[ecrea] Locative Social Media: Place in the Digital Age

*Locative Social Media: **Place in the Digital Age*

Palgrave Macmillan, London (2015)

*Leighton Evans*

/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*

For more information, please visit:
http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/locative-social-media-/?K=9781137456106

Many thanks, Leighton

--

Dr Leighton Evans
Postdoctoral Researcher
Programmable City Project
National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis (NIRSA)
Maynooth University
Maynooth
Co. Kildare
Republic of Ireland

(leighton.evans /at/ nuim.ie)

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