I’ll tell you all my ideas about Looking-glass House. First, there’s the room you can see through the glass—that’s just the same as our drawing room, only the things go the other way. [Lewis (1871/1991), Through the Looking-Glass, And What Alice Found There.]

Introduction

When the artist Simon Weckert carried 99 smartphones all running the Google Maps application in 2020 Berlin, it generated a false traffic jam, visualized in the navigation tool as a red line which drivers then interpreted as best to avoid. In the aptly titled installation ‘Google Maps Hacks’, Weckert (2020) shows several videos of himself dragging a red cart filled to the brim with smartphones, the traffic jam slowly emerging in the virtual map, and resulting in an eerie and almost dystopian view of empty streets as other users of the app rerouted away from the problem area. Weckert’s experiment is telling about the trust users have in navigational applications and their legitimacy. At the same time, the effects of the virtual traffic jam on the physical space are informative of how such digital cartographies produce real effects on the spaces they aim to represent, as well as on the humans navigating them. Weckert’s choice of using Google Maps is not arbitrary, as the application is one of the most used navigation services, sometimes being perceived as almost compulsory to have installed (Ghita 2022). The extensive adoption of Google Maps does not only affect human behaviour, but also other technologies such as the once portable popular GPS (Global Positioning System) devices which were quickly pushed into obsolescence as they were replaced by maps freely available on smartphones (Lavrinc 2012).

Although Google Maps initially served the sole purpose of aiding its users to navigate from one point to another, its present functions include information on public transportation, hotels availability, public service reviews, time estimates for different recommended routes, and images captured and shared by users, implying a complex representation of space. One of its most popular functions, Google Street View, allows for a first-person navigation of space. Designed to help the user to ‘know where to go and what to expect when travelling’ (Google n.d.), the function has been positively discussed for its innovative aspects in assessing safety in urban spaces (Rundle et al. 2011), environmental planning (Li et al. 2015), demographic patterns (Gebru et al. 2017), or air pollution (Apte et al. 2017). However, Google Street View has also received criticism regarding privacy issues (Flores and Belongie 2010), unfair representation (Power et al. 2013), or controversial sightings of deceased individuals (Kleinman 2021).

Digitalization has been unfolding in such intense manners that countries with large-scale digital adoption have been labelled as hyper-connected (Choi 2014). As digital use became institutionalized in such societies (Baptista 2009), certain application such as Google Maps became synonymous with travelling or navigating spaces. Furthermore, the large adoption of digital services and devices has been theorized to be followed by a (current) societal turn labelled as postdigitalFootnote 1. The postdigital condition often eludes definitions (Jandrić et al. 2022) but appears to be generally characterized by a certain disenchantment with ubiquitous digital devices which results in new hybridized forms of media or repurposed functions or devices (Cramer 2015). From this perspective, Google Maps Street View could be conceptualized as a symptom of the postdigital, as its wide adoption, criticism, and large variety of functions have led to alternative uses, of which the artistic installation of Simon Weckert’s is but one example. Furthermore, Google envisions a typical use of the app to be that of a wayfinder (Google n.d.), this implying navigating towards an unknown place and/or space.

The differences between space and place are subtle, but important. From an anthropological perspective, space has been articulated in a broader manner as something stable, often measurable and having boundaries; place, however, is more abstractly conceptualized because it is defined by cultural meaning ascribed to a specific area, Anderson and Jones (2009: 293) explaining this difference as ‘the counterpoint of space: places are politicized and cultured; they are humanized versions of space’. Although places can also have very specific boundaries, the differences between space and place become more apparent when they are being described. For example, the city of Uppsala can be described as space by stating that it is Sweden’s fourth largest city, located close to Stockholm. However, Uppsala as a place could be characterized as a university city, referring to the many student-specific activities and locations. Thus, how a certain area is experienced and remembered becomes definitory when conceptualizing place.

