The Social Capital of Locative Social Media

Abstract

The accumulation of capital through being somewhere could seem, at first, an odd concept. Humans are always “somewhere” and, as such, what is being proposed here is that this necessary and unavoidable facet of being human may be a commodity to be traded. Of course, from one perspective a link between commoditisation and location is obvious; the use of programmes and applications that accumulate data on where you are, what you are doing, who you do this activity with, how often you do this, and what times of the day you do this at sounds like gold to advertisers, and a political economy approach to the use of location-based social networking would concentrate on this aspect of the commoditisation of space. This chapter takes a different approach; the focus here is not on how value as a financial commodity is extracted or created for places in their encoding in databases of places that are used by LBSN, but instead on the practices of users that frame places as a particular kind of commodity. That commodity is social capital, the result of the use of LBSN to create an impression on other users, connections, friends or acquaintances that is positive or that is perceived positively by others. This is not revealing place as place; this is revealing place as resource.