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*Correspondence: Michael.saker@city.ac.uk
1 City, University of London
2 University of North Texas
Architecture_MPS
Locative Media and Sociability: Using Location-Based Social
Networks to Coordinate Everyday Life
Michael Saker,*,1 Jordan Frith2
How to cite: Saker, M., Frith, J. ‘Locative Media and Sociability: Using Location-
Based Social Networks to Coordinate Everyday Life.’ Architecture_MPS, 2018, 14(1):
1. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.amps.2018v14i1.001.
Published: 01 September 2018
Peer Review:
This article has been peer reviewed through the journal’s standard double blind peer-review, where
both the reviewers and authors are anonymised during review.
Copyright:
© 2018, The Author(s). This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative
Commons Attribution License (CC-BY) 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits
unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source
are credited • DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.amps.2018v14i1.001.
Open Access:
Architecture_MPS is a peer-reviewed open access journal.
ARCHITECTURE_MEDIA_POLITICS_SOCIETY Vol. 14 No. 1. September 2018
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Title: Locative Media and Sociability:
Using Location-Based Social Networks
toCoordinate Everyday Life
Author: Michael Saker,1 Jordan Frith2
Architecture_media_politics_society. vol. 14, no. 1.
September 2018
Aliation: 1City, University of London, 2University of North Texas
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.
Keywords
coordination, Foursquare, LBSNs, location-based social networks, locative media, sociability,
social media
DOI: 10.14324/111.444.amps.2018v14i1.001, © 2018, The Authors. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative
Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source
are credited.
ARCHITECTURE_MEDIA_POLITICS_SOCIETY Vol. 14 No. 1 September 2018 1
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Title: Locative Media and Sociability:
Using Location-Based Social Networks
to Coordinate Everyday Life
Authors: Michael Saker, Jordan Frith
Architecture_media_politics_society. vol. 14, no. 1.
September 2018
Introduction
Digital media technologies increasingly aect how people understand and
interact with their environment. As Townsend1 prophetically suggested,
“portable digital communication tools . . . will undoubtedly lead to funda-
mental transformations in individuals’ perceptions of self, and the world, and
consequently the way they collectively construct that world.” One of the main
contributors to the shift Townsend predicted was the mobile web. The mobile
web allows people to engage with digital and location-based information on
the move. Consequently, the city has become “a hybrid of the physical and the
digital.”2 When considered alongside smartphones and location-based social
networks (LBSNs), the mobile web has the potential to aect how people
engage with both their surroundings and each other.3, 4, 5, 6 This potential can
be seen in the LBSN Foursquare.
Foursquare was developed by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai in
late 2008 before being launched at the South by Southwest (SxSW) festival in
2009. Since its unveiling, the application has changed considerably. In 2014,
Foursquare realigned, focusing on place-based suggestions and navigation.
The check-ins that are the focus of this article were moved to a separate
application: Swarm.7 Prior to this realignment, Foursquare functioned in a
social, locational, playful, and archival manner. It is this original version of
Foursquare that is the focus here. However, most of the data examined below
is equally applicable to the newer Swarm application.
Foursquare (and now Swarm) enabled people to form networks through
the application and check in to share their location with friends. People
could also use Foursquare to explore place because preceding check-ins were
algorithmically employed to oer users personalized place-based suggestions.
Similarly, other users left “tips” that became locational digital traces of expe-
rience. Concerning play, Foursquare eectively turned ordinary “life into a
DOI: 10.14324/111.444.amps.2018v14i1.001
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game”8 by awarding points, mayorships, and badges for check-ins. Lastly,
Foursquare worked as a “memory tool that people [could] use to archive their
past mobility.”9, 10, 11
Foursquare has been widely studied in mobile communication literature.
However, with the exception of Frith’s12 work, extant research has not
fully addressed how people use the application to engage in new forms of
social interaction or “sociability”, as we refer to it throughout this article.
“Sociability” in this context includes making social arrangements, engag-
ing in impromptu social encounters, and forging new social connection.
As Bertel13 points out, research on LBSNs and sociability “has mainly
been theoretical, critical reviews or interpretations of previous empirical
work.” Given the incorporation of locative mechanics in more mainstream
social- networking sites (SNSs), such as Facebook and Twitter, there is
an exigency for additional studies that explore these issues. With this in mind
the article expands upon the social potential of Foursquare, drawing on
original research to address three overarching questions: (1) is Foursquare
used to organize social encounters, and if so, why? (2) Does the visualiza-
tion of surrounding social connections lead to “serendipitous encounters”
with known others? (3) Does the use of Foursquare lead to new social
relationships?
To explore these issues further, we rst review literature on mobile com-
munication and social coordination. We then describe our methodological
approach before moving on to data analysis and concluding with a discus-
sion of our ndings. Our chief aim is to shed light on the social practices of
Foursquare users and in so doing build upon contemporary understandings
of the diverse uses of locative media.
From Time-Based to Space-Based Social Coordination
For much of the twentieth century, examinations of social coordination
focused on the temporal dimension. This approach was based on the works of
Georg Simmel, who argued the displaced nature of social connections in the
metropolis meant that individuals had to adopt time-based systems of social
coordination in order for them to function smoothly. For Simmel14 the “uni-
versal diusion of pocket watches” underlined this situation. Coordinating
sociability in the metropolis accordingly involved “complex systems and
inexible time.”15 People had to be “punctual” in order for social arrange-
ments to work as it was not yet possible to rearrange things on the move.16
The adoption of the mobile phone shifted understandings of temporality,
altering practices of urban coordination.17, 18, 19) The ner details of social
arrangements can now be negotiated in transit, just as people have the option
of remaining in “perpetual contact” with their social circles regardless of
physical proximity.20, 21, 22 For Ling and Yttri23 this “microcoordination,”
as they refer to it, has transformed the spatial and temporal constraints
surrounding social coordination.24, 25
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These new forms of “on the y” coordination are important because they
eectively “soften” the power of mechanical time.26 A corollary to this devel-
opment is the mollication of Simmel’s suggested need for “punctuality”.
Practices of microcoordination have spatial impact as well, as distance is simi-
larly reduced when individuals no longer have to call places (landline phones),
but can instead call people.27, 28, 29 Mobile phones are therefore implicitly
understood to reduce the importance of space.30, 31, 32 This suggestion reso-
nates with early scholarly criticisms of mobile telephony and environmental
dislocation,33, 34, 35 as well as contemporary studies that explore these devices
in the context of pedestrian distraction.36
In contrast to earlier mobile phone scholarship that focused on how
people became distracted from their surroundings, and in so doing, it could
be argued, momentarily reduced the signicance of their location, the rise
in locative media can be seen as reinstating the importance of physical loca-
tion.37 For de Souza e Silva and Sutko38 mobile interfaces now function as
“technological lters” that help “users manage interactions with city space.”
As Frith39 suggests, “[increasingly], individuals use mobile applications to
share their location with friends” and to see which social connections are
nearby. From this position, far from removing the question of place from
sociability, the mobile phone in these instances is “rmly embedded in what
it means to experience place,”40 just as it is entangled in communal practices.
Humphreys’41 study of the pioneering mobile social network Dodgeball is a
good case in point.
Active in the mid 2000s, Dodgeball allowed users to share their location
with a select group of existing friends. Individuals would text their location
to a central service, which would then send this information to recipients in a
series of text messages. Humphreys42, 43 found that Dodgeball users frequently
changed their movements through the city if they realized friends were nearby,
just as they experienced unfamiliar environments as being in some way more
familiar. Elaborating on this further, Humpreys44 identies a process she refers
to as social molecularization. This process occurs when users “experience and
move through the city in a collective manner,”45 precisely because of their
interaction with this mobile social network. Yet this isn’t to suggest that public
space lacked sociability outside of Dodgeball. Rather, what Humphreys is pos-
iting is the social molecularization congured through Dodgeball is dierent
in two ways. First, users no longer have to discuss location, as this is textually
communicated through the interface itself. Second, locational information is
detailed in real time, allowing users to make decisions about their movements
as and when they receive such information. “Together these two dierences
can bring about momentum in using and responding to Dodgeball check-
ins.”46 In eect, then, by enabling users to visualize where their friends were in
relation to their locative position, this spatial awareness worked alongside “the
clock as a medium for coordinating meetings in space”.47
Dodgeball has since been replaced by more technologically advanced LBSNs
that use both the mobile Web and the GPS functionality of smartphones.
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These applications provide new opportunities for people to coordinate
socially through the sharing of location and the visualization of space. The
increase in location sharing and the use of location in mobile applications
more generally has been met with a growth in the literature on these applica-
tions.48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56 Locative applications and mobile social networks
have been shown to alter urban mobilities,57, 58 imbue life with a sense of
play,59, 60, 61 and more broadly impact perceptions of mobile media.62
For our purposes, what is signicant about the corpus of locative media
is that it has “focused on the impact of LBSNs on space and place.”63 While
there are notable studies that have extended place-based discussions to
other areas, conceptualizing Foursquare through a post-phenomenology
of place,64 and examining the marking of location as a modality of self
presentation,65, 66, 67 aside from Frith’s68 work on Foursquare, research that
approaches the application from a sociability perspective is lacking. Similarly,
there is a lack of empirical studies that examine Foursquare’s potential to
either enable “serendipitous encounters” or develop new social ties.
In contrast, a body of work surrounds SNSs and sociability.69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74)
Research in this area has shown how SNSs can facilitate social relation-
ships,75, 76, 77, 78 maintain existing social connections,79), and forge new friend-
ships.80 It is our aim to address this gap in the literature on locative media by
examining Foursquare in the context of sociability.
Methodology
The data used in this paper is based on semi-structured interviews with a range
of Foursquare users. It was never our intention to make broad generalizations
about the application, but rather gather rich information on LBSN adoption
in everyday lives. This study therefore focuses on “how ordinary people”
using Foursquare “observe and describe their lives,”81 paying close attention
to what “meanings” individuals attribute to their given social situation.
As Horrocks and King82 note, “[researchers] seek to recruit participants
who represent a variety of positions in relation to the research topic, of a
kind that might be expected to throw light on meaningful dierences in
experience.” Following approval by the University Ethics Committee, a
diverse range of Foursquare users were recruited for this study. Recruitment
involved Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook, Gumtree, leaets and emails, with
Twitter being by far the most successful of these approaches. This is because
it allowed us to identify Foursquare users who would then ‘retweet’ details of
our project to larger groups of people. In all instances, individuals interested
in the study received a “participant information sheet.” This sheet detailed
the rationale for the project, what taking part would encompass, and how col-
lected data would be used. Those who still wanted to be involved then had to
sign a consent form acknowledging that they had fully read the “participant
information sheet,” were happy for their data to be used for the purposes of
this study, and that they understood they could withdraw from the study at
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any time. Participant anonymity and condentiality were protected during
and after the project using pseudonyms, while the ensuing data was securely
stored, to ensure that it was not disclosed to public/unauthorized individuals.
During the summer of 2012, twenty-two Foursquare users were inter-
viewed, all of whom resided in the south east of Britain. This area was chosen
so face-to-face interviews could be conducted where possible. In sum, twenty
participants were interviewed in person and two by Skype. Participants
included seventeen men and ve women. Ages ranged from nineteen to sixty-
ve, with the mean age being thirty-two. Interviews were semi-structured and
focused on social coordination and sociability. For the most part interviews
lasted approximately one hour. This is because half an hour or more is argu-
ably needed in order for the information to be valuable, whereas “anything
going much over an hour may be making unreasonable demands on busy
interviewees, and could have the eect of reducing the number of persons
willing to participate.”83 The vast majority of interviews took place in venues
participants regularly checked-in to. All interviews were recorded and then
transcribed by hand.
