A genealogy of social geomedia: The life, death, and (possible) afterlife of location-based social networks

In the early 2010s, location-based social networks (LBSNs) received significant attention from both the public and venture capital. The “LBSN moment” was an important period of early mobile geomedia history, and this article argues that the reverberations of that moment still shape the contemporary social geomedia landscape. This article examines the LBSN moment through a media genealogy approach that views the period as a moment of juncture for the development of social location-sharing, which ended up being dominated by large platforms like Facebook and Uber. The article also draws from research on technological development to push back against narratives of inevitability and argue that specific dynamics of the LBSN moment, particularly the double-edged sword of hype, closed-off avenues for the media form. The article ultimately uses an interventionist genealogical approach to explore different paths that could have been—and still could be—taken

The Pedagogical Opportunities of Technical Standards: Learning from the Electronic Product Code

Purpose: The goal of this article is to make the case that technical standards can be valuable educational tools for technical communication teachers. The article argues for the pedagogical value of standards through an examination of one particular standard: the Tag Data Standard, published by GS1. The analysis focuses on areas in which the document could be improved by technical communication practitioners and students.Method: The data for this article come from the 126-page Tag Data Standard. The standard was inductively analyzed using grounded theory and involved a second coder. The research question that guided this analysis was, How could this comprehensive standard be improved by trained technical communicators? The goal is to show how technical standards could be used to provide students with real-world texts to analyze and edit.Results: The data show the TDS could likely be improved if technical communication practitioners were more involved in the writing process to focus on issues of consistency, audience, and design. The article uses those results to show why standards could be valuable educational tools for teachers.Conclusion: Standards are a crucial form of technical communication. They are an example of how language shapes the material world. The analysis in this article shows that these crucial documents can be improved by skilled technical communicators and can serve multiple pedagogical goals, including showing students how documents shape materiality and providing students with comprehensive, real-world texts to work with and improve

Technical Standards and a Theory of Writing as Infrastructure

Infrastructures support and shape our social world, but they do so in often invisible ways. In few cases is that truer than with various documents that serve infrastructural functions. This article takes one type of those documents—technical standards—and uses analysis of one specific standard to develop theory related to the infrastructural function of writing. The author specifically analyzes one of the major infrastructures of the Internet of Things—the 126-page Tag Data Standard (TDS)—to show how rethinking writing as infrastructure can be valuable for multiple conversations occurring with writing studies, including research on material rhetoric, research that expands the scope of what should be studied as writing, and research in writing studies that links with emerging fields. The author concludes by developing a model for future research on the infrastructural functions of writing

Invisibility through the interface: the social consequences of spatial search

Location-based services are mobile applications that use a device’s location to provide relevant results. Spatial search applications are a popular subset of location-based services that enable people to search through their surrounding space to find nearby locations. This article examines spatial search applications through a framework that combines critical geography research with research on the power search engines exert over information visibility. The main argument of the article is that popular spatial search applications, such as Yelp, may subtly reproduce existing forms of spatial segregation by rendering certain location invisible through the mobile mapping interface

The Pedagogical Opportunities of Technical Standards: Learning from the Electronic Product Code

Purpose: The goal of this article is to make the case that technical standards can be valuable educational tools for technical communication teachers. The article argues for the pedagogical value of standards through an examination of one particular standard: the Tag Data Standard, published by GS1. The analysis focuses on areas in which the document could be improved by technical communication practitioners and students.Method: The data for this article come from the 126-page Tag Data Standard. The standard was inductively analyzed using grounded theory and involved a second coder. The research question that guided this analysis was, How could this comprehensive standard be improved by trained technical communicators? The goal is to show how technical standards could be used to provide students with real-world texts to analyze and edit.Results: The data show the TDS could likely be improved if technical communication practitioners were more involved in the writing process to focus on issues of consistency, audience, and design. The article uses those results to show why standards could be valuable educational tools for teachers.Conclusion: Standards are a crucial form of technical communication. They are an example of how language shapes the material world. The analysis in this article shows that these crucial documents can be improved by skilled technical communicators and can serve multiple pedagogical goals, including showing students how documents shape materiality and providing students with comprehensive, real-world texts to work with and improve

Big Data, Technical Communication, and the Smart City

Big data is one of the most hyped buzzwords in both academia and industry. This article makes an early contribution to research on big data by situating data theoretically as a historical object and arguing that much of the discourse about the supposed transparency and objectivity of big data ignores the crucial roles of interpretation and communication. To set forth that analysis, this article engages with recent discussion of big data and “smart” cities to show the communicative practices operating behind the scenes of large data projects and relate those practices to the profession of technical communication

Building participatory counternarratives: Pedagogical interventions through digital placemaking

Places are filled with stories, with histories that shape how people understand the nature of a place. Places are unique sets of trajectories – each with a story – coming into contact. However, just as much as places are defined by their histories, they are also shaped by the histories that are forgotten, or far too often, actively suppressed through dominant narratives. After all, dominant media of spatial, public memory – for example, plaques and public monuments – often reproduce dominant narratives of a place, narratives created by the powerful. This project examines how digital placemaking can be deployed through locative technologies to push back on dominant spatial narratives and make places more polyvocal in consequential ways. In particular, through a project at Clemson University, we examine how locative storytelling applications can help students intervene in traditional narratives of place to engage with social justice and alternative histories

Mobile media beyond mobile phones

In this introduction, we argue for an expanded focus in mobile media and communication studies (MMCS) that accounts for the many types of mobile media that affect our lives. We begin by pointing out that mobile phone/smartphone research has dominated MMCS as a field. That focus makes sense, but it runs the risk of MMCS essentially turning into “smartphone studies,” which we argue would limit our impact. To make that case, we identify a few examples of the types of oft-ignored technologies that could add to the depth and breadth of MMCS research (e.g., RFID [radio frequency identification] tags, the Walkman, barcodes). We then summarize the articles in this special issue to categorize the breadth of this research, which ranges from analyses of mobile fans to autonomous cars to mobile infrastructure