Locative Social Media (PDF)

Leighton Evans received his PhD in the Philosophy of Technology and New Media from Swansea University in 2012. He is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher on the European Research Council-funded "Programmable City" project at Maynooth University, National University of Ireland Maynooth, Ireland.

"Locative Social Media is a fine book that is theoretically sophisticated and empirically grounded. In it, Leighton Evans develops a rigorous post-phenomenology of location-based social media, and explores how mood or orientation, embodied practices involving mobile technology use, and the data-infused environment, are all 'co-constitutive of place'." - Rowan Wilken, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia

"In this book, Leighton Evans accomplishes something very ambitious: a deep theoretical reflection on the phenomenology of place experience as it occurs in the context of physical/digital interactions, interwoven with a thorough empirical account of situated use of location-based social networks. Evans' study of Foursquare users details complex place-related agencies in the age of what he calls a 'computationally infused world', including gathering, mapping, bridging, broadcasting, reputation management and building social capital. His findings resonate with and holistically consolidate the state of the art of interdisciplinary investigations of locative social media. The most impressive achievement in this book, however, is how the empirical evidence builds the basis for an exciting conceptual revisitation of the phenomenology of place; Evans proposes an original 'digital post-phenomenology of place' that connects key aspects of situated socio-technical systems: from embodied practices, to new and emergent mappings, occurrences and representations enabled by code and by locative infrastructures." - Luigina Ciolfi, Sheffield Hallam University, UK

"Transporting Heidegger from the Black Forest to the urban Foursquare-world, Leighton Evans discusses the persistently collective nature of space and place in digital culture. This important study opens different ways how location based social networks function to frame space for us but also how users participate in this process of defining belonging. Evans' book addresses algorithmic situations as