Abstract
In an era where the internet has merged with maps to spatialise information, questions concerning locality and locative media have started to attract the attention of academic researchers. Aware of the challenge that the topic itself is changing rapidly, in Net Locality: Why Location Matters in a Networked World, Gordon and de Souza e Silva come up with conceptual discussions about location and location awareness. Instead of focusing on the transformations and adaptations in everyday life that location-based interactions are believed to be triggering, this approach helps the reader towards a broader understanding of how the meaning of locality changes in time and the role that location-based technologies play within this change. In employing such a perspective on the problematic of location awareness, the book fills an important gap in media and communications literature by analysing how individuals and societies use this emerging form of location awareness.
The authors coin the term ‘net locality’ in order to analyse and explain the new phenomenon of location awareness in everyday interactions by focusing on social and political activities. They claim that this emergent form of interaction with technology and space is not a new tool for visualising data but an interface which allows users to experience space in new ways, facilitating their interaction with their locale remotely or locally. Relating the discussions on locality to physical and virtual communities, the book answers potential questions about locative media, leaving the reader with a brief explanation and understanding of location awareness in everyday life on a global scale.
Starting with an example of what now seems to be a normal scene on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, Gordon and de Souza e Silva take the reader in a retrospective journey, analysing the importance of location and information sharing in a networked world. As opposed to the shift in the social sciences towards ‘spatialising social information’ (Massey, 2005), the authors argue that location awareness has gained new connotations, such as ‘socialising spatial information’, as an agent of collaboration and participation. ‘Once information is geolocated, it becomes the context and content for social interaction’ (p. 28). Acting as a social agent, location awareness creates a geographical context to networked data (p. 31). During the journey through the development and evolution of mapping social information, the authors point to the use of location information as a filter to categorise ‘the world of information’ on the Internet. Illustrating their analysis with the site formerly known as Geocities, where information was categorised and filtered with respect to real city names, they reveal earlier uses of location information, indicating the significance of location and locality in a networked world.
After describing the framework and situating their analysis in this retrospective journey, the authors continue their discussions by focusing on mobile communication and locative media, including locative arts and social networking. They argue that representational maps can empower users and trigger participation as they allow new ways to see and connect with various people whose existence we may not be aware of until we see them on a map sharing the same locale. As Farman argues: ‘Our embodied interaction with a locale offers insights to the meaning of the place and our situatedness there. However, a locale’s context is limitedly known and much may remain unknown to us during our interactions with that space’ (2012: 44). Therefore sharing locality on such a platform can produce a common ground for social and political interaction. As space is an active constitutive element in the production of social relations (Kitchin and Dodge, 2011), and produced by social interactions (Lefebvre, 1991), sharing the same place, either remotely or locally, affects the organisation of various social situations. Thus, net locality, as Gordon and de Souza e Silva argue, provides a context where people can exchange various kinds of information about a specific place and make their presence known to the rest of the network on the same platform. However, they also highlight the fact that this context does not only consist of people who use specific technologies, such as smartphones and LBC per se, but also of people who are present at a specific place at a specific time during our interactions with and through that place.
Gordon and de Souza e Silva also situate their arguments within the framework of democratisation and argue that the collective process of mapping and sharing information in net locality is a form of empowerment. Although some of their basic propositions on empowerment may seem rather obvious, they nevertheless ground them in the framework of political empowerment and multiplicity in their discussions of democratisation. They argue that empowerment stems from developments that remove maps and locative media from the exclusive domain of geographical information systems (GIS) experts. Bringing these technologies to the centre of everyday life with the help of locative media, ‘anyone can create a map, invite other users, and embed it in an existing social network’ (pp. 30–1). This approach at first seems to cover Castells’s (1996) general arguments regarding the network society that ‘localities become disembodied from their cultural, historical, geographic meaning, and reintegrated into functional networks’ (p. 375). However, contrary to the view that virtual worlds create less social individuals and thus a less social everyday life, the authors argue that net localities challenge such a situation by redefining locality. They carry communities to an online platform, and act as a catalyst in bringing online communities to physical spaces. For them ‘locality’ is no longer defined in terms of physical proximity as users can interact with local conditions of a physical space remotely.
Besides addressing the empowerment brought by net locality, the authors also emphasize that the nature of ‘being mapped’ can also be disempowering, as who retains control of shared information in a networked world is rather questionable. They call this double-sided effect the ‘paradox of net locality’ as, on the one hand, the relationship to a physical space is rather personal, but, on the other, it threatens one’s control of that physical space. Gordon and de Souza e Silva’s arguments on surveillance and locational privacy are thus wide-ranging, showing that surveillance now has a circular orientation. Even if an in-depth discussion of privacy and surveillance is, as they indicate (p. 141), outside the scope of the book, their discussions would have benefited from a more concentrated examination of privacy in a networked world where location matters.