As Klandermans and Staggenborg84 suggest, “[in] semi-structured inter-
viewing, analysis and interpretation are ongoing processes.” Accordingly,
the “interpretation of initial interviews can . . . reshape the direction of the
study.”85 The rst ve interviews were piloted to experiment and develop
the various verbal probes required to explore the paths emerging amidst the
assorted social uses of Foursquare. This approach importantly helped estab-
lish the questions that were most conducive to our study. For Horrocks and
King,86 when exploring dierent approaches to analysis, “one distinction that
is often made is between approaches that are strongly focused on language and
those that are more concerned with the content of what the participant has to
say. Congruently here, and as evidenced by the data sought, this research is
principally interested in comprehending how participants use and understand
Foursquare from their own perspective, and in their own words. To this end,
from the oset it was our intention to become fully immersed in the material
gathered. Analysis therefore commenced with the careful reading of full inter-
view transcriptions, highlighting material that was applicable to this project.
An interpretive stage was subsequently employed to draw out meaning from
our gathered data. These interpretations were then hierarchically ordered in
terms of their signicance to the exigency of this study.”
Findings
Social coordination
Foursquare has promoted the potential for check-ins to positively impact
social coordination. Our research found that while participants used
Foursquare in a variety of social situations, there was a signicant emphasis
on interactions in which participants were not sure what time they would be
available to meet with friends.
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We used to do it at work, especially at the media agency, because there are a
lot of people using it. People would nish work at dierent times, depending
on what department they were in, so they would maybe go o to a pub or a
restaurant and then say, come nd us later. So instead of picking up the phone
and calling them, you would just nd the person, see where they were. As long
as they had checked-in you would know that they were at that particular place.
So if they were going for a drink or to a restaurant, you wouldn’t have to worry
about rushing out the door or following them, you can just wait until they
checked-in, and then meet them there. (Dennis)
I was going to meet up with a friend and I didn’t know where I was going to
be and I just said, check where I am on Foursquare and you’ll know where I
am. (David)
This spatial sentience meant that Dennis no longer had to “rush out” after
colleagues at the end of the day. He could instead choose when he wanted to
join them, at a time and place that was ostensibly convenient to him. To be
clear, although the ensuing interactions in both examples did take place at a
certain time, they weren’t solely organized through time, but also the visuali-
zation of space.
Our data shows that the vast majority of these occurrences involved groups
of work colleagues congregating at the end of the week. These gatherings fre-
quently involved participants visiting a number of dierent venues, with both
known and unknown others arriving at various times. Some participants com-
mented that prior to Foursquare, such social events were far more challenging
to organize because people were less likely to hear their phone ringing as the
evening went on, which then made it increasingly dicult for people to nd out
where everyone else was if they were “late.” In most instances, Foursquare’s
communicative aordances worked best in situations predicated on a prior
agreement to meet up that involved multiple people. As multiple participants
explained, check-ins were more successful as a form of semi-mass communica-
tion than one-on-one interpersonal communication. In dyadic interpersonal
situations, texting or simple messaging was likely more eective.
In most social situations revealed in our data, the majority of participants
did not actively contact friends to alter arrangements in transit, but rather
used Foursquare to see where friends were. Signicantly then, Foursquare
provided the possibility of social encounters without the responsibility. An
important part of this process is accordingly the reduced obligation to arrive
at a specic place at a specic time. Participants who used Foursquare to meet
with work colleagues appreciated the fact these gathering felt less compulsory
than they would through other communicative means. In this vein, several
participants commented that the use of Foursquare gave them additional
ability to change their mind because they did not have to make a binary
decision at a specic time. This phenomenon was underlined by participants
who had decided not to meet with colleagues, but then reversed their decision
when either their mood or the location of the group changed.
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Serendipitous encounters
Foursquare heavily promoted the “serendipitous encounters” that can occur
through location sharing. These encounters take place when one person is
able to see a friend has checked-in nearby, and then meets with them. We
found this did occasionally happen with our participants:
A friend Dave, he lives in Woking near me, and he just happened to be in
London one day, but he wasn’t planning on staying out, he was just going to go
straight home, and I’d been out with work colleagues and was walking back to
the train station and saw he was there, and it was sort of on the way, so I just
popped in. (Dennis)
My school was in Peterseld and I saw some old people who used to go to
that school live nearby, and sometimes they check-in and I’ll say, hey do you
want to come in for a coee. I did that a few times. In fact, I did that pretty
much every week People come by and visit. So yeah, that’s been really useful. I
imagine it will be good at Surrey, as a lot of my friends are quite close to Surrey,
so a lot of them will probably be nearby. (Mark)
This kind of meeting is notably dierent to the social interactions produced
by older mobile phones. The ability to visualize where friends are located
allowed more impromptu social encounters to transpire, stemming from a dif-
ferent kind of connectedness. At the same time, however, and perhaps more
signicantly, our research also shows that these encounters were rarely wel-
comed. This is important, given the positive framing of such happenstances
by Foursquare.
I’ve had a few funny moments in that sense, when I’ve arrived somewhere,
checked-in and it has said your friend Ben is here, okay, and I’ve looked up
and he’s walked around the corner in the pub. So it has mainly been things like
that. It has mainly been randomly bumping into people in the same location. If
I check-in somewhere now, if there are other people there, I will see if I know
them. (Doug)
Was the experience improved because of Foursquare? (Researcher)
Well I probably wouldn’t have known he was there. I mean, okay, he hap-
pened to walk around, but I was saying to my wife, it’s really weird, it’s saying a
friend of mine is here and when I looked he was checked-in a couple of minutes
ago, and I was like, he must still be here, and then he came around the corner.
