Communication infrastructures and the contest over location positioning

Abstract

This article builds on renewed critical awareness of the significance of, and need to understand, the material infrastructures that underpin and, importantly, also sustain mobile communication. The focus of this article is on the fluctuating fortunes of one U.S. company: Skyhook Wireless. The company was founded in 2003 with the explicit aim of exploring and developing systems that responded to a very specific communication infrastructure related challenge: how to calculate location positioning from Wi-Fi signals rather than from cellular towers or by using GPS? In this article, I detail the technical means by which they achieved this, and examine how the strength of Skyhook’s position in the field of location positioning and analysis became a key factor driving Google’s highly contentious Street View program for extracting and recording Wi-Fi access point and payload data. Through this analysis of Skyhook Wireless and its technical achievements, this article aims to contribute valuable new knowledge to our understanding of the location-related operations of mobile devices; the infrastructures associated with these operations; and the businesses that have emerged around, draw on, contribute to, and have come to dominate, these infrastructural systems.

The Phenomenon Of Mass Culture As Area Of Transmitting Cultural Codes

“…Such features as insufficiency and inferiority of reflexive processes, basic pragmatism, unconscious appeal to the archetypal matrix, actualization of the sphere of the collective unconscious manifested in the texts of mass culture speak of its mythological nature and conditionality. The sociocultural conditionality of mass culture texts (Wilken, 2019) is manifested in the desire to follow specific models of thinking and recreate them with an exact copy; that is why the unity of the "mass" is inseparable from the phenomenon of the "collective unconscious".…”

The algorithmic fix: Location intelligence, placemaking, and predictable futures

“…With these types of uses, location data can help businesses to profile consumers better through measuring foot traffic and gaining market and competitor insights (Barreneche, 2012;Barreneche and Wilken, 2015;Smith, 2019;Wilken, 2019b). However, it is important to note that location intelligence is not a new industry (Wilken, 2019a). Place has always been an important aspect of marketing and advertising to an extent that it is discussed as one of the 4Ps of marketing along with product, price, and promotion in theories of marketing.…”

“…I build on the existing studies on location intelligence and location analytics (e.g. Barreneche, 2012;Smith, 2019Smith, , 2020Wilken, 2019a) and geodemographic profiling and segmentation (e.g. Burrows and Gane, 2006).…”

Mobile media beyond mobile phones

“…As also argued by Wilken in his article, we should embrace our objects of study beyond the affordances and limitations of technology. We need to look into alternative and novel ways of researching histories, materialities, and politics of mobile media like in the examples of analyzing political economy ecosystems (Alvarez Leon, 2019), corporate communications, trade publications, and patents (Wilken, 2019). This move would not only provide us with a historical trajectory of mobile media, but also will give us the chance to expand our field's understanding of mobile media futures, as argued in Rijske's article "Mobilized Networked Infrastructures: Implications for Action, Space, and Knowledge."…”