Being-towards the social: Mood and orientation to location-based social media,computational things and applications

Introduction

The use of digital media to understand the world has become the subject of an intense debate around the epistemological, rather than phenomenological, implications of this kind of ‘knowing’. Polarities are drawn around Carr’s (2011) contention that instant access to information is indicative of ‘shallow’ thinking, in contrast to Shirky’s (2010) embracement of crowd-sourced knowledge and freedom of access. These approaches to the use of digital media do not take into account the context in which people access information, and by context this paper emphasises the physical or environmental context of information retrieval and use (abetted by mobile computational technology) or place; people use information to understand that local context or place that they are in at that time. A body of research has grown around situated computing: for example, Mackenzie’s (2010) discussion of wirelessness, which argues that continual engagement with computational devices and gadgets leads to a tendency to make network connections at all times. This tendency to network is an embodiment of an attunement to computational devices and gadgets that provide information to users and indicates an awareness of network connections as a fundamental part of living in a world with a proliferation of computational devices.

Mackenzie’s work is one of many that refer to the series of studies of urban space and cartography that emphasise the growing importance and influence of computational devices in modern cities and how these devices alter and mediate the experience of space. Thrift and French (2002: 309) identified that the spaces of everyday life ‘come loaded up with software, lines of code that are installing a new kind of automatically produced background (to urban life) and whose nature is only now starting to become clear’. Dodge and Kitchin (2011) emphasised the importance of computer code in the production of urban spaces. Shepard (2011) argued that increasingly the ‘dataclouds of the 21^st century’ shape experience of the city and Gordon and De Souza (Gordon, 2008; Gordon and De Souza, 2011) concept of networked locality emphasised how particular usage of networked devices and the information they can provide from de-localised storage can increase nearness to places rather than increase distance in a phenomenological sense. Coyne investigated how digital devices influence the way people use spaces, and argues that such devices are mobile ‘tuning’ devices in that they draw information into, and out of, situations to help users establish a sense of place (Coyne, 2010: 223). In this way, they ‘tune’ the user to the place through the incremental changes that the device makes to the experience of place until an attunement to the place is achieved. These studies all make critical contributions to the understanding of the use of mobile devices in the mediation of the understanding of place, but do not focus upon understanding of place in a phenomenological sense; that is how the user of the device experiences space. This paper aims to contribute to the existing literature through empirical work with users of location-based social networking and a Heidegger-influenced theoretical discussion with the aim of exploring the phenomenological experiences of users of mobile computation and locational services.

The work of Farman (2012) is an example of a phenomenological approach where the relationship between user and mobile computational device is understood through the prism of embedded cognition; where embodiment and space are co-constitutive; and mobile computational devices are entities that can reconfigure the way that users can embody that space of which they are co-constitutive. This Merleau-Ponty-influenced approach positions the user as an active part of the mediation of the world with the (as opposed to by the) medium, and it is this consideration of the contribution of the individual as a meaningful entity in the process of mediation that is developed in this paper. A criticism of Farman’s approach (and phenomenological approaches in general) is that the account of mobile computational device users tends towards a homogeneous view of users, in that they form discrete kinds for different formal uses of the medium. Such homogeneity does not allow for the possibility that users can be oriented to the device and use of the device in different ways at different times, and as such their practices of obtaining knowledge – and the depth or phenomenological experience of the world as mediated by the device – about the world can differ due to the phenomenological orientation, or mood, that the user is in when using a device. This paper utilises the Heideggerian notion of mood, or towards-which, to understand how a user of a mobile computational device can understand place differently due to their phenomenological orientation to the device and world at different times, and how this difference is exemplified in the use of locative social media.

Presenting an ethnographic study of users of the location-based social network (LBSN) Foursquare, this paper argues that the understanding of place as place (a meaningful environment where one exists relative to other meaningful entities) rather than undifferentiated space is dependent on an attunement to place that emerges from the use of the mobile device and LBSN, in particular practices that are towards an understanding of place as a meaningful existential locale. The same user can, in a different mood or towards-which, use the device in a manner that reveals places as space, as a region devoid of meaning and utilised for social capital. It is this difference in revealing or understanding place and space that indicates the importance of phenomenological mood in the mediation of the device and software when users use the LBSN – a towards-which of understanding place, or a towards-which or using space. The phenomenological approach emphases that the information about place users’ access should be considered as a co-constituent of the understanding of place, along with user intentions and mood at the time of accessing information.

This paper builds the above argument by firstly providing a brief exegesis of what is meant by mood and attunement in Heidegger’s philosophy, drawing on his work on the Care structure of Dasein in Being and Time and the notion of the event of world revealing of Ereignis in Heidegger’s ‘later philosophy’. Two different moods or attunements to place are established following this: the computational, where the towards-which of Dasein is a being-towards understanding place, and the technological, where the towards-which is the use of locative media to leverage space as resource. The practices of these different moods of Dasein are then illustrated briefly with reference to ethnographic data taken from the ethnography of Foursquare users. The paper utilises the Heideggerian concepts of mood, attunement, towards-which, ‘thinging’ and orientation to allow for a phenomenological analysis of original empirical work. By utilising these concepts in this way, the method reported here draws on the richness of concepts in Heideggerian philosophy to develop a phenomenological method for understanding the way that particular digital devices, in this case location-enabled, can structure users’ consciousness of their environment and location. The conceptual deployment foregrounds a notion of the ‘for-ness’ of the computational device – how the device orients users to place through usage and through the mode and motivation of the engagement of the user with the device – as critical in orienting users to place and understanding place as place.

Place and mood: Situatedness, making sense of place and the importance of place to understanding the world

While accepting that Heidegger’s fundamental ontology privileges Being as temporal, following Malpas (2008: 112–146) it is important to also consider that Dasein’s (being-there or human) understanding of the world depends on taking objects into care (Sorge) and being involved with the world through engagement with equipment (concern or Besorge). This is critical to understanding how Dasein makes sense of place. Dasein’s making sense of the world is dependent on the mood of Dasein’s being-in-the-world, and a mood of situatedness is an attunement to things in the world. Dasein’s situatedness is a ‘being-there’ that resonates, or is attuned to the world through Dasein’s own active engagement in the world achieved through engagement with things (Malpas, 2008: 126).

Dasein’s mood of engagement with the world or attunement to the world is the primordial condition of ‘being-attuned’ as a basic condition of being (Coyne, 2010: xiv). The mood of being-in-the-world can explain how and why Dasein makes sense of place by bringing things into care, creating particular existential locales. Mood (Stimmung) is our attunement towards the world. Dasein is already in the world and as such cannot have a neutral attunement towards it:

It [Dasein] finds itself in this way or that way it is disposed in this or that mood. When we say it finds itself, this ‘itself’ first does not really refer expressly to a developed and thematically conscious I. (Heidegger, 1992: 255)

Heidegger uses the concept of attunement (Befindlichkeit) to explain that mood is not something chosen; Dasein does not choose to be bored or anxious, it is bored or anxious. Jacobson (2006: 94) argues that the spatial understanding of Dasein changes with mood, as mood discloses the way that Dasein exists as being-in. When an ‘objectively’ identical thing or region is significant in one instance and insignificant in another, then it is the mood or orientation to the world of Dasein that is responsible for this change. Dasein is always in a mood of some kind, and is always, therefore, oriented to the world in some way. When understood as an attunement to things, Dasein’s mood or towards-which in the world will direct Dasein’s circumspection towards things in the world. The taking of things into care as ready-to-hand is due to the towards-which that Dasein is in at that time. It is this kind of engagement or attunement that is responsible for a revealing of place as place. Heidegger’s concept of dwelling from Building, Thinking, Dwelling can be considered as the attunement to the world or Dasein’s mood that is conducive to establishing a sense of place in the world. The idea that Dasein dwells in the world, and that this dwelling is conducive to a proper understanding of things (and hence a proper understanding of being) is central to this paper.

