Location technologies in extreme environments : the case of King George Island, Antarctica

This chapter offers a critical reading of the assumptions inherent in what constitutes "location" in the notion of "location technologies," particularly when considered in relation to extreme environments and places outside national boundaries. Drawing on ï¬eldwork conducted in the Antarctic Peninsula from 2012 to 2015, the brief ethnographic interventions provided here offer a schematic overview of the geopolitical and social dimensions of media use and telecommunications infrastructures in Antarctic settlements, particularly in King George Island in the Antarctic Peninsula. In this chapter, I look at the use of social media and location-based technologies, exploring how they reinforce geography and a sense of place for their users. I ask whether the use of location technologies leads to a signiï¬cant shift in the relational bond between mobility and place, and whether extreme environments open up possibilities for how we might think of place-making in relation to communication technologies. More speciï¬cally, I ask, how do we account for the ways in which telecommunications have reconï¬gured Antarctica as a space amid the growing centrality of the Polar Regions in global geopolitics and environmental politics? The key aim of this chapter is thus to examine the world-making capacities afforded by technological infrastructures in general and location technologies in particular, as they shape both particular modes of governance practiced by a range of states operating in the area and the relational dynamics of social life there. By world-making, I refer to the generative force of information and communication infrastructures as overlapping sociotechnical systems, particularly in the ways that they shape the character of human settlement in extreme environments such as Antarctica. Antarctica is not only a laboratory for science, but utmost, a laboratory for understanding how human settlements in extreme environments" uninhabitable until very recently" are transforming these fragile ecosystems. Communications infrastructures are vital to sustaining human settlements in extreme environments, such as Antarctica. Information infrastructures are not only essential to the conduct of scientiï¬c research in the Antarctic, they are also the operational backbone of life there. And yet, little research has been conducted thus far on how location technologies and services work in extreme environments and extraterritorial spaces such as Antarctica, and how these can help us to understand the role of infrastructure and logistics as forms of governance.