search results increasing, as a consequence, the visibility of information that could only be reached before through its local services (from Google Local to Maps).
Googles 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). Googles 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 algorithms patent documentation: 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 mentions of a place tied to a particular locale, or as it is stated in another of Googles 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 entitys 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 attention value in real-time.
Another important ranking factor to consider not only in place ranking but also in Googles
search technology at large is personalization:2
A rankings premium may be assigned to geospatial entities based on the users 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 algorithmically 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.
Googles 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 Googles 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
platforms use of sentiment analysis is a form of environmental power that works as a modulation
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Figure 2. Google Places Sentiment analysis of a restaurant.

Source: Google Places search query.
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 Googles 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 Ganes 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 behavioural 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, particularly 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 Sociologys ideas
of urban ecology as the citys principle of socio-spatial organization (see Ashby et al., 2008;
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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 geodemographic 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 represented a significant development since making geodemographic data publicly available encouraged 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 geodemographic 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 systems 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 segmentations 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 youve 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
theres a very good chance youre going to love them too. (Google Inc., 2011a)
Even though Google Places does not provide a rich description of its places recommendation system, 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 mapping 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 household 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
users 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
users visits to different locations may be used to build a consumer profile based on the characteristics of the places this person has gone to and their respective periodical patterns such as frequency, 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 possible 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 facilitates the exploitation of peoples 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): Googles 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 discipline, 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 Google 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 users local environment. Microsoft, Googles main search competitor, estimates 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 experience 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 Googles economy relies almost exclusively on advertising revenue
(96.7% in 2010), and the companys success has depended precisely upon innovation on advertising technology. More broadly, this market opportunity also comprehends most location-based services. 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, Googles key location-based advertising patent (Google Inc., 2010a) describes procedures 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 Googles advertising system, comprising,
among other options, specifying a point on a map with a radius or a polygon marking a geographical 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, heres whats 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 Googles advertising system. For that reason, owning
the database of places (local/location data) constitutes a crucial economic asset in as much as mapping and profiling the locations from which users are searching, updating their status or checkingin 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.
Googles 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 annotations (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 profiles 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 Tardes economic psychology it
could be concluded that there is no economic relationship between men that is not first accompanied 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 services including posting fake reviews or the elimination of negative reviews in order to deceive
Googles local algorithm.
On another level, in as much as Place Pages are automatically generated, every business owner
is compelled to enrol in Googles 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 microformats such as hCard or hReview) to make that content better suitable for Googles indexing technology. 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 intermediary 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.
Googles 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 Googles different services. Through the aforementioned forms of
capturing users distributed-labour, therefore, Google manages to set up a circuit of database coproduction that continuously feeds back into a cycle of production as the data contributed by users
makes Googles 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 Googles advertising programs and producers of local/location data.
More broadly, Google Places can be also understood in the light of a process of commoditization 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 worlds 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, locational

marketing 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 latitudelongitude 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 Googles
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 technology, 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 Persistent 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 relationship 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 intervention does not entail establishing territorial restrictions (Foucault, 2007: 51), but an environmentality 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 discovery 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 extraordinary 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 location (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 association 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 selfinterest (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 negativity 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 maximize consumption constitutes for this reason a biopolitical project. At stake is the spatial governance 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 sociospatial relations are mediated according to a logic of maximization of consumption (reviews, ratings,
recommendations, coupons and so forth). From Thrifts standpoint, this is a new postphenomenological commodity architecture . . . that can combine interactive systems . . . and commodities 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 agents 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, recommending, and checking in to places in short, the worlds 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 places 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 algorithmic 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 Westminsters Communication 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).
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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 represents 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 accumulation in the contemporary metropolis see Pasquinelli (2010).
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18(3) 353
The Author(s) 2012
DOI: 10.1177/1354856512447186
con.sagepub.com
Corrigendum
Corrigendum to the Debate Preserving digital narratives in an age of present-mindedness

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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, 1315 May 2011.

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Editorial

Locative media: From

Convergence: The International

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A location of ones own: A

Convergence: The International

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Transcultural Mapping Reader (2005)

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BotFighters (April 2002)

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Gibson W (2007) Spook Country. New York: Penguin Books.

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Convergence: The International

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Figure.1. Songlines by GPSter, at Impakt Festival, Utrecht, the Netherlands, 2003.

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Conclusion: Situated media

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Mute Editors (2003) The Cartographic Congress. Available at: http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/

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The sound of locative

Convergence: The International

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Sound in locative and mobile media cultures

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Exploring a locative sound application

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Immersed in media and sound

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