Abstract

This article argues that location-based services (LBS) like the social network-based LBS Foursquare are playing an active role in the transformation of experience of the world for users. Based on Heidegger's critique of modern technology and view of technology as a modern ontotheology, and using quantitative and qualitative analyses, this article argues that the importance and role of mobile computational devices and LBS is shifting users’ views of physical space by providing social and semantic cues for navigating the world via mobile devices and LBS. This movement is based on users accessing and interacting with maps, making them meaningful through social gazetteers and part of a socially based referential totality, which while liberating has consequences for how users perceive other users and entities in the world, along with problematising current key issues like privacy.