The place of emplaced visualities: A case study of smartphone visuality and location-based social media in Shanghai, China

Abstract

As camera phones become more commonplace in the explosion of smartphones – along with new contexts for image distribution like microblogging and location-based services (LBS) – we are witnessing emergent types of visuality. In particular, through LBS such as Facebook Places we see ways in which users create new contexts for the overlay between place, ambient images, and geographic locations. While globally camera phone genres like self-portraiture have blossomed, we are also witnessing the flourishing of vernacular visualities that reflect a localized notion of place, social, and identity making practices (Lee 2009). As LBS transforms the context, and thus content, for camera phone images, there is a need to reassess the role of such visualities. Can we speak of ‘smartphone visuality’? This paper considers the shift through a case study of Jiepang users in Shanghai. As an emergent area in mobile communication, we reflect upon some of the ways it rehearses and extends earlier studies on networked visuality as well as reflecting a localized notion of mobility and place.

Notes

1. While there is yet to be a study on this phenomenon, in fieldwork with students and their parents in Shanghai from 2009–2011, almost all the parents had shanzhai and note anecdotally why they preferred them. Many note that having the ‘real’ brand was only a concern of the ba ling hou generation. This fieldwork was part of the Australian Research Council Discovery Project Online@Asia-Pacific, with Michael Arnold.

2. Sherman Young (2005) provides an alternative model of the transition from flâneur to phoneur. In his prescient article on GPS in cars, Young notes the shift towards a highly technologically mediated city has seen a movement away from the flâneur to the driveur. Using the example of Sydney, Young outlines how the car with its GPS tools creates new cartographies of the landscape as information. This draws upon Walter Benjamin's (2002) notion of the flâneur as the wanderer who is both the internal and external figure of the new visual regimes of nineteenth-century urbanity.

3. Please note all images have been edited so that all information identifiable with the user is deleted to ensure the respondents' anonymity.