Locative Media and Sociability: Using Location-Based Social Networks to Coordinate Everyday Life

Abstract

Foursquare was a mobile social networking application that enabled people to share location with friends in the form of “check-ins.” The visualization of surrounding known social connections as well as unknown others has the potential to impact how people coordinate social encounters and forge new social ties. While many studies have explored mobile phones and sociability, there is a lack of empirical research examining location-based social network’s (LSBNs) from a sociability perspective. Drawing on a dataset of original qualitative research with a range of Foursquare users, the paper examines the application in the context of social coordination and sociability in three ways. First, the paper explores if Foursquare is used to organize certain social encounters, and if so, why. Second, the paper examines the visualization of surrounding social connections and whether this leads to “serendipitous encounters.” Lastly, the paper examines whether the use of Foursquare can produce new social relationships.

Coextensive space: virtual reality and the developing relationship between the body, the digital and physical space

“…At the same time, this concept also resonates with other media technologies that effectively blur the boundaries between the physical and the digital aspects of daily life. This kind of blurring can readily be identified with locative media (Frith and Saker, 2017;Saker and Frith, 2018). And this is, especially, the case with early location-based social networking sites (LBSNs).…”

Mobile Augmented Reality and Language‐Related Episodes

“…Portable locative media such as smartphones have opened up new possibilities for interfacing embodied and virtual experience. Of direct relevance to the research we present below, mobile game and social media researchers are exploring the potential of locative media to enable and enhance interaction among humans and the social spaces they inhabit, and in part produce, through the use of location‐aware mobile devices (Saker & Frith, ).…”

Social media and memory: how can Facebook enhance memory activity?

“…As pointed out by Hustad (2014), location-based technology seems to be most popular among young people, but it is accepted by most of the users on Facebook. By offering recommendations of known people nearby or stranger users might be interested in, Facebook provide users with new ways to develop social relationships or to choose their communities (Saker and Frith, 2018). Compared with arranging meetups offline or meeting new people randomly, the users of Facebook appear to prefer online interactions with acquaintances, and during these online interactions, people tend to construct new memories based on their social networks.…”

“…The feature works for 'searching for a place nearby or adding a place to check-in' (Singel, Barber, Tiku, Simonite, Baker-Whitcomb, & Lapowsky, 2010) and sharing the location with friends. Users of Facebook are more willing to check in the places where they interested in, highlighting them and sharing locational information (Saker & Frith, 2018). In a sense, the places people check-in seem to be unique, unusual or meaningful for individual.…”