1.1 Developments in Media Technology and Media Studies

Within the history of technology—and also under a critical perspective—the new media for quite some time have been connected to the idea of 'de-spatialization' and 'de-localization.' However, contrary to the expectation that the "sense of place" (Massey, 1993) is being eroded, current media-theoretical discussions (Döring/Thielmann, 2009) and studies in mobile media practices show that now place is being re-evaluated as well (Hjorth 2008; Goggin/Hjorth 2009; Wilken/Goggin 2011). This "rebirth of place" (Staple, 1997: 219) can at present also be encountered in other developments of media, be it by re-conceptualizing the place of a musical performance following a crisis in the music industry (Baym/Burnett, 2009; Simun, 2009), be it by re-territorializing media art in "Locative Arts" (Hemment 2006a, 2006b; Schäfer/Gendolla 2010) or in the form of the different new geo-medial developments like "Geosurveillace" (Sui, 2007), the "Geospatial Web" (Scharl/Tochtermann, 2007), "Geocaching" (Willis, 2010), or Geotainment (Döllner, 2007). The British geographer Nigel Thrift (2008: 166) is even suggesting an era of a new "a-whereness," attributing the methodological and theoretical interest in problems of place to the following current developments:

(i)  The enormous increase in the mapping of all areas of life (Abrams/Hall, 2006; Börner 2010, Wood, 2010—in particular by way of "Map Mashups" (Crampton 2010) and geobrowsers like Google Earth (Parks 2009).
(ii)  The establishment of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and consequently geo-demographics that not only represents social statistics of distribution but that also feeds the emergence of a new form of class (Burrows/Gane, 2006; Parker/Uprichard/Burrows, 2007).
(iii)  A change of the places themselves. These are not constituted any longer by a "set of fixed points" (Thrift, 2004) but are following a logistic network of relations and connections that is being realized by the possibilities of tagging and tracking through localization technologies like GPS, WLAN, or RFID (Crang/Graham, 2007; Coyne, 2010; Hayles, 2009).

At their core, all these developments are of a media-technological character that could be subsumed under the term "geomedia" (Crang/Graham, 2007; Coyne, 2010; Hayles, 2009): These are media with geographical references that reorganize our dealings with space and place socio-technically. They are also globally networked media whose use and content change according to their concrete physical location. These developments lead to a possible convergence of technologies of localization, communication and entertainment (de Souza e Silva/Sutko, 2009) and currently to an expansion of location-based services contributing to the "re-grounding of the self" (Tuters/Varnelis, 2006: 362), to changes in social networks and classification (Galloway, 2008; Elmer, 2010) by mandating themselves to an "automatic production of space" (Thrift/French, 2002; Dodge/Kitchin/Zook 2009).

This development in media technology is noticeably paralleled with developments in media studies. International locative and situational media studies since the 1990s have extended and stabilized; this is true for the German research in this field as well. At first, the respective research and its methods had emerged and differentiated between the individual disciplines involved—media studies, ethnology, European ethnology, sociology, science and technology studies (STS), linguistics, history and aesthetics of art, theater studies, geography, media information technology with CSCW (computer supported cooperative work) and HCI (human-computer interaction)—and since then, they have been activated in a much discussed and transdisciplinary way whose effects cannot yet be assessed. Regardless of whether it is in traditional or digital, technical or artistic media—the hard core of all these scholarly endeavors is without doubt the ethnographic studies of locative and situational media processes by applying locative and situational methods locally and "in situ" (see paragraph 3.2)