Locative Social Media: Place in the Digital Age

by Leighton Evans

This book offers a critical analysis of the effect of usage of locative social media on the perceptions and phenomenal experience of lived in spaces and places. Drawing on users accounts of location-based social networking, a digital post-phenomenology of place is developed to explain how place is mediated in the digital age.

193 pages, Hardcover

First published May 13, 2015

About the author

In 2013, I successfully defended my PhD thesis in the Philosophy of Technology at Swansea University. My research was in in the remediation of place and surfacing of the possibility of place through mobile technologies and social gazetteers. I’m also interested in the practices of being in online places, digital ecologies, privacy, smart cities and technological dystopianism. Decidedly Heideggerian.

My first book is 'Locative Social Media: Place in the Digital Age'. 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.

Much of my everyday existence is taken up in a remorseless devouring of digital culture, from video games and social networking to science fiction, futurism and posthuman texts.

Reviews

[Novel Crush · Rating 5 out of 5]

Locative Social Media by Leighton is a thought-provoking exploration of how digital platforms reshape our sense of place and belonging. Through insightful analysis and real user experiences, Leighton examines how location-based apps influence how we perceive, navigate, and emotionally connect with our environments. The book masterfully bridges technology, philosophy, and human experience, offering readers a new way to understand space in the digital era. Highly recommended for scholars, students, and anyone interested in media, culture, and modern identity.