Locative Social Media offers a critical analysis of the effect of using locative social media on the perceptions and phenomenal experience of lived in spaces and places. It includes a comprehensive overview of the historical development of traditional mapping and global positioning technology to smartphone-based application services that incorporate social networking features as a series of modes of understanding place. Drawing on users accounts of the location-based social network Foursquare, a digital post-phenomenology of place is developed to explain how place is mediated in the digital age. This draws upon both the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and post-phenomenology to encompass the materiality and computationality of the smartphone. The functioning and surfacing of place by the device and application, along with the orientation of the user, allows for a particular experiencing of place when using locative social media termed attunement, in contrast to an instrumentalist conception of place.
Reviews
"Locative Social Media is a fine book that is theoretically sophisticated and empirically grounded. In it, Leighton Evans develops a rigorous post-phenomenology of location-based social media, and explores how mood or orientation, embodied practices involving mobile technology use, and the data-infused environment, are all 'co-constitutive of place'." - Rowan Wilken, Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Health, Arts and Design, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia
"In this book, Leighton Evans accomplishes something very ambitious: a deep theoretical reflection on the phenomenology of place experience as it occurs in the context of physical/digital interactions, interwoven with a thorough empirical account of situated use of location-based social networks. Evans' study of Foursquare users details complex place-related agencies in the age of what he calls a 'computationally infused world', including gathering, mapping, bridging, broadcasting, reputation management and building social capital. His findings resonate with and holistically consolidate the state of the art of interdisciplinary investigations of locative social media. The most impressive achievement in this book, however, is how the empirical evidence builds the basis for an exciting conceptual revisitation of the phenomenology of place; Evans proposes an original 'digital post-phenomenology of place' that connects key aspects of situated socio-technical systems: from embodied practices, to new and emergent mappings, occurrences and representations enabled by code and by locative infrastructures." - Luigina Ciolfi, Reader in Communication in the Cultural Communication and Computing Research Institute, Sheffield Hallam University, UK
"Transporting Heidegger from the Black Forest to the urban Foursquare-world, Leighton Evans discusses the persistently collective nature of space and place in digital culture. This important study opens different ways how location based social networks function to frame space for us but also how users participate in this process of defining belonging. Evans' book addresses algorithmic situations as digital post-phenomenology of place; the book is a valuable research text for scholars and students in media, sociology and cultural studies of technology." - Jussi Parikka, Professor of Technological Culture and Aesthetics, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, UK
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