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Visual Studies

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Geomedia: on location-based media, the changing status of collectiveimage production and the emergence of social navigation systems

Francesco LapentaOnline publication date: 14 March 2011

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Lapenta, Francesco(2011) 'Geomedia: on location-based media, the changing status of collective imageproduction and the emergence of social navigation systems', Visual Studies, 26: 1, 14 — 24

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10.1080/1472586X.2011.548485

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Visual Studies, Vol. 26, No. 1, March 2011

Geomedia: on location-based media, the changing statusof collective image production and the emergence ofsocial navigation systems

FRANCESCO LAPENTA

The increased computational power of portable devicessuch as smart phones and laptops, and their integrationwith widely available global positioning systems, areopening the way for a new range of location-basedapplications that integrate and coordinate users’ mediatedinteractions and data exchanges with other users’ live geographical positions. This user-generated information,shared on navigable live virtual maps such as GoogleLatitude, Foursquare and Gowalla, illustrates theincreasing use of location-based applications and the Webto create, assemble and disseminate personal information(in the form of images, sounds and text) to enable sharedexperiences of individually and socially relevant spaces andevents. The new virtual maps, in which this information isvisually blurred and merged, represent the emergence of anew paradigm in the visualisation of space. The articleelaborates on the fundamental social and perceptual shiftsthat are being operated today by these new technologiesand software applications that the author refers to as geomedia. Geomedia are not new media per se, but platforms that merge existing electronic media

theInternet

location-based technologies (or locativemedia)

AR (Augmented Reality) technologies in a newmode of digital composite imaging, data association andsocially maintained data exchange and communication. Inthe article the author examines the early adoption of suchnew geolocation-based technologies and develops atheoretical analysis of the ontological and epistemological shifts that characterise their contemporary evolution, patterns of production and exchange, and the unique formof geolocational digital re-aggregation of which digital images are now a part.

I am here to show you, the reader, my home. Icould take many pictures to portray all therooms and several others to depict the many objects they contain. Or I could take a videoand while ﬁlming comment on the many roomsand their objects. This ﬁrst photograph portraysthe studio desk and the bookshelf behind it.The second shows the books and my computer

Francesco Lapenta is Associate Professor in Visual Culture and New Media in the Department of Communication, Business and Information Technologies at theRoskildeUniversity,Denmark.Heisa VisitingScholarin theDepartmentofSociology at New YorkUniversity.He servesontheexecutiveboardoftheInternationalVisual Sociology Association. Lapenta’s most recent work includes the special issue ‘Autonomy and Creative Labour’ (Routledge, 2010), edited with Fabian Holt forthe

Journal of Cultural Research

and the article ‘Theoretical and Methodological Approaches to Photo-elicitation’ in the

Handbook of Visual Methods

(Sage, 2010).He is currently researching for a book on location-based technologies and software applications.

on the same desk. In the video I can pan from awide angle shot of my studio down to the desk,my books and my computer. There is anotheralternative, I can take all the pictures I havetaken of my house and merge them together inQuicktime VR (1995) or better in Photosynth(2008), and tag each object with comments andpersonal descriptions (Places iPhoto 2009,Google Earth). Instead of a series of pictures ora fixed sequence of a video showing my house, Inow have a navigable virtual photograph of my house. I can pan right, top, down, left in oneroom (with Quicktime VR), or zoom in on thetable, focus on the computer on my desk, pan tothe left and move into the living room (withPhotosynth). While moving around you canread or hear me describe these rooms and theobjects they contain. If not satisfied you can gothrough the front door and move down thestreet (Google Street View 2007) or fly high towatch the whole neighbourhood from above(Google Earth 2006, Google Maps 2005, LiveSearch Maps Microsoft 2005). I could also comeand visit your home, office, favourite cafe,movie theatre, restaurant or your actuallocation (Foursquare, Gowalla 2009). Using thelatest location based applications and software(Foursquare.com 2009, Bliin.com 2008), I couldpoint to your location, your city, your street, your home, office or favourite shop orrestaurant, and see the images and commentsthat you posted about them. (Lapenta 2008)Reminiscent of a technology that Ridley Scott created forRick Deckard to use in the fictional Los Angeles of 2019in his film

