DOCTORAL DISSERTATION RESEARCH: UNDERSTANDING THE ROLE OF LOCATION IN SOCIAL BROADCASTING PRACTICES

这项科学与学会博士论文研究基金计划调查全球定位系统（GPS）和无线射频识别（RFID）设备等技术的商业化如何产生新的实践，如地理标记（将地理元数据附加到物体上的行为）和移动社交地图（通过网络移动设备寻找并提醒地理上接近的联系人的实践）。这个项目认为，当这些实践涉及到人与人之间的互动时，它们可以被称为“社会定位”。这些技术建立在网络连接的基础上，越来越多地将朋友、家人和更大的全球受众联系在一起。虽然拥有精确定位人们位置的设施已经引起了公众对监控和隐私问题的讨论，但该项目注意到，在基于位置的技术的经验丰富的用户所表达的意见中，流行的言论是不一致的。用户似乎忽视了隐私问题，他们渴望传播自己的位置或他们创建的人工制品（如照片）的位置。本文研究的一个主要问题是：新的社会定位广播实践背后的动机和影响是什么？为了探究这一研究问题，本研究利用民族志访谈和人工制品分析来比较两种社会实践的用户体验，这两种社会实践分别是：在Flickr网站上分享照片，以及使用Jaiku和Twitter应用程序广播微博。这项研究将探讨：个人和他们各自的社区之间的联系，技术如何使集体定义地点的新方法成为可能，社交网络在数字和物质空间中的行为方式，以及个人身份如何与地点相关。本研究的结果将记录位置元数据如何作为社会互动的组织力量，从而为人机交互、社会网络、文化/经济地理、通信和技术社会研究的社会科学知识做出贡献。这项研究还可能会产生更广泛的影响，为更大的公众对话提供急需的数据，这些对话涉及个人如何以及为什么使用技术介导的社交场所来表达自己并在群体内互动。

This Science & Society Doctoral Dissertation research grant proposes to investigate how the recent commercialization of technologies such as global positioning system (GPS) and radio frequency identification (RFID) devices has engendered new practices like geotagging (the act of attaching geographic metadata to objects), and mobile social mapping (the practice of seeking and being alerted to geographically proximate contacts via networked mobile devices). This project argues that when these practices involve interactions among people, they can be called "socio-locative." Built on the backbone of network connectivity, these technologies increasingly connect friends, family, and a larger global audience. While having the facility to accurately pinpoint people's location has raised public discussion of surveillance and privacy issues, this project notes a disjuncture with prevailing rhetoric in the opinions expressed by experienced users of the location-based technologies. Users seem to disregard privacy issues in their desire to broadcast their own location or that of artifacts they have created, such as photographs. A major question of this dissertation research is: What are the motivations behind and the impacts of new socio-locative broadcast practices? To pursue this research question, this study utilizes ethnographic interviews and artifact analyses to compare the experiences of users engaged in two social practices that have locative and non-locative variants: photo sharing on the website Flickr, and broadcast micro-blogging using the applications Jaiku and Twitter. This research will examine: the links among individuals and their respective communities, how technologies enable new ways for collectively defining place, how social networks behave in digital and material spaces, and how personal identity may be related to location. Findings from this study will document how locative metadata acts as an organizing force for social interaction, and thus stands to contribute to social science knowledge on human-computer interaction, social networks, cultural/economic geography, communication, and social studies of technology. This research also may have broader impacts in providing much needed data for the larger public conversation regarding how and why individuals use technologically-mediated social venues to express themselves and interact within groups.