Smartphone adoption has surpassed 50% of the population in more than 15
countries, and there are now more than one million mobile applications
people can download to their phones. Many of these applications take
advantage of smartphones as locative media, which is what allows
smartphones to be located in physical space. Applications that take
advantage of people's location are called location-based services, and
they are the focus of this book.
Smartphones as locative media raise important questions about how we
understand the complicated relationship between the Internet and
physical space. This book addresses these questions through an
interdisciplinary theoretical framework and a detailed analysis of how
various popular mobile applications including Google Maps, Facebook,
Instagram, Yelp, and Foursquare use people's location to provide
information about their surrounding space.
The topics explored in this book are essential reading for anyone
interested in how smartphones and location-based services have begun to
impact the ways we navigate and engage with the physical world.