Week 6: It's All Been Done Before

In the short time studying New Media, I have noticed a trend: The tendency for pundits and technologists to attach words like "cutting edge", "innovative" and "cool" to every big new idea they come across. Everybody wants to be Steve Jobs...

To that end, this week we were introduced to newest coolest feature to hit the streets: "Location tagging". My initial reaction was, I have to admit, "urgh". I could just picture going to (say) the Eiffel Tower, consulting my generic-brand smartphone for the monument's "location", and being confronted with 100,000 tags like, "HAI FROM BRITNEY & CAYTLIN!!!!! LOL ILY ^.^" And another 100,000 tags advertising everything from Pierre's Tour Petit Shoppe to inexplicable penis enlargements.

I imagined this "Location Tagging" bringing about the electronic equivalent of the said monument lying ruined, buried under commercial brochures and carved and spray-painted to oblivion with "so-and-so woz ere" messages. Of course, being electronic, we could simply turn off or ignore the facility. But doesn't that defeat the purpose?

Clearly something like location tagging would need serious moderation to be meaningful, at least for popular tourist spots. Which would entail some formal control over the information which, unfortunately, is the antithesis of the Internet's uncensored consumer-producer zeitgeist.

More generally, though, I was disturbed, yet again, at how these starry-eyed pundits introduce their pet innovations as the "newest thing", and pat themselves on the back, as if they divined them from heaven. (Or pulled them glittering from a certain orifice.) Guess what? NOTHING IS NEW! Location tagging has been present for several years in Google Maps, which has a neat (if underutilised) facility where people can pin photos, websites, Wikipedia articles, and other resources to any physical location on Earth. And the Moon IIRC. Wikipedia reciprocates by providing lat/long coordinates which can tracked back to several major resources. Street directory sites like Whereis do the same thing. Then we have a good ol' Facebook Group for every tourist spot you can think of, which incorporate "walls" for people to leave comments on. These Groups also benefit from natural moderation by the creators and other "mature" parties, or at least whinging outsiders. Just to name a few.

In its defence, Location Tagging (as an "innovation") seems to be an attempt to distil the above facilities into a central and quickly accessible whole. Cool...