Jumping for Fun? Negotiating Mobility and the Geopolitics of Foursquare

Abstract

Rather than assume that there is some universal “right way” to engage social media platforms, we interrogate how the location-based social media practice known as “jumping” played out on the popular service Foursquare. We use this case to investigate how a “global” or universal system is constructed with an imagined user in mind, one who enjoys a particular type of mobility and experience of place. Through the analysis of official Foursquare policies and mission statements, discussions among developers, interviews with and conversations among Foursquare users, online traces left by jumpers, and correspondence between designers and users on discussion forums, we identify how certain practices and participants are discursively constructed as normative, while other practices and groups are marginalized. Through the study of “jumping,” and its association with Indonesian players in particular, we highlight tensions between the assumptions and industrial strategies of Foursquare designers and the emergent practices and norms of early adopters and avid participants. We argue that the practices of “Indonesian” Foursquare jumpers and the discourses surrounding their use of Foursquare illustrate that practices understood as transgressive or resistive might best be read as strategies for engaging with a platform as groups contend with marginalizing social, economic, and/or political conditions. The case study examined in this article highlights the practices of participants who attempt to integrate themselves into the design of a social media system and the “workarounds,” tensions, negotiations, and logics that manifest in that process.