Google’s emphasis on navigating known spaces ignores the potential for the tool to be used for the exploration of places, especially those familiar to the user. Navigating familiar spaces can be fundamentally different as elements related to memory, family, education, nostalgia, and others become embedded in the space, be that physical or virtual. As Ingold (2000: 232) notes with respect of the importance of sociocultural factors in the cartographies of space, ‘all wayfinding is mapping, though not all mapping is wayfinding’. Google Maps has been previously studied in relation to concepts of space and place, for example in Jelewska (2024)’s work on developing the concept of postdigital collective memory, in Flores and Belongie (2010)’s proposed method of eliminating pedestrians from Google Street View imagery, with a focus on the screen as mediator of interaction/navigation (Maithani 2024), the case of digitally mapping favelas (Luque-Ayala and Neves Maia 2019), or in everyday and alternative designed uses (Gentzel et al. 2021). However, few studies have approached the use of Google Maps for purposes of exploring known places. For example, Peesapati et al. (2010) take a reminiscence perspective but in which the users included in the study are not familiar with Google Maps. A common denominator of previous work in this area appears to be located in a certain focus on the user perspective, often at the expense of the role and agency of the technology itself.

Focus in this paper lies in the exploration of places available in Google Maps which the users are familiar with in their physical forms. Through this perspective, I depart from the envisioned use of navigating unfamiliar spaces from one point to another, focusing instead on the familiar places the participants are connected with. As such, the research lens is directed equally towards the human and non-human actors involved in making possible the experience of digital place. The aim of the study is to develop knowledge about how familiar places are revisited and, in this process, reconfigured in a digital environment. In order to answer this research question, I conducted digital go-along interviews, a method which I describe in the following section.

Digital Go-Along Interviews

The aim of the study is to uncover and articulate how digital navigation tools reconfigure how (digital) places are perceived by users who are familiar with their physical originals. For this purpose, I conducted digital go-along interviews, based on the go-along interview technique (Kusenbach 2003) in which the researcher and the study participants navigate together locations of interest. The difference to Kusenbach (2003)’s described method is that in this study, the location where the walks took place was not a physical space but a digital one, namely by using Google Maps (henceforth abbreviated as GM) function Street View (henceforth abbreviated as GSV).

The go-along interview, sometimes described as walking interview, comes as a methodologic reaction to a relatively static social science, often boundered to a particular place without relevance to the topic of discussion (Evans and Jones 2011). As such, movement is introduced to elicit memories but also to observe the way participants navigate and experience their surroundings. The space itself is often described as a physical one, although it does not have to be, valid alternatives being ‘imaginative and virtual mobilities of people’ (Sheller and Urry 2006: 218). Although variance exists in the different approaches to this method, there is a common aim of including locations as an important element in the research process and allowing for the participation of the researcher in a walk in which the participant has more agency than usual (Kinney 2017).

I have conducted eight digital go-along interviews with participants which I recruited through a combination of convenience and snowballing sampling, by reaching out to potential participants and also asking them to recommend others who could be interested in participating. I have taken a similar approach to Browne (2005) using snowball sampling through interpersonal networks, starting from my own and branching onward. The envisioned participants for this study are not a specific community or group which I could access and negotiate participation with, but are scattered with no obvious element which could signal their interest in exploring familiar places on GM. Snowballing allowed, then, for participants to recommend others who could potentially be interested in such digital explorations of known places. Convenience sampling was used in conjunction to snowballing because at times, a participant could not nominate another possible person to participate, but also because at the beginning of the study, I reached out directly to my own social network with invitations to participate. Careful consideration was given to who was eligible to participate; for example, I decided against the participation of those who although would have wanted to join the study were not familiar with GSV or where power relations could have affected what was disclosed. At the same time, knowing or not knowing a participant would always affect what and how such material is produced in a research assemblage (Fox and Alldred 2015) which always changes with context, but as any qualitative work anchored in a new materialist ontology would not make claims of generalisable results, the contents of this paper are limited to the confines of this particular configuration of participants.

The conditions for participation were that the participants should (a) have used Google Maps and its Street View function before and be familiar to navigating in it and (b) have access to a stable Internet connection and, in the case of remote interviews, be able to access software in which the function of sharing their screens was possible. The interviews lasted approximately 1 h each and were recorded audio and video with the permission of the participants. The resulted material was comprised of audio recordings, video recordings of the GSV exploration, and participant observation notes which I took during the interviews, especially in the Street View exploration part. The material was stored on a GDPR-compliant data portal. The participants were anonymized in the present paper, for which reason I do not include photographic material from the GSV which includes addresses or visual elements which could lead to the identification of locations.

The interviews were divided into two main parts. First, participants answered questions regarding their typical use of GM and GSV. Following that, they were asked to choose a place they wanted to explore and show to me, engaging in a Street View exploration together, this resulting in observation-like fieldnotes and video material. The place could be whichever the participants selected, with the condition that it was not the place where they were currently residing or visiting often (physically or digitally). The reasoning here was that the place experienced through GSV should be a known one, but still spark curiosity and have a novelty attribute.

