The  first  projects  in  locative  media

Locative media projects have been around for while, but most early initiatives were born in the field of media arts. In this section, some of the earliest locative media projects are presented, highlighting the institutions or artists who developed them. One early type of locative media was the audio walk, linked to locations by GPS. Audio walks were one of the first attempts to digitally attach information to locations. One of the first GPS-enabled audio walks was Knowton, Hight, and Spellman’s 34 North 118 West (Gordon & de Souza e Silva, 2011, p. 47). Named after the geographical coordinates of the city of Los Angeles, the project invited participants to uncover narratives about Los Angeles’s history as they navigated through the city’s downtown. Equipped with GPS-enabled Tablet PCs and headphones, participants heard stories about the places they were moving through, triggered by their location.

The first two well-known locative media projects were Urban Tapestries, developed in 2002, by the UK-based art group proboscis (see Galloway, 2008) and Yellow Arrow. Urban Tapestries allowed participants to attach geographical coordinates to stories, pictures, sounds, and video and upload them to a server, embedding social knowledge into the fabric of the city. According to de Souza e Silva

& Frith (2014), Urban Tapestries was “perhaps” the first mobile annotation project. In their words, “the real innovation of Urban Tapestries was to develop a location-aware platform that challenged the common top-down approach of location-based experiences at that time” (p.45). In other words, the project relied on the participation of its users to create content, which is in line with the approach of this dissertation.

As Galloway (2008) wrote in her dissertation about locative media and urban computing, Urban Tapestries, along with other location-based services analyzed in her work, “were valuable only in so far as they tied ‘meaning to a place’… The emphasis on public participation, and ground-up media creation and sharing, is also crucial…” (p. 237). Also, as Galloway highlights, Urban Tapestries was self-described as a “research endeavor”, not technological product development. This research follows this line of thinking by focusing and fostering participation from the ground-up, with the difference of choosing a specific demographic group.

The second well-known project was Yellow Arrow, created in 2004. Users had to order yellow arrow stickers and shirts from the website (each marked with a unique code) and place or wear them throughout the city. Once placed or worn, users

would send an SMS or access the website to annotate the unique code of the sticker or shirt. Once annotated, the message associated with the code of the sticker or shirt could be changed many times. So when users came across a yellow arrow in the city, they needed only to call the number on the arrow and dial the unique code to access the message. As Gordon and De Souza e Silva (2011) reminds us, those projects pioneered the development of commercial mobile annotation applications (e.g.:

Foursquare).

Despite some common origins in these kinds of projects, Gordon and De Souza e Silva (2011) point out that artists and for-profit companies have different motivations; while the first tend to “subvert established practices” and challenge accepted interpretations and uses of space, for-profit companies tend to monetize them, commodifying space (p. 52). In this sense, these scholars recognize that there is nothing exceptionally special about any of these applications, but together they point to a significant trend in using mobile phones as urban annotation tools. The authors conceptualize mobile phones as “writing utensils” that facilitate interactions and cultivate a rich nature of maps and spaces.

Although these authors have noted this trend, I have noticed that these locative media technologies are not reaching widespread use, and in fact, many attempts at monetizing GPS and location-based social networks faded into inexistence (e.g.:

Gowalla, EveryBlock). It is undeniable that the shut down of these applications points also to a difficulty of getting commercial location-based applications to become widely popular. In fact, a 2011 survey with 437 US smartphone users, the company White Horse (Reese & Beckland, 2011) generated four key findings: 1) Location-based services have not yet reached the tipping point, 2) the chief barriers today are a lack of clear benefit and privacy fears, 3) Users are mostly young, active contributors to social networks, and 4) marketers will need to create and test new geolocation experiences that are not generic but relevant to a particular brand and audience. One approach to overcome the difficulties of getting people interested in locative media has been hyperlocalism, which means content focused on neighborhoods or residential blocks where people would be more likely to have a common interest and a willingness to share information about their local scene. News media also began to think that one way to revive interest in news and involve citizen journalists would be to create services for hyperlocal journalism.

Everyblock was one of the earliest entrants in the hyperlocal scenario. This service started as a newsfeed (relying only on public data) of a neighborhood, in 2007, but after being acquired by MSNBC, in 2009, it presented itself as “a platform for discussion around neighborhood news” in which the role of user-generated content was key. Basically, Everyblock mixed a collection of news, photos, crime statistics, and government data for each city block that it covered with contributions from users in 16 major cities in the US. Everyblock allowed users to sign up on the website or mobile app and to post comments to their neighbors in the city. It obtained content by crawling websites of government departments, references to city locations in a subset of online media, local services including deals, meetups and real estate, and photos on third-party sites tagged with locations in the city. Most discussions on Everyblock revolve around local information and events posted by users.

In the literature, Everyblock has been mentioned as an example of location-based media (Schmitz Weiss, 2013; Nyre et al, 2012), usually in opposition to the location-based social network Foursquare. For instance, Foursquare has been described as a competitor for local news or Everyblock’s hyperlocal service (Nyre et al, 2012). Adam Greenfield selected 11 apps that best represent serendipity in a city, including Everyblock and Foursquare (Danzico, 2010). Clark (2010) also cited Foursquare and Everyblock (among other examples) as tools for attaching information to places. Everyblock was considered to be a location-based media because in 2011, Everyblock released a mobile application that took into consideration the user’s physical position (Øie, 2013), in which users could customize maps. However, the service, that was active in 16 cities in the U.S., was shut down suddenly in 2013. Vivian Schiller, senior vice president and chief digital officer of NBC News said that the reason for closure was the struggle to find a profitable business model (Sonderman, 2013).

In this section, I have tried to briefly show some of the early projects in locative media. Some of them were arts projects and others were attempts to commercialize locative media. However, users did not adopt them widely enough for them to survive. Despite not being a concern of this dissertation, the slow adoption of technologies of location is deemed a practical problem to be solved or at least to be grasped in order to propose new trajectories, new frameworks, or new design goals in locative media.