ABSTRACT
New media location-based services like Google Maps and practices like geo-tagging have become an integral part of everyday life, entangling movements across relationships, lifestyles, places and spaces. Existing research has shown that the growth of locative media is impacting upon how people experience place, time and mobility, in ways that are uneven across cultural, generational and temporal scales (Gazzard 2011; Farman 2011; de Souza e Silva and Frith 2012). Few studies have tried to understand how different generations are using locative media for everyday “friendly” surveillance—to stay in touch, to keep children “safe” and to monitor the activities of children, partners and parents (Sengupta 2012; Clark 2012). Understanding the cultural and intergenerational dimensions of people’s locative media use can provide new insights into culturally nuanced notions of new media. In particular, mapping the digital practices through and around the family can help us to comprehend the tension between the tenacity of kinship ties and their transformation through digital entanglements.