Participants were given the freedom of deciding the path taken during the exploration, taking as many breaks as they wanted to explain or contextualize what the walk included, discuss eventual differences and similarities to how they remembered the place, or take additional walks if time allowed it. The participants (abbreviated henceforth with P1–P8) chose to digitally explore a familiar place as illustrated in Table 1:

Table 1 Overview of participants and places explored
Full size table

The transcripts were coded descriptively, following a two-cycle process (Saldaña 2016) in which I firstly coded the material to systematize it, and in the second cycle forming themes inductively. The themes were formed by similarity, looking not necessarily for similar content of the digital walk, but for similar types of emerging experiences. In the following section, I detail how an agential realist approach is fitting for the analysis of the resulted themes.

An Agential Realist Approach

Understanding how place is revisited and reconfigured in a digital environment implies an understanding of how the participants’ memory of the chosen locations, the physically existent place, and the place’s virtual representation come together. This togetherness has been a key ingredient in new materialist theoretical approaches which emphasize the inseparability of the social and the material. As Malecki (2017) notes, virtual and physical spaces are increasingly interconnected, making it substantially difficult to conceptualize in isolation from each other. .

Instead of seeing such blurred boundaries as a challenging aspect of studying digital environments, I see this as an opportunity for approaching this topic through an agential realist perspective which capitalizes on and argues for such inseparability. Agential realism is the theoretical work of Karen Barad (2007) and part of theoretical approaches such as posthumanism, new materialism, or science and technology studies which see humans and non-humans as both having agency (Cozza and Gherardi 2023; Fox and Alldred 2016). Furthermore, Barad notes that agency is not something which humans or non-humans can have as a separate element which implies its ownership, but ‘an enactment, a matter of possibilities for reconfiguring entanglements’ (Barad in Dolphijn and Tuin 2012: 54).

Barad marks this inseparability through the concept of intra-action, defined in opposition to inter-action which implies the existence of two or more parts which intersect while still remaining separate; intra-action signifies ‘the mutual constitution of entangled agencies’ (Barad 2007: 33) and refers to the coming together in a profound and inseparable manner of the social and material, or humans and non-humans. This perspective breaks from the anthropocentric tradition of focusing exclusively on humans and opens for the production of knowledge where the boundaries between humans and non-humans dissolve, leading to their relational conceptualization. This is useful for the present study as what is articulated is not at the intersection of GM users and the technology itself, but in the intra-actions of an assemblage of elements which come together in the act of exploring digital place. Thus, the meaning-making embedded in the act of digital place exploration is not a representational one, but performative and anchored in its respective context: ‘Meaning is not a property of individual words or groups of words but an ongoing performance of the world in its differential dance of intelligibility and unintelligibility.’ (Barad 2007: 149) In the context of this study, the analytical emphasis is, thus, placed not on how explorations of known places on GSV are discussed or reported, but how they are enacted. Therefore, what emerges in an agential realist analysis of how place is navigated by participants is not representational, but an insight into how this act is in a state of becoming—a dynamic and ongoing material reconfiguration of the world in its specific given context (Barad 2003). In regard to this context, Barad (2007) conceptualizes the entanglement of space, time, and matter as spacetimemattering. This concept is especially useful in the analysis of digital place because it is embedded in temporal shifts between past, present, and future. In summary, I employ an agential realist analysis in which I use the Baradian central concepts of intra-action, spacetimemattering, and becoming.

Although similar approaches are popular in works on the interplay between humans and technologies, few studies have employed it in the context of digital place or navigational tools such as GM; for example, Maithani (2024) focuses specifically on the performativity of screens in GM by using agential realism, Jelewska (2024) explores ways of designing for history and memory through a posthumanist approach, and Rose (2017) discusses the posthuman agency in the context of digital urban spaces. Despite the seemingly lack of previous work on navigating known space and place in digital environments through agential realist or ontologically similar perspectives, the few existent works do emphasize the usefulness of this approach which breaks the typical anthropocentric analysis and allows for results which illustrate the proposed agentic role of technology alongside that of humans (Fox and Alldred 2016: 4). Accordingly, Matthews (2021) remarks that the concept of the postdigital can function as a critical lens through which digital technologies can be further interrogated as an everyday engagement, precisely because of its characteristic tenet which sees the digital as having long lost its novelty. Although Matthews (2021) approaches this through a different new materialist theoretical lens, namely actor-network theory, they nonetheless underline the alignment of the postdigital’s characteristic of blurred boundaries between the analogue and the digital with the potential of theories which seek to understand precisely what happens when such boundaries dissolve.