The attunement of Dasein to the world that is dwelling is not a projection of Dasein onto the world, but is emergent through Dasein’s engagement with the world and the structure of things in the world. These elements are gathered together in an event, and dwelling is a factor of both Dasein’s towards-which and the things Dasein encounters and uses in the world. The thing used in the revealing of place, that is, the mobile device, gathered in a manner accordant to the idea of the fourfold – earth, sky, mortals, divinities – is a simple oneness (Wrathall, 2006: 112), which is how entities in the world exist if that entity has presence in the world as a thing rather than an object. Each thing in the world ‘things’; it performs a function of ‘thinging’ appropriate to what that thing is and its position in the world. This ‘thinging’ is a part of an event in the world, and its ‘thinging’ is a gathering of the elements of earth, sky, mortals and divinities known as das Geviert or the fourfold (Harman, 2007: 131). For Harman (2007), the thing (when ‘thinging’) produces a nearness to that thing. This nearness is when the thing produces a specific locale for being based around how that thing operates in the world, that is what its function is, how it gathers the elements and how this is given back to being as a revealing of the thing and its region, therefore providing an explanation of the (local) world. We dwell by attuning ourselves to the local world, and this attunement is an attuning to things in that locale.

Understanding the fourfold is a starting point for understanding how the thing ‘things’. The intersection of the four elements (earth, sky, mortals and divinities) is the event or Ereignis. ¹ The taken-for-granted practices that ground situations and give them significance as situations are earth. These practices, such as in Borgmann’s (in Dreyfus and Spinoza, 1997) example of the family meal, operate to make the gathering significant in that for a family such a dining practice is not an option to indulge in or not, but the basis upon which other options appear (Dreyfus and Spinoza, 1997) and in this paper as the practices for locating oneself, such as the check-in to Foursquare to orient oneself. Heidegger regards this grounding of practices as withdrawn and hidden, whereas sky is the revealed or manifest possibilities that arise from the focal situations (such as the family meal) and therefore is explicitly revealed. These are the possibilities for action that are appropriate for that focal gathering or locale in the case of the family meal; discussion of the day and warm conversation would be appropriate (Dreyfus and Spinoza, 1997), while discussion of gory injury and death threats would not be appropriate. The possibilities of action are dictated by the situation that itself is disclosed by the fourfold.

By divinities, Heidegger refers to the attunement of being in the situation to an extent that one feels in tune with what is happening and events unfold of their own accord without the need to push this unfolding through action. When a thing ‘things’ this sense of divinity must be present, although this too will be withdrawn (Harman, 2007: 132), such as the attunement of dwelling, which should not be thought of as explicit but as the mood in which Dasein is in at that time pre-reflectively. Mortals refer to how the thing ‘thinging’ includes humans but in a specific sense. Mortals act as disclosers of the thing ‘thinging’ – and therefore the fourfold – itself, as without humans there would be no meaning to the gathering of the elements. By mortals, Heidegger means an attribute of the way human practices work that causes mortals to understand they have no fixed identity. This understanding is necessary if one is to attune to the locale and nature of practices demanded by the thing ‘thinging’ and the possibilities that are appropriate for that locale (Dreyfus and Spinoza, 1997).

The fourfold is the event of the thing ‘thinging’; it gathers the four elements and, in doing so, it reveals a local world of meaning that is dependent upon the thing. The fourfold, and the event of gathering into the fourfold, is the key to dwelling. Taking things into care makes possible the attunement of dwelling as a means of making sense of location that allows Dasein to be claimed by that place and to think about location in a manner that is not as resource, but that takes other entities into consideration as entities rather than objects. The clearing (lichtung) is where Dasein can reclaim the possibility of thinking about being by being able to think. The clearing is not a projection of Dasein, but a gathering of Dasein, the place and the things in that place into an event (Ereignis). In this way, Ereignis is a clearing away of the technological mode of revealing as a totalising world disclosure and a place for thinking about the deeper essences of things and other entities.

