Locating the Visual

Introduction

As Soo sat in a busy Starbucks café in Shinchon, she toyed with her smartphone. Having seen on Facebook that her friend, Hyunjin, was running late and still on the train, Soo began to take photos of her coffee. She played around with various photo apps on her iPhone. First, there was Hipstamatic. It gave a retro-analog texture to the image like a Polaroid. Second, there was Instagram. She loved the way in which she could render the banal image of a Starbucks coffee cup into something dreamy, whimsical, and of another era. She then uploaded and automatically geotagged the analog-looking image to her various “always-on” social media applications such as Facebook and Korea’s Cyworld minihompy. This process allowed her to share a moment—that is, an emotional gesture in a specific geospatial space—with physically absent friends through electronic co-presence. It gave a sense of snapshots of almost (physical) contact (Hjorth 2007). But the shared image also operated to remind Hyunjin that Soo was waiting—especially as she had uploaded the picture with the message “coffee with a friend.” A minute later, Hyunjin was physically standing in front of Soo holding her smartphone saying “who’s this friend, then?” Both girls laughed.

This opening vignette depicts a typical scenario in which locative-based services (LBS) are reshaping camera phone practices and their ability to simultaneously occupy online and offline spaces that are both intimate and public. Using Global Positioning Systems (GPS), LBS social media like Facebook and games like Foursquare contextualize camera phone images within new possibilities for sharing and information overlays. Increasingly, the mobile phone is the repository for not only social media like Facebook but also location-aware services such as geotagging. In this mobile media space, more location-based information about the user is being shared with others—both friends and strangers. Through LBS, mobile media users are able to create and convey more complex details about a locality. This overlay of information reshapes how place is experienced with co-presence others, especially in terms of privacy and potential surveillance.

The use of LBS with camera phone image sharing is creating new visual tapestries. These new types of copresent visuality overlay and interweave online and offline cartographies in different ways. These maps require us to think about locality in terms of co-presence rather than co-location (Beaulieu 2010). With the added dimensions of movement and touch becoming important features of camera phone practices, we see a shift from the emphasis upon networked to “emplaced” visuality. Images are emplaced insofar as they are part of what human geographer Tim Ingold (2008) has called a “meshwork” and entanglement of lines whereby images themselves are part of such lines as they are inextricable from the person and camera who took them. In this sense, then camera phone images are not simply about what they represent (although they are also about that) but they are additionally about what is behind, above, below, and to either side (Pink and Hjorth 2012).

As camera phones become more commonplace—along with divergent networked and social media contexts such as microblogging and LBS—new types of visuality are overlaid onto place as part of user’s personal journeys and forms of self-expression. These visualities are marked by gender and locality. Although globally camera phone genres like self-portraiture have blossomed especially with young female users (Hjorth 2007; D.-H. Lee 2005), we are also witnessing the flourishing of vernacular visualities that reflect a localized notion of place, social, and identity-making practices. In particular, mobile media practices highlight how relationships between gender, labor, and technology are paradoxically being reinforced (Fortunati 2009; Gregg 2011; Wajcman et al. 2009) and potentially subverted (Hjorth 2009).

Specifically, in locations such as Seoul, the rise of camera phone practices has been synonymous with debates around young women’s empowerment (Hjorth 2007; D.-H. Lee 2005) and emergent forms of intimate politics and publics (Hjorth and Arnold 2013). While much fascinating research has been conducted into first generation camera phone practices (Ito and Okabe, 2005, 2006) and the movement of LBS into the mainstream (de Souza e Silva and Frith 2012; de Souza e Silva and Hjorth 2009; Farman 2011; Gordon and de Souza e Silva 2011), the overlay of this combination—that is, the impact of LBS on the motivations and types of images being taken and shared—has been relatively overlooked. As a predominately gendered activity, the adding of locational information with camera phone practices undoubtedly shapes the types of genres, content, and motivations as it does inform the context of meaning/reading and its relationship to place. For example, with LBS becoming a key part of mobile media practices, issues around the relationship between place, intimacy, information, and privacy come to the forefront. Coupled with the increase of photographic apps, we see changes in camera phone practices. This sees the decline in the ubiquitous self-portrait (sel-ca) in favor of more metaphorical or abstract representations of place.

This article draws on three years of fieldwork (2009–12) as part of an Australian Research Council Discovery grant (Online@AsiaPacific) with Michael Arnold in which we conducted ethnographies into six locations in the region (Manila, Melbourne, Seoul, Singapore, Tokyo, and Shanghai). Each year, fieldwork was conducted in each of the six locations. Respondents between the ages of eighteen and sixty-four were recruited through universities. The fieldwork consisted of focus groups, surveys, and in-depth interviews. In this fieldwork, we witnessed the uneven uptake of locative media and how it shaped, and was shaped by, locality and gender. This was particularly the case in Seoul that has a long history of early mobile media adoption.