Against this background, I present the empirical material by first providing a more in-depth description of the participants’ profiles and how GSV was used.

Participants’ Customary Manners of Digital Navigation of Spaces and Places

The participants had a common motivation of using Google Maps as an aid in wayfinding, commonly through the smartphone application but also occasionally from a computer or tablet. GM was used for this purpose mostly as a way of ‘scouting’ ahead in order to view how specific places looked before physically travelling there. An example for engaging in scouting on GSV was when considering buying property, when participants were interested in seeing how close shops and public transportation stations were, the traffic density, or how safe the environment looked. For one participant who was a parent of a young child, scouting ahead was important in regard to knowing the availability of parking at the destination: ‘Do I need to take a pushchair or can I carry her for the distance I have to walk? How close I can park outside would determine what kind of transport I would take for her, if any.’

The participants varied in how much they used GM, from only occasionally using it while driving to using it every day even in known locations. As one participant explained, ‘I’ve gotten to the point where I use GM even for routes I know really well because I trust it more than I trust myself when navigating’. Besides travelling, the reviews for businesses and public services were a popular motivation for its use, influencing much of the decision-making of the participants for locations to visit or dine at.

Some participants responded that they never explored unknown places, while others said that they had in the past enjoyed doing so. For example, in the Covid-19 pandemic, the impossibility of travelling led to digital explorations of vacation locations such as Gran Canaria as digital substitutes. Similarly, a participant explains the following:

I really wanted to go to Orkney, an island in Scotland, but I was a poor student and you need to take a ferry or something to get there and it was quite expensive. So I used Google to go. And I went to Chornobyl a few times because I was just curious. On the Street View of Chornobyl, you sometimes have inside pictures.

Some participants explained how they also explored known locations on GSV such as old addresses or childhood neighbourhoods for their own reminiscence value but also to show them to friends and family. In the exploration part of the interviews, this theme was predominant, as most participants chose a location related to childhood such as the neighbourhood they grew up in or their school.

Even the most seasoned GM explorers did not know of the possibility of accessing the interior of certain buildings through GSV and were surprised when it would happen by accident in the interview, for example in a dentist office, a hotel room in a beach resort, or in a funeral service business.

In the words of one of the participants, GM ‘became an integrated part of life’, used when travelling (in vacation or in mundane locations), when deciding where to park or where and what to eat, planning renovations, buying propriety, reminiscing, exploring places not easily accessible, and more.

In the following section, I describe the digital explorations of familiar places as experienced through GSV. Fully acknowledging that I cannot give a voice to the non-human elements of this study, I present the empirical material in the form of vignettes (Miles and Huberman 1994; Schöneich 2001) constructed as to emphasize the agency of both humans and non-humans. I refer to vignettes, not as the qualitative method of constructing text as support material for data collection, but as in the ethnographic tradition of presenting ‘a vivid portrayal of the conduct of an event of everyday life, in which the sights and sounds of what was being said and done are described in the natural sequence of their occurrence in real time’ (Erickson 1986: 149–150). I constructed the vignettes from the material in the interview transcripts as well as my own observational notes during the GSV explorations, following the three emergent themes. Thus, they are composites of the experiences produced through the GSV explorations and meant to be an evocative account supporting the subsequent analysis. In the vignettes, I present the contents of the explorations through a first-person narrative which includes myself and the participants as exploring places together, while at the same time underlying the agential quality of the technology by avoiding passive form and presenting through active voice the way GSV affected our choices and ways of exploring the respective locations.

Exploring Familiar Places Through Google Street View

Vignette 1: Disruptions and Workarounds

After a moment of thinking, P1 decides on the place which they want to explore together: their childhood neighbourhood and the path they biked to their secondary school. It is a choice many participants make, drawn by former childhood neighbourhoods filled with memories at an age in which the world seemed larger. ‘I remember this park being so much bigger’, explains P2 trying to enter a green space located in a small Swedish neighbourhood with tidy houses painted a rich dark red.

