ABSTRACT
The immaterial paths and continuously updated location streams of geomedia present quite differently from other textual and visual forms, and a holistic treatment demands a modified perceptual approach. Location awareness has become an expected capability of smartphones such as Apple’s iPhone, and given that such mobile devices are rapidly displacing desktop computers as the dominant interface with the Internet, location awareness is arguably an understudied aspect of digital culture. Anthropology has recognized for some decades that the questions of culture with which it has been engaged for so long are ineluctably entangled with contemporary developments in technologies of mediation. Media scholars and critical historians of communication technology have illustrated how grandiose claims about the ‘death of distance’ were just as central to the utopian rhetoric of ‘the electronic revolution’ in the nineteenth century as they were in the digital revolution of the twentieth.
