Page - 27 - in >mcs_lab> - Mobile Culture Studies, Volume 1/2020

Mobile Culture Studies | >mcs_lab> 1 (2020) Johanna Menhard | Entanglements on and with the street 27 and Kevin Lynch’s work on cartographies in The Image of the City6; I talked about all this, asked friends and family about their experiences and associations with walking, moving, driv- ing, being on the streets – trying to find my way, trying to orientate myself.7 Finally, in all this disorientation, I made orientation itself my topic. Sara Ahmed writes on orientation, “It is by understanding how we become orientated in moments of disorientation that we might learn what it means to be orientated in the first place”.8 Like Ahmed suggests, I used a phenomeno- logical approach, because it makes orientation toward phenomena, things, objects, bodies, and bodily experiences central and gave me guidance on how to tackle my research project.9 While I followed specific lines, some things became reachable, others remained or even moved out of reach, some became visible, others were covered and became invisible to me.10 Coincidentally, I just had my first smartphone for a few months by then and was wonder- ing about how it might have changed and influenced my way to navigate in cities and how I orient myself on and to streets.11 Additionally, some of my first informal encounters and con- versations I recorded in my field diary were dealing with digital maps, self-tracking devices, unwanted notifications and requests for rating certain locations people passed by or just bought some everyday products. People told me: “Why should I rate this shop I don’t even care about? Why should I want to know when the next bus arrives or that I should consider walking home instead, since I haven’t walked enough today? I didn’t ask for that information in the first place.”12 Influenced by these reactions, I ended up focusing on walking, digital maps, and GPS-Technologies and their usage in everyday life via multiple smartphone applications.13 With so-called locative media I found a research field which I wanted to explore.14 I felt I had found what I was missing in the discussion on streets in our research project. There is probably no field of research in which the internet would not play an important role, writes Gertraud Koch 6 See Kevin Lynch: The Image of the City. London: MIT Press 1960, p. 95. 7 In reference to my fieldnotes on different explorations on the streets, 17.03.2018, 22.03.2018, 04.04.2018, 06.04.2018, 18.04.2018. 8 Sara Ahmed: Finding Your Way. In: Sara Ahmed: Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, objects, others. Dur- ham/London: Duke University Press 2006. pp. 1-24., here p. 6. 9 See Ahmed 2006, p. 2. 10 Ibid., p. 14. 11 “Hast du ein Smartphone bei dir? Dann weißt du, wo du bist. […] Dein Sein, wo auch immer du bist, wird zum Koordinatenpunkt. Ein Punkt in einer von vielen Abstraktionen von Wirklichkeit. Beispielsweise auf einer Karte, die Straßen, Gebäude und Plätze darstellt. Ein Punkt, der mit anderen Punkten in Beziehung gestellt wird, in Verhältnisse gesetzt wird.“ [Do you have a smartphone with you? Then you know where you are. [...] Your being, wherever you are, becomes a point of coordinates. A dot in one of many abstractions of reality. For example, on a map showing streets, buildings and squares. A point that is linked to other points, that is put into a context., JM] Diary entry, 23.04.2018. 12 Based on fieldnotes on conversations I had from April to May 2018, e.g. 11.05.2018, 13.05.2018. 13 Excursus: The Global Positioning System (GPS) was developed by the US Department of Defense in the 1970s and became available for civilian use in 2000. Russia and the European Union have also developed and are developing satellite navigation systems. Meanwhile, the term is used for various satellite navigation systems and is integrated into multiple electronic devices and of course the mobile phone. With mobile phones, the locations of their users can be determined very precisely. Mobile phone networks, Bluetooth, WLAN or GPS are mainly used for this purpose. 14 Excursus: What is Locative Media? A medium that uses e.g. GPS-Data to respond to the position of its users. This term has emerged from the artistic examination of and research on ubiquitous computing (omnipresence of computers) (see workshop “Mapping the Zone” in Riga, 2003).