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CHAPTER 4

Identity

Abstract Building on the spatial and temporal elements of LBSNs devel- oped in the previous two chapters, the focus here is LBSN use in the context of identity. Specifically, the chapter explores the various ways presenting and archiving spatial movements through LBSN can be called upon to present a certain self to others. Research in this field has indicated that ‘self-presentation has moved from examining interpersonal interac- tions to displays through mass media’ (Mendelson and Papacharissi, The networked self: Identity, community and culture on social network sites, London, Routledge; 2010, p. 252), with SNSs offering new ways for people to present themselves to others and ‘keep a particular narrative going’ (Giddens, Modernity and self-identity: Self and society in the late modern age, Stanford, Stanford University Press; 1991, p. 54). Drawing on the work of Goffman, The presentation of self in everyday life, Garden City, Doubleday (1959) and his suggestion that identity is the conse- quence of ‘front stage’ and ‘back stage’ behaviours, our analysis extends these insights to LBSN. This understanding is then further developed with reference to Schwartz and Halegoua’s New Media & Society, doi: 10.1177/1461444814531364 (2014, p. 1) ‘spatial self’, which serves as ‘a theoretical framework encapsulating the process of online self-presentation based on the display of offline physical activities’.

Keywords Identity � Spatial self � Narrative � Presentation of the self � Self- image

Evans, Leighton, and Michael Saker. Location-Based Social Media : Space, Time and Identity, Palgrave Macmillan US, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umkc/detail.action?docID=4794250. Created from umkc on 2018-08-09 13:11:30.

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4.1 SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES: SPACE, PLACE AND IDENTITY As we have suggested throughout this book, to suggest that social media is a big deal does not really do it justice. Social media usage is exponentially growing. Let’s take a look at the numbers. In January 2016, there were 2.3 billion active social media users out of a total global population of 7.3 billion. This figure is up 10% on last year’s tally (We Are Social 2016). As a consequence of this growth, social media has continued to be a hugely important global medium of communication; a medium that not only impacts the social realm, but equally influences the cultural, political and the economic spheres of many societies today. Broadly speaking, social media refers to various types of online communication platforms. These platforms comprise forums, blogs, microblogs, wikis, social curation sites and Social Networking Sites (SNS). The biggest category of social media is SNS, with prominent examples including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google +, YouTube and Instagram, to name but a few. To put things into perspective, as of the first quarter of 2016 Facebook had 1.65 billion monthly active users (Statista 2016), while Twitter had amassed 310 million users, and LinkedIn had accumulated 433 million users. You would be forgiven at this stage for assuming it is only really young people who engage with SNS to post, pin and, on rare occasion, poke. You would be excused for making this assumption, but you would be wrong. ‘Use of social media has surged in recent years, initially spurred by young people but now used by all demographic groups of the global population’ (Ellison 2013, p. 3). Indeed, millions of people throughout the world interact with SNS on a daily basis, and for a growing number of reasons.

SNS primarily enable ‘a culture of remote connectivity for . . . maintain- ing a variety of social ties to primary and secondary groups of contact’ (Mendelson and Papacharissi 2010, p. 251). As a result of this and owing to the growing popularity of SNS, a diverse multi-disciplinary body of research has developed around this field (see Albarran 2013; boyd 2014; Bradburne 2007; Dasgupta 2013; Edwards 2015; Flynn 2012; Issa et al. 2015; Kelsey 2010; Li 2013; Light 2014; Lipschultz 2014; Mallia 2013; Mandiberg 2012; Obee 2012; Partridge 2011; Pătruţ et al. 2014; Ryan 2011; Fuchs 2014; Wilde 2012). Research has explored the impact of SNS on education (Dasgupta 2013; Issa et al. 2015), with schools utilising prominent platforms to enhance the teaching experience of their students (Mallia 2013). SNS have been examined within the context of the law (Lipschultz 2014) and politics (Pătruţ and Pătruţ 2014) with new policies

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being implemented to police the ‘Facebook age’ (Fuchs 2014). Research has also investigated the pivotal part social media now plays in business (Flynn 2012) with SNS like Facebook and Twitter becoming integral to many advertising and marketing campaigns (Li 2013; Wilde 2012). Likewise, the communal impact of SNS and their connective potential have been scrutinised with research probing how young people (Edwards 2015) and teenagers utilise social media (Livingston 2008; Obee 2012) to facilitate their ‘complicated’ social lives (boyd 2014). Alongside this, and importantly for our purposes in this chapter, ‘[studies] concerning prac- tices of self-presentation and impression management on popular social networking sites . . . have increased significantly’ (Schwartz and Halegoua 2014, p. 3; Milani et al. 2014; Ellison 2013; Senft 2012; boyd and Ellison 2007; Donath and boyd 2004). It is now widely accepted that people use SNS to ‘present a highly curated version of themselves’ (Schwartz and Halegoua 2014, p. 3; Mendelson and Papacharissi 2010), enabling ‘the possibility for more controlled and more imaginative performances of identity online’ (Papacharissi 2011, p. 307). This idea of personal identity being a ‘highly curated’ process, involving some degree of choice, suggests something important about the relationship between SNS and identity itself that warrants further attention.

