Location-Based Social Media - Space, Time and Identity

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.

Leighton Evans is Lecturer in Digital Media Cultures at the University of Brighton, UK, and author of Locative Social Media: Place in the Digital Age (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 

 

Michael Saker is a Senior Lecturer in Broadcasting and Digital Creative Industries at Southampton Solent University, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Web Science Institute at the University of Southampton. His work has been published in journals including New Media & Society, Media Culture & Society, and First Monday.