Toward a Rhetoric of Hybrid-Space Walking

This paper examines how mobile technologies and Web 2.0 applications are changing the ways their users are organizing and experiencing city space. Adopting de Certeau’s rhetoric of walking as a framework, this paper argues that mobile technologies with geolocation awareness combined with mapping mashups value map-space and location awareness rather than the city space as practiced place. Users lose the sensory experience and presence of walking in the streets; they become linkers of locations rather than walkers of spaces. As mobile technologies change our sense of being and doing, we may be losing a part of “the practice of everyday life” worth rescuing. Finally, this paper considers the flâneur as a rhetorical maneuver that restores the subject position of the walker, who is fully present within physical space. The flâneur becomes a rhetorical strategy for rethinking the digital network activities and digital cartographies enabled by mobile technologies.