Papers
Pokémon Go is a hugely popular hybrid reality game (HRG) that enables players to occupy a space t... more Pokémon Go is a hugely popular hybrid reality game (HRG) that enables players to occupy a space that is simultaneously physical and digital. The general aim of Pokémon Go is to discover and then capture Pokémon. This article reports on an original research project designed to explore the impact of Pokémon Go on spatiality and sociability. The project was conducted between May 2017 and July 2017, using an online survey which received 375 responses from users of Pokémon Go geographically spread across the globe. Drawing on the concept of the “playeur” as an established approach to understanding the effects of locative play on spatiality and sociability, this research follows three lines of enquiry. First, the research examines whether the intermingling of play and ordinary life might encourage players to spend more time outside in public spaces, and how this mode of play is experienced. Second, the research explores whether the game mechanics of Pokémon Go might lead players to traverse their environment using modified routes, as well as to frequent new places. Third, the research examines whether the praxis of Pokémon Go might enable new forms of sociability to emerge that extend beyond earlier HRGs.
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The role of location-based social networks (LBSNs) on identity is a relatively unexplored area wi... more The role of location-based social networks (LBSNs) on identity is a relatively unexplored area within the growing cannon of work on locative media. Following an exegesis of Giddens’s argument that narrative biographical accounts are critical in self-identity in the modern age and Foucault’s technologies of the self, this article positions LBSN, and in particular Foursquare, as a contributor to self-identity in users’ lives. A close reading of ethnographic and interview data from Foursquare users reveals that in the context of the presentation, maintenance, and reflection upon self-identity, LBSN use can play an integral role in the self-identity of its users. The contribution of LBSN to indicators of user lifestyle, the intentional sharing of particular locations, and user recollection of events and locations are the key features of how LBSNs provide conduits to self-identity. The degree of usage in everyday life is identified as critical in the positioning of LBSN as a key contributor to identity narratives. With the integration of LBSN features into more mainstream social media platforms, this contribution to self-identity in the social media age is resilient to the demise of stand-alone LBSN applications.
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Over the past two decades urban social life has undergone a rapid and pervasive geocoding, becomi... more Over the past two decades urban social life has undergone a rapid and pervasive geocoding, becoming mediated, augmented and anticipated by location-sensitive technologies and services that generate and utilise big, personal, locative data. The production of these data has prompted the development of exploratory data-driven computing experiments that seek to find ways to extract value and insight from them. These projects often start from the data, rather than from a question or theory, and try to imagine and identify their potential utility. In this paper, we explore the desires and mechanics of data-driven computing experiments. We demonstrate how both locative media data and computing experiments are 'staged' to create new values and computing techniques, which in turn are used to try and derive possible futures that are ridden with unintended consequences. We argue that using computing experiments to imagine potential urban futures produces effects that often have little to do with creating new urban practices. Instead, these experiments promote Big Data science and the prospect that data produced for one purpose can be recast for another and act as alternative mechanisms of envisioning urban futures.
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Foursquare is a location-based social network (LBSN) that combines gaming elements with features ... more Foursquare is a location-based social network (LBSN) that combines gaming elements with features conventionally associated with social networking sites (SNSs). Following two qualitative studies, this article sets out to explore what impact this overlaying of physical environments with play has on everyday life and experiences of space and place. Drawing on early understandings of play, alongside the flâneur and ‘phoneur’ as respective methods for conceptualizing play in the context of mobility and urbanity, this article examines whether the suggested division between play and ordinary life is challenged by Foursquare, and if so, how this reframing of play is experienced. Second, this article investigates what effect this LBSN has on mobility choices and spatial relationships. Finally, the novel concept of the ‘phoneur’ is posited as a way of understanding how pervasive play through LBSNs acts as a mediating influence on the experience of space and place.
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Foursquare is a location-based social network (LBSN) that can be used to explore locations and ma... more Foursquare is a location-based social network (LBSN) that can be used to explore locations and mark one’s movements in the form of ‘check-ins’. This paper investigates why some Foursquare users are choosing to record their locational past, and in so doing using it as a ‘mediated memory object’ (Dijck, 2009). The paper explores the different ways users then interact with their preserved spatial pasts, owing to Foursquare’s mode of preservation. A close engagement with phenomenological theory on the importance of engagement with technology and technicity as a shaping force on the experience of time conceptualises the use of Foursquare as a memory object. The functionality of Foursquare is positioned as a key element in how the location-based social network is significantly different from older memory related practices, as well as signalling its importance for the individuals that employ Foursquare in this manner.