So that was kind of weird. (Doug)
So did you just say ‘hi’ and then carry on with what you were doing?
(Researcher)
Yes, because I was having dinner with my family and he was having dinner
with his family. (Doug)
This predicament illuminates that just because Foursquare can produce
“serendipitous encounters,” it does not necessarily follow that these meetings
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are desirable or that participants know what social signs apply in these situ-
ations. For many participants, the possibility of such meetings were not only
unwanted, but seen as markedly awkward.
It is quite awkward because if someone isn’t that close you wouldn’t do that
kind of thing because you would feel you are stalking someone. (Robbie)
This research also found that the visualization of social space through
Foursquare was used by some participants to actively avoid certain social
situations. Again, this goes against the initial publicity surrounding the
application.
So are your friends on Foursquare close-friends? (Researcher)
Yes, they were, then since the merger with American Express I’ve had col-
leagues requesting it and obviously you can’t really decline, so now it has
changed slightly. But you can get around it, you can check-in at all the places
you go, but when you don’t want to tell certain people you can keep checking-in
and it gets missed. (David)
Do you mean you are using the ‘private’ function? (Researcher)
No, what I mean is you can check-in to all the places you’ve been during
the day, but just miss the places out that you don’t want them to see. Then
those people see your other check-ins and just assume you are around that
area. It is like using this whole kind of openness to actually be more private.
(David)
In this example, David had accepted various friend requests from individu-
als he wasn’t particularly close with. As a result, he then used the spatial
aordance of Foursquare to avoid these people without appearing rude.
There were other instances of participants similarly using the visualization
of space to actively evade people. This shows that the coordination of social
interaction through the visualization of space is not always done with social
ends in mind. Just as locative media can increase the likelihood of “ser-
endipitous encounters,” it can also produce new tactics for avoiding such
encounters.
Ultimately, the challenges of dealing with serendipity or even avoiding ser-
endipity shows an important fact about the social nature of the check-in: as a
relatively new form of social communication, our research revealed an estab-
lished set of social norms had not arisen governing location sharing. People
repeatedly expressed uncertainty about what to do when someone checked-in
nearby, and as discussed earlier, they begrudgingly would sometimes meet up
or go out of their way to avoid making a connection. Our data suggests that
it will be interesting for future researchers to examine if a more established set
of social norms does coalesce around the serendipitous encounter enabled by
LBSNs.
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New relationships
Foursquare uses an eponymous interface, which means participants can see
unknown others who have checked-in at the same place. Our data shows that
the ability to visualize nearby Foursquare users did lead some participants to
develop new friendships. For the most part this was the case for participants
who were more interested in the gaming side of the applications. There were
several instances of participants who were ghting over a certain mayorship
with an unknown other, which then provided space-based opportunities for
social connections.
Like this guy Ian, I had no idea who he was, then I got a message saying he’d
stolen my mayorship, and then I saw his Twitter, and tweeted him to say, give
that back, and then you just get chatting, and it has got to the point where we’ve
gone for a drink. (Dennis)
It’s largely banter. Particularly the messages Foursquare sends you, like
Jamie just stole the mayorship from you. You’re not going to let that stand! So
I took it from him and wrote, in your face. (Richard)
When these situations did occur, interestingly the ensuing communication
frequently took place through Twitter, as many participants had linked social
media accounts and were therefore aware of accompanying usernames and
the like.
I only know him because he and I were vying for the ‘mayorship’ of Woking
station for a while. I have not met him in person, because we just keep on not
getting around to it, and literally the only reason we know each other at all is
because for about a period of two months, we would alternate ‘mayorships’
about once or twice a week. (Adrian)
So how did you two get in contact with each other? (Researcher)
I think we probably both had it set to ‘tweet’ when we gained a ‘mayorship’,
and so we started chatting on Twitter as a result, just a, ha-ha better luck next
time, kind of thing, and then he sent me a Foursquare friend request at some
point and I thought why not? (Adrian)
I’ve got my Foursquare tied in with Twitter, so my check-in comes up as a
status. (Ben)
Another reason some participants gave for using Twitter to form these con-
nections was that communicating through Foursquare felt too personal,
whereas Twitter provided a safer more open forum to jovially “brag” about
the acquisition of “mayorships”. In terms of these social connections then,
they were oftentimes symptomatic of participants using the application for
reasons revolving around play. In other words, participants were not actively
using Foursquare to make new friends per se, but rather engaging with space
and place in the context of a game. This playful engagement then became a
conduit through which new social ties were forged.
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This research shows that just as the playful aordances of Foursquare led
some participants to make new friends, other participants developed addi-
tional social ties through the active community that surrounds the applica-
tion. This was repeatedly the case with participants who identied themselves
as being “heavy users.”
I’ve denitely made some friends that I would meet up with in real-life if I were
well enough. It’s just nice. There are a lot of my friends online that sort of don’t
understand it, don’t get it, who are not particularly interested in it, so it is nice
to have that little circle of people that I can literally rabbit about Foursquare
with all day. I am bonkers about Foursquare. I don’t know why I’ve got the
enthusiasm that I have? I just appreciate it so much, as it has changed my life,
it has got me out the house so much more than what I used to. So I’ve just got
this big appreciation for it. (Sarah)
For Sarah, Foursquare signicantly allowed her to socialize with a “circle of
people” that understood and appreciated her obsession with this LBSN. In
several comparable incidences, participants did not necessarily make friends
with other users through the Foursquare application itself, but through their
involvement with unocial Foursquare fan sites and corresponding Twitter
accounts. Signicantly, the “circle of people” Sarah mentioned was geo-
graphically dispersed, which was a common occurrence for participants who
had developed social ties with the surrounding community. Mark touches on
this point in the following extract.