Therefore, in the practices that users have in revealing location using the LBSN, there is an event (in the sense of Ereignis) where the key elements of world are gathered and Dasein can understand the world as place through the revealing that comes from bringing forth the LBSN and the computational device through taking it into care. The event is a gathering that occurs when a thing ‘things’. For a thing to ‘thing’, it is held ‘near’ to Dasein to create the locale of revealing. This nearness is the circumspection of Dasein as part of taking the thing into care, and therefore the nearness itself (and the event of revealing) is contingent upon taking things into care. This is termed computationality, and is indicative of a computational revealing of the world (Berry, 2011) that shares with a poetic revealing of the world a towards-which of looking to understand entities and place beyond crude resources to be used. This revealing is poetic in the Heideggerian sense because the device, in its thinging and revealing of entities and place, is in a process of letting-come-forth as opposed to setting-forth.

Technological revealing as an alternative and dominant ontotheology

If Dasein is in a mood where its ‘mineness’ is lost, ² Dasein’s care is lost and falls into the world of the ‘They’ (Inwood, 2002: 23–24). In such a towards-which to the world, Dasein does not see its ‘mineness’ in the context of its possibilities (those possibilities that are ahead of themselves as a towards-which), but instead defines itself in the terms of the ‘They’ (Inwood, 2002: 23). This kind of engagement or mood is what Heidegger saw as the result of a technological mode of existence, a being-towards the world that sets the world (and those entities within it) as resources to be used. In a mode of technological revealing Dasein cannot think as all things are revealed as a resource, including other entities and Dasein itself, and as such thinking about being is absent in such a world revealing. The technological revealing of the world, enframing, describes how humans come to relate to the world around them, or how they are orientated to the world around them in a technological mode of existence. Enframing compels humans to categorise our experiences and the entities that we encounter in the world. This then gives humans a sense of control over the entities that are encountered in the world, and it is this that is the character of modern technology.

Heidegger states that the essence of modern technology ‘is by no means anything technological’ (Heidegger, 1977: 4). Technology does not have its essence in technological creations themselves, and not in the activities that humans indulge in using technology, such as creating the LBSN. Instead, the essence of technology is realised through the ‘frame of mind’ or attunement – befindlichkeit – that the individual constituents of technological processes are viewed. Enframing is a process of reduction in that humans are reduced to resources, and the inherent significance of entities will be lost due to this reductive process (Wrathall, 2006: 82).

As Heidegger notes, humans go from being entities with deep essences to ‘functionaries of enframing’ (Heidegger, 1977: 30). As functionaries of enframing, humans are affected in two ways. Firstly, they are transformed into resources to be exploited by other users. Secondly, humans will be driven to get the most out of the possibilities that exist in other people. In doing this, the deep essences of other entities will not be recognised. They are simply seen in terms of their ease of use and maximum utility, and how flexible the entity is in being used for the needs of the person. Such a revealing ‘never comes to an end’ (Heidegger, 1977: 16), because everything must be considered as a resource at all times. An understanding of physical space that can be utilised for maximum reward supersedes an understanding of place, and this clearly relates to the pertinent issue of the understanding of place in this paper. This is very different to the revealing of place through the taking of things into care, and as such represents a danger as place is ostensibly eradicated from understanding of the world, through the obscuring of care for things (concern) by the totalising world view that is the technological mode of revealing.

The technological world revealing holds all things as equally distant and close, flattening all things in terms of nearness. This ‘uniform distancelessness’ (Heidegger, 2008: 268) destroys the possibility of a world-revealing event. In the context of this paper, the use of the LBSN must therefore be considered in how such usage can be ‘near’ and can be part of a gathering that brings Dasein into a world-revealing moment. Dwelling represents the possibility of avoiding the modern condition of anxiety and homelessness in the world, and modern man fails to dwell if the world is revealed technologically. By not dwelling, we avoid existential questions about self and identity as we are given easy options to be distracted through the technological mode of revealing (McHugh, 2007: 263). The type of thinking that is desirable for Heidegger is the poetic kind that in this paper is understood as computational; a step back from thinking that represents instead a kind of thinking that recalls and responds to entities themselves (McHugh, 2007: 264). This thinking is difficult because of the mode of technological revealing, as there is no requirement to think intuitively or to bring mystery to presence when technology reveals so conveniently. The technological objectification of things in the world leads to a mode of thinking that is incompatible with dwelling, and therefore dwelling itself is a thinking about (or more appropriately an attunement to) entities in the world that allows things to come forth as a letting come forth rather than a bringing forth.