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Contemporary or “smart” bike share schemes have exploited the capacity of information and communi... more Contemporary or “smart” bike share schemes have exploited the capacity of information and communications technologies to effectively automate systems and deliver improved mobility and convenience for citizens in a way that is both sympathetic to the environment and cost effective for service providers. However, research in the sector has tended to view schemes as technically homogenous and uniform in character, with little attention paid to the potential of creative design to deliver on goals which transcend quite narrow definitions of efficiency and sustainability. As the industry develops and new concepts emerge, creative design has the potential to integrate riders in knowledge sharing and decision making practices which frame them, not as passive recipients of information and services, but as active participants in the creation of the systems they appropriate. This paper reports the findings of two case studies conceived to explore these themes. Using a critical perspective derived from constructivist technology studies we argue that the architectural and ideological content of systems is not technically determined but is a product of the socio-cultural milieu within which the design and implementation processes occur. These processes in turn are conditioned by, and reflective of, the goals and expectations of dominant institutional and bureaucratic actors. Accordingly our analysis demonstrates how design supports the way of life of one or another influential social group and how these processes are related back to the implementation strategies and design parameters of the schemes.
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Locative Social Media offers a critical analysis of the effect of using locative social media on ... more 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.
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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, Mar 11, 2014
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New Media and Society, 2014
Through an investigation of patterns of use of the location-based social network Foursquare deriv... more Through an investigation of patterns of use of the location-based social network Foursquare derived from an extensive ethnographic survey of users, this paper focuses on the orientation of users towards location-based social media and mobile computational devices. Utilising Heidegger’s notions of mood and attunement to the world, the paper argues that the towards-which of the user, that is the mood of the user in a phenomenological sense, is critical to their experience of using location-based social media and the revealing of place that emerges from that usage. A contrast between a technological and a poetic or computational revealing of place can then be established based on the phenomenological orientation of user to device, application and world. The emphasis on orientation and attunement has implications for application design and research on user experience.
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This article argues that location-based services (LBS) like the social network-based LBS Foursqua... more This article argues that location-based services (LBS) like the social network-based LBS Foursquare are playing an active role in the transformation of experience of the world for users. Based on Heidegger’s critique of modern technology and view of technology as a modern ontotheology, and using quantitative and qualitative analyses, this article argues that the importance and role of mobile computational devices and LBS is shifting users’ views of physical space by providing social and semantic cues for navigating the world via mobile devices and LBS. This movement is based on users accessing and interacting with maps, making them meaningful through social gazetteers and part of a socially based referential totality, which while liberating has consequences for how users perceive other users and entities in the world, along with problematising current key issues like privacy.
Keywords: computational devices; Enframing; location-based services; navigation; privacy
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With over 10 million users to date, Foursquare represents the most popular of a developing trend ... more With over 10 million users to date, Foursquare represents the most popular of a developing trend in integrating Global Positioning System technology and social networking platforms. The use of location based services (LBS) raises fundamental questions about the nature of privacy and self-disclosure in the field of new media, especially following the decisions of Facebook and Twitter to integrate GPS tagging into their interfaces, and with the increase of web access using mobile phones.
This paper will summarise the findings of 20 email interviews with users of Foursquare, assessing 3 key research questions that concern the relationship between the user and the physical space as mediated by technology, the relationship between the user and the technology itself and the relationship between the user and the interface. These research questions were used to assess the suitability of a phenomenological model for describing and predicting the emergence of a new world view on the part of users from use of the software – the paper will consider this in light of the findings with reference to, Heidegger, McLuhan and Latour. Finally, I consider how location has become an assemblage of user, technology and interface rather than a representation of position in physical space.
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I argue that the category of equipment denoted computational objects have, by virtue of the uniqu... more I argue that the category of equipment denoted computational objects have, by virtue of the unique presence of those objects in the world as permanently withdrawn from full disclosure of operation due to their dependence on computational code, a unique manner of causal interaction with users that can only be described as vicarious. As computational devices become increasingly ubiquitous as tools for managing and navigation the human world, this vicarious relationship becomes important in understanding how this technology affects the phenomenological experience of being in the world as it is, alongside computational objects, and how orientation towards the world can be described as computational.
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In this paper, I will aim to describe a webnography-based approach to exploring issues of the aut... more In this paper, I will aim to describe a webnography-based approach to exploring issues of the authenticity of being in online spaces. Early studies held the prevailing view that online communities were exotic places and fundamentally different to the norms of everyday communication, but the issue of authenticity still demands enquiry, and using Heidegger’s categories of angst and resoluteness as moods of authentic existence, it will be argued that the extent of authenticity in being online can be assessed using ethnography. In asking about the nature of anxiety in online communications important insights about the possibilities of authentic response can be established.
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Welsh rock band the Manic Street Preachers have travelled a great distance in the years since the... more Welsh rock band the Manic Street Preachers have travelled a great distance in the years since the release of their first album Generation Terrorists in 1991. They’ve had a myriad of musical styles, huge mid-to-late-90s popularity, the still-unsolved disappearance of songwriter Richey Edwards, acclaim, and some derision, along the way. A band committed to their vision, the Manics’ work has always had an overt political and philosophical focus which has set them apart from contemporaries both in Welsh music and the wider British popular scene. The band’s third album, The Holy Bible, now widely regarded as one of the best British albums of the 1990s, is an education in nihilism and alienation.
One recurring influence for the lyrics has been the towering presence of Friedrich Nietzsche.
