The sense of place from mobile communication to locative media

The paper aims to put in context and investigate the experience of place related to the use of geolocalization services on social network sites accessed by mobile devices taking into account previous forms of social appropriation of mobile communication. For this purpose I will refer to some empiric findings of ethnographic matrix regarding the social uses of mobile phones – collected during different phases of the social history of mobile technologies, including those I conducted – to show different relations and connections created between the subjects' physical space, always connected with a specific social situation, and the virtual space of the communication mediated by mobile and locative technologies. In this way the strong continuity found among the social uses of mobile communication and localization services, rather than the novelty and social-cultural discontinuity, will be highlighted. In fact, despite often mobile technology and the consequent ubiquitous availability of information has often been evoked to emphasize the irrelevance of location, theorizing processes of disembodiment of the experience from local contexts, empirical research has rather shown that mobile communication, in its ‘vocal’, messaging and visual practices, emphasizes forms of experience that are strongly rooted in physical space. Moreover, these practices show the need for players to embedded to localized and socially contextualized forms of interaction, allowing the proliferation of connections between different social and physical spaces. From this point of view, locative media represent a further stage in the socio-technological processes of re-location, pluralization and translocation of experience, already embryonically present in mobile communications.