Rowan Wilken

Locative media: From specialized preoccupation to mainstream fascination

In 2010, Google generated global controversy when their Google Street View cars recorded data sourced from unsecured WiFi networks. While, in February of the same year, mobile social networking service Foursquare became embroiled in its own controversy when it was revealed that much of the traffic on their site was appearing on Please Rob Me.com, a website which streams updates from various location-based networks that shows when users check-in to a geographical location that is not their home. These controversies are of note not just for the salutary lessons they offer about the risks associated with digital data retention, privacy and security. At a more general level, they are noteworthy in that they testify to the dramatically increased public awareness of, and mainstream (especially press) exposure granted to, location-based media services. Such services are now well established and booming commercially, with consumers accustomed to using sat nav devices in their cars, Google maps on desktop and laptop computers and mobile devices, geoweb and geotagging and other mapping applications, and various apps on iPhones and smartphones that use location technologies. Not only do location-based services ‘comprise the fastest growing sector in web technology businesses’ (Gordon and de Souza e Silva, 2011: 9), questions of location and locationawareness are increasingly central to our contemporary engagements with the internet and mobile media. Indeed, as Gordon and de Souza e Silva (2011: 19) suggest, ‘unlocated information will cease to be the norm’ and location will become a ‘near universal search string for the world’s data’ (2011: 20); or, as McCullough (2006: 26) puts it, information ‘is now coming to you . . . wherever you are’ and ‘is increasingly about where you are’. In this special issue, ‘locative media’ is the term that is used to capture this diverse array of location aware technologies and practices. The term ‘locative media’ (that is, media of communication that are functionally bound to a location) is preferred for the precise reason that it is economical and expansive but also precise. That is to say, it captures a lot in two words while also retaining a sense of the term’s very particular history, which is anchored within the field of new media arts. For instance, various sources trace the origin of the term ‘locative media’ back to Karlis Kalnins, who is said to have first proposed it during the Art þ Communication Festival in Riga,

A Community of Strangers? Mobile Media, Art, Tactility and Urban Encounters with the Other

Abstract This article is concerned with detailing key instances where mobile media (especially mobile gaming and mobile media art) have been used to make connections with relative and complete strangers. The article is divided into three parts. The first examines two key examples of past experimental design that explicitly explored questions of mobility and difference. The second section details more contemporary experimental engagements with mobile technologies that seek to perform urban encounters with ‘the Other’. The third and final part of the article reads both sets of experimental work through the lens of (poststructuralist) philosophical engagements with the concepts of community and difference.

Places Nearby: Facebook as a location-based social media platform

This article examines the growing importance of Facebook as a location-focused platform. Facebook’s approach has been cautious but deliberate. However, following the strategic acquisitions of location-sharing start-ups Gowalla and Glancee, Facebook has ramped up its location-based services: they launched their Nearby feature in December 2012, and adjusted their application programming interface (API) in early 2013 to enable ‘seamless’ location-sharing across third-party applications. These, and more recent acquisitions, are part of ambitious, longer-term moves that reposition Facebook as a local recommendation service (taking on Foursquare and Yelp), and, significantly, establish Facebook as a key local, and increasingly mobile-centred, advertising portal (taking on Google).

Rethinking ‘big data’ as visual knowledge: the sublime and the diagrammatic in data visualisation

Informational data, we are told, are proliferating ever more rapidly and with increasing complexity. In an age of ‘big data’ we are seeing a broad reaching, and often uncritical fascination with data visualisation and its potential for knowledge generation. At its extreme this represents a fantasy of knowing, or total knowledge. Nonetheless, for those working in visual anthropology, big data and data visualisation offer significant extensions to our ways of knowing and our categories of knowledge. In this article we probe the fascination and potential of data visualisation and its relevance for understanding human experience, social relations and networks. First, we argue that the celebration of informational aesthetics can be understood as a version of the Kantian mathematical sublime. Extending this analysis, we argue that productive possibilities for thinking about data visualisation are to be found in Deleuze’s engagement with the diagram. The diagram, for Deleuze, does not represent but rather operates both as expression and problem resolution. It is incomplete in the dual sense of never capturing the totality of the object and in its dynamism. This approach points to the merits of this investment in data visualisation (the way it works as expression and problem resolution), but highlights the need to be cautious about fetishising the sublimity of ‘beautiful data’.

Platform specificity and the politics of location data extraction

The rise of smart phone use, and its convergence with mapping infrastructures and large search and social media corporations, has led to a commensurate rise in the importance of location. While locations are still defined by fixed longitude/latitude coordinates, they now increasingly ‘acquire dynamic meaning as a consequence of the constantly changing location-based information that is attached to them’ becoming ‘a near universal search string for the world’s data’. As the richness of this geocoded information increases, so the commercial value of this location information also increases. This article examines the growing commercial significance of location data. Informed by recent calls for ‘medium-specific analysis’, we build on earlier work to argue that social media companies actively extract location data for commercial advantage in quite specific ways. By not paying due and careful attention to the specifics of data extraction strategies, political and cultural economic analyses of new media services risk eliding key differences between new media platforms, and their respective software systems, patterns of consumer use, and individual revenue models. In response, we develop a comparative analysis of two platforms – Foursquare and Google – and examine how each extracts and uses geocoded user data. From this comparative exploration of platform specificity, we aim to draw conclusions concerning marketing (economic) surveillance, and how Foursquare’s and Google’s operations work in the service of fostering the securitization of mobility - the process by which the capacity to track and predict mobility and associated patterns of consumption is directly productive of value.

Digital housekeepers and domestic expertise in the networked home

This article examines the distribution of expertise in the performance of ‘digital housekeeping’ required to maintain a networked home. It considers the labours required to maintain a networked home, the forms of digital expertise that are available and valued in digital housekeeping, and ways in which expertise is gendered in distribution amongst household members. As part of this discussion, we consider how digital housekeeping implicitly situates technology work within the home in the role of the ‘housekeeper’, a term that is complicated by gendered sensitivities. Digital housework, like other forms of domestic labour, contributes to identity and self-worth. The concept of housework also affords visibility of the digital housekeeper’s enrolment in the project of maintaining the household. This article therefore asks, what is at stake in the gendered distribution of digital housekeeping?