In our journeys through digital cities and towns, we move through streets at a pace that is difficult to gauge as either faster or slower than if navigated physically, impossible to stop at precise locations in order to look at something or discuss a particular memory. As participants attempt to find an angle that would allow us to see something a little better, blurs sometimes appear on trees, street lamps, empty walls (Fig. 1), or fences, blocking our view. None but one participant takes note of them, others leaving them largely ignored. When I inquire about the strange blurs, P1 answers ‘stuff like that happens, it’s a reminder that this is a digital world’.

Fig. 1
figure 1

Same location shows a blurred wall when close, but unblurred when at a different distance

Full size image

Suddenly, the sunny weather changes into rain, and the trees have seemingly shed their foliage. ‘And now it’s autumn!’ declares a participant, as we try to understand why there are two seasons in the same street, July and October compressed into a single movement. Although the weather depicted in most explorations is sunny, often captured in the summer months, sudden changes mark a discontinuity in the walk, interrupting its flow (Fig. 2). ‘I want to show you this place where we used to play as kids!’ P1 declares, but as they navigate, the street crosses under a bridge and suddenly we are on it, over the street we were just a second ago. It takes several attempts to redirect ourselves on the correct path and only after P1 clicks directly on the map resetting the Street View to another point.

Fig. 2
figure 2

Same exploration shows autumn environment (with a blurred tree), while minutes later showing summer

Full size image

In Poland, as we explore P3’s old school building, GSV quickly transports us inside a dentist office’s waiting room, and later in a funeral office. Confused, we realize a random click led us to the business’ mapped indoors. As navigating is not as precise as expected, participants mistakenly click inside mapped buildings such as a hotel room’s bathroom, the sudden view of towels and blue-coloured walls confusing at first and comical later. The sudden shift from a known outdoors place to a completely unknown indoors one feels as an intimate intrusion.

In Spain, we walk through crowded streets as P8 tries to remember the way to the beach, stopping to locate their old window in a tall building whose details are hidden by equally tall trees. Stories about a former partner’s family living nearby emerge, and how the palm trees, a non-native species of Spain, were a subject of heated discussion among friends as they were a cost sustained by the city ‘because tourists expected it’ despite their not very aesthetically appealing appearance. In the timeline we are navigating now they look good, we both remark. Having finally found our way to the beach, we take a digital stroll alongside it, remarking that the small kiosks look identical to when P8 was last there. In the background, a beautiful mountain can be seen and P8 shares stories of past hikes there. There is no path there that Google has captured but as we come as close to it as possible, we can see small circles on the map section, which we understand after clicking to be panoramic pictures, 360° photographs which emulate street view but from a static point. Captured and uploaded by users, the panoramic photos allow us to jump from one picture to another, rotating in the spot for P8 to point at different places and telling me past memories there. We look through photos and panoramic pictures in lieu of existent captured Street View roads. Sometimes the immersiveness of it deceives us as we try to walk further only to be reminded that it is a static element, and often seeing the shadow of the person who captured it. Realizing that this feature allows us to circumvent the lack of mapped roads, we explore the mountain further.

Vignette 2: Spatiotemporal Jumps

Entering the university campus, P6 notices that everything looks just the same as they remember it from their time there, ‘but trees are so tall now’, a simple but sure signifier that time has, indeed, passed in significant and material manners.

As we exit the street where P7 has just showed me around their childhood neighbourhood in a small Swedish town, they continue to the main road explaining where they would wait for the school bus. They explain that it used to look different, with a small bus station towards the road and an unmarked place behind it in the forest area, which was dedicated to the school bus—‘it wasn’t marked but everyone knew where the school bus went from’. The image shows an undescriptive grassy area (Fig. 3), but when clicking on the function to see more dates at which the location was previously mapped, we can access it as existing in 2022, 2021, 2019, 2018, and 2009. Excited at the possibility, P7 finds an older version that shows the place exactly how they described it from their childhood memories.

Fig. 3
figure 3

Image showing on the bottom the several timelines available for exploration

Full size image

As we walk through the street where P2’s school was, they explain how right next to the building there used to be another one. ‘But it’s gone now! I don’t know if perhaps I am not remembering this correctly.’ However, when accessing its 2009 past mapped existence, it is again revealed, making memories about teachers and friends emerge.

