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Location-based services are mobile applications that use a device’s location to provide relevant results. Spatial search applications are a popular subset of location-based services that enable people to search through their surrounding space to find nearby locations. This article examines spatial search applications through a framework that combines critical geography research with research on the power search engines exert over information visibility. The main argument of the article is that popular spatial search applications, such as Yelp, may subtly reproduce existing forms of spatial segregation by rendering certain location invisible through the mobile mapping interface. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how location-based mobile media technologies are affecting the ways individuals experience the relationship between memory and place. We argue that location-based mobile applications that allow people to check in to places or record their routes represent new practices of place-based digital memory. Many individuals are using mobile media to mobilize place and memory together to create new forms of digital network memory from which they may begin to remember their pasts and to write their histories—a kind of rhetorical and poetic memory making. To help illuminate these practices, we analyze applications such as Foursquare and My Tracks and draw on research in mobilities studies, new media studies, and memory studies to introduce and advance concepts such as personal digital archiving and digital network memory. These practices of place-based digital memory have consequences for understanding the interrelationships between mobility, place, memory, and mobile media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People use location-aware mobile applications to both produce and organize information. As scholars have noted, digital information is increasingly being organized by physical location. This article examines how new forms of location-based writing represent an important development for composition scholars. Increasingly, people use mobile applications to write about locations, and those texts then appear when other people travel to those locations. This form of location-based composition shows the potential of understanding how texts can impact how people experience physical space. To understand these forms of writing, this article develops a theoretical framework for understanding these texts and then historicizes location-based writing by discussing earlier forms of locative media art. The article then examines the location-based texts found in the mobile application Foursquare to show that instructors can use mobile applications to teach students about attaching texts to the physical places they describe. This article ultimately argues that location-based texts represent a new form of text, a form of text that should be taught in the composition classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Location-based social networks ( LBSNs) are mobile applications that allow people to share their physical location with friends through their mobile device. The sharing of location is a relatively new form of computer-mediated communication, and there is a lack of existing research examining the coordination practices of people using social location sharing services. This article reports on qualitative interviews with frequent users of the LBSN Foursquare to show both how LBSNs complicate views of the relative 'placelessness' of traditional mobile communication and how the design of Foursquare complicates its utility as a mobile coordination tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study conceptualizes the new spatial logic created by the social use of location aware mobile technologies, analyzing how mobile communities are formed by the mapping of social networks in urban spaces. It explores two main areas with the goal of understanding how locative mobile social networks (LMSNs) challenge the traditional logic of networks. First, it conceptualizes LMSNs by comparing them to (1) traditional transportation and communication networks, and (2) mobile social networks (MSNs). Second, the paper discusses potential social implications of LMSNs, such as privacy, surveillance, and social exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]