A lot of them are based all over England. There’s not really many near me.
The closest would be Drew, because he lives in Woking. So we’ve crossed paths
many times. I’ve had a few close misses with him. I was there to see Derren
Brown and he was checked-in at a pub nearby and I didn’t notice, I wasn’t
paying attention you see, and he was like, I could have seen you then, and I was
like, poor me. (Mark)
On the whole, our research found that participants who had made friends
with other Foursquare users in this manner seldom then met these people
in person. Instead, Foursquare provided a network of online contacts that
participants would then engage with to “pass the time.” It should be noted
here that this form of engagement was again only evident with participants
who classied themselves as “heavy users.” In these instances, it was a mutual
appreciation of Foursquare that provided a common ground for participants
and “unknown others” to bond over.
Discussion
de Souza e Silva and Sutko87 propose that as the use of locative media gains
popularity, the visualization of space rather than time will increasingly
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mediate social life. To a certain extent our research supports this assertion.
Much like in Frith’s study, the visualization of space to coordinate certain
gatherings “was generally limited to a few specic social situations88 in which
many people may be congregated in a limited physical area.”89 Repeatedly
these situations involved evenings out with work colleagues, as opposed to
close friends. Here Foursquare provided participants with the freedom to join
these acquaintances when they wanted to without feeling obligated to appear
at a specic time or place. In other words, the visual aordance of Foursquare
eectively functioned to alleviate some of the social responsibility felt by
participants who wanted to socialize on their own spatiotemporal terms,
without fear of oending others. For those involved, these interactions could
then unfold in a manner that felt more relaxed. This nding possibly extends
Ling’s90 earlier work on how the mobile phone lessened the importance of
set times, showcasing how location-sharing becomes a more passive way to
loosen social bonds and arrange gatherings.
The visualization of space alone, however, did not solely coordinate
these encounters. Equally important was a previously established tempo-
ral understanding that get-togethers would be organized in this way and
would occur within a certain window of time. A signicant aspect of these
“specic social situations” then, was an awareness of the underlying intent
surrounding check-ins.91 Participants using Foursquare were cognizant that
the marking of location within this context signied an invitation to “meet
up”. In this vein, and through a tacit agreement that a social encounter
would take place at some time, Foursquare builds upon Ling and Yttri’s92
notion of “micro-coordination.” In contrast to older mobile telephony
and sociability, however, the visualization of space meant that neither a
specic time nor place needed to be negotiated in transit.93, 94 Instead, par-
ticipants could establish where people were without actively engaging others
in dialogue. Accordingly, Foursquare similarly oers a mode of “social
molecularization”95 that accentuates the sociability of the city outside of
this “human-body-device-sensor-software-data conguration,”96 one that
is enabled through the spatial and temporal aordances of this assemblage.
Consequently, and signicantly, Foursquare doesn’t simply “soften” time,97
but equally softens space.
The social sentience Foursquare permits also means there are now more
opportunities for social encounters to occur that have not been previously
arranged. While several participants spoke of their use of Foursquare having
led to them socializing with people they otherwise wouldn’t have, making their
environment feel more social and echoing Humphreys’98, 99 nding regarding
Dodgeball, for the most part “serendipitous encounters” with known others
were rarely welcomed. Rather than being ‘serendipitous’ such meetings were
experienced as being “inconvenient”. How successful Foursquare was at
coordinating social encounters was here predicated on there being some form
of tacit agreement already in place, as touched on above, suggesting that
an established set of social norms had not arisen surrounding the check-in.
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People instead repeatedly felt uncomfortable and did not know how to react
when faced with the possibilities of serendipitous sociality. As Frith suggests
The dierent reasons people use Foursquare complicate the issues of sociability
and collective mobile communication . . . Some people who used Foursquare
for more social reasons or as a way to catalogue their life only checked in to
more interesting locations they wanted to highlight. But other users who saw
Foursquare more as a game checked in everywhere.100
In alignment with Frith,101 our research found that participants would check-
in for many reasons other than social coordination. Humphreys’102, 103 study
of Dodgeball is again useful here. As she notes, “[social] interaction is a
complex negotiation. The same information exchanged through Dodgeball
could be used to facilitate meeting up as much as it could be used to avoid
a particular person.”104 De Souza e Silva and Frith105 propose that mobile
interfaces function as “technological lters” helping “users manage interac-
tions with city space,” and thus “cope with sensory overload.”106 This study
supports such a position, both in terms of identifying places to engage with
as well as avoid. For instance, some participants suggested that due to the
dierent locations, timings, and people involved, organizing post-work
events prior to Foursquare was an extremely hard task. By using Foursquare
in this manner, participants were eectively able to “lter” out the spaces
that weren’t socially signicant to them, while focusing on those that were.
Similarly, participants were also able to use the application to lter out the
social spaces they actively wanted to avoid. In these examples, the implicit
openness of Foursquare was paradoxically used to curtail sociability and
bolster privacy. David’s concealment of his location through outdated
check-ins is an interesting case in point, which raises some pressing questions
around locative media and issues pertaining to social privacy, just as it casts
a much needed light on locative media practices that are undertaken to hide
one’s locale.107
Importantly, checking-in on Foursquare requires an active process of
engagement. Unlike some LBSNs, such as Swarm, Foursquare does not use
real-time location tracking (it should be noted that this aspect of Swarm
can be switched o by the user, and only general spatial coordinates
are shared). In the context of Foursquare, people must search for nearby
locations and then check in. The work of Papacharissi108 is helpful here for
working through some of the issues users might face when choosing to dis-
close personal and locative data. While privacy, in Western nations at least,
is considered a basic human right, new media technologies and concomitant
companies are increasingly placing the onus on individuals to determine
where this entitlement begins and ends.109 Running concurrently with this
trend, monolithic companies such as Facebook and Google have been
accused of breaking EU privacy law by eectively utilizing self-serving terms
and conditions that implicitly implicate users in acts that contravene their
ARCHITECTURE_MEDIA_POLITICS_SOCIETY Vol. 14 No. 1 September 2018 13
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own rights. As Papacharissi110 explains, “[companies] employ privacy and
terms of user statements to outline how personal information provided will
be used, so that in the event of users’ complaints, companies are absolved of
responsibility.” Users of services such as Foursquare are therefore placed in
a potentially dicult position where they must reconcile fears of surveillance
with their desire to interact with locative applications. In this instance, the
benets of Foursquare evidently outweighed any apprehensions participants
might have felt about who was accessing their data and why, with this LBSN
being used in one instance as a viable way to remain hidden. In other words,
while the sharing of location can have possible negative privacy aspects and
lead to a kind of social “Big Brother” observation, in the context of this study
the active process of the check-in also oered the ability to limit those eects.
People tended to check in strategically, highlighting some places over others
and sharing locations at times when they might be more willing to meet up.
People rarely checked in from private places they did not want others to know
about, in part because those places are unexciting to show o to others and in
part because they have little chance of social serendipity.
Lastly, our study explored whether Foursquare led to new social relation-
ships. To reiterate, it has been suggested “we might be witnessing a techno-
logical and social shift towards the ability for location-aware media to help
build and connect with new ties.”111 This research found that Foursquare did
lead to some participants developing new social ties. However, much like with
SNSs, this practice wasn’t a common occurrence among most participants112
but was instead reserved for those who were either heavily involved in the
surrounding community or those with a deep interest in the gaming side of
Foursquare. In terms of the former, for the most part new social ties were
geographically dispersed and subsequently maintained online. In terms of
the latter, participants who established new connections through location-
based play often did so because of a shared connection to a specic place or
location.
Limitations
A limitation of this study is the gender imbalance of the participants involved.
From the oset, it was notably more dicult to gain female participants than
it was male participants. This, of course, could be the case for a number of
reasons. It could be that the participants who helped establish contact with
other participants early on had more male than female friends, and accord-
ingly put us in touch with these users. Likewise, it could also be that female
participants felt less comfortable meeting with researchers that they hadn’t
met before. Regardless of the reasons, future studies should examine ques-
tions of gender and locative media in more detail, as it would be hugely
interesting to explore the potentially dierent ways men and woman employ
locative applications to facilitate their social lives. Likewise, it would also be
interesting to extend this research to other locales beyond the south east of the
14 ARCHITECTURE_MEDIA_POLITICS_SOCIETY Vol. 14 No. 1 September 2018
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UK. Again, this could cast a meaningful light on the various ways in which
location impacts how locative applications are congured and used.
Conclusion
This study has explored how people use Foursquare in the context of socia-
bility, to coordinate social situations and develop new relationships. In doing
so, our work readily contributes to research on how people use Foursquare to
coordinate certain social interactions113 as well as forge new social ties. At the
same time, this study also addresses gaps in the literature surrounding LBSNs
and sociability using original research, which is frequently lacking in this
eld.114 As the use of locative media continues to increase115 as well as develop
in new and perhaps wearable ways,116 there will be further opportunities for
people to share their location, coordinate meetings, and create new social
bonds. With this in mind, new social understandings will need to be developed
around locative applications and the intentions behind the marking of one’s
location, because it is apparent check-ins mean dierent things to dierent
people. While LBSNs and sociability are limited in scope now, new forms
of locative media might lend themselves to a variety of dierent situations.
Future studies should explore these issues in the context of specic LBSNs,
paying close attention to their communicative aordances and the various
social opportunities they might support.
Notes
1 Anthony Townsend, “Life in the Real-Time City: Mobile Telephones and Urban
Metabolism,” Journal of Urban Metabolism (2000):1.
2 Michiel de Lange and Martijn de Waal. “Owning the City: New Media and
Citizen Engagement in urban Design,” First Monday (2013): n.p, accessed
October 26, 2017, doi:http://rstmonday.org/article/view/4954/3786.
3 Adriana de Souza e Silva, “From Cyber to Hybrid: Mobile Technologies as
Interfaces of Hybrid Spaces, “Space and Culture 9, no. 3 (2006): 261–78.
4 Jordan Frith, “Splintered Space: Hybrid Spaces and Dierential Mobility,”
Mobilities 7, no. 1 (2012): 131–49.
5 Jordan Frith, Smartphones as Locative Media (London: Polity Press, 2015).
6 Michael Saker and Leighton Evans, “Locative Mobile Media and Time:
Foursquare and Technological Memory,” First Monday 21, no. 2 (2016),
accessed October 26, 2017, doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.5210/fm.v21i2.6006.
7 “About Us,” Foursquare Corporation, accessed April 8, 2016, https://foursquare.
com/about.
8 Jordan Frith, “Turning Life into a Game: Foursquare, Gamication, and
Personal Mobility,” Mobile Media & Communication 1, no. 2 (2013): 248–62.
9 Jordan Frith, “Communicating Through Location: The Understood Meaning
of the Foursquare Check-In,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 19,
no. 4 (2014): 890–905.
ARCHITECTURE_MEDIA_POLITICS_SOCIETY Vol. 14 No. 1 September 2018 15
Amps
10 Jordan Frith and Jason Kalin, “Here, I Used To Be: Mobile Media and Practices
of Place-Based Digital Memory,” Space and Culture19, no. 1 (2016): 43–55.