The revealing of place with the location-based social network: technological/capital or computational/poetic

The following analysis draws on an ethnographic study – conducted in 2011 and 2012 using mixed methods including online surveys, face-to-face interviews, Skype interviews and email interviews – of 65 users of the LBSN Foursquare. There was a dual purpose for this ethnography: firstly, to investigate what Foursquare was being used for, that is what were the practices of use that users were actually engaging in; secondly, what effect on the understanding of place did the practices of use of Foursquare have for the users, and how could this be conceptually related to and analysed through a phenomenological framework. A hermeneutic phenomenological analysis (Van Manen, 1997) as a derivative analytic method from critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1995) was employed to analyse the data with regards to how usage affected an understanding of place for the user. Following a macro reading of the material collected, the data was coded using conceptual codes derived from the Heideggerian phenomenological theory. The codes world, care, place as resource, dwelling, dependent on LBSN, management of self and understanding of place were identified following the macro reading as key themes in the data, and were appropriate in associating the data once coded with the two understandings of world (the poetic/computational and the technological) derived from the Heideggerian phenomenological analysis that has been described above. It was found that user responses do not cleanly fall into poetic/computational or technological understandings of place; users move between these understandings, and the ethnographic analysis concentrated upon what factors affected this movement in understanding. The ethnographic material presented here has been selected to illustrate the most salient examples of these alternate understandings.

LBSNs – Foursquare being the most popular example – build databases of places by users creating ‘spots’ and ‘checking-in’ at those spots. Users are rewarded in points-based systems for the creation of spots and for checking-in to spots, and from this a game environment is created where users are encouraged to compete with friends for high scores over periods of time. Users are also rewarded with badges and titles for check-ins and creating spots: Foursquare conveys the status of ‘mayor’ on users who have the most check-ins at a spot. Users can leave comments about spots they check-in at (and as many of these spots are services such as restaurants or shops, this can be seen as a form of free advertising or user-review of the service) and photographs of the place. Links with other social networks, with Facebook and Twitter being ubiquitous options, are used to both find friends and to post real-time updates to potentially larger audiences – all while promoting the application itself across other platforms. By checking-in to a place, a list of nearby venues and places is automatically generated, providing the user with further information on their location and their relative position to other places and services. The database of places is built using user-generated content (be that geo-tagged places, comments or recommendations) and as such the database grows and develops as a function of the use of the LBSN. ³

The two world disclosures – the computational/poetic and the technological – were linked to different practices in usage and it is these focal practices of use that are indicative of the different world disclosures and understandings of place when using the LBSN. These world disclosures are explicitly linked to the taking into care of the computational device in using the LBSN; the use of the device as a tool can lead to a computational or poetic/computational revealing of place, while the use of the device as an object in the world leads to a technological understanding of place as a resource. A towards-which that is concerned with the accrual of social capital is indicative of a technological revealing of place. Places were revealed as resources and the practices of usage that emerge from these orientations to the device lead to this technological understanding without the revealing of place as a letting-come forth, but as a standing forth of place to be used as resource.

Berry (2012b) talks about self-monitoring as a form of life-stream or quantified-self (see Berry, 2012b). The reduction of place to consumable information is the presentation of place facilitated by computational devices – the orientation of the user to place and device is one that sees the device as a ‘coded object’ for the production of data, rather than understanding place (Berry, 2012a). It is the idea that location can be presented to others for their consumption that corresponds to the technological mode of understanding. This information is not just for self-understanding, but also promotes the self and commoditises the everyday behaviours that one performs that suggest a technological mode of being. The idea that one promotes and shares location to produce social capital is supported by a number of other responses, such as:

I have some ground rules regarding my check-ins - no private homes unless there’s a party or a social gathering (my friend opened a venue for my house, and my girlfriend is the mayor), no cities nor little streets. (M9)

The idea that checking-in is rule based, and those rules derive from principles that are commensurate with the production of social capital due to association with high-status venues, reiterates the point that there is a technological mode of revealing at work that reduces place to commodity to be associated with and to derive benefit from by checking-in. The distribution of such high-status check-ins is also acknowledged:

