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

Geographies of social networks: meetings, travel and communications

The past decade has seen striking increases in travel and in communications at-a-distance through mobile phone calls, text messaging and emailing. People in prosperous societies are both travelling and communicating more to connect with absent others. People can travel, relocate and migrate and yet still be connected with friends and family members 'back home'. So, increasingly, people who are near emotionally may be geographically very far away; yet they are only a journey, email or a phone call away. In this article we attempt to examine how such strong ties are spatially distributed and sustained through specific geographies of travel, meetings and communications. How often do strong ties meet, talk at-at-distance and write, and to what degree does distance determine regularity? To what extent are communications enhancing and/or substituting for physical travel? We examine in particular to what degree far-flung ties and emotional networking at-a-distance are characteristic of many people other than the transnational 'elites' and 'underprivileged' migrants. We consider the notion of 'network capital'