In this article, I first contextualize the rise of camera phone practices and how smartphones are shifting the types of networked visuality and their impact upon narrating and depicting a sense of place and intimacy. Second, I focus on a case study of LBS camera phone practices in Seoul to show how they are both rehearsing and revising traditional Korean notions of place (bang) and intimacy (ilchon) through new visual cartographies.

Mobile Places: The Shifting Lens of Camera Phone Practices

As I suggest in this article, we can see two overlapping stages or generations of camera phone practices. For clarity sake, I have broken these two interrelated stages to make sense of the changing logic—that is, the motivations, genres, and content—that inform this emergent and changing visual culture. In the first generation of camera phone studies by Mizuko Ito and Daisuke Okabe (2005, 2006), they noted the pivotal role played by the three “s”—sharing, storing, and saving—in informing the content of what was predominantly “banal” everyday content (Koskinen 2007). In this first generation of camera phone studies, networked sites like Flickr and YouTube played a key role in defining aesthetics such as “common banalities” (Mørk Petersen 2009) and “vernacular creativity” (Burgess 2007).

However, with the growth in LBS like Foursquare, Jiepang (China), and Flags (South Korea), which allow users to “check in” and upload pictures, networked visuality and the attendant empowerment for women become further complicated. For some, LBS provide new forms of überveillance (Michael and Michael 2012) and ways to stalk (Gazzard 2011)—issues that are undoubtedly gendered. For others, LBS highlight how the local continues to play a pivotal role in informing notions of privacy and sociality. LBS allow already “friendly” (i.e., knowing) surveillance such as parental to flourish in new ways. In this relatively new phenomenon, one thing is apparent—it is predominately young female users who are taking and sharing camera phone images as part of the LBS experience. In these new geospatial visualities, motivations and genres are changing. These reflect new ways in which locative media shape how localities are shared and experienced.

With LBS, we see a further extension of overlaying place with the social and personal whereby the electronic is superimposed onto the geographic in new ways. In particular, by sharing an image and comment about a place through LBS, users can create different ways to experience and record journeys and, in turn, affect how place is memorialized. Although the area of locative media has attracted much critical attention of late (de Souza e Silva and Frith 2012; Farman 2011; Gordon and de Souza e Silva 2011) as a convergence between urban, gaming, and mobile media studies, little has focused upon the ways in locative media practices that are gendered and that gender performativity (Butler 1991)—that is, the regulation of gender as a series of reiterations—is informed by the sociocultural. This is despite the fact that gender informs fundamental questions about locative media such as intimacy, privacy, and surveillance (Cincotta et al. 2011). Moreover, this oversight is conspicuous given that LBS games represent a convergence of two areas that have acknowledged the significant role gender plays—mobile media (Fortunati 2009; Hjorth 2009; Wajcman et al. 2009) and game studies (Hjorth et al. 2009; Kennedy 2002; Pearce 2009).

With LBS added to the camera phone mix, our relationship to place, cartography, and visuality changes. Jason Farman writes that the digital map is “a social network that engages users as embodied interactors rather than disembodied voyeurs” (2010, 869). The combination of digital maps and augmented reality is not purely visual (Farman 2010; Lapenta 2011), they are, as Sarah Pink (2011) eloquently suggests, about “emplaced visuality.” The overlay of online and offline localities, and the various forms of presence (i.e., co, tele, net) they ensure, highlights the ways in which place is a combination of numerous “entanglements” (Ingold 2008). The emotional, psychological, and social dimensions are both lived and imagined. As Doreen Massey (2005) notes, places are stories-so-far.

The role of camera phones in representing, mediating, and memorializing places as a series of vignettes is dramatically altered with the rise of locative media added to the mix. This shift is not only in the motivations and genres but also in the aesthetics. It is impossible to talk about camera phone discourses without now engaging in the increasing role of photo apps. According to Daniel Palmer (2012) and Chris Chesher (2012), smartphone photo apps—exemplified by iPhone photography—represent a new “universe of reference” that shifts away from the “snapshot” politics of the Kodak toward a more embodied and yet perpetually shifting reference. While there has been much discussion about the haunting of the analog within the digital (Gye 2007; Hjorth 2007; D.-H. Lee 2005), smartphone visuality is about haptic movement rather than the visual containment of time and space suggested by the snapshot.