I’m pretty aware of the image I put out using 4sq and Twitter. I will confess that if my friends saw me check in to burger places all the time, I probably wouldn’t hear the end of it. (M15)

M15 recognises that the check-in will affect how others treat the person within the context of the information provided by the service. Self-presentation in the context of data therefore becomes a vital aspect of self-management, and this again is commensurate with the technological mode of being, in that the presentation of oneself is modified to maximise one’s social capital and that place is reduced to resource to facilitate the maximum value of this self-presentation. The following comments reiterate this analysis:

Some other places I want to make sure that everyone knows where I am. Sometimes a check in is a badge of honour. (M3)

I may decline to check-in to some locations because it’s out of context or I don’t consider it as of interest to my friends. (M14)

I don’t check into shops because its boring and I have nothing really to say about shops, I don’t always check into railway stations because it’s a bit dull unless I’m going to see a client (M20)

It was also a good way to let people know you were going out and where to go on a given night. (M47)

Depending on the location, there is some sense of value in the recognition by others. (M54)

I do it most often when I want to publicize where I am so others can join me or at least be aware. (M58)

Check-ins act as a source of value and capital for the individual in the context of how they present themselves to others. The importance of this is that, as Heidegger argued, one cannot dwell and therefore think when one is with technology and has the world disclosure of technological revealing. In the technological world revealing, Dasein is addicted to the flexibility and ease of life when using things to accomplish tasks for the sake of those tasks and the goal of the task. Heidegger’s argument was that this leads to a profound boredom leading to the idle chatter of being with the ‘they’ (das Man) and the resultant inauthentic mode of existence that this entails. This is exemplified in the checking-in for the sake of the check-in, and the accumulation of social capital through associating oneself with high-status places without a consideration for that place, or for the places that one passes through and is in on a daily basis that do not have high status socially, but in which one spends time and acts in the world. This need for constant distraction at all times leads to distraction from the task of thinking (that is, being concerned with being) and this is the failure of being-at-home in the world with technology (Wrathall, 2006: 110).

The possibility of an alternative orientation to the world addresses what Heidegger argued was the possibility of a free relationship with technology (1977: 6). A free relationship would be the result of the ‘thinging’ (Harman, 2007: 131) of the thing being the kind of activity that allowed for a true, reflective space for dwelling with the thing and genuine thought to occur, that is the contemplation about being with being as the focus of that thought, as opposed to the harassed unrest that characterises being-with technology, the technological ontotheology and enframing. Users that have brought the device and the LBSN into their everyday routines as a means to understand place (the towards-which of understanding place), and situate the LBSN in their everyday practices as part of a set of computational practices in everyday life have a towards-which that allows for the revealing of place through the device.

The revealing of place as place is indicative of a being-towards the world that brings the computational device into care, rather than just being influenced by information mediated computationally but ultimately derived from friends, acquaintances or family. The following comment illustrates what is meant by such a being-towards or comportment:

I mark it anywhere I go, if I remember to do it. It’s sometimes a conversation starter with friends on Twitter and Facebook. It makes me feel like I’m not living quite so invisibly. (F37)

F37 explains their behaviour in the context of providing information for socialising and the idea of a visibility for their lives. Both these justifications for using the LBSN relate to the data-stream that their activity produces, and therefore their activity (of using the LBSN) is with full awareness of the creation and sharing of information across social networks. The comment on the visibility of their life is a reference to the visibility of the information they provide via the LBSN through the encoding of location and semantic gazetteers as a data-stream to other users (and themselves), and as part of a worlding through using the device that connects their actions to digital sharing practices and being visible through computational means, which is afforded by the computational functioning of the device (through its use of code). The following comment acknowledges a similar approach to usage:

Because I post to Facebook with Foursquare, it lets my distant family see a little of our normal activities, especially with my younger daughter’s soccer and Girl Scout events. (F37)