11 Saker and Evans, “Locative Mobile Media and Time.”
12 Frith, “Communicating Through Location,” 890–905.
13 Troels Fibæk Bertel, “‘Why Would You Want To Know?’ The Reluctant
Use of Location Sharing via Check-Ins on Facebook among Danish Youth,”
Convergence 22, no. 2 (2016): 1.
14 Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in Simmel on Culture, ed.
Mike Featherston and David Frisby (London: Sage, 1997), 177.
15 Kay W. Axhausen, John Urry, and Jonas Larsen, Mobilities, Networks, Geo-
graphies (Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2012), 59.
16 Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” 177.
17 Ditte Laursen and Margaret H. Szymanski, “Where Are You? Location Talk in
Mobile Phone Conversations,” Mobile Media & Communication 1, no. 3 (2013):
314–34.
18 Rich Ling, The Mobile Connection: The Cell Phone’s Impact on Society (San
Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann, 2004).
19 Alexandra Weilenmann, “‘I Can’t Talk Now, I’m in a Fitting Room’: Formulating
Availability and Location in Mobile-Phone Conversations,” Environment and
Planning A 35, no. 9 (2003): 1589–1605.
20 Jon Agar, Constant Touch: A Global History of the Mobile Phone (Icon Books
Ltd, 2013).
21 James E. Katz and Mark Aakhus, eds. Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication,
Private Talk, Public Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge: University Press,
2002).
22 Christian Licoppe, “‘Connected’ Presence: The Emergence of a New Repertoire
for Managing Social Relationships in a Changing Communication Technoscape,”
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22, no. 1 (2004): 135–56.
23 Richard Ling and Birgitte Yttri, “10 Hyper-Coordination via Mobile Phones in
Norway,” in Perpetual Contact, 139–69.
24 Rich Ling, The Mobile Connection”.
25 Richard Ling and Birgitte Yttri, “10 Hyper-Coordination,” 139–69.
26 Ibid.
27 Kay W. Axhausen, John Urry, and Jonas Larsen, Mobilities, Networks,
Geographies, 59.
28 Rheingold, Howard and Anthony Weeks, Net Smart: How to Thrive Online
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).
29 Barry Wellman, “Little Boxes, Glocalization, and Networked Individualism,” in
Computational and Sociological Approaches: Second Kyoto Workshop on Digital
Cities, ed. Makoto Tanabe, Peter van den Besselaar, and Toru Ishida (Berlin,
Heidelberg: Springer, 2003), 10–25.
30 Adriana de Souza e Silva and Jordan Frith, “Locational Privacy in Public Spaces:
Media Discourses on Location-Aware Mobile Technologies,” Communication,
Culture & Critique 3, no. 4 (2010): 503–25.
31 Jordan Frith, “Communicating Through Location,” 890–905.
16 ARCHITECTURE_MEDIA_POLITICS_SOCIETY Vol. 14 No. 1 September 2018
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32 Jordan Frith, Smartphones as Locative Media.
33 Chantal de Gournay, “12 Pretense of Intimacy in France,” in Perpetual Contact,
193–205.
34 Kenneth J. Gergen, “The Challenge of Absent Presence,” in Perpetual Contact, 227.
35 Katz and Aakhus, eds. Perpetual Contact.
36 Despina Stavrinos, Katherine W. Byington, and David C. Schwebel, “Distracted
Walking: Cell Phones Increase Injury Risk for College Pedestrians,” Journal of
Safety Research 42, no. 2 (2011): 101–7.
37 Eric Gordon and Adriana de Souza e Silva, Net Locality: Why Location Matters
in a Networked World (Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons, 2011).
38 Daniel M. Sutko and Adriana de Souza e Silva, “Location-Aware Mobile Media
and Urban Sociability,” New Media & Society 13, no. 5 (2011): 809.
39 Frith, “Communicating Through Location”, 890.
40 Larissa Hjorth, “Being Real in the Mobile Reel: A Case Study on Convergent
Mobile Media as Domesticated New Media in Seoul, South Korea,”
Convergence 14, no. 1 (2008): 93.
41 Lee Humphreys, “Mobile Social Networks and Social Practice: A Case Study of
Dodgeball,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13, no. 1 (2007): 341–60.
42 Humphreys, “Mobile Social Networks and Social Practice, 341–60.
43 Lee Humphreys, “Mobile Social Networks and Urban Public Space,” New
Media & Society 12, no. 5 (2010): 763–78.
44 Humphreys, “Mobile Social Networks and Social Practice, 341–60.
45 Ibid., 353.
46 Ibid.
47 Sutko and de Souza e Silva, “Location-Aware Mobile Media, 809.
48 De Lange, and de Waal. “Owning the City.”
49 De Souza e Silva and Frith, “Locational Privacy in Public Spaces, 503–25.
50 Evans and Saker, Location-Based Social Media.
51 Frith, “Splintered Space,”131–49.
52 Jordan Frith, Smartphones as Locative Media.
53 Lee Humphreys and Tony Liao, “Foursquare and the Parochialization of Public
Space,” First Monday 18, no. 11 (2013).
54 Rich Ling and Scott W. Campbell, eds. The Reconstruction of Space and Time:
Mobile Communication Practices (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers,
2010).
55 Rowan Wilken, “Locative Media: From Specialized Preoccupation to
Mainstream Fascination,” Convergence 18, no. 3 (2012): 243–7.
56 Rowan Wilken and Gerard Goggin, eds. Mobile Technology and Place (London:
Routledge, 2013).
57 Gordon and de Souza e Silva, Net Locality: Why Location Matters.
58 Saker and Evans, “Locative Mobile Media.
59 Frith, “Turning Life into a Game, 248–62.
60 Christian Licoppe and Yoriko Inada, “Geolocalized Technologies, Location-
Aware Communities, and Personal Territories: The Mogi Case,” Journal of Urban
Technology 15, no. 3 (2008): 5–24.
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61 Janne Lindqvist, Justin Cranshaw, Jason Wiese, Jason Hong, and John
Zimmerman, “I’m the Mayor of My House: Examining Why People Use
Foursquare – A Social-Driven Location Sharing Application,” in Proceedings of
the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM, 2011),
pp. 2409–418.
62 Jason Farman, Mobile Interface Theory: Embodied Space and Locative Media
(New York: Routledge, 2013).
63 Michael Saker, “Foursquare and Identity: Checking-In and Presenting the Self
Through Location,” New Media & Society (2016): 4.
64 Evans, Leighton, Locative Social Media: Place in the Digital Age (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
65 Saker, “Foursquare and Identity.”
66 Henriette Cramer, Mattias Rost, and Lars Erik Holmquist, “Performing a
Check-In: Emerging Practices, Norms and ‘Conicts’ in Location-Sharing Using
Foursquare,” in Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Human
Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (ACM, 2011), 57–66.
67 Schwartz, Raz, and Germaine R. Halegoua. “The Spatial Self: Location-Based
Identity Performance on Social Media.” New Media & Society 17, no. 10 (2015):
1643–60.
68 Frith, “Communicating Through Location,” 890–905.
69 Agar, Constant Touch.
70 Mizuko Ito and Daisuke Okabe, “Intimate Visual Co-Presence” (paper presented
at the Ubiquitous Computing Conference, Tokyo, Japan, 2005).
71 Katz and Aakhus, eds. Perpetual Contact.
72 Laursen and Szymanski, “Where Are You?” 314–34.
73 Rich Ling and Scott W. Campbell, eds. The Reconstruction of Space and Time:
Mobile Communication Practices (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers,
2010).
74 Ling and Yttri, “10 Hyper-Coordination,” 139–169.
75 Boyd, Danah M., “Friendster and Publicly Articulated Social Networking,”
in Proceedings of the Twenty-Second Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human
Factors in Computing Systems. (New York: ACM Press).
76 Nicole B. Ellison, “Social Network Sites: Denition, History, and Scholarship,”
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13, no. 1 (2007): 210–30.
77 Alice E. Marwick, “’I’m a Lot More Interesting than a Friendster Prole’:
Identity Presentation, Authenticity and Power in Social Networking Services,”
Association of Internet Researchers 18 (2005), 6.
78 Amanda Lenhart and Mary Madden, “Teens, Privacy, and Online Social
Networks.” Pew Internet and American Life Project 18 (2007).
79 Ellison, “Social Network Sites,” 210–30.
80 Nicole L. Muscanell and Rosanna E. Guadagno, “Make New Friends or Keep the
Old: Gender and Personality Dierences in Social Networking Use,” Computers
in Human Behavior 28, no. 1 (2012): 107–12.
81 David Silverman. Interpreting Qualitative Data: Methods for Analyzing Talk,
Text and Interaction (London: Sage, 2006).
18 ARCHITECTURE_MEDIA_POLITICS_SOCIETY Vol. 14 No. 1 September 2018
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82 Nigel King and Christine Horrocks, Interviews in Qualitative Research (Los
Angeles: Sage, 2010), 29.
83 Colin Robinson, Real World Research: A Resource for Social Scientists and
Practitioner-Researchers (John Wiley & Sons, 2002), 273.
84 Bert Klandermans and Suzanne Staggenborg, eds. Methods of Social Movement
Research. Vol. 16. (University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 110.
85 Klandermans and Staggenborg, eds. Social Movement Research, 110.
86 King and Horrocks, Interviews in Qualitative Research, 142.
87 Sutko and de Souza e Silva, “Location-Aware Mobile Media,” 807–23.
88 Frith, “Communicating Through Location,” 896.
89 Frith, “Communicating Through Location,” 899.
90 Ling, The Mobile Connection.
91 Evans, Locative Social Media.
92 Ling and Yttri, “10 Hyper-Coordination,” 139–169.
93 Ling, The Mobile Connection.
94 Ling and Yttri, “10 Hyper-Coordination,” 139–169.
95 Humphreys, “Mobile Social networks and Social Practice,” 353.
96 Deborah Lupton, The Quantied Self (John Wiley & Sons, 2016), 40.
97 Ling and Yttri, “10 Hyper-Coordination,” 6.
98 Humphreys, “Mobile Social Networks and Social Practice, 341–60.
99 Humphreys, “Mobile Social Networks and Urban Public Space, 763–78.
100 Frith, “Communicating Through Location,” 890–905.
101 Frith, “Communicating Through Location,” 890–905.
102 Humphreys, “Mobile Social Networks and Social Practice,” 341–60.
103 Humphreys, “Mobile Social Networks and Urban Public Space, 763–78.
104 Ibid.,774.
105 Adriana de Souza e Silva and Jordan Frith, “Locational Privacy in Public
Space,” 505.
106 De Lange and de Waal. “Owning the City.”
107 Frith, “Communicating Through Location,” 890–905.
108 Zizi Papacharissi, A Private Sphere: Democracy in a Digital Age (Polity, 2010).
109 Lawrence Lessig, Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace (Basic Books, 1999).
110 Papacharissi, A Private Sphere, 46–7.
111 Sutko and de Souza e Silva, “Location-Aware Mobile,” 819.
112 Muscanell and Guadagno, “Make New Friends,” 107–112.
113 Frith, “Communicating Through Location,” 890–905.
114 Bertel, “‘Why Would You Want To Know?,” 1.
115 Frith, Smartphones as Locative Media.
116 Susan Elizabeth Ryan, Garments of Paradise: Wearable Discourse in the Digital
Age (MIT Press, 2014).
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