Book review: Mobility and Locative Media

Locative media have been on the public agenda since the mid2000s when GPS became available in smartphones, spawning applications such as GoogleMaps, Foursquare, Runkeeper, etc. They are becoming increasingly significant in the everyday routines of smartphone users, and in media design and innovation. While these issues are clearly important, and the individual contributions in this book deal with them in quite interesting ways – the book itself remains a loose confederation of topics and approaches. It strikes me as typical of contemporary academic publishing, where the anthology genre is fuelled by researchers’ needs to produce a large quantity of articles, and publishers’ business strategies of publishing a large number of books and journals at a low cost. As well, anthologies are often based on papers presented at themed conferences (in this case at North Carolina State University in 2012). This genre of anthologies is characterized by open and inclusive titles, and while the contributions revolve around roughly the same thing, they aren’t necessarily based on harmonized methods or the same theoretical foundations, and rarely if ever with a coherent set of findings or criticisms. Anthologies don’t have a sustained argument with a narrative curve and accumulation of insights along the way. There is no real difference between such anthologies and special issues in journals, except that it is remarkably difficult to access anthology articles online. The implication for a book reviewer is that I cannot evaluate such an anthology as a proper book. The best approach is to deal with each article individually, and evaluate them according to criteria for good academic work. I have scrutinized six articles that come across as representative of the research presented in the altogether fifteen artiMobility and Locative Media. Mobile communication in hybrid spaces. By Adriana de Souza e Sliva and Mimi Sheller (eds).