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Mediated Geographies and Geographies of Media pp 209–221Cite as

GIS as Media?

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Abstract

In early 2012, Google announced Project Glass, a device worn as glasses that augments the user’s vision through communication with the user’s mobile device. The glasses display images for the user’s eyes and listens for audible commands. In a promotional video released by Google to announce the device (2012), the user navigates urban spaces augmented by the device, including city streets, the public transportation network, and even the internal, private spaces of a bookstore. While moving around the city, the user takes phone calls and responds to instant messages, taking photos of what he sees and enters into a video chat. The device functions through minimal gestures and human interaction, responding through voice commands and the framing of the user’s gaze. Project Glass anticipates a future where the seemingly immaterial online spaces created through the internet are made material through embodied manifestations of the mobile user. In this present future, media are both social and spatial, and understanding the phenomenality of life requires hybrid approaches and new conceptual footings.

…media are increasingly becoming like GIS (Sui and Goodchild 2011 , p. 1739).

Here, we continue to think through this question posed by Dan Sui and Mike Goodchild in 2001 and again in 2011.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA

    Matthew W. Wilson

  2. Department of Geography, University at Buffalo (SUNY Buffalo), Buffalo, NY, USA

    Monica Stephens

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  1. Matthew W. Wilson
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Correspondence to Matthew W. Wilson .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Geography, University of Dundee School of the Environment, Dundee, United Kingdom

    Susan P. Mains

  2. Institute of Geography School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom

    Julie Cupples

  3. School of Geography and Development, The University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, USA

    Chris Lukinbeal

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Wilson, M.W., Stephens, M. (2015). GIS as Media?. In: Mains, S., Cupples, J., Lukinbeal, C. (eds) Mediated Geographies and Geographies of Media. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9969-0_13

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