F37’s contributions to their personal data-stream contribute to the knowledge of a specific audience, which is their distant family. The comment emphasises how the mediation of location through the device and LBSN becomes part of the average everydayness of the user, and the media becomes a form of what Merrin (2010) calls me-dia, in that it facilitates a form of horizontal, peer-to-peer communication with the person and their immediate and chosen social groups and friends. The computational being-towards everyday activity is a key aspect of this world disclosure, in that understanding the importance of the visibility of oneself and one’s activity through computational means is a critical part of knowing how one must act in a world with computational devices as a product of the event of world revealing through the LBSN. In practice, the user can perceive such an understanding of place and the world beneficially:

Foursquare has made keeping up with my best friend, who moved back to the United States in February of this year, easier as I can see what she’s up to and where she is. (F32)

F32 is again using the data-stream to understand place (in this case to make meaningful their distant friend’s activities with regards to place), which adds a level of significance to the information provided. The understanding is dependent upon the LBSN and data-stream surfacing the possibility of place for the user and is possible because of the computational functionality of the device, running the code of the LBSN and connecting to servers. The user can understand the average everydayness of the other using the LBSN and data-stream, and the global space that separates the two users is reduced to a local relationship as the position of the other is transformed by the mediation of place through the LBSN. This is enabled by the mood or towards-which of the user, in that there is a desire to understand the location and situatedness of the other person as a meaningful location, rather than superfluous information – as place, rather than space. The information produced, stored and provided allows for an understanding of place that was not possible previously, and is not necessarily technological in disclosure.

I think my view of the world has changed by using these services – or at least how I view the world. When visiting new places I used to stick to small areas, which I could achieve familiarity with quite easily, whereas now using location-based services means that I can use the device with confidence to locate myself and familiarize myself with the place. I suppose I am seeing it more through the device than through exploring it physically. (M11).

The use of the device as a navigational tool, as something to guide the user through the world, is clear. The real-time information is given unobtrusively, so not removing the device and its computational functioning from continuing its presence as a co-constructing element in the understanding and revealing of place. A final comment shows how continual information given in real time by the device affects understanding of the world, and changes orientation to the world in a practical way for place and location:

Suddenly the ability to ask for directions is lost! In the past I’d often end up wandering around new places relatively aimlessly but it was just as good as going somewhere specific because that kind of wandering can lead to making new discoveries. If you are headed in a very specific direction with a very clear aim, you might risk missing things along the way, which is a shame. (F07)

With the device (assuming connectivity is a given) the existential possibility of being lost is reduced, and if the technological conditions are optimal then being lost could be something that is technologically not possible. More important is the idea that something important in itself is lost if one cannot get lost; the chance discovery, the valuable new place found, the orienting oneself in the unfamiliar place that leads to a new familiarity and the creation of an existential locale through orienting oneself to the objects and entities in the new locale. The revealing of place is dependent on the device as being lost or ‘placeless’ is not a possibility if one has taken the device into the car as a part of the average everydayness of navigating the world. If this has been done, then place as a familiar existential locale is always possible through the use of the device as a co-constructor of the sense of place in the world.

This situating of the device in the practices of everyday life as a tool to be used is a bringing of the device into care, and as such characterises the usage of the device; allowing for the creation of an existential locale from the use of the device from which dwelling with the LBSN can emerge from the event of world revealing. Care or concern for the device is necessary for the revealing of place as poesis, but it is not sufficient. The device once taken into care gathers the place, the user, other users and the possibilities of the location and place as part of the existential locale that allows for the mood of dwelling and the being-with the LBSN that emerges from the event of world revealing. The event is contingent upon the initial towards-which of Dasein and the practices of use of the LBSN.

Being-at-home (dwelling) is having a way of living suited to the locale or place in which one is situated, and the technological mode of revealing makes it impossible to attune oneself to the local world in order to achieve this. While a technological mode of revealing is lived as a ‘harassed unrest’ (Heidegger, 2008: 247), in which thinking and dwelling are made impossible by the need to realise the insatiable demand of using things and entities as ever unfolding resources, a being-at-home or dwelling is a mode of existence in which thinking about place is facilitated by the mood of Dasein and the attunement to entities in that place as facilitated by the gathering of the thing in its ‘thinging’. While the movement to a co-constructed understanding of place dependent on the thing is towards a delegated acceptance of place as that defined through the computational networks that recognise and authorise certain places above other spaces, in a technological being-towards this reveals space as resource; in the poetic/computational being-towards that is a dwelling-with the thing, this reveals place as a meaningful referential totality. The examples from the ethnography are used to illustrate and exemplify how this dwelling-with is achieved in practice and what the phenomenological experience of such a dwelling-with is for users.

