Locative Media and Cultures of Mediated Proximity: The Case of the Mogi Game Location-Aware Community

This paper provides an analysis of the interaction order in a unique nonexperimental and enduring location-aware community (ie the players of the Mogi game) and of the ways it is particularly oriented towards location and proximity concerns. It shows how one of its features is the public character of positional data, so that players routinely orient towards the fact that their location might be remarked and commented on at all times. Location awareness also provides users with resources to recognize their coproximity when they happen to be close but not copresent. We will discuss how such a situation generally projects an encounter as a relevant future course of action in this environment as well as in other mediated settings. The management of mediated proximities appears to be a crucial feature of the organization of encounters between players in the Mogi community, and as we argue, this must also be the case in any kind of location-aware community that supports occasions for recognizing coproximity ‘at-a-distance’. We describe various practices that have evolved in the Mogi location-aware community to recognize and acknowledge coproximity at a distance, manage its consequences, and even play at fabricating situations that have the appearance of mediated proximity events. This set of practices has gradually evolved to form a rich and peculiar ‘culture of proximity’. Beyond its apparent singularity the kinds of concerns with location and proximity that such a culture addresses are very general and could play a central part in our understanding of future uses of locative media.