Abstract

Mobility and location-awareness are pervasive and foundational elements of contemporary communication systems, and a descriptive term to synthesize them, “locative media”, has gained widespread use throughout mobile media and communication research. That label of “locative media”, though, usually gets defined ad hoc and used in many different ways to express a variety of related ideas. Locative features of digital media increasingly have changed from visible location-driven aspects of user interfaces, such as check-in features and location badges, toward more inconspicuous ways of relating to location through automated backend processes. In turn, locative features—whether in journalism or other formats and content types—are now increasingly algorithmic and hidden “under the hood”, so to speak. Part of the problem with existing classifications or typologies in this field is that they do not take into account this practical shift and the rapid development of locative media in many new directions, intertwining ubiquitous digital integration with heterogeneous content distinctions and divergences. Existing definitions and typologies tend to be based on dated practices of use and initial versions of applications that have changed significantly since inception. To illustrate, this article identifies three emerging areas within digital journalism and mobile media practice that call for further research into the locative dimensions of journalism: <em>the situational turn in news consumption research</em>, <em>platform-specific vis-a-vis platform-agnostic mobile news production</em>, and <em>personalised news</em>.

Highlights

  • Mobile devices have become an integral part of everyday life for most citizens in the world (e.g., Newman, Fletcher, Kalogeropoulos, Levy, & Nielsen, 2018)

  • Mobile technologies of all sorts—as the interface through which many people experience the world (Farman, 2012)—must be brought more to the forefront via research into the intersection of digital journalism, social media, and other emerging technologies, to truly understand what’s happening and to address in this context more fully what is “hidden under the hood” with regards to how data gathering and analysis happen behind the scenes in relation to positioning and various end-user services and revenue streams

  • One of the first challenges to overcome is to be clear about how the terms mobile media, mobile technology, and locative media are defined in previous research

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Summary

Introduction

Mobile devices have become an integral part of everyday life for most citizens in the world (e.g., Newman, Fletcher, Kalogeropoulos, Levy, & Nielsen, 2018). Mobile technologies of all sorts—as the interface through which many people experience the world (Farman, 2012)—must be brought more to the forefront via research into the intersection of digital journalism, social media, and other emerging technologies, to truly understand what’s happening and to address in this context more fully what is “hidden under the hood” with regards to how data gathering and analysis happen behind the scenes in relation to positioning and various end-user services and revenue streams To illuminate this construct, this article argues that location features in digital journalism are increasingly hard to identify and represent a research design challenge for contemporary and future scholarly inquiry. Personalised news points to the tailoring of news exposure for individuals, based on explicit choices or on preferences set through generally covert uses of algorithms

Locative Media Has Been a Moving Target for Researchers
Mobile Media and Communication Research
Existing Typologies and Classifications of Locative Media
The Situational Turn in News Consumption Research
Platform-Specific Vis-a-Vis Platform-Agnostic Mobile News Production
Personalised News
Conclusion
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