The evolution of mobile phones into integrated multimedia and data-storage devices has further enhanced users’ ‘emotional attachment’ (Vincent, 2006: 117) to mobile phones which are perceived as personalized communications tools used to achieve ‘continuous connectivity’ to personal and business networks while engendering a feeling of intimacy by being permanently connected with friends and family (Vincent, 2006: 117). A significant element of the person-alization of mobile communications involved the transfer of established Web 2.0 and social networking applications to mobile technologies. For instance, email accounts, Facebook profiles, Twitter accounts, online banking, YouTube profiles, Skype accounts and Google’s services accounts are but a few of the personalized applications that have moved from the limited mobility of localized comput-ing to the ubiquitous and continuous connectivity of mobile computcomput-ing. This therefore potentially transforms the mobile into the epicentre of the individ-ual’s online existence. This transition, linked with the newly acquired geoloca-tional, imaging and data-acquisition capabilities of smart phones, is pioneering an increase in the production and distribution of volunteered geographic
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information favoured by the development of new geographic information sys-tems that shape and support existing and new Web 2.0 applications such as Wikimapia, OpenStreetMap, Google Earth or Google Latitude, Google Places, Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook Places, and countless others.
Goodchild sees the new generation of GPS-enabled computing devices as the interfaces that transform mobile and geomedia users into ‘augmented’,
‘intelligent, mobile sensors’ (Goodchild, 2007: 24). Such ‘sensors’ collectively possess an incredible ability to gather a uniquely rich amount of knowledge and information about the ‘surface of the Earth and its properties’ (Goodchild, 2007: 24). At the core of this evolution Goodchild identified the evolution of Web 2.0 behaviours and collective projects such as Wikipedia or Google Earth.
These projects inspired collective ‘meshups’, mapping projects like Wikimapia and OpenStreetMap or Google My Maps, that, similarly to Wikipedia, rely on volunteer work and volunteered geographic information to fulfill their aim to map the entire world.
As I have argued elsewhere (Lapenta, 2011), the new virtual map deserves further scrutiny because of the complex social dynamics and developing social functions that it engenders, and because of the significant technological and cultural developments it represents in terms of the representation and visual-ization of the world.
The virtual map’s origin and basic function lies in its capacity to facilitate and organize Geomedia users’ collective production and exchange of images, sounds and texts. It does so by visualizing information by means of elabo-rated ‘algorithms’ (Uricchio, 2011) that transform bits and pieces of informa-tion into a unified image of evolving representainforma-tions of the world. This visual transformation, or ‘algorithmic turn’ (Uricchio, 2011: 25), of the represen-tation of the world is leading and is representative of a momentous cultural and technological evolution in which the ‘virtual map’ embodies a historical function in the re-negotiation of the cultural value and perception of the image (Lapenta, 2011: 14–22; Uricchio, 2011: 25–34). However, the virtual map has further qualities – it moreover may be conceived as a complex, evolv-ing, interactive and live visualization of the social identities, social relations and social interactions of the users that contribute to its composition. The digital symbolic system of the virtual map, the puzzle of countless photo-graphic images, signs, texts and sounds produced and volunteered by geo-media users, represents an intrinsically new social phenomenon. This builds on sociocultural aspects that have been developing throughout the history of the Internet and are finally maturing in geomedia-based Web 2.0 social performances and dynamics. These dynamics have individual and collective significance. Once a disconnected collection of images, data and texts, in the virtual map this wealth of collectively produced information is now readily
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synthesized, organized in a network of social interactions and exchanges that are finally connected by geomedia technologies to what cannot be discon-nected anymore, the individual’s physical reality and digital identity.
As a collective phenomenon the virtual map has a projective social significance (Lapenta, 2011: 16, 18). In 1967, Debord already described modernity as an immense accumulation of ‘spectacles’ (Debord, 1983 [1967]: 2), an immense collection of images of every aspect of life that fused in a common stream to create ‘a pseudo-world apart’. He characterized the society of the ‘spectacle’ not as a society simply ‘collecting images’, but as a system of ‘social relations among people, mediated by images’ (Debord, 1983 [1967]: §4). In 1991, Jameson described cognitive mapping as the coordination of existential data, the empir-ical position of the subject, with an abstract conception of an ‘unrepresentable’
socio-geographic totality (Jameson, 1991: 52). If framed within these theo-retical perspectives, the virtual map can be interpreted as a utopian projection, or heterotopian realization, of this unrepresentable socio-geographic totality.