The proposition that identity is something people actively work on has its roots in late modernity, when the ontological anchor (that identity is in some way fixed) restraining the concept of identity began to loosen (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002; Turkle 1996; Giddens 1991; Lash and Friedman 1992; Butler 1990). The work of Giddens (1991), and specifically his seminal text Modernity and Self-Identity, is helpful here for teasing out some of the more significant changes this change in view provoked. Giddens makes an immediate distinction between pre-modern societies that are characterised by tradition, and modern societies which are post- traditional. As David Gauntlett (2008, p. 104) explains, ‘[when] tradition dominates, individual actions do not have to be analysed and thought about so much, because choices are already prescribed by the tradition and cus- toms’. In opposition to this, in post-traditional societies identity is ‘more mobile, multiple, personal, self-reflective, and subject to change and innova- tion’ (Kellner 1992, p. 141). In other words self-identity ‘is not a set of traits or observable characteristics. It is a person’s own reflexive understanding of their biography’ (Giddens 1991, p. 53). A good question at this juncture would be ‘how does a person go about constructing his or her identity?’ In answer to this question Giddens (1991, p. 81) proposes ‘lifestyle’, which he

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defines as being ‘a more or less integrated set of practices which an individual embraces, not only because such practices fulfil utilitarian needs, but because they give material form to a particular narrative of self-identity’. So, on a daily basis each of us will make any number of outwardly unimportant decisions that pertain to a certain way of life. These decisions might include what music we listen to, how we listen to music, the football team we support, the clothes we wear, the smartphone we use, the applications we have, and so on. In each instance, the outcome of these decisions, implicitly or explicitly, says something about who we are, who we want to be, and very often, who we wish to be seen as being.

Lifestyle choices ‘give our personal narrative an identifiable shape, linking us to communities of people who are ‘like us’ – or people who, at least, have made similar choices’ (Gauntlett 2008, p. 112). Giddens (1991, p. 92) suggests this process produces a degree of ‘ontological security’, which is ‘the confidence that most human beings have in the continuity of their self-identity and in the constancy of the surrounding social and material environment of action’. While the decisions sur- rounding our lifestyles might outwardly appear trivial, inwardly they can have a huge effect on our personal identity. As this is the case ‘the materials’ used to construct and present our various identities, ‘as well as the circumstances under which this construction takes place, acquire an increased significance’ (Siapera 2012, p. 173). This last point is particularly important in the context of the ‘Facebook age’ (Fuchs 2014), as SNS arrive with their own imagined affordances (Nagy and Neff 2015) that have implications for identity formation. As Nagy and Neff (2015, p. 1) explain, ‘imagined affordances emerge between users’ perceptions, attitudes, and expectations; between the materiality and functionality of technologies; and between the intentions and percep- tions of designers’. Regarding SNS then, imagined affordances may include ‘digital objects like photos, videos and self-descriptions’ (Belk and Ruvio 2013, p. 87) and the various meanings people attach to these items. SNS afford new ways for people to curate, present and perform who they understand themselves as ‘being’. The suggestion we are making here is that identity is itself a performance played out through various platforms, such as SNS (see Hogan 2010). This echoes Goffman’s (1959) understanding of the self as explained in his classic text The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.

For Goffman (1959), all interactions are performances in which indivi- duals attempt to present themselves in a certain light. ‘Goffman contends

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that in interactions, individuals consciously contrive to give off particular expressions in order to create particular impressions in the others around them’ (Peachy and Childs 2011, pp. 16–17). Consequently, identity is the outcome of enactments ‘in which the actors provide an impression of the self’ (Cramer et al. 2011, p. 3). As with the majority of performances, an audience is usually required:

When an individual plays a part he implicitly requests his observers to take seriously the impression that is fostered before them. They are asked to believe that the character they see actually possesses the attributes he appears to possess, that the tasks that he performs will have the consequences that are implicitly claimed for it, and that, in general, matters are what they appear to be. (Goffman 1959, p. 28)

Taking the metaphor of the stage further still, Goffman argues that identity can readily be divided between front and back regions of social interaction, each with its own schema and corresponding subject position. Front regions are the part of the performance witnessed by the spectators. As Clarke (2008, p. 512) explains, ‘if we take the principle of performance, then we may use stage props – desks, academic attire, white coats for doctors – in order to manage a ‘front’’. That is to say, all performances of the self are idealised (Manning 1992); actors wish to be ‘shown in the best possible light to conform to cultural and societal norms’ (Clarke 2008, p. 512). In stark contrast, back regions are those places ‘where performers can relax and step out of character’ (Ellison 2013, p. 4); those spaces where ‘action occurs . . . related to the performance but [are] inconsistent with the appear- ance fostered by the performance’ (Goffman 1959, p. 115). As a result of this disparity, ‘it is natural to expect that the passage from the front region to the back region will be kept closed to members of the audience or that the entire back region will be hidden from them’ (Goffman 1959, p. 116).

Two significant points have been made about the nature of identity that bear repeating as a means to relate this understanding to locative media. First, identity is not a passive activity; it is an active process that is the result of various life choices, and which manifest themselves in myriad ways. Second, identity can be interpreted as a performance in which people use any number of front regions to present an idealised version of themselves to others. In the digital age, one significant stage that these performances are played out on is SNS. As detailed previously, research in this vein has shown that individuals use the likes of Facebook to construct and present

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their identity to an audience (See Cunningham 2013; Senft 2012) with factors such as age (Livingstone 2008) and the events surrounding them (Schmalz et al. 2015) affecting what elements people choose to share. Alice Marwick’s (2013) research on San Francisco’s Silicon Valley nicely illustrates this point. From 2006 to 2010, Marwick (2013, p. 4) con- ducted an ethnographic study that explored ‘how “the tech scene” [func- tioned], what it [valued], and what it [produced]’. Through her work Marwick quickly identified ‘a strict social hierarchy. It mattered what company you worked for, whether you were an entrepreneur, and how much attention you received online’ (Marwick 2013, p. 4). She also found that certain people then treated their identity as if it were a brand that they subsequently maintained through various SNS. An important imagined affordance in these instances was the synchronous and asynchronous messages SNS permitted (Hogan 2010). Individuals were able to choose what features of themselves they wanted to immediately share with others, just as they had the time required to respond to messages in a manner congruent with their ‘brand’ and that enabled them to keep ‘a particular narrative going’ (Giddens 1991, p. 54).