Global Marketing Communications and Strategic Regionalism

This article examines how ideas of global standardization, localization, and regionalization are played out in relation to global marketing. Its aim is to deepen present understanding of global marketing communications and corporate strategy through case studies examining corporate responses to the issues of global standardization, localization, and regionalization. To do this, a research project was developed: an exploratory analysis of the advertising trade-press literature over a ten year period (1997–2007) mapping how three major multinational corporations (MNCs)—Coca-Cola, McDonalds, and Colgate-Palmolive—engage with marketing from the global, to the local, and the regional. From this exploratory analysis, two key developments emerge. The first is that, despite individual variations in each corporations response to global marketing, in broad terms the dominant global marketing approach is one of ‘glocalization’. The second key development and key argument of this paper is that, while the reemergence of ‘regionalization’ in analyses of global marketing and corporate strategy is becoming more prevalent, the term as presently understood requires significant conceptual revision. Thus we propose and develop the concept of ‘strategic regionalism’ as a valuable umbrella term for capturing some of the nuances of regionalization as it pertains to and is practiced within global marketing communications and corporate strategy. Este artículo examina cómo las ideas de localización, regionalización y estandarización global se han desarrollado en relación al mercadeo global. Su objetivo es profundizar el conocimiento actual sobre las comunicaciones del mercadeo global y la estrategia corporativa a través de estudios de caso, para analizar las respuestas corporativas a temas como la regionalización, localización y estandarización global. Para lograrlo, se desarrolló un proyecto de investigación: un análisis preliminar de la literatura de prensa especializada en publicidad durante un periodo de diez años (1997-2007). Se realizó un mapeo de cómo las tres principales corporaciones multinacionales (MNCs)—Coca-Cola, McDonalds, y Colgate-Palmolive—abordan el mercadeo a partir de lo global, a lo local y por último lo regional. De este análisis preliminar, surgieron dos resultados fundamentales. El primero consiste en que, a pesar de las diferencias en la respuesta de cada corporación al mercadeo global, en términos generales, el enfoque predominante del mercadeo global fue el de “glocalización”. El segundo resultado y argumento fundamental del artículo consiste en que, mientras el resurgimiento del término de ‘regionalización’ predomina en el análisis de mercadeo global y de estrategia corporativa, dicho término requiere una revisión conceptual. Por lo tanto, proponemos desarrollar el concepto de ‘regionalismo estratégico’, como un término genérico que reúna los diferentes matices de regionalización pertinentes, que se utilizan en las comunicaciones de mercadeo global y estrategia corporativa. 本文探讨全球标准化、本土化和区域化等概念相对于全球营销现象是如何过时了。通过案例研究，本文考察了公司是如何应对全球标准化、本土化和区域化等问题的，其目的是要深化对全球营销传播和公司战略的现有理解。为此，我们进行了一项研究：深入分析十年内（1997–2007）三大跨国公司（MNCs）即可口可乐、麦当劳和高露洁的广告宣传文献，勾画它们如何进行从全球到地方到区域各个层次的营销活动。 从这一分析来看，有两个重要发展。首先是，尽管各公司的全球营销战略存在个体间差异，广义地讲，主导性的战略还是“全球本土化”。第二个重要发展也是本文的主要观点是，虽然在分析全球营销和公司战略的过程中，再度出现“区域化”越来越普遍，但目前所理解的“区域化”在概念上需要进行重大修正。因此，我们提出和发展了“战略区域主义”这一有用的包容性概念，以抓住区域化在涉及和运用于全球营销传播和公司战略时的一些细微差别。

Social media, small businesses, and the control of information

Much of the discussion regarding privacy and social media has focused on consumers of social media, but social media is also popular among businesses. This article explores the privacy tensions of small business owners using social media to disseminate and gather information to better engage and serve their customers while maintaining customer trust. Drawing on Communication Privacy Management theory [Petronio, S. (2002). Boundaries of privacy: Dialectics of disclosure. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, Petronio, S. (2007). Translational research endeavors and the practices of communication privacy management. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 35(3), 218–222], we argue that there is a dialectical tension between control and engagement. As information is disclosed via social media, it creates new opportunities for engagement, surveillance, and commodification. Based on group interviews with small business owners, we identify the kinds of information that small businesses must manage as participants on social media platforms and the privacy rules they develop.

Data cultures of mobile dating and hook-up apps: Emerging issues for critical social science research:

The ethical and social implications of data mining, algorithmic curation and automation in the context of social media have been of heightened concern for a range of researchers with interests in digital media in recent years, with particular concerns about privacy arising in the context of mobile and locative media. Despite their wide adoption and economic importance, mobile dating apps have received little scholarly attention from this perspective – but they are intense sites of data generation, algorithmic processing, and cross-platform data-sharing; bound up with competing cultures of production, exploitation and use. In this paper, we describe the ways various forms of data are incorporated into, and emerge from, hook-up apps’ business logics, socio-technical arrangements, and cultures of use to produce multiple and intersecting data cultures. We propose a multi-layered research agenda for critical and empirical inquiry into this field, and suggest appropriate conceptual and methodological frameworks for exploring the social and political challenges of data cultures.

Mobile media and ecologies of location

This paper examines the ongoing significance of locative media and mobile-generated geocoded data, including their increasing integration into the core functionalities and business objectives of large social media and search services. In this article, I take a ‘communicative ecologies’ approach to explore how location-based services function as a dynamic system, with a fluid and shifting structure or set of relations. The evolution of the mobile social networking and search and recommendation service Foursquare provides a striking example of such a system. In the first half of the paper, I explore the company’s still-evolving business model, and their intricate corporate relationships with other key search, recommendation, and social media firms. In the second half, I trace how this dynamic engagement is also at play in the end uses of Foursquare and other location applications.