Location and Data Visualisation Culture in Chile
This chapter discusses the social and cultural consequences of living and under a constant spatial and temporal location system in Chile. The clearest example is Google maps which we can easily access on our mobile phones while they transmit our location
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Location and Data Visualisation Culture in Chile Francisco Osorio
Introduction As Wilken and Goggin (2015) argued in the book Locative Media, we are witnessing different practices, uses, meanings, emotions, and possibilities (among other aspects of social life) because people are using location technology, mainly through mobile phones. They define locative media as the use of information, data, sounds, and images about location (although they say the definition is challenged by the complexity of real-life experiences). Why is this important? Because, as they say, it is the emergent media of our time. The anthropological question is how this technology is being used in different cultural settings. The literature review is very short as well as the case studies. In this text we address the question by focusing on Chile because it is a country in the global South where technology is increasingly used intensively in people’s daily life. Yet, there is little research dedicated to understanding location technology in Latin America. There is a 2015 study in Mexico (Goggin and
F. Osorio (*) University of Chile, Santiago, Chile e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 A. Scribano, P. Lisdero (eds.), Digital Labour, Society and the Politics of Sensibilities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12306-2_4
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Albarran-Torres 2015), on the Geolocalization Law of 2011 that gave more power to law enforcement to access mobile phone data (not only calls but also location). Brazil has attracted many studies on augmented reality, location services and urban space, as well as locative mobile media. For instance, Lemos (2011) has argued that previous forms of use of communication technology were independent of context (place) but today augmented reality examples in urban spaces have merged together technology and place for different objectives. Nevertheless, it is hard to find studies in Latin America. One obvious stumbling block is the lack of a common word in the dominant languages used in Latin America to signify location. If we take the English word location and make a rough translation into ‘locación’ (just changing a t for a c plus the accent on the last vowel), the meaning would be different for our purposes. According to the Spanish Royal Academy of Language, the Spanish word ‘locación’ comes from the Latin locatio and it is a legal term for lending a property (but this meaning is no longer in use in common Spanish). Today ‘locación’ means place as, for example, a film production crew looking for a place to shoot a scene (same idea of the famous expression ‘location, location, location’). Therefore, the rough translation of media location as ‘medios de locación’ makes no sense in Spanish. We propose that the Spanish translation of media location is ‘medios de localización’. If we make the same exercise but from Spanish to English, the word ‘localización’ means localise. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, there are two meanings for localise. The first refers to keep something within a limited ar
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