Due to various technological advancements, and the addition of numerous features, the imagined affordances available through SNS have developed in numerous ways. An important example of this is the mobile social network Dodgeball (which we discussed briefly in Chapter 2), which predominately revolved around people disclosing their location to prompt social encounters. Through her research of this mobile social network, Humphreys (2007, 2010) identified a process she terms ‘parochialization’: by ‘creating, sharing and exchanging information, social and locational’, users experienced a ‘sense of commonality among a group of friends in a public space’ (Humphreys 2010, p. 768). That is to say, space felt more social and familiar. Following the emergence of the mobile web, location has subsequently acquired an added layer of complexity. People now use their smartphones to engage with digital information on the move, just as this information has been endowed with a sense of locality. For De Souza e Silva (2006) this development has produced what she refers to as being ‘hybrid space’, which occurs when physical envir- onments are overlaid with digital information. This hybrid space is the foun- dation for location-based media, and location-based social networks (LBSNs) like Foursquare. As detailed in previous chapters LBSN, and broadly speaking locative media, have become the locus of a large body of research (de Souza e Silva and Frith 2012, 2015; Evans 2014; Farman 2012; Wilken and Goggin 2014). Studies have chiefly examined the impact of LBSN on space and place

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(Saker 2016; Saker and Evans 2016a). This focus, however, has more recently extended to other areas, such as the impact of LBSN on sociability and social coordination (Frith 2014), memory (Frith and Kalin 2016; Kalin and Frith 2016) and significantly here the marking of one’s location in the context of self-presentation (Cramer et al. 2011; Guha and Birnholtz 2013; Saker 2016; Schwartz and Halegoua 2014). While these latter example are a welcomed additional to the canon of locative media, research exploring ‘practices of . . . impression management’ (Schwartz and Halegoua 2014, p. 3) facili- tated by LBSN are nonetheless still few and far between (Saker 2016). To address this shortage, Schwartz and Halegoua (2014) propose the ‘spatial self’ as a suitable theoretical framework for approaching such a phenomenon.

‘The spatial self refers to a variety of instances (both online and offline) where individuals document, archive and display their experience and/or mobility within space in order to represent or perform aspects of their identity to others’ (Schwartz and Halegoua 2014, p. 2). With the advent of locative media, the imagined affordances surrounding social media have moved beyond simply being textual and visual objects ‘like photos, videos, and self-descriptions’ (Belk and Ruvio 2013, p. 87) and now equally include ‘geocoded digital traces, geographical data visualisations and maps of individual patterns of mobility’. (Schwartz and Halegoua 2014, p. 2). As Goggin (2013, p. 202) notes, ‘place is a fundamental pillar of human identity’ as well as ‘a key category of understanding the dynamics of new media’. As a result of this, LBSN can be utilised by people to support who they understand themselves as being through the places they frequent and the connotations they assume these environments carry. It would be careless of us to suggest that people have never used the places they inhabit as part of self-expression prior to locative media, as this of course simply is not the case. To this end, Schwartz and Halegoua (2014, p. 5) readily list off a number of pre-digital instances of the spatial self, which includes photo albums, slideshows, home videos, photographic postcards (Milne 2010) as well as diaries of urban flâneurs stemming from the Victorian era. In each example, space is employed to suggest something meaningful about a particular period of time. This convergence of identity and place can be interpreted as communicating something meaningful about the how people are embedded in these examples. While this is correct, it is equally our assertion that the spatial self as enabled through LBSN (in this instance Foursquare) is notably different to its pre-digital predecessors. First, Foursquare enables a level of imme- diacy that simply was not possible before smartphones and the mobile

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web. Like the synchronous messages of SNS (Hogan 2010), Foursquare can be used to share a person’s location instantly with a defined list of friends. Secondly, Foursquare check-ins can be witnessed by a potentially vast audience in real time. Thirdly, as discussed in the previous chapter, Foursquare has a more complex archive function and temporal dimension. Much like the asynchronous imagined affordance of SNS (Hogan 2010), check-ins can be stored and then algorithmically encountered at a later date for a variety of reasons. It is our suggestion that the spatial self as configured through Foursquare involves users actively thinking about the places they inhabit, what these environments might suggest about their identity and whether this is a narrative they wish to disclose to their friends or document for the future.

The aim of this chapter is therefore to examine Foursquare in light of Schwartz and Halegoua’ (2014) spatial self. First, we will explore the extent to which Foursquare users comprehend one of its imagined affor- dances as revolving around the presentation of self through locality, and therefore how suitable this framework is for approaching the meanings underpinning the marking of location. Second, drawing on Giddens’ (1991) understanding of the role lifestyle plays in the identity formation, we will expand upon the ‘spatial self’ to include identity-based practices that don’t explicitly engage with the sharing of location but rather com- prise the connotations associated with LBSN and digital culture. Third, we will consider what role locational suggestions (or location search) play in how users subsequently engage with their environment, and what effect this has on their sense of self.

This chapter again reports on the two original research projects designed to explore the spatial and social experience of Foursquare users. The post-research thematic analysis for this chapter involved the careful reading of full interview transcriptions, highlighting material that was of interest to the underlining research question regarding how usage related to issues of identity and self-presentation.

4.2 ‘I AM, WHERE I AM’ A defining feature of Foursquare its check-in function which has been shown to impact social coordination (Frith 2014) as well as giving space a sense of playfulness (Frith 2014; Saker and Evans 2016a). At the same time, the ‘check-in’ exceeds this and can be employed as an indicator of self. The users we spoke to were immediately aware that their check-ins

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communicated something more than just where they were; their spatial inscriptions communicated something about who they are and who they understand themselves as being:

You choose what places you want to check-in, and this is like a creation of yourself, your identity. (Robbie)

If you are going to a gig or whatever, you want to show off that you like that band, or you went to that gallery. (Doug)

Our research readily supports Schwartz and Halegoua (2014) ‘spatial self’ as an appropriate framework for exploring the use of location as a method for presenting a particular sense of self to others. For both Robbie and Doug, their shared locations are called upon to illustrate something noteworthy about the kind of people they understand themselves as being. As Robbie puts it, his check-ins are ‘like a creation’ of himself. Through a merging of the physical and the digital (the ‘hybrid space’ De Souza e Silva [2006] suggests) Foursquare has moved beyond the visual and textual markings of SNS. LBSN have an impactful imagined affordance of this intermingling of information and location in fashioning place as a marker of identity. Our research echoes other studies that appreciate the meanings that can the lie behind place-based performances facilitated by LBSN, and that have made similar points in the context of Foursquare and identity formation (see Cramer et al. 2011; Guha and Birnholtz 2013).