Blade Runner

(1982), reality can now exceedfantasy in allowing us to seamlessly move from oneimage into another in a virtual continuum of increasingly global spatial representations of the world.This article elaborates on the fundamental social andperceptual shifts that are being operated today by newsoftware applications that merge existing images, soundand text, creating representations connected to

D o w nl o ad ed B y : [ U ni v e r si t y of Pl y m o u th Lib r a r y] A t : 16 :25 5 A p ril 2011

Geomedia

users’ live geographical position on a virtual map. Thesetechnologies, that I call geomedia, are not new media perse, but platforms that merge existing technologies(electronic media

the Internet

location-based andAugmented Reality technologies) in a new mode of digital composite imaging, data association and socially maintained data exchange and communication.In this article I examine the early adoption of such newgeolocation-based technologies and develop a theoreticalanalysis of the ontological and epistemological shifts thatcharacterise their contemporary evolution, their patternsof production and exchange, and the unique form of geolocational digital re-aggregation of which images arenow part. I interpret the geomedia-rendered map as anew social space and organising principle. I suggest thatthis virtual map is the site of complex and ramifiedontological and epistemological shifts that can beinitially observed and investigated from at least threeinterconnected and inseparable perspectives –technological, social and economic – that have the imageas their centre of gravity.The first perspective focuses on the technological, todevelop a theoretical understanding of the fusion of digital imaging technologies with fast-developinggeolocational technologies. I interpret instances of digitalsynthesised imaging (photographic mapping) as anexample of the changing ontological function of space inthe photographic representations of reality. I argue thatthese technologies reinforce an epistemology thatinterprets geomedia-based photographic mapping not just as a mere new form of digitally synthesisedrepresentation of space, but as a visualisation of thesocial spaces, identities and social relations andinteractions of the users that contribute to itscomposition.I next develop this argument to describe how thegeomedia-based reorganisation of photographicmapping can be interpreted as paradigmatic of aresponse to the need to organise the complexity of information flows and mediated interactions. I arguethat the virtual map can be interpreted as a newsocio-regulatory system adopted by the individual toreduce the complexity of global information flows.Therefore, theoretically I propose that the photographicarticulation of space of the virtual map can beunderstood as a new organisational system – a systembased on a regulated virtual representation of space onwhich geomedia users rely to organise their mediatedcommunications and social interactions in moremanageable and contextually relevant informationexchanges.I finally conclude the article with a critical interpretationof these very organisational functions. I argue that whilethese technological evolutions can be interpreted as aform of social adaptation to the complexities of newtechnologically enhanced social environments, they canalso more problematically be interpreted as theembodiment of a new socio-economic order thatexploits geomedia users’ increased social production andexchange of information. In this context, images, soundsand texts are interpreted as dominant commoditieswhose social patterns of production and exchange can beanalysed within known socio-economic discourses. Inthis interpretation the geomedia-based virtual map (andthe digitally synthesised images that compose it) areinterpreted as a new organisational principle pushed by the same old market forces that led to the progressiveglobal uniformisation of time (and labour) and to theorganisation of the production and exchange of materialcommodities. Geomedia, I suggest, are to space what thewatch is to time. They regulate social behaviour andcoordinate mediated interactions, and can be interpretedas the new tools used to cadence the production andexchange of these dominant immaterial commodities,images and information.

LIFE ON A SCREEN: A CHANGINGEPISTEMOLOGY

Simulacra and Simulation

, Baudrillard uses Jorge LuisBorges’ well-known allegory of the ‘Map and the Empire’to describe the progressive mutation of the relation of the object with its representation. In ‘On Exactitude inScience’, Borges (1946) narrates an empire in whichcartography had become a striving and exacting art. Suchwere the cartographers’ mapping skills and steadfastwork that the map of the empire grew to be increasingly detailed. The map eventually became so detailed that itoverlaid the entire empire and was eventually mistakenfor the empire itself. Baudrillard used this allegory todescribe the social and perceptual shifts operated by themedia system, and the increasingly vanishing relation of their representations with the ‘real’ object of reference.By means of a critique of the epistemological values of the photographic image (the most detailed of allmapping techniques), Baudrillard declared the demise of the empire of the ‘real’ and the rise of the world of simulacra and simulations, a world generated ‘by modelsof a real without origin or reality’ (Baudrillard1994, 1).The relationship between the phenomenological real andits many possible representations has always beencomplex, as have the mediated effects of such