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ABSTRACT:
An important development in mobile communications has been the emergence of positional and locative technologies, whether GPS and navigational devices, or Bluetooth and advertising, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), or even the status updates of the SMS technology Twitter. There is now a crossover between these place-making and space-constructing technologies associated with mobile and wireless technologies and what has become known as the 'geospatial web'-namely, the fertile range of practices reshaping the Internet, such as geotagging, online mapping (Google Maps), and locative vectors of social software.
In this paper, we wish to explore what is occurring to mobile communication through this rich set of intersections. The 'geomobile web', as we dub it, is a handy way to think about what is at stake in questions of placing mobile communications. Crucially, the geomobile web is very much about new inventions of place in everyday life.
Earth materializes, rotating majestically in front of his face. Hiro reaches out and grabs it. He twists it around so he's looking at Oregon. Tells it to get rid of the clouds, and it does, giving him a crystalline view of the mountains and the seashore. (Stephenson, 1992)
In the very near future, billions of people will be roaming the planet with GPS devices. Clouds of network connectivity are forming over our major cities and will inevitably coalesce. The geoaware Web isn't a product we buy; it's an environment we colonize. (Udell, 2005)
Introduction
In 1992, novelist Neal Stephenson's scenario was still (largely) in the realm of science fiction. Today, Google Earth, mobile location-based services, and other technologies make it possible to view geographical data in an astounding variety of guises and on a wide array of platforms, While it was once speculated that mobile information technologies would make location and place obsolete, the arrival of geographical information services (GIS), geoinformatics (Karimi & Hammad, 2004), 'geospatial' applications, and location-based services (LBS) on mobile platforms looks poised to prove that location still matters - indeed, it becomes a central organising principle. On the 'smart' phones of today, the 'geospatial web', or 'geoweb', has become mobile, transforming the relationship between data space and physical space.
This locative turn makes the literal an important theme in mobile communications. Reference to points in space...