We are in Bulgaria, and P5 is showing me the beach where they would often go as a child. However, it appears smaller to them now, changed permanently by what they believe could be coastal erosion. In the small nearby town, we navigate to the summer house of P5’s grandparents, a place where many childhood memories took shape and which are now shared as we travel its main street, stopping occasionally to talk about specific houses and the people living there. Outside P5’s summer house, the thick green fence and trees’ foliage make it difficult to see details so they change to the 2012 timeline when it is still spring. In that timeline, a red car is parked outside the house and P5 spots their grandmother as captured tending the garden. ‘The car was there because my grandpa was still alive and they were there. Me and my cousin painted this door brown. It’s a bit sad, it’s a trip down memory lane.’ We realize that by staying in the 2012 March timeline version of the town, it would allow us to see more as the foliage is not so overwhelming, thus meaning that we were taking a significant step back in time. On a house, P5 notices a paper on its gate: ‘this is a “necrolog”. It means someone died there’. The paper is not readable in the screen, but P5 identifies it as an obituary which often includes the deceased’s portrait, accomplishments, and funeral information. At the beach, we must rely on panoramic pictures shared by users which are constrained to the dates they were captured in, and we miss the option to compare different timelines.

Vignette 3: Presence and Absence

As we travel through cities and towns filled with memories, participants often point to buildings or spaces that look different than how they remember them. A building has been torn down, an extension has been built to a neighbour’s home, and a different colour or decorations adorn a childhood home now owned by others. It is an experience described as eerie, ‘like uncanny valley. I know it’s the same house but it looks as if it is not real somehow’. One street reveals that, depending on the angle at which we rotate to see a building, it is showing it standing in 2022, but also being torn down in 2023.

P6 is showing me their former university campus, and as we pass buildings, students, cars, and bikes, something is missing from the imagery. Geese, an annoyance specific to that campus, are missing. With no natural predator and competing for resources, the birds became territorial and violent, and P6 tells me about the specific ways in which they changed how the campus had to be navigated, complete with full strategies for distracting the birds in order to enter and exit certain buildings. Their absence in GSV is overwhelming, and we are soon on a hunt of sorts for locating the geese, navigating on streets and small alleys to look for any trace of them, leaving us to wonder if the university had found a solution for the troublesome academic birds.

Participants point at undescriptive buildings which spark intense memories: a funeral home where a parent’s funeral was once held, a green area where they played as children, a restaurant where one worked for the first time. P7 points out at an almost invisible green net connecting two sides of a fence meant to stop a dog escaping to the road. The net is a small detail, but it is a reminder of a pet who is no longer alive and it becomes precious that way. Excited to show me a house they used to live in, P4 is disappointed to find it completely blurred and hidden from view. We understand that the current owners probably requested a blur on GSV but the home still feels like it somehow belongs to P4, who is both frustrated and disappointed that they cannot see it anymore. It is present, but at the same time hidden and made invisible.

People appear on the street with blurred faces, and their bodies sometimes turned towards the camera as they spot the Google car. Sometimes the Google car itself is visible as a shadow on the ground, as well as shadows of users who captured and uploaded panoramic pictures (Fig. 4). On several occasions, participants recognize individuals despite the face blurs: a grandmother, a neighbour, or a store keeper. At other times, the presence of familiar objects such as cars, trees, gates, or windows evokes strong emotions: ‘I know it looks like a completely normal window to you, but to me it almost jumps from the screen. It is my window from my time there.’

Fig. 4
figure 4

User uploaded panoramic pictures inadvertently including the author’s shadow

Full size image

Google Street View as More-Than-Digital

Much like the quote framing the introduction to this paper, the place experienced in the digital explorations is just the same as the physical one, while at the same time being profoundly different with its own rules, aesthetics, and temporal logics which only make sense there. The explored digital places match the memories of participants who navigate it with ease, and yet still manage to surprise.

