Smartphones as Locative Media

A useful road map for readers seeking to obtain an in-depth understanding of the relevance and impacts of locative media on society. The book is well-structured, innovative in its thinking, and contains a number of original case studies and rich theoretical discussions that will be equally interesting for experienced academic audiences and the general public. LSE Review of Books Concise and accessible, Frith's Smartphones as Locative Media could serve as an important stanchion for expanding this area of mobile studies, bringing people into important places, showing them around the highlights, and setting up engaging discussions. Brett Oppegaard, University of Hawaii We are increasingly using location-enabled phones to find our way, locate services and find one another. All the while, their traces raise basic questions of privacy. Jordan Frith provides an excellent and finely-tuned analysis that helps us to understand the nuances of this fundamental social transition. Richard Ling, Nanyang Technological University Smartphones as Locative Media is a fine book that offers an engagingly written, accessible, up-to-date, and thorough account of contemporary location-based services. Taking our embrace of the smartphone as a point of entry, Frith considers the rise and emerging capabilities of mobile location-based services, their still evolving social uses, and the political economic dimensions and privacy implications of these services. The book makes an important contribution to the literature on locative media, and forms a valuable resource for anyone studying or teaching on the development, growth, and wider impacts of location-enabled mobile technologies. Rowan Wilken, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia