Thing 17: Geolocation
This is a cross-post between WordPress and Medium.
There’s sort of these two polarising perspectives, right? Everything is great. The Internet has created all this freedom and liberty, and everything’s going to be fantastic. Or, everything’s terrible. The Internet has created all these tools for cracking down, and spying, and controlling what we say. The thing is, both are true — right? The Internet has done both. And both are kind of amazing and astonishing. And which one will win out in the long run is up to us. It doesn’t make sense to make out that one is doing better than the other. They’re both true, and it’s up to us which ones we emphasise and which ones we take advantage of, because they’re both there and they’re both always going to be there.
Aaron Swartz (‘The Internet’s Own Boy’, 2014)
The mainstreaming of the Internet was characterised by successive waves of new technologies that were enabled by the platform. Peer-to-peer applications, blogging, social networks, online video, tweeting — these mostly all brought novel and different means of expression and connection. Every year, a start-up service seemed to define the Internet that year, be it Napster, Blogger, MySpace, YouTube, or Twitter. By 2006, Time Magazine named ‘You’ as ‘Person Of The Year’, due to the scale of the user-generated content phenomenon.
For much of this early wave of optimistic disruption, I keenly embraced each successive new thing, once I got a handle on what it was about and how I could benefit from it or contribute to it. In Rogers’ diffusion of innovations curve, I would tend to fall roughly into the ‘early adopters’ category of user of a new technology — rarely ever first in, but getting going with something before a new tech became mainstream. Although I identified myself differently on this curve in an earlier post, on reflection, that seems about right. When I joined Twitter, for example (around the time of Obama’s first election), my new account was the 17,968,281st. There are now over 315 million active users, making roughly one in every 24 people on Earth a Twitter user (one in every 376 when I joined). Twitter has subsequently become accepted as a communications medium in its own right, like email or text messaging.
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After several years of enthusiastic embraces of new online accounts and much content created, I began to feel the need for a bit more of a critical perspective on networked digital media, and particularly my place within it. The Digital Media Masters programme I was accepted onto at Sussex University gave me a critical theory perspective whilst also allowing for developing practical skills. Roughly around that time, location-aware mobile apps had become the next big thing, following the rise of the smartphone.
I distinctly remember feeling that this was a line that I was no longer that comfortable crossing. Part of the early appeal of the Internet was that ‘no-one knew you were a dog’ (or in other words, it was possible to use the platform to express yourself without having to identify your real identity, let alone your location). I didn’t get the latest buzz-platform of the time — FourSquare — but definitely decided not to get into that game when I realised that its appeal amounted to ‘everyone knows where you are’. A friend in a bar in Sydney explained the appeal via features like ‘checking in’ to a place and get discounts or things like that. Given that I’m also old enough to largely remember the Internet when it was still a bit more ‘Wild West’ and retained some of its founding spirit of anti-commercialism, the idea of a willingly using a technology that combined customer tracking with location identification was something I was highly uncomfortable with. The end of my degree coincided with Edward Snowden’s disclosures of global mass surveillance programmes, which was a major turning point for how many people felt about expressing themselves online.
Contextualising the opening quotation, let’s name this cognitively dissonant polarity as the Swartz Paradox — the fact that the Internet (or many Internet technologies) is perceived as both a hugely liberating force on one hand and the greatest ever tool for suppression and control on the other hand. While I want to feel that I am a free agent, to be able to go where I want to go, I do not want to feel as if I have surrendered to the Panopticon and allowed my thoughts and movements to be observed by others I have not consented to like that.
Geolocational tools are a great example of the Swartz Paradox. I may not want others to see where I am, but in an entirely networked world, I am not only unable to avoid this (without also avoiding all other aspects of the rest of human society), but I am also a very keen and regular user of such tools. I’ve been working in London for a little over two years now, and rely on CityMapper to help me get around when I need to promptly figure out the quickest way from A to B. Earlier this year, I willingly gave in to trying Uber for the first time when I needed a cab quickly, and have used it again since when in less of a rush. Probably all car journeys I am involved in that cover reasonable distance or to unknown places are driven by Google Maps as much as by the humans in the car. The sheer utility of having a portable device that can identify and track location means that, like millions of others these days, while I might not be 100% happy with it, I consent to being tracked to some extent.
A few weeks after arriving in Tokyo, back in 2003, I had a mission to deliver a laptop with some media encoding software on it to a contact I’d been provided but whom I’d never met. I was helping out with a live link up between Tokyo’s Club Ageha and some venue in London’s Hoxton, and it was my first real mission outside of the teaching job I had moved to Japan to do. I spoke almost no Japanese at the time, and had some hand written instructions for getting to the art gallery in the back streets of Ebisu where the promoter was waiting for the laptop. Needless to say, after a few streets away from the station I had exited at, I got completely lost. I called the promoter (getting a keitai was one of my earliest actions in the country) and explained my situation to her. Trouble was, given that I had absolutely no idea where I was, her ability to direct me from my location to hers was negligible to say the least. In the end, I approached a random highway worker with a ‘Sumimasen’, passed him the phone and let her explain my problem in Japanese. He then (very obligingly) gave her directions from where I was to where she was, passed the phone back to me, and she then explained how I could find her — as I scrambled with a pencil and paper trying to make sure I wrote the instructions down before I lost them.
In some ways, 2003 seems like not very long ago. In other ways, it’s another lifetime away. I understand that iPhones are very popular in Tokyo these days.
Having said all the above, I’ve been trying out the ActionBound app for a student induction idea at work, which allows for the creation of smartphone-based treasure hunts or guided walks. I haven’t figured out the geolocational stuff much yet, but definitely plan to. I would download the free version and set up a little treasure hunt to test it out, but it’s almost Xmas and I don’t want to be blogging too much when in a break. Will do more with it when back.
