Online place attachment: exploring technological ties to physical places
2014
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 decor, 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 tophysical 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
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