Not only is locative media one of the fastest growing areas in digital technology, but questions of location and location-awareness are increasingly central to our contemporary engagements with online and mobile media, and indeed media and culture generally. This volume is a comprehensive account of the various location-based technologies, services, applications, and cultures, as media, with an aim to identify, inventory, explore, and critique their cultural, economic, political, social, and policy dimensions internationally. In particular, the collection is organized around the perception that the growth of locative media gives rise to a number of crucial questions concerning the areas of culture, economy, and policy.

This book extends current understandings of the effects of using locative social media on spatiality, the experience of time and identity. This is a pertinent and timely topic given the increase in opportunities people now have to explicitly and implicitly share their location through digital and mobile technologies. There is a growing body of research on locative media, much of this literature has concentrated on spatial issues. Research here has explored how locative media and location-based social media (LBSN) are used to communicate and coordinate social interactions in public space, affecting how people approach their surroundings, turning ordinary life “into a game”, and altering how mobile media is involved in understanding the world. This book offers a critical analysis of the effect of usage of locative social media on identity through an engagement with the current literature on spatiality, a novel critical investigation of the temporal effects of LBSN use and a view of identity as influenced by the spatio-temporal effects of interacting with place through LBSN. Drawing on phenomenology, post-phenomenology and critical theory on social and locative media, alongside established sociological frameworks for approaching spatiality and the city, it presents a comprehensive account of the effects of LBSN and locative media use.

Mobilities has become an important framework to understand and analyze contemporary social, spatial, economic and political practices. Especially as mobile media become seamlessly integrated into transportation networks, navigating urban spaces, and connecting with social networks while on the move, researchers need new approaches and methods to bring together mobilities with mobile communication and locative media. Mobile communication scholars have focused on cell phones, often ignoring broader connections to urban spaces, geography, and locational media. As a result, they emphasized virtual mobility and personalized communication as a way of disconnecting from place, location and publics. The growing pervasiveness of location-aware technology urges us to rethink the intersection among location, mobile technologies and mobility. Few studies have addressed the many transformations taking place in mobile sociality and in urban spatial processes through the appropriation of these technologies. Chapter 12 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 3.0 license.

The Routledge Companion to Urban Media and Communication traces central debates within the burgeoning interdisciplinary research on mediated cities and urban communication. The volume brings together diverse perspectives and global case studies to map key areas of research within media, cultural and urban studies, where a joint focus on communications and cities has made important innovations in how we understand urban space, technology, identity and community. Exploring the rise and growing complexity of urban media and communication as the next key theme for both urban and media studies, the book gathers and reviews fast-developing knowledge on specific emergent phenomena such as: reading the city as symbol and text; understanding urban infrastructures as media (and vice-versa); the rise of global cities; urban and suburban media cultures: newspapers, cinema, radio, television and the mobile phone; changing spaces and practices of urban consumption; the mediation of the neighbourhood, community and diaspora; the centrality of culture to urban regeneration; communicative responses to urban crises such as racism, poverty and pollution; the role of street art in the negotiation of ‘the right to the city’; city competition and urban branding; outdoor advertising; moving image architecture; ‘smart’/cyber urbanism; the emergence of Media City production spaces and clusters. Charting key debates and neglected connections between cities and media, this book challenges what we know about contemporary urban living and introduces innovative frameworks for understanding cities, media and their futures. As such, it will be an essential resource for students and scholars of media and communication studies, urban communication, urban sociology, urban planning and design, architecture, visual cultures, urban geography, art history, politics, cultural studies, anthropology and cultural policy studies, as well as those working with governmental agencies, cultural foundations and institutes, and policy think tanks.

This open access book explores the often contradictory relationship between kinship and digital change and upheaval. The authors develop the idea of ‘digital kinship’ as a conceptual avenue through which to examine the role of the digital and wider issues concerning cultural and family practices and routines. The examples outlined in the book confirm the diverse ways in which locative media are incorporated into the daily life of households. The ‘digital,’ ‘visual,’ and ‘playful kinships’ discussed provide three useful methods for exploring this theme by addressing histories and memories. This approach allows the researchers to examine embodied and affective features of mundane everyday life that involve digital media practices.

Preliminary Material -- Introduction /Howard Rheingold -- Overview /Martin Rieser -- Pockets of Plenty: An Archaeology of Mobile Media /Erkki Huhtamo -- The Temporal and Spatial Design of Video and Film-based Installation Art in the 60s and 70s: Their Inherent Perception Processes and Effects on the Perceivers' Actions /Susanne Jaschko -- Forgotten Histories of Interactive Space /Martin Rieser -- Art by Telephone: From Static to Mobile Interfaces /Adriana de Souza e Silva -- Mobile/Audience: Thinking the Contradictions /Mary Griffiths and Sean Cubitt -- Towards a Language of Mobile Media /Jon Dovey and Constance Fleuriot -- Snapshots from Curating Mobility: (If you build it, they won't necessarily come) /Beryl Graham -- Beyond Mapping: New Strategies for Meaning in Locative Artworks /Martin Rieser -- Digital Media and Architecture--An Observation /Anke Jacob -- Urban Screens as the Visualization Zone of the City's Invisible Communication Sphere /Mirjam Struppek -- Future Physical: The Creative User and theme of response-ABILITY /Debbi Lander -- 'A Fracture in Reality': Networked Narratives as Imaginary Fields of Action and Dislocation /Andrea Zapp -- What makes mediascapes compelling?:Insights from the Riot! 1831 case-study /Josephine Reid and Richard Hull -- Hopstory: A study in place-based, historically inspired narrative /Valentina Nisi and Glorianna Davenport -- The Media Portrait of Liberties: A Non-linear Community Portrait /Valentina Nisi , Mads Haahr and Glorianna Davenport -- Loca: 'Location Oriented Critical Arts' /Drew Hemment , John Evans , Mika Raento and Theo Humphries -- Invisible Topographies /Usman Haque -- Wifi-Hog: The Battle for Ownership in Public Wireless Space /Jonah Brucker-Cohen -- Puppeteers, Performers or Avatars: A Perceptual Difference in Telematic Space /Paul Sermon -- Mobile Feelings: Wireless Communication of Heartbeat and Breath for Mobile Art /Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau -- The Living Room /Victoria Fang -- tunA and the Power of Proximity /Arianna Bassoli -- Engagement with the Everyday /Margot Jacobs -- Between Improvisation and Publication: Supporting the Creative Metamorphosis with Technology /Cati Vaucelle -- Developing Creative Audience Interaction: Four Projects by Squidsoup. /Anthony Rowe -- The Emotional Wardrobe /Lisa Stead , Petar Goulev , Caroline Evans and Ebrahim Mamdani -- Social Fashioning and Active Conduits /Katherine Moriwaki -- Wunderkammer: Wearables as an Artistic Strategy /Laura Beloff -- Flirt and Mset /Fiona Raby -- Trace, The Choreography of Everyday Movement and Drift /Teri Rueb -- Blast Theory /Matt Adams -- Mixed Reality Lab /Steve Benford -- The Politics of Mobility /Drew Hemment -- Memory-Rich Garments and Social Interaction /Joey Berzowska -- Heart on Your Sleeve /Annie Lovejoy -- Contributor Biographies -- Glossary -- Selected Bibliography Books and Articles.