This week, I read “Location, location, location: Collecting space and place in mobile media” by Alison Gazzard for my weekly reading. The article is about how usage of GPS in phones has allowed us to view the spaces around them in new ways. Gazzard explains how geotagged photos (photos that include the location that they were taken at) can either remain online for years untouched or they could be updated regularly on the individual level. The GPS on our phone can help change the way that we look at the environment. For example, I posted a picture on google maps 4 years ago showing a picture of ice cream at my local dairy queen. Reading through this article made me curious as to if there was a way to check how many views the photo has. I looked on my google maps account, and I found that there were user metrics tools that measured how many views there were on each photo that I posted. I checked it, and there were over 1.3 million views on the ice cream photo. This felt relevant to me because the photo that I posted may have impacted someone's decision to go to the dairy queen or not.
Gazzard goes on to discuss the distortion of space. The idea here is that spaces can be distorted by peoples reviews or the photos that they post about the space. This can reshape how people see a space either negatively or positively. I personally tend not to leave reviews for this reason. One time, I was eating at a restaurant near Mt. Rainier, and it was probably the worst food that I’ve had in a restaurant. However, I didn’t leave a review because the restaurant was small and most likely did not get a lot of business. If the food just wasn’t my taste and was delicious to someone else, I wouldn’t want my perception of the food to impact someone else's decision to go to the restaurant. I do post photos of the food I get occasionally. Reading this article made me question whether the pictures I post are as impactful or more impactful than leaving a review. At first, I was thinking that photos hold less bias, because I’m not telling you what to think when I post a picture of a business or a location. This isn’t entirely true. When I post a picture of something, it carries bias without using words. Take the picture of ice cream that I posted, for example. The picture makes the ice cream look delicious. I remember thinking that the ice cream looked especially good on the day that I took the picture.
Looking through the other photos on google maps, I see several pictures of the same type of ice cream that other people took. Some of the photos show an entirely different depiction of the same ice cream. Their pictures make it look disgusting. There are photos of ice cream dripping off the sides of the cup that it’s in, and it looks like a mess. I frequented that specific dairy queen in high school, and I remember it looking just as bad as those photos make it seem in person.
Both my photo and the photos of the ice cream that others took are accurate depictions of what the ice cream could look like if you order it from that dairy queen. Each one carries a different bias. If you already wanted to go to the dairy queen and you saw my photo, confirmation bias would most likely make you decide to go to the dairy queen. If you saw the other photo, you might reconsider, but you would most likely ignore it because of how good the ice cream looks in my photo. Photos can suggest people to feel a certain way about a business just as much as reviews can.
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