Towards a Typology of Locative Media

Hamburg.
The last ECREA 2010 panel tonight starts with my QUT colleague Tanya Nitins, whose interest is in locative media. There’s been significant development in this in recent times, through wireless devices and and GPS-enabled phones. This divides into social-annotative, commercial-annotative, navigational, and combined forms of locative media.

A number of concepts have been applied to this – LBS, geospatial Web, GeoWeb, pervasive computing, sonic signage, GPS, and many other terms. We must therefore develop the language to communicate more clearly with one another as we research these technologies.

Social annotative media allow us to add geographic data to content, and to access such location-specific layers of information. Projects like Urban Tapestries were early experiments in this area – allowing users to upload geo-specific content (stories, photos, etc.) and attach them to specific geographical locations; other users could then access this new layer of information on the spot. This can be understood as similar to the graffiti-style tagging of locations.

Commercial annotative projects operate on a similar basis; they allow users to tag specific locations and access the information left by others. This is of considerable interest to advertisers and other commercial groups, of course, and so they, too, have begun to explore these opportunities. This includes triggered location-based push services as well as ‘thingfinder’ services where users pull specific data on demand. Such services unsettle current distinctions between public and private space, as public spaces become infused with commercial content and messages; indeed, one’s very location now becomes trackable and commercialisable.

The most common usage of such tools is for navigational purposes, however, and can be interpenetrated by social and commercial annotative spatial data. Here, there are questions of content ownership and personal safety, and thus about the ownership of and control over geographical space. Further, location-based services combine annotation with the navigational affordances of locative media.

A fast-growing use of location-based media is location-based gaming. This draws on users’ geographic location to enable them to compete and engage with one another in the physical space. Here, too, there are concerns about personal safety, of course, especially for users deeply immersed in the game world.

There are growing tensions between these different uses, then – and it is necessary to better understand the implications of each form of locative media as we continue to research and develop such services.