As argued elsewhere with Sarah Pink (2011), emplaced visuality means understanding camera phone practices and the socialities that create and emerge through them in ways corresponding with non-representational or “more-than-representational” approaches in geography (Lorimer 2005). Instead of analyzing the content, increasingly camera phone ethnographies are attracting studies that focus on practice and the non-representational (e.g., Gómez Cruz, 2012). Given that camera phones are always with us and embedded in everyday life, they inflect a particular experience of place as a series of overlaid stories and thus, reflect the work conducted in human geography around redefining place and place-making. As Ingold (2008) and Massey (2005) stress, movement is part of the constituting of place.

For Palmer (2012), iPhone photography is distinctive across three areas. First, it creates an experience between touch and the image that Palmer calls an “embodied visual intimacy” (2012, 88). While

touch has long been an important, but neglected, dimension in the history of photography . . . the iPhone, held in the palm of the hand, reintroduces a visual intimacy to screen culture that is missing from the larger monitor screen. (Palmer 2012, 88)

Second, the proliferation of photo apps for the iPhone has meant that there is a plethora of ways for taking, editing, and sharing photos. No longer do camera phone images have to look like the poorer cousin to the professional camera. Third, is the role of GPS capability with the iPhone automatically “tagging photographs with their location, allowing images to be browsed and arranged geographically” (Palmer 2012, 88).

Having outlined the movement of camera phone studies from first to second generation—or networked to emplaced visuality—in the following section, I focus upon a location known for its prolific use of camera phones, especially by women (Hjorth 2007; D.-H. Lee 2005), Seoul, South Korea. In the following section, I draw on a series of interviews and focus groups conducted with fifty respondents from 2011 to 2012. In the questions, LBS and camera phone practices were framed in terms of general media practices to allow respondents the space to direct the conversation. One of the first things that became apparent was the shift in attitudes toward the online. Once a country lauded for its democratic use of mobile media and the Internet (Kim 2003), more recently there has been an about face. A growing sense of ambivalence in light of governmental and corporate surveillance—highlighted by the arrest of bloggers for anti-governmental sentiment (Minvera) and the yet to be resolved Samsung illegal tracking of workers scandal (Hjorth 2011a; K. S. Lee 2011; Wallace 2012)—was expressed by respondents. This, along with the rise of LBS, was seeing a shift in the ways privacy and sociality were playing out. In particular, this was expressed through two Korean notions—bang (social space) and ilchon (intimate relations).

The Case Study of Emplaced Visuality: The Place of LBS and Gender in Korea

In Korea, one can find many traditional and contemporary versions of the bang (space/room): jimjilbang (bathhouse), PC bang, DVD bang, and noraebang (music room). In Florence Chee’s (2005) ethnography on PC bang and the politics of online multiplayer games, she argues that these spaces are social spaces that are viewed as “third spaces” between home and work. According to Jaz Hee-jeong Choi, the bang is an independent space for the sharing of ideas that is “static in form, yet flexible in functionality” (2009, 93). In other words, the bang does not have a predetermined purpose—instead the occupants sharing the space actively determine the use.

Like the bang (social space) so too has the ilchon (intimacy) been repurposed by new media. In the once dominant Korean social network site, Cyworld minihompy, friends are called ilchon, a concept traditionally used to denote one degree of distance from family members in a Korean kinship (i.e., one’s mother is one chon; Hjorth 2011a; Hjorth and Kim 2005). But the relationship between bang and ilchon also plays out in unofficial ways too across social, locative, and mobile media practices (Hjorth 2007; D.-H. Lee 2005). In particular, the need to overlay the social and intimate (ilchon) with the spatial (bang) clearly foregrounds the motivations of use for locative media and camera phone sharing in Korea. Far from a phoneur dystopia where users become nodes in the commercial information circuits (Luke 2006), many LBS users spoke about the play outside the official game—that is, the unofficial forms of play through overlaying the ilchon and bang in novel ways that were not part of the intended gameplay. This was especially the case with the use of camera phones with LBS games.

In Seoul, camera phones have played a key role in creating bricolages of contemporary, urban life (D.-H. Lee 2009). These bricolages are about overlaying the bang—as both an online and offline, lived and imagined space—with the ilchon. Many respondents spoke about the need to create a sense of place’s smell, touch, and texture in their images to not only add to the complex interpretations of place but also to give copresent friends a sense of “being there.” In these “multisensorial” (Pink 2009) visual cultures, gender played a key role. All the respondents believed women took and shared more camera phone images. While male respondents might participate in an LBS game but not take a picture, female respondents felt compelled to take pictures as part of sharing that moment (as a specific time, at a specific place, with a specific feeling). The women spoke of feeling compelled to take pictures—not just as part of their own personal journal but to share these experiences with others.

In this article, I focus upon a few key responses that reflect and summarize the general attitudes found in fieldwork. Repeatedly, the relationship between place and intimacy, or bang and ilchon, was an important part of the motivations for sharing camera phone images via LBS. For some, the gesture of creating and sharing visual cultures through LBS is about a type of “girl culture.” Women LBS respondents were more likely to share a picture and comment—that is, participate in a type of placing and “emplacing” of presence—than men users. So too, younger users felt more compulsion to add and share than older users. Women respondents spoke of taking and sharing camera phone pictures as enhancing the geosocial co-present experience. Through locative media camera phone practices, respondents felt traditional notions of place (bang) and intimacy (ilchon) were entangled with new narratives of place.

For one Korean female aged thirty years, Soo-hyun, LBS was a highly gendered practice. The narrating of place by overlaying images and comments onto a place is something she perceived as highly gendered. Play is gendered in its inflection of place and intimacy. As thirty-year-old Soo-hyun notes,

Usually, female users view it (LBS) as a game to be played. For example, they record comments or put photos of the places where they’ve been before. Or they use it (LBS) so that they can get points and coupons to use . . . But, male users use it (LBS) to leave their footprints so they can find out how they moved in certain situations. I think they don’t have big interests about getting coupons or recording histories through posting photos or comments.

For twenty-five-year-old Kahyun, LBS are “girls’ games” and she uses various kinds. However, in this play, she was concerned about privacy issues, something that was not an issue for male respondents. Kahyun highlighted the way in which issues such as privacy are as culturally specific as they are gendered and generational. She spoke about her parents’ trust of the online in the way they openly used social media like Cyworld minihompy; whereas for her generation, they often tried to create boundaries between different audiences (i.e., work/private, family/friends). For Kahyun, the role of social and mobile media in “collapsing contexts” (boyd 2010) meant that she and her friends often tried to differentiate the types of material they share with their different audiences. As she noted,

My parents are very open in their use of Cyworld minihompy. But for me and my friends there are some things we share that we don’t want everyone seeing, especially parents and grandparents. As they don’t take many photos they don’t understand the context and the references. So I prefer to edit my settings so that they can’t see many of my photos, it’s easier that way.

As Kahyun noted, she no longer shared self-portraiture images (sel-ca) with the rise of LBS contexts. She felt the overlay of the LBS with sel-ca provided too much information that could be easily taken out of context. While when she was younger she loved taking sel-ca with friends and sharing via minihompy, she felt LBS were not a good context for it.

As a female I am conscious that leaving information about where I go isn’t always a good thing. My friends and I now tend to share pictures of abstract and familiar objects rather than sel-ca. Uploading images of yourself in places is boring for friends and also gives strangers too much information.

The redeployment of the bang and ilchon through LBS reflects the increasing pressure for the young to be part of Chalnajok (Choe 2009). While Chal-na means “instant,” jok refers to a “tribe” (D.-H. Lee 2009). The motivations for taking and sharing of pictures were also attributed to the pressure to be part of the Chalnajok in which mobile media play a key role. One twenty-seven-year-old woman, Nara Ara, noted,

Sometimes I don’t want to take endless pictures and share them. I may be feeling sad or be having a bad hair day. But then when I get pictures from my friends this makes me want to return the feelings.

In Nara Ara’s comments, we see the compulsion for LBS camera phone sharing as part of gift-giving processes (Mauss 1954). Some of the earlier studies into mobile media highlighted how practices such as SMS (short messaging service) reinforce socio-cultural notions of power and repository by reflecting gift-giving rituals (Taylor and Harper 2003). These gift-giving rituals are also highly gendered and relative to age, something that is yet to be explored in the mobile media literature despite its prevalence (Hjorth and Kim 2005). As Nara Ara notes, she feels compelled to share because her friends have. This feeling of obligation plays an important role in the frequency for maintaining mobile media contact. Also there is an element of tacit etiquette in which there is an often unspoken expectation for mobile media users to be “always on” and thus, always responsive.

Gender and generational differences were apparent in the use of visualities within LBS games. While cross-generational surveillance is nothing new, the way in which it occurs via LBS is. In the face of ominous corporate surveillance like the Samsung tracking of workers trying to organize a union meeting, LBS also provide benevolent forms of the familial “friendly eye.” For Hyun-suk, a forty-year-old father of a teenage daughter, social and locative media allowed him to keep an eye on his daughter and her friends. Extending what Misa Matsuda (2009) noted in her study of Japanese mother and children relationships in which the mobile phone functioned as a “mum in the pocket,” Hyun-suk spoke of how he and his wife were able to be a “friendly, caring eye” in monitoring their daughter via minihompy and flags. This parental überveillance became important when one of their daughter’s friends began to demonstrate suicidal tendencies—the parents intervened and created a parental network to help youth with emotional health issues. Here, the positive side of surveillance emerges as a benevolent force, as opposed to the less benign practices evidenced in the Samsung case noted earlier.

