Special Issue on Locative Media
for
Convergence: The International Journal of research into New Media
Technologies
vol 18 no 3
Article deadline: August 20, 2011
Publication: August, 2012
Editor: Rowan Wilken
All contributors must read the Convergence ‘Intructions to authors’
before submission at:
http://convergence.beds.ac.uk/submissions/instructions
Email correspondence for this issue: rwilken at swin.edu.au
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Questions of location and location-awareness are becoming increasingly
central to our contemporary engagements with the internet and mobile
media. Information, as Malcolm McCullough has suggested, ‘is now
coming to you … wherever you are’ and ‘is increasingly about where you
are’. Indeed, locative media services are now well-established and
booming commercially, with consumers accustomed to using sat nav
devices in their cars, Google maps on desktop and laptop computers and
mobile devices, geoweb and geotagging and other mapping applications,
and various apps on iPhones and smartphones that use location
technologies.
The growth and increased ubiquity of these technologies has been
accompanied by an emerging critical scholarship. Much of this work to
date, especially the early work, has been centred on various creative
explorations around locative media, especially coming out of
experimental art and cultural movements. This work has made important
contributions to critical understanding of developments in and uses of
location-based technologies. What is missing from much existing
scholarship in this field is a coherent and systematic account of the
various location-based services as media, and which details in depth
their cultural-economic dimensions. Given the growing ubiquity of
locative media, the questions regarding this field that have not thus
been addressed in the media and communications literature are crucial
and concern the constitution, function, and effects of locative media
culture: how location-based services are culturally and economically
shaped, how they have been regulated (or not), and what are the
implications for broader understandings of media and technology.
This special ‘Locative Media’ issue of Convergence seeks contributions
that will address this gap in scholarship on this increasingly
persuasive suite of information and communications technologies.
Contributions to this special issue may wish to explore:
• the usefulness (or otherwise) of established political economy of
the media approaches for examinations of locative media
• to what extent do locative media complicate existing
regulatory regimes?
• locative media and privacy considerations
• locative media and the ‘spatial turn’ in media studies
• location-based mobile social networking (Facebook Places, Google
Latitude, Gowalla, Foursquare, Loopt, etc.)
• the performance of identity through consumer engagement with
locative media services
• analysis of the ‘points’ systems of location-based mobile social
networking services (eg. Foursquare)
• the socio-technical conditions under which locative media
technologies emerge
• tracing the ‘crisis identities’ (Gitelman) associated with the
development of specific locative media technologies (such as GPS,
Bluetooth, QR codes, RFID tags, geotagging, etc.)
• phenomenological engagements with locative media services: do
these
differ from our engagements with other forms of mobile media?
• If ‘pure geographical location is rarely of users’ interest’
(Ilkka
Arminen), what, then, is driving the take-up and consumption of
location-based media services?
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