Mobile media and ecologies of location

Abstract

This paper examines the ongoing significance of locative media and mobile-generated geocoded data, including their increasing integration into the core functionalities and business objectives of large social media and search services. In this article, I take a ‘communicative ecologies’ approach to explore how location-based services function as a dynamic system, with a fluid and shifting structure or set of relations. The evolution of the mobile social networking and search and recommendation service Foursquare provides a striking example of such a system. In the first half of the paper, I explore the company’s still-evolving business model, and their intricate corporate relationships with other key search, recommendation, and social media firms. In the second half, I trace how this dynamic engagement is also at play in the end uses of Foursquare and other location applications.

Keywords:

• locative media
• mobile media
• Foursquare
• communicative ecologies

Acknowledgements

This article is an output of the Australian Research Council (ARC)-funded project, ‘The Cultural Economy of Locative Media’ (DE120102114). I wish to thank the ARC for its financial support, Lee Humphreys, and Jenny Kennedy for her invaluable research assistance.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rowan Wilken

Rowan Wilken, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia, and holds an Australian Research Council funded research fellowship to investigate location-based services in the Swinburne Institute for Social Research. His present research interests include mobile and locative media, digital technologies and culture, theories and practices of everyday life, domestic technology consumption, and old and new media. He has published widely on mobile and location-based media. He is the co-editor (with Gerard Goggin) of Locative Media (Routledge, 2015) and Mobile Technology and Place (Routledge, 2012), and is the author of Teletechnologies, Place, and Community (Routledge, 2011). At present he is working on two books: Cultural Economies of Locative Media (Oxford University Press, forthcoming); and, an edited collection (with Justin Clemens), The Afterlives of Georges Perec (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming).