IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Spring 2014 - 79

This is illustrated by the comments on the famous Fat Duck
restaurant in Bray, Berkshire, U.K.
The comments left by users differ
significantly from both the marking of a location on a map through a
gazetteer and the reviews one might
find in a restaurant review of the
location. The first review offers a
critique that may be useful for tall
visitors; the second a review of the
food available that (while verging
on the sycophantic) can offer the
user a view of the experience of eating at the location and can be used
to inform a decision on whether the
location is worth visiting; the third
contextualizes visiting the location
as an experience that will be more
worthwhile than the food itself. This
kind of information is not something that can be found in traditional
mapping of locations, and draws
together socially relevant information, such as experiences, impressions, emotions, and humorous
asides to create a new impression
of location on the part of the user
that advances beyond the representation of territory by gazetteers that
express important locations in a flat
manner, or by pure coordinate.
The identification of code as an
important mediating influence in the
experience of location resonates with
Mackenzie's [44] discussion of the
phenomenon of wirelessness, arguing
that the continual engagement with
computational devices and gadgets
leads to a tendency to make network
connections at all times in the current
networked world. This tendency is
an embodiment of an attunement to
computational devices and gadgets
that provide information to users and
indicates an awareness of network
connections as a fundamental part of
living in a world with a proliferation
of computational devices. This work
is also reflective of a canon of work
on what can be termed the Virtual
City: studies of urban space and cartography that emphasise the growing
importance and influence of computational devices in modern cities and
how these devices alter and mediate

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text: "Heaven. Be prepared to have all your senses overwhelmed, in a good
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Fig. 2. Continued.

the experience of space. For example, Dodge and Kitchin [42] emphasize the importance of computer code
in the production of urban spaces, as
does this work. Shepard [43] argues
that increasingly the "dataclouds
of the 21st century" shape experience of the city, and this work supports that view by illustrating how
this experience is shaped through
the coding of information. Gordon
and De Sousa e Silva's [1] concept
of networked locality emphasizes
how particular usage of networked
devices and the information they can
provide from de-localized storage
can increase nearness to places rather
than increase distance in a phenomenological sense, and the analysis here
adds to such an analysis by associating "nearness" with the provision
of socially- and personally-relevant
information.
This article emphasizes that a
reading of how physical locations
are translated, resurfaced, and represented to users by computational
code is important as more people
use these services and begin to experience places and locations through
the mediation of code. The method
used, critical discourse analysis,
emphasizes aspects of code that can
sometimes be overlooked. Code
constructs representations that are
used to understand the world, and

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

SPRING 2014

the semantic encoding that this
involves is an important feature of
the deployment of code in everyday
life. Through this encoding, understanding of the world occurs, and
this method (although imperfect)
can contribute to discussions of both
the effect of code on human understanding and the potential design
of applications and software with
regards to their intended and unintended effects for users.

Author Information
Leighton Evans is an Honorary
Research Associate at Swansea
University, having recently completed his Ph.D. in digital media.
He can be reached at 60 High
Street, Glynneath, Neath, Wales,
U.K. SA11 5DA.

References

[1] E. Gordon and A. de Souza e Silva, Net Locality: Why Location Matters in a Networked
World. Chichester, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
[2] M. McCullough, "On the urbanism of locative media," Places, vol. 18, no. 2, p. 26, 2006.
[3] R. Wilken, "Locative media: From specialized preoccupation to mainstream fascination," Convergence, vol. 18, pp. 243, 2012.
[4] A. Crawford and G. Goggin, "Geomobile
web: Locative technologies and mobile media," Australian J.Commun., vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 97-
109, 2009.
[5] A. de Souza e Silva and J. Frith, "Locative
mobile social networks: Mapping communication and location in urban spaces," Mobilities, vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 485-505, 2010.

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