[Air-L] Locative Social Media: Place in the Digital Age

[Leighton Evans]

Dear list members,

The following book has just been published by Palgrave Macmillan, and 
may be of interest to those working on new media, digital media, social 
media and locative or spatial media.

Please email me if you would like any queries or would like further 
information.


*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

Tel: 353-1-708-6187
leighton.evans at nuim.ie
www.nuim.ie/ProgCity
@ProgCity