Up close and impersonal: locative media and the changing nature of the networked individual in the city

By 2050, three-quarters of the world’s population will live in large urban centers comprised of many municipalities of varying sizes (Castells 2002), such as the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA) in Canada, with a population in 2016 of almost 7 million (City of Toronto 2017) and the Pearl River delta region of China, with a population in 2010 of approximately 42 million (World Bank Group 2015). Many of the people living in these urban centers were not born there, and so will not have any historical ties to them. In the GTHA, for example, approximately 40 percent of the population was born outside Canada (City of Toronto 2013). Within these urban conurbations, people may live in one city, work in another and play in yet another, resulting in considerable mobility throughout (Castells 2002). Within this context, we see the rise of locative media, mobile technologies that capture and deliver location- and time-specific content and connections to their users. Since locative media draw on how a person moves through these urban conurbations, enhancing and transforming the experience, they can have significant impacts on the ways in which people interact with these spaces and with each other. As location awareness becomes a standard feature of increasing numbers of mobile applications (apps), the capacity for locative media to affect people’s relationships with the urban spaces they inhabit, as well as with the people they inhabit these spaces with, becomes increasingly significant. In this chapter, we examine the role that locative media apps play in cities and urban life, and the ways in which people navigate and interact in these cities. The chapter starts by tracing the origins of locative media, and demonstrating how these tools differ from other information and communication technologies (ICTs). To show how locative media apps shape current structural changes, we discuss the move from group-based interactions toward diverse, unbounded networks, and link locative media to the concept of networked individualism (Rainie and Wellman 2012). We examine how locative media apps can further complicate networked individualism through supporting ad hoc, transient relationships that further add to the fragmentation and declustering of individuals’ social networks. We look at three main ways in which locative media apps insert themselves into people’s daily experiences of urban space: wayfinding, accessing and sharing information in networked ways, and seeing and networking with people nearby. We also examine the social implications of locative media apps on urban sociability by discussing visibility, sensory overload, social accessibility, trust and familiarity, and finally privacy. As the field is still nascent, we are only starting to understand what privacy rights need to be in place to protect users. Our chapter also has important implications for designers of mobile technologies, as they can gain understandings of the social implications and structural transformations that locative media apps have in the context of urban life.