Leighton Evans

The use of ICT in road freight transport for CO2 reduction - an exploratory study of UK's grocery retail industry

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate empirically how information and communication technologies (ICT) can contribute to reduction of CO2 emissions in road freight transport and to identify opportunities for further improvements. Design/methodology/approach – This research adopts a multiple case study approach with three leading UK grocery retailers as exemplars of fast-moving consumer goods retailers, conducted using multiple data collection techniques including interviews, system demonstrations, onsite observations and the use of archive information. Findings – ICT solutions have a direct positive impact on CO2 emissions reduction but opportunities to further reduce CO2 emissions are perceived as lying beyond retailers’ own distribution networks. These opportunities are not fully utilised due to the complexities of collaborative ICT provisions and retailers’ reluctance to share information with competitors. Research limitations/implications – A limitation of the study is that it is explo...

Location-based services: transformation of the experience of space

This article argues that location-based services (LBS) like the social network-based LBS Foursquare are playing an active role in the transformation of experience of the world for users. Based on Heideggers critique of modern technology and view of technology as a modern ontotheology, and using quantitative and qualitative analyses, this article argues that the importance and role of mobile computational devices and LBS is shifting users’ views of physical space by providing social and semantic cues for navigating the world via mobile devices and LBS. This movement is based on users accessing and interacting with maps, making them meaningful through social gazetteers and part of a socially based referential totality, which while liberating has consequences for how users perceive other users and entities in the world, along with problematising current key issues like privacy.

Everyday life and locative play: an exploration of Foursquare and playful engagements with space and place

Foursquare is a location-based social network (LBSN) that combines gaming elements with features conventionally associated with social networking sites (SNSs). Following two qualitative studies, this article sets out to explore what impact this overlaying of physical environments with play has on everyday life and experiences of space and place. Drawing on early understandings of play, alongside the flâneur and ‘phoneur’ as respective methods for conceptualizing play in the context of mobility and urbanity, this article examines whether the suggested division between play and ordinary life is challenged by Foursquare, and if so, how this reframing of play is experienced. Second, this article investigates what effect this LBSN has on mobility choices and spatial relationships. Finally, the novel concept of the ‘phoneur’ is posited as a way of understanding how pervasive play through LBSNs acts as a mediating influence on the experience of space and place.

Location-Based Social Media

This book extends current understandings of the effects of using locative social media on spatiality, the experience of time and identity. This is a pertinent and timely topic given the increase in opportunities people now have to explicitly and implicitly share their location through digital and mobile technologies. There is a growing body of research on locative media, much of this literature has concentrated on spatial issues. Research here has explored how locative media and location-based social media (LBSN) are used to communicate and coordinate social interactions in public space, affecting how people approach their surroundings, turning ordinary life “into a game”, and altering how mobile media is involved in understanding the world. This bookoffers a critical analysis of the effect of usage of locative social media on identity through an engagement with the current literature on spatiality, a novel critical investigation of the temporal effects of LBSN use and a view of identity as influenced by the spatio-temporal effects of interacting with place through LBSN. Drawing on phenomenology, post-phenomenology and critical theory on social and locative media, alongside established sociological frameworks for approaching spatiality and the city, it presents a comprehensive account of the effects of LBSN and locative media use.

Maps as Deep: Reading the Code of Location-Based Social Networks

Location-based services comprise the fastest growing sector in web technology business [1, p. 9]. These services, be they location-based social networks, satellite navigation devices in cars, or augmented reality browsers as applications on mobile phones, have opened questions about their mediating effects on the awareness of location and engagement with location for users. McCulloch [2] argues that location-based services are a channel for specialized information, in that the information reaching users is now about where they are, rather than decontextualized information with no relevance to the location of the user. Analyses of the impact of location-based services have been myriad in consideration [3], but some major areas of research have emerged. Wilken [3] identifies the major themes as research directed towards analyzing how locative technologies mediate the relationship between technology use and physical or digital spaces [4]-[12], discussions of power and politics in location-based services [13], and assessments and discussions on the nature of the representation of space that emerge through locative media [14], [15]. In addition, the area of privacy has been a major area of interest [16]-[19].

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

Through an investigation of patterns of use of the location-based social network Foursquare derived from an extensive ethnographic survey of users, this paper focuses on the orientation of users towards location-based social media and mobile computational devices. Utilising Heidegger’s notions of mood and attunement to the world, the paper argues that the towards-which of the user, that is the mood of the user in a phenomenological sense, is critical to their experience of using location-based social media and the revealing of place that emerges from that usage. A contrast between a technological and a poetic or computational revealing of place can then be established based on the phenomenological orientation of user to device, application and world. The emphasis on orientation and attunement has implications for application design and research on user experience.

Locative Media and Data-Driven Computing Experiments

Over the past two decades urban social life has undergone a rapid and pervasive geocoding, becoming mediated, augmented and anticipated by location-sensitive technologies and services that generate and utilise big, personal, locative data. The production of these data has prompted the development of exploratory data-driven computing experiments that seek to find ways to extract value and insight from them. These projects often start from the data, rather than from a question or theory, and try to imagine and identify their potential utility. In this paper, we explore the desires and mechanics of data-driven computing experiments. We demonstrate how both locative media data and computing experiments are ‘staged’ to create new values and computing techniques, which in turn are used to try and derive possible futures that are ridden with unintended consequences. We argue that using computing experiments to imagine potential urban futures produces effects that often have little to do with creating new urban practices. Instead, these experiments promote Big Data science and the prospect that data produced for one purpose can be recast for another and act as alternative mechanisms of envisioning urban futures.

A smart place to work? Big data systems, labour, control and modern retail stores

The modern retail store is a complex coded assemblage and data‐intensive environment, its operations and management mediated by a number of interlinked big data systems. This paper draws on an ethnography of a retail store in Ireland to examine how these systems modulate the functioning of the store and working practices of employees. It was found that retail work involves a continual movement between a governance regime of control reliant on big data systems which seek to regulate and harnesses formal labour and automation into enterprise planning, and a disciplinary regime that deals with the symbolic, interactive labour that workers perform and act as a reserve mode of governmentality if control fails. This continual movement is caused by new systems of control being open to vertical and horizontal fissures. While retail functions as a coded assemblage of control, systems are too brittle to sustain the governmentality desired.

Locative Media and Identity: Accumulative technologies of the self

The role of location-based social networks (LBSNs) on identity is a relatively unexplored area within the growing cannon of work on locative media. Following an exegesis of Giddens’s argument that narrative biographical accounts are critical in self-identity in the modern age and Foucault’s technologies of the self, this article positions LBSN, and in particular Foursquare, as a contributor to self-identity in users’ lives. A close reading of ethnographic and interview data from Foursquare users reveals that in the context of the presentation, maintenance, and reflection upon self-identity, LBSN use can play an integral role in the self-identity of its users. The contribution of LBSN to indicators of user lifestyle, the intentional sharing of particular locations, and user recollection of events and locations are the key features of how LBSNs provide conduits to self-identity. The degree of usage in everyday life is identified as critical in the positioning of LBSN as a key contributor to identity narratives. With the integration of LBSN features into more mainstream social media platforms, this contribution to self-identity in the social media age is resilient to the demise of stand-alone LBSN applications.

Sharing Location with Locative Social Media

To understand the use of LBSN in everyday contexts and how this affects users’ experience of place, a substantial and original body of research on user experiences needed to the conducted. This chapter will detail he methods and techniques used in that research process, and will detail the practices and behaviours of using LBSN that are indicative of a deep understanding of place as a meaningful existential locale.