From this ethnography and critical discourse reading of user responses it can be seen that there are practices that are typical of the device to anticipate and locate others within a community of LBSN users. They are actively using the device to locate themselves in a novel space and understand that space as a set of places of interest and using the device as an everyday part of one’s life for understanding place are the focal practices that allow for the letting-come forth of place (a poetic/computational revealing) through the device’s ‘thinging’. This kind of orientation to the device results in the dwelling with the device that allows for the revealing of place. As such, this dwelling also allows for consideration of the LBSN as an information creating and distributing system through the functioning of the code of the software, in a manner that is contemplative without inhibiting the use of the service that has become central to the everyday practices of the user. Far from being an inevitable use of the LBSN, the revealing of place in a computational manner is dependent upon the user bringing the device into care as part of their average everyday behaviour and is contingent upon the towards-which to understand place, rather than exploit place.

Conclusions

The technological and poetic/computational revealing of the world both emerge from a desire to understand the world, but are different in both practices of use and orientation to the world. As such, the same user can reveal physical space as space or place at different times, given a change in their orientation to the world at different times or a change in the usage of the device at different times, in particular if the place being understood is meaningful beyond social capital. Understanding place from a technological worldview commoditises place for social capital, a ‘screenic’ use of the technology that presents places as venues to be utilised through mediated presence that assists in the accrual of this capital. A poetic or computational orientation towards place is a using of the device to locate oneself in a novel space and understand that space as a set of places of interest and using the device as an everyday part of one’s life for understanding place are the focal practices that allow for the letting-come forth of place through the device’s ‘thinging’. This kind of orientation to the device results in the dwelling with the device that allows for the revealing of place. As such, dwelling also allows for consideration of the LBSN as an information-creating and distributing system through the functioning of the code of the software, in a manner that is contemplative without inhibiting the use of the service that has become central to the everyday practices of the user. Far from being an inevitable use of the LBSN, the revealing of place in a computational or poetic manner is dependent upon the user bringing the device into care as part of their average everyday behaviours and is contingent upon the extent to which computation is a part of their everyday life.

The most important finding of the analysis of the ethnographic material was that users reveal places using the LBSN in both ways – technological and poetic/computational – and that the revealing of place that they phenomenologically experience is dependent upon their orientation towards and intention for using the device. In one mood, the device can reveal poetically/computationally, in another mood the device can reveal technologically – and the same user can move between these orientations depending upon their mood of engagement with the device. The orientation and towards-which of the user is as important in the mediation of the world phenomenologically, particularly in the revealing of place as investigated here, as the ability of the device to gather information on location and present it in a manner that is informative and easy to use. The LBSN investigated in this paper clearly mediates the world through the provision of information on location (including social gazetteers from other users), sharing of location with others and the gamifiacation (Bogost, 2011) of location, but the phenomenological effect of that mediation is also a factor of the approach and orientation of the user of that media. The deployment of the concepts of orientation, towards-which and thinging in this work to reach this conclusion could be used in the analysis of other technologies, not only with place-based technologies, but with regards to mobile computational technology or embodied computation in the future, and this paper outlines some of the conditions by which one could utilise Heideggerian concepts in to undertake ethnographic work in new media.

Media, applications and software that allow users to explore place (or any other aspect of being-in-the-world) with the aim of discovering, learning and being able to gather the relevant aspects or elements together to understand the world on a deeper than resource level can ‘thing’. At the same time they can mediate our understanding of the world as a resource to be accrued. The former may be analysed with the kind of interpretive phenomenological analysis deployed in this paper. The latter could result in a shallowness of understanding the world that would be Carr’s nightmare.