As we detailed previously, the vast majority of performances are pre- dicated on there being an audience to observe them. The same point can be made with regard to Foursquare. In the following extract Jane discusses being aware that her check-ins might be witnessed by other people:

So here is an interesting one between the policy and the practice. My main motivation was keep a map, tracking where I had been in 2012, you know, I went to these countries, and in England I went to these cities, and stuff like that, but then I found myself checking-in to places that I was going to pretty much a couple of times each week and stuff like that. I was in Newcastle, so I checked-in to a lot of places in Newcastle, repeatedly, so, sometimes my work place, not every day. I’d quite often check-in to the swimming pool, probably because it is good to be seen going swimming. People will check-in to the gym but won’t check-in to McDonalds. (Jane)

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Interestingly, Jane is conscious that she often shares when she has been swimming because it is a good thing to be seen doing this activity. It isn’t so much the swimming itself that Jane is outwardly interested then (although this is of course part of it) but rather the realisation that could be witnessed by other people. As a consequence of this, Jane is openly mindful that her check-ins are grounded on the possibility of a corre- sponding audience, and that these imagined spectators might read her movements as well as the activities that take place in these locations as being in some way indicative of her identity. This sense of revealing is tethered to a particular lifestyle (Giddens 1991), one that is broadly associated with health and fitness. This position is further cemented by the next observation Jane makes, namely being that people will check-in to the gym but they won’t check-in to McDonalds. Again, this underlines the reflexive application of place in relation to identity. Just as location increas- ingly ‘provides the context from which information is interpreted and used’ (de Souza e Silva and Gordon 2011, p. 12), so too does the sharing of one’s locale become a practical means of constructing the kind of person he or she wants to be perceived as being. In the following extract, Ben develops this point further, when he discusses the impact this knowl- edge can have on the places he decides to share or document:

It’ll mostly be cafes and pubs that I like, maybe cinema as well, but then interestingly I probably wouldn’t check-in at the Odeon. Another one might be Starbucks. I actually got berated by my sister for this as well, because I’ve always been quite vocal in my opposition to Starbucks. I hate the fact that it is so omnipresent. So I made the mistake of checking-in at Starbucks. I just ended up going there because a friend wanted to go there, and then got berated by my sister because of it. (Ben)

The most revealing part of this excerpt is Ben’s suggestion that he ‘prob- ably’ wouldn’t check-in at this particular cinema, with the implicit reason for this being that he assumes it would suggest something negative about him. In a similar vein, Guha and Birnholtz (2013) have observed the ‘multiple audiences’ users of LBSN have to contend with whenever they are deciding whether to check-in at a particular place. An outcome of this knowledge, the authors propose, is the provision of various strategies to reduce the tension ‘multiple’ audiences can evoke such as the decision not to disclose one’s location in the first place. The likelihood of this strategy being employed is supported by Ben’s reluctance to disclose his trip to the

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Odeon, as well as his pointed ‘mistake’ of checking-in at Starbucks and the ensuing berating he received from his sister. Much like Robbie, Doug and Jane, Ben recognises that Foursquare and its location-sharing features communicate something about his identity, which in turn leads to him engaging with his environment differently than he would outside of this LBSN. Indeed, building on Guha and Birnholtz (2013) study, our research demonstrates that Foursquare not only has the potential to alter the spaces users choose to digitally share with their friends (as established by Ben’s reflections), it also has the potential to affect the kinds of places users physically frequent. The following extract helps cement this point, when Drew discusses the influence Foursquare can have on his behaviour:

I’m just thinking of this one person I’m ‘friends’ with on Foursquare. He’s friends with Katie and added me on Facebook, then added me on Foursquare. I know he probably looks at my account, and whenever I look at the [Foursquare] newsfeed I see that he’s been to the gym, and it makes me think, if he’s going to the gym, I should probably go to the gym. So there are certain examples where, yeah, it would influence me and I would look at other people and see what they are doing. (Drew)

There are two active processes at work in this example that warrant inspection. First, through the imagined affordances of Foursquare Drew is aware that his partner’s friend regularly goes to the gym, and that he is accordingly the kind of person who would do this. Second, he is conscious that this person also has access to his check-ins and may therefore know that he doesn’t go to the gym. For Drew, this knowledge leaves him feeling anxious that he too should probably go to the gym and in doing so become the kind of ‘person’ he evidently wants to be. This point is extended by Paul in the following extract:

I had a friend who would always check-in at the gym, while I wasn’t going, and it would make me feel a bit rubbish, you know, he’s at the gym again, I can’t believe it, he’s working out a lot! So I’ve taken that experience and now I’m checking-in, so I feel better. I guess for some reason checking-in on it made it feel a bit more like I’d actually been, because people knew I’d been, rather than just going on my own. You know, people could go four or five times a week, not check in, and you’d never know. For some reason, if I check in and everyone sees he’s at the gym again, it feels a bit more like I’ve done something. (Paul)

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In this instance, Paul intriguingly details a desire to not only go to the gym but also for his gym check-ins to be witnessed by others. Paul suggests that it is through this ‘witnessing’ that the reality of his movements then feel more real. This observation provides another thought-provoking position on the affective character of the spatial self as configured through Foursquare. In employing Foursquare as a digital platform from which he might potentially be observed, Paul not only adapts his spatial move- ments but also looks for a certain degree of spatial surveillance. Paul’s check-ins are performed with two apparent motives in mind. First, they are a marker of his movements. Second, they offer a vicarious viewpoint on the identity he wants to project. Sarah outlines a similar purpose for her check-ins:

I’m registered disabled, with the M.E. and I’m mainly housebound. So Foursquare was just an incentive to get out and get mayorships, and to tell friends and family that I’m out, rather than having to ring them and say I’m at such and such a place today, they can instantly see, when I published my check-ins, where I was and that I was getting out. It kept them happy because they were concerned I wasn’t getting out, you know, cabin fever and just wasting away in the house. It’s really brightened them up to see that I’m getting out and about. (Sarah)

For Sarah then, aside from the appeal of Foursquare’s game mechanics which includes points, badges and mayorships, there an equally important imagined affordance of this LBSN is that it lets her friends and family know she is ‘getting out’ and not just ‘wasting away in the house’. This affordance also has implication for how Sarah perceives herself:

Yeah it is a big part of my identity, which is why I particularly wanted something about it at the wedding, because Foursquare is me, it’s such a big part of my life, it’s made such a big impact on my life, I felt that if I had something Foursquare involved, it would be more personal. (Sarah)

As Sarah states with some impact, ‘Foursquare is me’. Sarah doesn’t simply use Foursquare to communicate that she has left the house although this is of course part of it. More importantly, her usage allows Sarah to identify with a version of herself which isn’t rooted in M.E. but is instead seen as

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being physically active. This sense of self is then further strengthened through the various social connections Foursquare opens up:

It gives me something to talk about that isn’t my M.E. Sometimes I just get bored of saying, I didn’t go out yesterday, and I didn’t go out the day before, you know, I was stuck in bed the day before that. It is just something different to talk about. I’ll tell my friends what badges I unlocked, or something like that. Some of them aren’t remotely interested. If I could talk about it all day I know I would. (Sarah)

Here, our research demonstrates it that the use of location through Foursquare is evidently different to the likes of Dodgeball, which predomi- nately functioned to facilitate social interactions (Humphreys 2007, 2010). In the series of previous examples, Foursquare is in part employed to perpe- tuate a certain sense of self rooted in the various connotations associated with particular environments. As a result of this, users spend more time thinking about the spaces they inhabit, what these places might say about them and the different audiences they present their location to through using LBSN. Users adopt suitable strategies to contend with the multiple audiences they might face, including the decision not checking-in to a certain environment, or to avoid these places all together. And lastly, owing to the knowledge that their check-ins might be witnessed by potential audiences, users are able to strengthen their projected self-presentation through the vicarious subject positions these digital imprints of location make on other people.

4.3 THE SPATIAL SELF ISN’T ALWAYS, WELL, SPATIAL So far we have explored an assortment of instances where Foursquare involves users performing and affirming who they understand themselves as ‘being’ by sharing and documenting their day-to-day movements. At the same time however, our research also discovered that the spatial self as configured through Foursquare does not necessarily have to be spatial but can instead revolve around the lifestyles with which this practice is asso- ciated. For the most part, this lifestyle revolves around new technologies:

We’re both very much internet people. I’ve got Tweet Deck running on my phone; I’ve got Tweet Deck running on my laptop in the office; it is also running on my laptop at home. When I go for a cigarette I am probably reading foursquare or Twitter. (Adrian)

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I think I just read about it somewhere, and thought that sounds like some- thing I’d be interested in. I’m into all of this kind of stuff anyway, new gadgets, technologies and apps. I’m all over it anyway. So I’ll hear about something and think that sounds cool let’s try it out. (Nigel)

As Nigel notes, his interest in Foursquare is symptomatic of a broader interest in ‘new gadgets, technologies and apps’ as well as a desire to try these technologies out. This was a lifestyle indicator shared by many of the users we spoke to:

Okay, so at university I studied television production, I now work with Apple, the retail store, and I’ve always been very ‘techie’ and into your kind of social media and sort of web technologies in a way. I dabbled in web design myself. So yeah, it’s always been something that has attracted me really. (Paul)

I guess I’ve been interested in it before phones had GPSs. So while I was at Southampton I was quite interested in the idea of checking-in or some kind of location-based game. I tried very hard with a friend at Southampton to make something like that. It was in the days of smartphones running Java and things like that – before Android – and trying to get it to talk to a Bluetooth GPS, and all kinds of crazy things like that. So I was quite excited when the technology caught up. So yeah, initially I was playing Gowalla, and then moved onto foursquare. I guess it does kind of highlight my interests. I’m interested in maps and location and things. I’m interested in technology and gadgets and things. (Ryan)

Significantly here, Nigel (an Information Technology [IT] Support Team Manager), Paul (an Apple Store Genius) and Ryan (a Technical Architect for the BBC) all have occupations that revolve around technology and each reference these connections when discussing their association Foursquare. This is also the case with John, whose job in the IT industry meant he grew up with new technologies. There is a lifestyle that this kind of history implicitly refers to, which in John’s mind goes some way towards explaining his use of this LBSN:

Well, probably the most pertinent fact would be that I worked for IBM for thirty-seven years, and working in the IT industry, with computers as an emerging industry, I started work obviously before there were any PCs or mobile phones, or anything like that, so I sort of grew up with that technology and really developed an interest in the new technologies as

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they emerged. I tended to work with younger people. I was probably old enough to be their dad. In later life I worked in IT support, and the people I worked with were very young, and I think that influenced me a great deal because they were always very keen on new technologies, and I tended to go along with them. When the new mobile phones came out I was quite interested in them. I haven’t had one for very long, because I just never got around to getting one, but then I was bought one for my birthday and I have been using it for well over a year and a half, and yeah, I’m interested in all technologies really, computers, cameras, mobile phones, anything of that ilk. (John)

For Doug too, it is his role teaching Digital Media with the kind of commitments this position entails that eventually led to him signing up to Foursquare:

