Relocating the mobile: A case study of locative media in Seoul, South Korea

While the 20th-century media practice was marked by the focus of visual and audio screen cultures, the 21st-century media can be characterized by three key features: locative, mobile and social. With the transformation of mobile media from a communication tool into a multimodal device accompanied by global positioning systems (GPS), the significance of location-based services (LBS) has taken centre stage. Google maps, Facebook places and Foursquare are but a few of the locative media, a phenomenon creating new forms of co-presence that disrupt old binaries between online and off-line. In this transformation, a paradoxical relationship between identity, personalization and place occurs. On one hand, we see new ways for engaging with people, place and co-presence. On the other hand, we see the potential for corporations to create new levels of surveillance - a type of 'u¨berveillence' - that put into question individual's sense of privacy and identity. If 'social networking sites don't publicize community, they privatize it' as Andrejevic notes, then second-generation locative media further challenge these distinctions. In this paradoxical struggle, we see that locative media highlight the pivotal role place has played in the evolution of mobile media practices. In each location, various factors such as sociocultural and technonational inform the types of media practices. One location experiencing a covert paradoxical struggle with locative media is South Korea. As one of the centres for technological innovation and techsavvy youth, Seoul provides a fascinating case study for the tensions around localized notions of identity, privacy and sociality as it plays out through locative media.