Mobility and Encounters in Urban Public Spaces in the Age of Locative Media

This paper provides an analytical framework within which to distinguish mobile locative media from mobile media in general from the point of view of user experience. Locative media make available two versions of the surrounding world, one embodied and one on screen, which articulate with the same ‘here and now’, so that a crucial feature of user experience is to recognize and match entities appearing in both versions. The corresponding set of practices may be glossed as a situated ‘unfolding’. I use different examples to show how this informs a reshaping of urban mobilities oriented towards serendipitous location-triggered events and wayfaring. Finally, I discuss sociality in urban public places and show how the spread of locative media promotes encounters between ‘pseudonymous strangers’ as the constitutive feature of the augmented metropolis, in lieu of the encounters between strangers which interactionist urban studies deemed crucial to the 20th century Western metropolitan experience.