The Mobile Device as a Thing: The Gathering of Place Digitally

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the thing, in this context the “computational device,” and how it is capable of revealing place as place in the digitally mediated world. LBSN can be a “thing” (Das Ting) in the sense that Heidegger employs the word, as a world-revealing entity that gathers the necessary elements together to understand world (and place) in an event, and therefore following the theoretical position established in Chapter 3 allows for a dwelling-with technology. Heidegger’s Thing is not considered sufficient to explain the feeling of place, however, in the context of two important aspects of the digital world: firstly, the interaction and practices of interacting with the computational device and code, and secondly in explaining the presence of data and information in the digital world. As such, this chapter develops a post-phenomenological theory with Heidegger’s notions of care, mood and situated attunement at the base, but integrating a sense of the body in place and the digital atmosphere. This goes beyond Dasein (and hence avoids the possibility of a world-projecting being) by contextualising being-in-the-world as embodied in action in an information-infused environment while retaining being-there as key to understanding the different senses of place that users of LBSN may have through using the technology (and therefore avoiding technological determinism).