Net Locality: Why Location Matters in a Networked World by Eric Gordon
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Gordon and de Souza e Silva propose “net locality” to describe the nature of communications and society whereby location becomes a more important attribute and catalyst as data is augmented with location information and our primary and secondary channels of communication are mobile allowing us to move through and experience spaces with these new augmentations and filters. Most usefully the book is a cohesive summary of early experiments in games, social networks, and civic interventions that use this location-aware technology to change behavior and test new forms of interaction between people and space. The authors also do a nice job of revisiting place and social performance related social theory from the past century and a half—walking readers through Goffman, Baudrillard, and Debord and how their ideas play out and are in some ways energized in an age of net locality. Whether you agree with their proposed new form of socio-technical configuration “net locality” there is much to learn here if you study or design mobile and location-aware computing.