More than a mere collection of representations of the world, the virtual map can be interpreted as a new social space, a visible articulation of the individual and social mediations of the once disconnected ‘world of autonomous images’
(Debord, 1983 [1967]) with the ‘real’ (Poster, 1988), ‘cognitive’ (Jameson, 1991) and social worlds of their producers. The virtual map can be interpreted as a projective tool that transforms our ‘cognitive mapping’ of the world, from a sub-ject’s abstract cognitive projection of an ‘unrepresentable’ geographic totality, to a collectively produced representation of individuals’ merged images, texts and sounds. Thus it becomes the virtual map of a socio-geographic totality that visualizes our individual and collective mediated conditions of existence. As an identity marker instead, I suggest (Lapenta, 2011) the virtual map can be critically contextualized as part of a general development in information com-munications technologies. Synthetically, ICTs have gone through two phases normally referred to (somewhat problematically) as Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. If Web 1.0 can be seen as the initial move towards the simple transfer of content (image, text, sound) to a new digital medium and delivery system (digital infor-mation, the computer and the Internet), then Web 2.0 can be interpreted as the reorganization of such distribution of content on the basis of existing and developing social networks. In this new ecosystem, social identity and social interactions have been transformed into data, and data have become part and parcel of online personal identity and mediated social interaction. Age, loca-tion, interests, photos and videos, comments and replies, links, friends’ lists and groups have all become, according to Sundén (Sundén, 2003), informa-tion used in social networking sites (SNS) and online social platforms to ‘type oneself into being’ (Sundén, 2003: 3). These data serve as exchanged ‘iden-tity markers’ (West and Turner, 2008: 389) in SNS and are used by users to
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perform identity and to develop a sense of ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 1991). What makes Web 2.0 platforms different from pre-existing forms of mediated-communication is, according to boyd and Ellison, that they ‘enable users to articulate and make visible’ their social identity and ‘social networks’
(boyd and Ellison, 2007). The process of production and consumption of images, sounds and texts in SNS can then be interpreted as part of a process of identity elaboration, impression management and self-presentation (Donath and boyd, 2004: 71–82). It is how people maintain relationships, and continu-ously perform and construct their online social identity and make it visible.
From these interrelated perspectives it is then easy to understand how it was only a question of time (and technological development) before the body, and its location, would become a system of reference used to organize the collective information flows that converge and constitute the virtual map. Geomedia and associated photographic applications, such as Photosynth and Google Earth, seem to represent a first response to this need to organize information in a way that makes it relevant to the body. It is also a way to technologically engage with a multi-sensorial organization of the increasingly multimodal and hybrid-ized (part nature, part information) space of the individual media user (see also Pink, 2011 and in this volume).
The geomedia-based virtual map can therefore be theorized as a mediat-ing space. It is a projective tool, in which two entities and identities converge and merge: the geosphere, the sphere of the body and the object, the physical and social environments in which media users communicate and live; and the
‘infosphere’ (Toffler, 1984), the bits of information, the photographic, iconic or symbolic representations of these physical environments, which media users produce and share (Lapenta, 2011).
Geomedia transform the geo-location of their users, their geosphere, into data, and connect these data to existing information that describe the user’s online activities and identity (and his/her infosphere). By means of software appli-cations (Foursquare, Bliin.comx, Google Latitude, Photosynth, QuickTime VR, Places iPhoto 2009, Layar, Ekin.net), geomedia platforms connect and merge, on a live navigable virtual map (Google Earth, Google Maps, Live Maps, etc), the user’s physical location and the ever-increasing wealth of infor-mation that they produce as part of their online social interactions. Once a disconnected collection of images, data and texts, the infosphere is now readily synthesized on the virtual map, organized in a network of social interactions and exchanges and connected by geomedia technologies to one’s individual physical reality and one’s own digital identity.
Geomedia become then a tool used by subjects to navigate their social worlds, to organize their local social relations, and to maintain their networked
‘latent ties’ (boyd and Ellison, 2007). The photographic virtual map becomes
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the tool used to project, organize and make visible these social performances, personal mediated identities, and ‘imagined’ communities. As such, the new virtual map can also be interpreted as a new social space in which social inter-actions and communications and their multimedia forms of representation are readily organized for observation. Such vast amounts of data and social and cultural significations, often public and readily volunteered by media users, constitute a social world that could appropriately be explored by new forms of ethnographic and sociological methods. Such methods would be designed to investigate the social systems and social worlds represented by these new hybrid, interconnected, social spaces as well as the new forms of cultural pro-duction, value elaboration, mediated social interactions, communications, and exchanges among individuals and entire communities.