ABSTRACT
For Aru, the user behind the Twitter handle @IAmAru, being the Foursquare mayor of a specific Starbucks carries special meanings. Although all other Starbucks have the same décor, same menu, and same background music, he continuously chooses to go to this particular one just to maintain his virtual mayor title. But @IAmAru’s choice of words is not accidental. “Betraying” is a strong, emotionally charged word mostly used in relationships between two individuals. Although in this case, it is utilized to portray a special connection between this user and a specific branch of the famous coffee shops chain. One might say there is nothing exceptional in Aru’s statement as we all have special ties to certain physical places. However, as the introduction of new online location-based services like Foursquare set the ground for hybrid, net locality (Gordon and de Souza e Silva 2011) interactions that carry the influences of both the online connection and the offline presence, we must ask ourselves, what are the elements that “online connect” someone to a certain physical place? Why do people, like @IAmAru, feel an intimate attachment to a specific place by using these technologies? And which theoretical frameworks can we apply to the study of this attachment? These questions are the main subject of inquiry in this chapter, as I examine the tensions and implications of online interactions to local connections between people and places. Although in recent years there is a growing body of literature that examines location-based social networks, these studies mostly focus on studying the affordances of this technology in regard to interactions between different users. The studies that did look at the connections between users and places explored how, for example, location-based social network users assign information to physical places, and “read and write” locations (de Souza e Silva and Frith 2010, 2012; de Souza e Silva 2013) but did not examine the ways these interactions instrument and maintain attachment between people and places. In this chapter I study these activities through the lens of “Place Attachment” (Low and Altman 1992), an interdisciplinary theory used to study people’s ties to
physical places. By analyzing users’ interviews, press coverage, and software interface, I set out to examine the role that checking in to places, obtaining mayorships, leaving notes and tips, and labeling public venues has for our connection to the physical places. The main contribution of this work to current literature is therefore with the introduction and application of Place Attachment to the examination of location-based online social interactions. This chapter begins with a literature overview of mobilities and locationbased technology research along with a description of the Place Attachment theory. This body of work frames my research questions as part of the growing efforts to study social interactions that are mediated by mobile devices and online social networks. Then, I describe the methodology and the results of a series of interviews with twenty-five Foursquare users through examining three categories: place-naming, ownership, and events. I present several examples and discuss how these interactions are framed within this theory. Finally, I argue that these interactions are part of a wider notion of “Online Place Attachment,” an online-offline personal connection to physical spaces mediated by locationbased technology. I focus in this work on activities that take place on Foursquare, one of the most popular location-based social networks. Foursquare was first launched in March of 2009 and offers its users to “check in” to the places they visit and instantly share that information with their friends. The application is designed for use with smartphone devices as the location data is gathered automatically through the device’s GPS component. In January 2013 the company reported that the service has over thirty million users worldwide, making it one of the largest location-based services in the world.2