I tend to sign up to every social network going, because of my job. Gowalla sounded a little more interesting because I quite like the idea of reality and the social network coming together. So unlike Twitter where it doesn’t really have any impact, this was focused on merging these two aspects, which I thought was quite interesting. Some of it is off of the back of this old Carnegie Mellon talk by this guy, I can’t remember his name, about gamifying a lot of general process, like going on a bus and getting points etcetera, he goes in to this whole thing, a lot of it is about Facebook, and I was kind of interested in this just generally, so it was just a service that I thought sounded interesting, so I joined Gowalla, which was pretty cool. Obviously Foursquare was coming along at the same time. I just didn’t think Foursquare was as good. (Doug)

When it comes to identity, continuity is understandably an important part of the phenomenon as it is precisely through continuity that the past is explained and ‘orientated towards an anticipated future’ (Gauntlett 2008, p. 108). An ‘anticipated’ future can readily be recognised in the various research extracts detailed previously, as users evidently comprehend their connection with Foursquare as being a natural progression in the context of their individual biographies. In addition our research also found was that users, rightly or wrongly, held strong beliefs about how their friends viewed them and what social expectations they therefore faced:

All my friends know I like to be in touch with up-and-coming things like that, and foursquare is a very up-and-coming thing. I’ve thought so for the

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past two and a half years. So far so good. I think if I didn’t know about foursquare I don’t think that would be right, because foursquare has been a big thing, and it’s been up-and-coming for a while, and I think it is some- thing people will think: he’ll know about Foursquare. (Mark)

In a similar way, John’s use of Foursquare is also as a result of the expectations he feels his friends have of him as the ‘person with a smart- phone’. This expectation then becomes reflexively intertwined with his own sense of self as well a feature that effectively marks him out from his retired peers:

When we’re out and about, you know, and I’m using my phone, and I’m using it in a social media situation, that to my friends is a pain. When they say to me, we need a restaurant, can you go on your mobile phone and find a local restaurant, or we need petrol where is the nearest garage, then sud- denly the smartphone becomes a useful tool, so that is my sort of my identity, the person with the smartphone. (John)

‘To be a “person” is not just to be a reflexive actor, but to have a concept of a person (as applied both to the self and others)’ (Giddens 1991, p. 53). For Mark, this means that it would be ‘wrong’ if he didn’t use Foursquare as he comprehends himself as being identified by his associa- tion with up-and-coming technologies. Our research demonstrates that Foursquare provides users with another means of extending or affirming themselves and their self-image precisely through these expectations. John comments that his friends in part identify him through his smart- phone, which has become a significant part of his story. As Giddens (1991, p. 54) explains:

The individual’s biography, if she is to maintain regular interaction with others in the day-to-day world, cannot be wholly fictive. It must continually integrate events which occur in the external world, and sort them into the ongoing ‘story’ about the self.

For both Mark and John, the expectations they experience from their friends are explicitly integrated into their ongoing narratives, which then allows them to reinforce further their respective selves through the prac- tice of using Foursquare. Alongside the perpetuation these personal nar- rative in the manner detailed previously, our research also illustrates that

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Foursquare can provide users with the opportunity to connect with com- munities of people who share similar lifestyles, which has implications for the cohesiveness of their identities:

I’ve met some really interesting people online. I wouldn’t say they’d all be my best friends or my drinking buddies, but they’re good to have a chat to when you’re bored late at night and there is nothing on television, or you can’t be bother to read that night; there’s always someone on Twitter or someone in the forum that you can have some banter and a laugh and a joke with. There’s just a small group of us and we get on really well. (Dennis)

It is nice to have that little circle of people that I can literally rabbit about foursquare with, all day. I am bonkers about foursquare. I don’t know why I’ve got the enthusiasm that I have? I just appreciate it so much, as it has changed my life; it has got me out the house so much more than what I used to. So I’ve just got this big appreciation for it. (Sarah)

Interestingly, in the latter excerpt the ‘circle’ of friends Sarah alludes to is geographically dispersed. This is a situation that many of the users who employed Foursquare in this way experienced. However, this isn’t to suggest that Foursquare can’t or doesn’t lead to physical encounters, as Dennis explains:

I have in the sense of, like this guy Ian, I had no idea who he was, then I got a message saying he’d stolen my mayorship, and then I saw his Twitter, and tweeted him to say, give that back, and then you just get chatting, and it has got to the point where we’ve gone for one drink. I wouldn’t say we were going to be best friends. (Dennis)

This last point is significant, as ‘[while] television, telephone, and internet research have shown the importance of media to build new social con- nections . . . there has been relatively little research exploring how mobile technology may also serve this function’ (Humphreys 2008, p. 115). For some users, by associating with this particular lifestyle, Foursquare not only confirms their identity but equally provides new social opportunities that then similarly feed back into their ongoing stories of self. In summary then, our research illustrates that the spatial self can be extended to practices that don’t strictly engage with spatiality, but that revolve around the formation and maintenance of identity nonetheless.

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4.4 LOCAL SEARCH AND FEELING ‘LOCAL’ An important element of Foursquare is the locational suggestions (or location search) it can provide. This feature involves algorithmically draw- ing together users’ historical check-ins to make place-based suggestion that are congruent with the user’s history when they are seeking locative inspiration, such as a place to eat. From the beginning, this function was heavily promoted as offering a different kind of tool for exploring space (Cramer et al. 2011; Frith 2013). In association with this understanding, many of the users we spoke to primarily used Foursquare as a viable way of navigating their environment. As Robbie explains:

It has just given me an insight into exciting places I should go. (Robbie)

In the following extract and while thinking about how Foursquare has changed the way he approaches going out, Terry details a similar situation:

As corny as this may sound when me and Lucy are thinking where we shall go for lunch or dinner, I don’t have that problem anymore; I’m guided by foursquare. You can look at what is around you and go here, here and here, and I think that’s great. I don’t have that thing where you end up going to the same place over and over again. If you do it, it is because you get value for money, not because you are just bored. (Terry)

This kind of use is also demonstrated by Henry in the following text. Henry, having recently moved to London, uses this LBSN to help him familiarise himself with an otherwise unfamiliar city:

