Checking in at the urban playground : Digital geographies and electronic flâneurs

摘要

Taking its point of departure in a critical discussion of the imagined dividing line between physical and digital spaces, this chapter demonstrates a socio-spatial turn in Internet studies and sets out to explore the meaning of locative technologies as an illuminating example of how such spatial boundaries increasingly collapse. Being empirically grounded in an analysis of twelve qualitative interviews with users of the applications Foursquare and Gowalla, this chapter focuses on the interplay between what is termed electronic flâneurs and digital geographies and demonstrates in what ways the use of locative technologies provokes changes at two levels in the social realm; first, by adding a communicative digital layer to the spatial organisation of physical space and second, by adding a spatially bound layer to interactions in digital space.