While LBS camera phone image sharing might represent a divide in cross-generational issues around privacy, they also help to intensify and strengthen bonds of trust between close intimates. Abstract images of places, between intimates, reflect localized notions of the bang ilchon. For twenty-year-old Soo, LBS like Facebook Places allow her to be co-present with friends elsewhere. She likes to leave comments when friends visit and take pictures of places. She also views it as a great way to “bump” into friends in her physical proximity. Soo states,

My friends and I lead such hectic lives it can sometimes be impossible to catch up. But sometimes I see that a friend is nearby via Facebook Places and so we can share a quick coffee (face-to-face). Commenting on people’s photos is a great way to stay in perpetual contact. Sometimes I know that a friend has taken a picture just for me because of the content and message. Sharing pictures can make me feel closer with friends even when I can’t see them (physically).

As noted elsewhere, the increased use of camera phones to record and document while also experiencing an event has created a phenomenon that can be called “fast-forwarding presence” (Hjorth 2007) in which experience and recording take on a new relationship. In this meshwork of moving things, LBS camera phone images can play a key role in reinforcing traditional notions of place as they transform the relationship between experiencing and recording a place. As a twenty-eight-year-old woman Hyunjin stated,

Here (LBS games) place is clearly a shared experience, reflecting the Korean bang. I use it (LBS games) to share my feeling or beautiful photos with others whenever I visit new places. These pictures are about a feeling, a smell, a touch. Or sometimes I use it (LBS games) when I’m curious who is in the same place with me . . . I think using it (LBS) changes the way I record a place rather than the way I experience a place. Getting points or stickers makes me to think about the places more meaningfully.

What is especially pertinent in Hyunjin’s comments was the fact that she believed LBS “changes the way I record a place rather than the way I experience a place.” This is a curious point for differentiation. Does not the recording of the place then affect the way in which it is relived and reexperienced as part of mnemonic narrations? In this way, recording brings together the social and spatial, or in the case of Korea, the bang and the ilchon. Here we see Ingrid Richardson and Rowan Wilken’s (2012) post-phenomenological argument for understanding place as a series of “placings” overlaid with entangled forms of co-presence. We also see how camera phone practices are contributing to a changing relationship between performativity, memory, and place. Rather than operating to memorialize place, camera phone practices, especially through LBS networks, are creating performances around the movement of copresence, place, and placing that are gendered. And these gendered visualities require us to revise the localized nature of gender.

As this study into gendered LBS camera phone practices highlights, more work into this phenomenon is required. While LBS have attracted much analysis recently, gender has been relatively overlooked. This is despite the fact that gender informs the nature of mobile media and gaming cultures. As a new form of user created content, LBS camera phone practices are demonstrating emerging forms of visual and geospatial cultures that are informed by localized gendered contexts.

Conclusion: Locating Gender

Although second generation LBS games like Foursquare are in their infancy, this is an area of growing diversity and complexity within mobile media and communication. In particular, LBS are changing how we visualize intimate cartographies though shifting camera phone practices. Whereas the first generation of camera phone practices highlighted gendered differences through LBS (Hjorth 2007; D.-H. Lee 2005), these gendered practices visualities take on new dimensions with next generation practices—particularly in terms of the potential “stalker” elements (Gazzard 2011). While notions of privacy differ dramatically in a Korean rather than Anglophonic context (K. S. Lee 2011), women are often the victims of LBS potential for stalking (Cincotta et al. 2011).

Given this phenomenon, the increased proliferation of camera phone images encouraged by the way in which LBS link place and intimacy gave way to two directions. On one hand, surveyed respondents often did not take pictures of themselves, mindful of how these geospatial visualities could be taken out of context by strangers. Constructing boundaries around different audiences played a key role in LBS camera phone practices. This was a relatively generational phenomenon. Just as camera phone genres like sel-ca are generational, so too are emergent LBS camera phone genres. On the other hand, through the deployment of photo apps, LBS camera phone users were trying to evoke a “multisensorial” sensibility of place to co-present intimates. In this article, I have used a Korean context to call upon the need for socio-cultural feminist readings of LBS and camera phone practices as they become embedded in geospatial forms of mobile intimacy.