School of Social and Political Science

Description

Abstract: Locative media is notorious for its bad boundaries. From brokering location information, to the relentless expansion of Google Maps’ ‘total’ plotting of the world, location data targets, tracks, fences, and positions. But in this ambience of the locative, there is a glut of imprecise spatial information. One source of this glut is place-based reviews. There are almost a billion reviews of restaurants, shops, hotels, libraries, beaches, car parks, airports, schools, playgrounds, and more on Google Maps alone. Ranging from excited praise to petty grievances, these location-specific ratings and reports on experience are sutured into the map data, ready to be recalled for people to read, sort decipher and decide. But this ‘location data’ is selective and idiosyncratic—at times absurd and other times pressing and urgent. In reporting on these discrepant affects collected over the course of a three-year collaborative project, this talk asks: what do online place-based reviews do? From their multivalent facilitation of punching up and punching down (where is complaint directed?), to its conflicted logics of visibility (who targeted?), to the uncertain motivations of critique (why involve the digital map?), online reviews are a form of ambivalent media that organize contradiction without necessitating resolution. In widening discussion of location data’s imprecisions, we come to understand new cultural logics of locative media and its bad boundaries.

Short Bio: Rebecca Noone is an artist and a Lecturer in Information Studies at the University of Glasgow’s School of Humanities. She is interested in the ambient, the banal, and the taken for granted in digital culture, with particular focus on location and locative media. She has published in Communication, Culture and Critique, the Journal of Gender Studies, and Qualitative Research, among other journals. In 2024, she published her first monograph, Location Awareness in the Age of Google Maps (Routledge).

Location: G.01 HSY Teaching Centre
High School Yards
Edinburgh, EH1 1LZ

And online - STIS Seminar Zoom Link (updated 2nd Oct 25):
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/82140544359?pwd=Eoxde3Vj_00WiBRxOt47aCdJ0Dy3CITi.T-3gLpgTSI0MkJAy
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