Spot-Hunting and Street Riding: Reading, "Riding," and Making Place on the Move

• In Event: Mobile (Media) Constructions of Place

Abstract

The recent popularity of augmented reality games, like Pokemon Go, has led educational research to explore further the relationship between learning and geography, particularly as learners move through place (Howell, 2017; Yip, 2017). Location, in these instances, however, is often a passive force, pushing information to users for their collection and analysis. Despite advances in mobile, location-aware technologies, there is little understanding of how location becomes a site of creative production for learners, a spot to move toward, dwell in, and produce with. In response, this paper draws on nearly 200 hours of ethnographic video data in the action sports community, including participant observation and semi-structured interviews, to understand the entangled relationship among digital media production, location, and mobility. Specifically, this paper describes action sports athletes’--skaters’ and BMX street riders’--practice of “spot hunting,” or seeking out specific locations (either natural or human-made) to perform tricks, capture those tricks (and spots) via photo/video, and then disseminate footage via social media through short clips called “edits.”

This paper theoretically orients itself toward Ingold’s description of wayfaring, or the understanding that lives are not lived “inside places, but through, around, to and from them, from and to places elsewhere” (2011, p. 148). Mobility, in this case, is not a matter of moving from destination to destination, but rather the very experience of movement, of the path traveled. Greeno & Engeström (2014), however, counter that the wayfarer “is implicitly considered to be an individual moving in relatively pristine space.” They call for a need to better understand the “interaction between wayfarers’ trails and already existing paths…encounters between the old and the new – between known information and learners’ own knowledge construction” (2014, p. 143). In response to this call, this paper questions how skateboarders and street riders navigate the “pre-existing paths”—both digital and physical—of those before them in order to effectively establish, maintain, and expand their role in the skating/street-riding community.

This paper makes makes three contributions toward literature at the intersection of mobility, media, and learning: 1) It advances perspectives on locative literacies (Author 4, 2017) to understand how athletes analyze, evaluate, and act upon digital representations of physical places; 2) It articulates the embodied nature of digital media production for artist-athletes; and 3) It describes how artist-athletes use their counter-mobilities—those which do not align with traditional, privileged forms of mobility—to counter-map landscapes and therefore tell alternative, place-based stories.

Authors

• Ty Hollett, The Pennsylvania State University

• Robert Hein, The Pennsylvania State University