Locative Media and Sociability:Using Location-Based Social Networks to Coordinate Everyday Life

Foursquare was a mobile social networking application that enabled people to share location with friends in the form of “check-ins.” The visualization of surrounding known social connections as well as unknown others has the potential to impact how people coordinate social encounters and forge new social ties. While many studies have explored mobile phones and sociability, there is a lack of empirical research examining location-based social network’s (LSBNs) from a sociability perspective. Drawing on a dataset of original qualitative research with a range of Foursquare users, the paper examines the application in the context of social coordination and sociability in three ways. First, the paper explores if Foursquare is used to organize certain social encounters, and if so, why. Second, the paper examines the visualization of surrounding social connections and whether this leads to “serendipitous encounters.” Lastly, the paper examines whether the use of Foursquare can produce new social relationships

"Get off my lawn!": Starting to understand territoriality in location based mobile games

With the increasing popularity of mobile video games, game designers and developers are starting to integrate geolocation information into such games. Although popular location-based games (LBGs) such as Ingress and Pokémon Go have millions of users, research still needs to be carried out to fully understand the ways in which such games impact upon a player’s interaction with other players and their physical surroundings. Consequently, there is limited knowledge on how user behavior can be addressed and drawn upon as a design resource to further engage and motivate players to play. To further understand this, we developed a LBG called CityConqueror and have conducted an in ’the wild’ study. This initial study starts to unpack the ways that human territoriality can be expressed in LBGs to facilitate player motivation, engagement and can support the integration of the game in the player’s daily life. Based on our findings we propose a series of design implications for LBGs. The primary purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the importance of territoriality and the way that this can be drawn upon as a resource for design

The Mediated City Between Research Fields: An Invitation to Urban Media Studies

In this article, that works as an introduction to a Special Section on Urban Media Studies, we argue for a wider recognition of an emerging and vibrant scholarly space for research that permeates the borders of both media/ communication studies and urban studies. Our main motivation and aim is to shed light on the mutually constitutive entanglement of media, in all their multiplicity, and urban phenomena. The article first lays out some of the key elements that help define, though do not exhaust, the field of urban media studies. Moreover, we identify some important developments in both media studies and urban studies that have paved the way to the endeavor, such as non-media-centric approaches to media and relational/processual takes on urban space. We bring together some familiar and emerging models in the formation of urban media studies, even if we envisage this emerging scholarly space as open to further refinements, additions, and modulations, as necessitated by individual research interests and contexts

Decentering Media Studies, Verbing the Audience: Methodological Considerations Concerning People’s Uses of Media in Urban Space

Media studies scholars are invited today to address the pervasive mediation of contemporary cities, together with researchers from human geography, urban studies, science and technology studies, and mobility studies. Current studies of people’s uses of media in urban space, in particular, could play a central role in shedding light on the mediatedness of urban daily life. Drawing on a review of this specific strand of research within the broader field of “urban media studies,” the article argues that participation in the interdisciplinary endeavor runs the risk of being hindered by overly media-centric methodological procedures. Their restrictive implications are most problematic in the taken-for-granted employment of “urban audience” and “urban media user” as key concepts in the study of how people use media in urban space. What we propose instead is to demarcate the research object by proceeding from the primary importance of urban practices. This methodological decentering of media necessitates the “verbing” of the notion of audience, thereby shifting the research focus to the activity of “audiencing” (media-related or not) and its interrelations with other urban activities

Methodological Approaches in Urban Media and Communication Research

Over the last two decades, the study of urban media and communication has witnessed an upsurge of empirical research, characterized by a plurality of methodological perspectives. In this chapter, we aim to help readers find their way through the field’s main methodological heuristics, as a way to both foster internal dialogue and offer guiding principles for urban media and communication scholars to develop their empirical research. Drawing from our previous work, we distinguish three main strands of research within urban media and communication studies: approaches that consider the city as content of communication, as a context of media engagement, and as a medium of communication

Locating Identities in Time: An examination of the Impact of Temporality on Presentations of the Self through Location-based Social networks

Studies of identity and location-based social networks (LBSN) have tended to focus on the performative aspects associated with marking one’s location. Yet, these studies often present this practice as being an a priori aspect of locative media. What is missing from this research is a more granular understanding of how this process develops over time. Accordingly, we focus on the first six weeks of 42 users beginning to use an LBSN we designed and named GeoMoments. Through our analysis of our users\u27 activities, we contribute to understanding identity and LBSN in two distinct ways. First, we show how LBSN users develop and perform self-identity over time. Second, we highlight the extent these temporal processes reshape the behaviors of users. Overall, our results illustrate that while a performative use of GeoMoments does evolve, this development does not occur in a vacuum. Rather, it occurs within the dynamic context of everyday life, which is prompted, conditioned, and mediated by the way the affordances of GeoMoments digitally organize and archive past locational traces