Location-aware mobile media allow users to see their locations on a map on their mobile phone screens. These applications either disclose the physical positions of known friends, or represent the locations of groups of unknown people. We call these interfaces eponymous and anonymous, respectively. This article presents our classification of eponymous and anonymous location-aware interfaces by investigating how these applications may require us to rethink our understanding of urban sociability, particularly how we coordinate and communicate in public spaces. We argue that common assumptions made about location-aware mobile media, namely their ability to increase one’s spatial awareness and to encourage one to meet more people in public spaces, might be fallacious due to pre-existing practices of sociability in the city. We explore these issues in the light of three bodies of theory: Goffman’s presentation of self in everyday life, Simmel’s ideas on sociability, and Lehtonen and Mäenpää’s concept of street sociability.

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This qualitative case study describes the social appropriation of mobile phones among low-income communities in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) by asking how favela (slum) residents appropriate cell phones. Findings highlight the difficulty these populations encounter in acquiring and using cell phones due to social and economic factors, and the consequent subversive or illegal tactics used to gain access to such technology. Moreover, these tactics are embedded in and exemplars of the cyclic power relationships between high-and low-income populations that constitute the unique use of mobile technologies in these Brazilian slums. The article concludes by suggesting that future research on technology in low-income communities focus instead on the relationship of people to technology rather than a dichotomization of their access or lack thereof.

The concept of the virtual along with the philosophical traditions it invokes has received sparse attention in the communication literature, even though the term ''virtual'' is used so readily to refer to new information and communication technologies (ICTs). In this article, we argue that philosophies of the virtual that dichotomize reality/representation, although perhaps sufficient for analyzing human-computer interfaces through the 21st century, are inadequate for developing theoretical approaches to understanding locationbased technologies. We thus summarize different philosophies of the virtual to propose a theoretical framework for the study of locative technologies. We do so to open up an understanding of the practical effects of locative technologies in lived experience and use examples of that experience to show motivations for shifts in theory.

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