I don’t use foursquare with the intention of letting people know where I am right now, so they can find me, nor do I use it to see where people are. That’s not the reason why I use it. I like to use it when I check in so I can learn about new places to go for dinner, and stuff like that, but not to stalk people. (Henry)

Mark makes a similar point while discussing his use of Foursquare during a physics trip to Geneva. Again, it should be note here that Mark’s reflexive awareness of his own identity is immediately apparent in his language:

I had a physics trip to Geneva to see LHC, and we were there and everyone was like I don’t know where we should go to night and I was like, this is a

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job for me then, and found a really good crêperie nearby, and we went there, and everyone had about five crêpes because they were so good. So that was good. (Mark)

What the previous excerpts demonstrate is that Foursquare provides these users with place-based information that effects where they go and what they do. At the same time there is of course more to this process than simply the provision of locational information, as such information could readily be accessed from a variety of sources that aren’t necessarily locative or indeed digital. For these users, Foursquare evidently offers them some- thing that they trust in terms of suggesting which places they should visit. Indeed, there is an implicit and unerring belief in the nature of the recommendations Foursquare delivers. Owing to this, these users are interminably confident that by employing Foursquare they are able to access to a city that would otherwise be hidden from them; a city that is cordoned off from those who aren’t in the know, as it were. The following extracts helps further develop this point:

In London there was a completely hidden, random dim sum restaurant that I found. It was down a small street in China Town that you wouldn’t know about because the back entrance is where the restaurant is, and there’s just a small door, and there it is. (David)

During the Olympics I was over in South London, I tend not to go south of the river very often, I hate to say it, and literally opened the ‘explore’ feature and just started searching for restaurants, within a mile, and found the most amazing tapas restaurant [José] I have been to in my life, just based on the fact so many people had recommended it. That was my hidden gem. (Amy)

In many ways this place [favourite café] is a hidden gem. It is almost as if you are a secret member of the Foursquare club. (Richard)

I was on holiday recently. I went to Malaga and didn’t necessarily know that much about it. For trying to find places to eat that weren’t tourist hotspots, Foursquare was perfect. So you could do the ‘explore’ option and say that you wanted somewhere to eat and then it would give me a list of places that are popular on Foursquare, and obviously people on Foursquare are more likely to be locals than tourists, or so I assumed. So it made it a lot easier to try and find places. I think they must have been local people, because most of the tips were in Spanish and I couldn’t understand any of them. (Ben)

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Another important element of LBSN use then is the faith that its locative suggestions are written by people who really know the areas, further cementing the suggestion that this information couldn’t be accessed through other channels. Whether this is accurate or not is of course impossible to know. Furthermore, the veracity of this belief is inconse- quential. Instead, what matters, and what we want to focus on here, is that it is precisely through this belief that these users are able to experience a city that subsequently feels different. Humphreys’ (2007, 2010) research on Dodgeball and specifically the process she terms ‘parochialization’, which materialises when the social sentience enabled through this mobile social networks makes users feel like they are interminably inhabiting familiar environments, provides a nuanced way of examining the impact of Foursquare on space, place and indeed, identity. Regarding Foursquare, it is our assertion that local recommendations do not so much make space feel different, or ‘parochial’, but alters how users themselves feel in these environments. When using the local search function users believe they are privy to locational information which is itself ‘local’. By utilising this information, these users are subsequently able to take on a subject position that feels similarly local, and that then impacts their experience of space:

It feels more like getting the insider’s view on the local area because it is the people that live there that are most likely to be checking-in regularly and posting tips for places. (Ben)

The ‘tips’ are probably my favourite thing about Foursquare. You do just get the inside deal from regular users that go there, that say, don’t try this or do try that. It doesn’t feel as daunting or scary as when you go somewhere and stare at the menu thinking, oh god what shall I have, and that kind of thing. (Sarah)

The standout experience I had was in Paris. We went to one of the museums, and it was the day that we were going home, so time was tight, and it was in the morning. So we got there and the queue was literally zigzagging. So I was standing in the queue and I thought I’ll check-in and while I was standing there I was reading the tips and one of them said the queue is massive, however, if you go around the corner you’ll find the queue for the library, which gets you in the same place, in terms of the ticketing area, and there is hardly anyone in that cue, so go to that cue and you will beat the main queue. I almost felt like we were committing an offence. (Nigel)

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Now I don’t go to McDonalds often, but it was with the kids so it was a treat, so this is a McDonalds based story; the tip on it said that a particular member of staff, who must have had a badge, was like really horrible, and it was kind of a bit weird, because then I knew a secret there, because I’m thinking that member of staff probably isn’t on Foursquare, they don’t know I am here, and I’m now watching them. It does give you a more authentic experience, although authentic is such a terrible word. (Doug)

Regarding Schwartz and Halegoua (2014) notion of the spatial self then, the use of local search suggests a different relationship between identity and place as well as a different relationship between Goffman’s (1959) front and back regions. Take Paul’s gym check-ins for instance; these inscriptions were explicitly motivated by a desire to perform the kind of person Paul wanted to be seen as ‘being’. In performing this practice, Paul is able to present himself in this fashion and he is also able to have this identity affirmed through the imagined audience that might witness any one of his accumulative enact- ments. This process then has a marked effect on the ‘passage from the front region to the back region, which Goffman (1959, p. 116) suggests is ‘kept closed to members of the audience’ (Goffman 1959, p. 116). For Paul, the witnessing by others of his movements enables him to distance himself gradually from the performative side of his identity. As a symptom of this distancing, the ‘passage from the front region to the back region’ (Goffman 1959, p. 116) is then closed to Paul too. As a consequence, the performed identity Paul observes through his Foursquare use ceases to be a performance and instead becomes his identity. In contrast, the users in the examples detailed previously aren’t necessarily engaging with locational recommenda- tions to disseminate a certain sense of self but are instead interested in gaining access to a place-based experience that would otherwise be con- cealed from them. However, by engaging with this kind of information and when considered alongside the belief this information is indigenous, their self-identities are altered. While Paul believes his front stage performance is indicative of his back region, users like Nigel and Ben are very aware of the difference between these two stages. Furthermore, it is precisely through this difference between the two stages that Nigel and Ben are able to adopt subject positions that momentarily feel authentically ‘local’.

Our research also provides a more nuanced take on perhaps why Ben didn’t want to be identified with the Odeon or Starbucks. An important function of Foursquare for some of the users we spoke to was that it supposedly helped them avoid places that they deemed to lack a certain genuineness. This

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function was particularly important to these users because they similarly understood themselves as being the kind of people who frequented places that weren’t commercial chains, but were more ‘real’ or ‘authen- tic’ than this. Again, the veracity of this faith is inconsequential. What is important is that these users believed it, and that this belief then impacted how they used Foursquare. For these users then, another important imagined affordance of this LBSN was that it offered some locative protection against their supposedly authentic identities being threatened by places that lacked the same degree of authenticity. By then marking themselves as present in these places, users’ identities were then further reinforced.

4.5 FOURSQUARE AND THE SPATIAL SELF IT CONFIGURES This chapter has examined the various ways in which one’s physical move- ments alongside the use of LBSN that may take place in these environments can be used to perpetuate a certain sense of self. This began with an examination of the imagined affordances of SNS, and the various ways SNS are used by people to ‘present a highly curated version of themselves’ (Schwartz and Halegoua 2014, p. 3) before moving on to important advancements, including smartphones and the mobile web, which has led to location being incorporated into social networking sites. Locative media and LBSN such as Foursquare have immediate implications for questions that pertain to identity formation, as borne out by our research. Indeed, the Foursquare users we spoke to were immediately aware that their check-ins connoted something meaningful about the kind of people they are, which had the potential to be witnessed by different audiences. As a result of this, for many of the users their check-ins weren’t something that they simply did on a whim without thinking about factors such as where they were and what this place might suggest about their identity but was rather a process that demanded more deliberation and thought. For these users Foursquare became a platform that could be called upon to present facets of their identity through the environments they frequented (Guha and Birnholtz 2013). As a ‘theoretical framework’ then ‘that explores the presentation of the self, based on geographic traces of physical activity’ (Schwartz and Halegoua 2014, p. 5), the spatial self was readily supported by our research. As Cramer et al. (2011, p. 9) argue, ‘[ultimately], what this means is that location has changed from being something you have (a property or state) to something you do (an action)’.

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Drawing on Goffman’s (1959) suggestion that identity is itself a perfor- mance divided between front and back regions, Foursquare is a viable plat- form for enacting one’s sense of self. What is most important about the various self-presentations discussed throughout this chapter is the way in which users utilised their respective spatial stages to perform a version of themselves that they were then able to believe in, precisely because of the digital traces these performances left behind. Foursquare and the imagined affordances that relate to identity formation seemingly infuse these self- projections with a measure of validity that simply isn’t possible without the incorporation of location, and the vicarious legitimacy this outwardly brings in its wake. For users like Paul and Sarah they were at once both performer and spectator of their own Foursquare feeds, with the division between front and back regions effectively closed in the process. By keeping this passage locked, Paul and Sarah were able to suspend any disbelief they may have had about the reality of their identities. In other words, and while continuing to use Goffman’s (1959) terminology, as a symptom of Foursquare and the spatial self it configures the division between front and back stage is gradually erased until the point there is no division to speak of. It is precisely through this process that the spatial self of Foursquare enabled users to present identities that then felt more real.

For Humphreys (2010, p. 775) an important feature of mobile social media like Dodgeball, and the social thinking they enable, is that they ‘make the urban environment [seem] less cold and anonymous’. In relation to LBSN then, it isn’t simply that Foursquare increased the sociability of space, although this is part of it (Frith 2014); equally Foursquare enabled users to further embed their identities into the various spaces they frequented on a daily basis. Put differently, for the users we spoke to Foursquare meant that they could present a sense of self that exhibited a degree of locational consistency with regard to the perceived character of places that they checked-into. Building on research within this field that has observed LBSN being employed to present the self through location (Guha and Birnholtz 2013) then, our research significantly demonstrates that Foursquare can in fact alter the places a person goes, with a view to establishing a sense of self that is reliable and consistent. To be clear, we are not suggesting that all Foursquare check-ins are ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ in this sense, as user can of course check-in to places where they are not physically located or check-in to an incongruous place. However, for the most part the users that we engaged share a similar belief that user check-ins should be accurate, as anything else goes against the ‘spirit’ of Foursquare.

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Just as this chapter sought to employ the ‘spatial self’ as a lens through which to consider the various uses of Foursquare, our research also demonstrated that this framework can be extended in two ways. First, the spatial self isn’t always as spatial as its eponymous title. For the Foursquare users we spoke to, their use of Foursquare wasn’t simply something that had happened out of the blue but was rather part and parcel of a much bigger narrative that they had been developing over a period of time. This narrative revolved around a particular lifestyle, which as Giddens (1991) points out is an important indicator of a person’s identity. In this instance, the lifestyle in question comprised new technol- ogies and an interest in gadgets. Many users explained that they had become involved in Foursquare through this lifestyle choice, with their affirmed inclination for new technologies enabling their identities to be effectively continued. In addition to this, these users also strongly believed that their friends perceived them in a manner as people who would use LBSN, and thus they felt in some ways obligated to engage with Foursquare. We also established the location recommendations Foursquare provides do not simply alter the places uses go, but also impact how these users feel about themselves in these places. Through a belief in the ‘indigenous’ character (i.e. user generated) of the locational recom- mendations Foursquare provides, these users were able to experience space in a manner that felt ‘local’. This accordingly enabled them to fleetingly adopt a commensurate subject position of ‘being local’. Interestingly here, users did not enact these locative suggestions (front stage) to influence themselves (back stage) – quite the opposite in fact. Nonetheless, it was precisely through these performances, and a stark awareness of them being a performance, that these users momentarily were able to experience a sense of self that felt unerringly ‘authentic’.

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