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Observing the Impact of Locative Media on the Public Space of Contemporary Cities

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Observing the Impact of Locative Media on the Public Space of Contemporary Cities Observing the Impact of Locative Media on the Public Space of Contemporary Cities Enqi Weng UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE Abstract The concept of public space in contemporary cities is vastly different from what Habermas (1991) conceptualized initially as today we have virtual platforms that engage with us constantly. With the increasing digitization of our postmodern society, communities are able to migrate onto a virtual platform to form imagined social relations across time and spatial distances, enabled by social media and mobile devices equipped with GPS functions. Locative media features on Google Maps and Facebook provide the means to connect communities with their physical and virtual locations. This article examines the impact of the relationship that communities have with their concepts of space in our present-day cities and the issues that arise in their negotiations to define their physical and virtual territories. Introduction We live in an increasingly mechanized society in this digital generation. Ubiquitous media has invaded and pervaded our lives and appears here to stay. Where we used to receive round-the-clock information through the television and radio physically fixed at certain localities (Lefebvre, 2004:47), today we carry their digital images and sounds with us on the road by means of mobile apparatuses. If printed flyers in our mailboxes are not enough for advertisers, the marketers’ messages have found their way onto the exterior of our city skyscrapers, dazzling us with flashing lights and alluring visuals (McQuire, 2006). The contemporary city is filled with complexities beyond its basic function of being a public place for gathering people. No longer is it just an urban landscape of walkways and buildings but it is now gleamed with a layer of visually-enticing mediascape, demanding our every attention. In busy cities like Hong Kong and Japan, flashing billboards cover the face of buildings all through the night, giving them the reputation of being cities that never sleep. In an invisible realm, a more pervasive yet subtle datascape penetrates every dimension of the air with bytes and information, as mobile devices such as mobile phones, handheld PDAs and laptop computers with Wi-Fi capabilities are on the move in cities and travel with their human agents from place to place. With the increasing digitization of the city comes the increase in the amount of information collected on these mobile human agents tracked through their mobile devices, and this has become a routine part of everyday life (Lyon, 2003:97). Where mass media used to perform the role of disseminating information through authoritative organizations such as news channels and governments, Lemos argues that we are now in the post-mass media era, where “anyone can produce information, ‘releasing’ the editorial center” to a state of joblessness (2010b:404). Information is no longer distributed through one-way communications and becomes “bidirectional” through mediums such as “blogs, wikis, map collaboration, chats network, social software networks, etc” (Lemos, 2010b:404). Today, we have the ability to “move physically/spatially and virtual/informational at the same time” and this is the “main feature of mobile Polymath: An Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Journal, Vol. 2, No. 2, Spring 2012 Observing the Impact of Locative Media computing and post-mass media function” (Lemos, 2010b: 404-405), which presents itself in the form of locative media. Locative Media The term locative media was first used by Karlis Kalnins in 2003 in Latvia to set apart “the corporation use of location-based services from artistic propose” (Lemos, 2010b:405; Tuters and Varnelis, 2006). Locative media is defined as a “mobile media with geographical positioning and context sensitivity” (Santaella, 2011:295). Tuters and Varnelis state that “broadly speaking, locative-media projects can be categorized under one of two types of mapping, either annotative— virtually tagging the world—or phenomenological— tracing the action of the subject in the world” (2006:359). In contemporary cities, locative media is localized and encapsulated in the form of individual mobile devices carried by human agents. Every movement or digital input a person makes can add information to a dataspace, and the resulting amount of data collected can be phenomenal. Characterized by “Foucault’s ‘disciplinary society’ to embody ‘spatial flexibility and continual monitoring,’” and what Deleuze term as the “control society,” data-collection on individuals is now an everyday routine to monitor human movement and action (McQuire, 2008:142-143). The focus, Deleuze argues, is no longer on the mass but on the individual as each person becomes a databank filled with digital footprints, information as well as patterns of behavior (McQuire, 2008:143). Where people of ancient times used to meet centrally in the city market square to interact and discuss issues of local and common interests, our modern physical cities no longer serve those functions in the same way. Instead, we face increasing isolation in big cities, and turn to our private media as channels for social networking and human-to-human engagements. With the high mobility of global citizens travelling in and out of cities, Lemos argues that “the very emphasis on locating and indexing everything with coordinates and tags … reflect[s] the culture of fear and insecurity” and views annotation as a form of fixing the “fear of drift and disorientation” (2010a:133). The Global Positioning System (GPS) feature of mobile phones allows telecommunication companies to pinpoint the position of any individual through latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates. Such a technological feature makes a compromise on people’s natural need to interact physically and allows them the ability to ‘see’ and communicate with one another on a virtual platform. The “culture of insecurity” that can result from this limited form of social interaction may “greatly increase the different forms of control, monitoring and surveillance” through individual’s use of “portable mobile and networked devices” (Lemos, 2010a:135). This move from a physical public space to a virtual one ensures a different form of human social interaction and creates an “augmented reality.” Its study generates interest among scholars, marketers, gamers and locative media artists alike. It also leads us to question our concept of space and prods scholars like Thielmann to ask if instead of putting ‘www’ on the Internet to represent ‘who, what, when’, we might convert it to ‘wwww’ to connote ‘who, what, when, where’ as we move into a future where there is an increasing obsession with virtual spatial placement (2010:3). Locative Media Framework A theoretical framework is needed to demonstrate the interaction between technological devices and humans and their relationships and influences with each other. We can adopt Bruno Latour’s Actor- 2 Polymath: An Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Journal Network Theory, which suggests that both social and technological determinism have a part to contribute to the networked relationships between machines and human agents (Thielmanm, 2010; Latour, 1996). It is suitable for use in relating to locative media because it allows us to refer back to Latour’s concept of the “Internet of Things” as a pretext towards the vision of “an integrated part of Future Internet” where “physical and virtual ‘things’ have identities, physical attributes, and virtual personalities and use intelligent interfaces, and are seamlessly integrated into the information network” (Vermesa et al., 2009). This networked relationship is well demonstrated by the trend of “geotagging objects instead of people” and letting “these objects tell their stories,” and it allows locative media to create “an awareness of the genealogy of actants and agencies” (Thielmann, 2010:11-12). The effect of this is enhanced through densely populated communication networks and its social network features which allow individuals to consciously choose spectacle over privacy, sharing details about their whereabouts and posting it up online easily for their direct communities to see (Lemos, 2010a:138). Issues of surveillance, control and monitoring arise as younger generation users in particular start to conceive and embody the “great paradox of contemporary surveillance” where “instead of striving to maintain privacy, [they] strive to increase self-exposure” (Santaella, 2011:305; Blatterer, 2010:76). What sort of information is being made available, how are these data about human mobility being archived, and what are the implications of such increasing availability of digital information? This datascape can very well be what Foucault conceptualized as a “heterotopia” which is a conceptual space that mirrors real, tangible, physical space, “a kind of enacted utopia in which real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted” (Rousseaux and Thouvenin, 2009:176). Lemos terms this as ‘information territory’ where control is determined over digital space and boundaries in the form of information organized by bytes and data (2010a:132). Within such a framework, issues of surveillance and control come into play as technological advances quickly reaches a stage where we are obsessed with the precise whereabouts of both humans and objects. With locative media, subjects are constantly on the move. The concept that we have of space as fixed and immovable
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