…
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When someone says “I am online”, it is a phenomenological issue. In reflecting upon the later phi... more When someone says “I am online”, it is a phenomenological issue. In reflecting upon the later philosophy of Martin Heidegger, in particular focusing upon The Question Concerning Technology, social networking is a classic modern technology. The essence of the technology of social networking is Enframing, the essence of all modern technology for Heidegger; the essence of technology is nothing technological, but instead how the technology orientates humans towards the world. Social networking allows the users of the network to be placed in “standing-reserve”, and so the actual essence of social networking is no different to other technologies. The resources in social networking are people; and so the technology is creating the sense that people can be manipulated as resources, and put in standing-reserve. This is the main issue with social networking; the technology is designed to organise persons and their relationships with others, and as such the essence of technology, Enframing, affects human relationships in a way in which other modern technologies do not, simply because of the usage of the technology by humans.
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Software, big data, smart cities
In this paper, we argue that the ideas, ideals and the rapid proliferation of smart city rhetoric... more In this paper, we argue that the ideas, ideals and the rapid proliferation of smart city rhetoric and initiatives globally have been facilitated and promoted by three interrelated communities. A new set of 'urban technocrats' – chief innovation/technology/data officers, project managers, consultants, designers, engineers, change-management civil servants, and academics – many of which have become embedded in city administrations. A smart cities 'epistemic community'; that is, a network of knowledge and policy experts that share a worldview and a common set of normative beliefs, values and practices with respect to addressing urban issues, and work to help decision-makers identify and deploy technological solutions to solve city problems. A wider 'advocacy coalition' of smart city stakeholders and vested interests who collaborate to promote the uptake and embedding of a smart city approach to urban management and governance. We examine the roles of new urban technocrats and the multiscale formation and operation of a smart cities epistemic community and advocacy coalitions, detailing a number of institutional networks at global, supra-national, national, and local scales. In the final section, we consider the translation of the ideas and practices of the smart city into the policies and work of city administrations. In particular, we consider what might be termed the 'last mile problem' and the reasons why, despite a vast and active set of technocrats and epistemic community and advocacy coalition, smart city initiatives are yet to become fully mainstreamed and the smart city mission successfully realized in cities across the globe. We illustrate this last mile problem through a discussion of plans to introduce smart lighting in Dublin.
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Over the past two decades urban social life has undergone a rapid and pervasive geocoding, becomi... more Over the past two decades urban social life has undergone a rapid and pervasive geocoding, becoming mediated, augmented and anticipated by location-sensitive technologies and services that generate and utilise big, personal, locative data. The production of these data has prompted the development of exploratory data-driven computing experiments that seek to find ways to extract value and insight from them. These projects often start from the data, rather than from a question or theory, and try to imagine and identify their potential utility. In this paper, we explore the desires and mechanics of data-driven computing experiments. We demonstrate how both locative media data and computing experiments are 'staged' to create new values and computing techniques, which in turn are used to try and derive possible futures that are ridden with unintended consequences. We argue that using computing experiments to imagine potential urban futures produces effects that often have little to do with creating new urban practices. Instead, these experiments promote Big Data science and the prospect that data produced for one purpose can be recast for another and act as alternative mechanisms of envisioning urban futures.
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Books
This book offers a critical analysis of the effect of usage of locative social media on the perce... more 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.
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In this short book, Evans interrogates the implications of VR’s re-emergence into the media mains... more In this short book, Evans interrogates the implications of VR’s re-emergence into the media mainstream, critiquing the notion of a VR revolution by analysing the development and ownership of VR companies while also exploring the possibilities of immersion in VR and the importance of immersion in the interest and ownership of VR enterprises. He assesses how the ideologies and desires of both computer programmers and major Silicon Valley industries may influence how VR worlds are conceived and experienced by users while also exploring the mechanisms that create the immersive experience that underpins interest in the medium.
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Uploads
Keywords: computational devices; Enframing; location-based services; navigation; privacy
This paper will summarise the findings of 20 email interviews with users of Foursquare, assessing 3 key research questions that concern the relationship between the user and the physical space as mediated by technology, the relationship between the user and the technology itself and the relationship between the user and the interface. These research questions were used to assess the suitability of a phenomenological model for describing and predicting the emergence of a new world view on the part of users from use of the software – the paper will consider this in light of the findings with reference to, Heidegger, McLuhan and Latour. Finally, I consider how location has become an assemblage of user, technology and interface rather than a representation of position in physical space.
One recurring influence for the lyrics has been the towering presence of Friedrich Nietzsche.
…
Keywords: computational devices; Enframing; location-based services; navigation; privacy
This paper will summarise the findings of 20 email interviews with users of Foursquare, assessing 3 key research questions that concern the relationship between the user and the physical space as mediated by technology, the relationship between the user and the technology itself and the relationship between the user and the interface. These research questions were used to assess the suitability of a phenomenological model for describing and predicting the emergence of a new world view on the part of users from use of the software – the paper will consider this in light of the findings with reference to, Heidegger, McLuhan and Latour. Finally, I consider how location has become an assemblage of user, technology and interface rather than a representation of position in physical space.
One recurring influence for the lyrics has been the towering presence of Friedrich Nietzsche.
…