Location-Based Social Media

LBSNs are often conceptualised as applications that one can use to explore locations and mark one’s movements through the check-in function. Importantly, these applications also carry a ‘recursive’ function, where a historical snapshot of previous check-ins are presented back to users. This offers an opportunity to review one’s own check-in history, much like the popular application Timehop does for social networking sites (and indeed for LBSN if sufficiently configured). This chapter considers why some LBSN users elect to both archive and explore their locations. In using LBSN in this way, users are employing applications as ‘mediated memory objects’ (van Dijck, The body within, Amsterdam, Brill; 2009). Here, we explore the different ways users interact with their stored spatial past. In order to conceptualise this behaviour with temporality, we engage closely with phenomenological theory on the importance of engagement with technology and technicity as a shaping force on the subjective experience of time. Most importantly, we argue that LBSNs are significantly different from older memory-related practices, and exemplify why this is important in terms of the understandings of space and place for users that employ LBSN to record and review their movements over time.

Building on the spatial and temporal elements of LBSNs developed in the previous two chapters, the focus here is LBSN use in the context of identity. Specifically, the chapter explores the various ways presenting and archiving spatial movements through LBSN can be called upon to present a certain self to others. Research in this field has indicated that ‘self-presentation has moved from examining interpersonal interactions to displays through mass media’ (Mendelson and Papacharissi, The networked self: Identity, community and culture on social network sites, London, Routledge; 2010, p. 252), with SNSs offering new ways for people to present themselves to others and ‘keep a particular narrative going’ (Giddens, Modernity and self-identity: Self and society in the late modern age, Stanford, Stanford University Press; 1991, p. 54). Drawing on the work of Goffman, The presentation of self in everyday life, Garden City, Doubleday (1959) and his suggestion that identity is the consequence of ‘front stage’ and ‘back stage’ behaviours, our analysis extends these insights to LBSN. This understanding is then further developed with reference to Schwartz and Halegoua’s New Media & Society, doi: 10.1177/1461444814531364 (2014, p. 1) ‘spatial self’, which serves as ‘a theoretical framework encapsulating the process of online self-presentation based on the display of offline physical activities’.