Anti-social media: Communicating risk and danger through open data, crime maps, and geo-locative media applications

Part of symposium: Beyond Infotopia: Contextualising Risk, Openness and Transparency in the Information Age We present a critical evaluation of a locative Internet application, Fearsquare, which provocatively invites users to... [ view full abstract ]

Part of symposium: Beyond Infotopia: Contextualising Risk, Openness and Transparency in the Information Age

We present a critical evaluation of a locative Internet application, Fearsquare, which provocatively invites users to engage with personally contextualized risk information drawn from the UK Government ‘open data’ crime maps cross-referenced with geo-located user ‘check-ins’ on the social media platform Foursquare. Our analysis of user data and a corpus of #Fearsquare discourse on Twitter revealed three cogent appraisals ('Affect', 'Technical' and 'Critical') reflecting the salient associations and aesthetics that were made between different components of the application and interwoven issues of technology, transparency, risk, danger, and emotion by users. We discuss how the varying strength and cogency of these public responses to Fearsquare call for a broader imagining and analysis of how associations of risk and transparency are interpreted; and conclude how our findings reveal important challenges for researchers and practitioners wishing to engage in projects that involve the computer-mediated communication of risk using social and locative media and open data.