Unexpected disruptions such as blurs in seemingly random places were at times a source of annoyance as they blocked the view, but also perceived as a normalcy in the digital environment which was expected to include imperfections and glitches. The glitch, irregularities caused accidently in digital media, is an important ingredient of the postdigital as it is conceptualized as a manifestation of the digitally mediated interactions, at times elevated to the level of art and being part of an aesthetic of failure. The glitch present in the unintended blurs signals to the effect of legislation requiring Google to implement such steps in order to protect privacy, but also of automated algorithms which do not always succeed at placing the blurs correctly. Furthermore, the blurs function within a postdigital turn, as participants interpret them as signs that this is a digital environment which is prone to errors, constructing the blurs as a glitch which is, as Mirocha (2015: 62) notes, ‘unveiling the degree of the software’s influence on the aesthetics of the digital image’. The blurs, integrated by Google in 2008, were implemented as a solution to privacy concerns and emerging legislations (Shankland 2008). However, as Flores and Belongie (2010) argued, users can easily identify known individuals despite the blurs; indeed, participants had no issues identifying relatives and neighbours captured in GSV by virtue of other identifying features. Thus, rather than serving as an instrument for protecting the privacy of individuals appearing in GSV, the blurs attracted more attention at times, resulting from intra-actions between the physical space captured, its digital representation, and the explorations. In an agential realist conceptualization, it is important to note that matter is not necessarily understood as physicality (Barad 2007: 151) and creates effects in participants through its surprising presence or unexpected absence. Instead, it emerges as agentic, as in the case where the absence of geese whose presence was expected in the university campus led to a course of exploration dedicated to finding them in GSV, affecting how and what we explored. In this regard, Barad (2003: 803) is clear: matter matters, and it is important to understand how.

The human and non-human intra-actions forming the digital explorations do not only emerge in emotional responses or changes in the routes. Physical changes are mapped and remarked by participants, such as the notice that a beach seemed smaller in the digital explorations than how it was remembered, speculating upon the climate change’s effects on the landscape. Further inquiring upon this specific aspect emerging in the exploration, I found evidence that the location visited is, indeed, one of the most affected cliff and coastal erosion area in Bulgaria (Stancheva et al. 2021), validating the participant’s remark during the interview.

Even though participants wanting to explore locations such as mountain paths or beaches believed that it would not be possible as the assumption was that for the GSV to work, there needs to be a road which had been mapped by Google, the technology allowed for workarounds. When not mapped, participants relied on panoramic views which were captured by other users. The combination of the technology, the memory of a place which was now wanted to be accessed again, the past humans who captured the views and uploaded them all intra-acted in the creation of the workaround. In such explorations, this intra-action was sometimes a visible one as we could often see the shadow of the person who had captured it on the ground, including them by virtue of this digital trace in the exploration and in this study.

There is no universal essence of GSV, but what emerges in the empiric material is a becoming of it—an experience of navigating place which is constantly being made and re-made through intra-active technologies, infrastructures, legislations, memory, weather, climate, personal histories, and more. Bergstedt (2021: 9) discusses the ontology of becoming as a way of understanding emergent phenomena, arguing for the importance of unexpected moments and events which challenge normative assumptions, allowing for an articulation of how meaning-making is produced. The tensions found in this study are aplenty, for example in how the presence and absence of meaningful elements, such as objects and buildings, come as a surprise which is illustrative of their agentic power. As participants describe familiar homes, windows, or past play areas, they describe them as looking different than the rest, as more familiar than anything surrounding them. Bennett (2010: 4) explains this phenomenon as non-human/material objects exhibiting a ‘thing-power’, commanding attention, issuing calls, and provoking affects. An illustrative example is the Bulgarian obituary (‘necrolog’), an object of cultural meaning (Karaboeva 2011) which beacons to the participant familiar with its cultural context and who can correctly decode it. Without the input of the participant, the object would appear to be a simple posted note; furthermore, without having switched to the respective timeline, it would have been completely missed. Thus, its existence and emergent discussion surrounding it in the exploration are made possible due to intra-active elements in which temporal dynamics are central.

The function allowing the exploration of different points in time of the same place allowed for its dynamic exploration breaking the rules of linear time. As Barad notes, spacetimemattering are forces which, through the intra-actions of humans and non-humans, are grounded in an entanglement of space, time, and matter (Barad 2007). The function exercised an agentic capability in which it not only allowed for more exploration, but also in different ways. Participants used it to select timelines which, when mapped in seasons when foliage was not existent, would allow more visibility and therefore allowing several participants to see more details. Being able to navigate different timelines reconsolidated memories or allowed for the support of visuals when telling stories, changing the way the exploration was conducted.

The possibilities of exploration of place during the digital go-along interviews were also limited to what space, time, and matter could allow. On a most basic level, the explorations were confined to my instructions of how to explore and the participant’s interests and memories which consolidated their connections to the respective place. Furthermore, limits were imposed through non-human elements such as technology limitations, existent infrastructure, GSV interface, the quality of the imagery, Internet connection strength, legislation dictating what and how content could be captured, and seasons dictating the visibility of details (less visibility in the summer months when foliage was blocking much of the view). It is, then, important to consider that the spacetimemattering forces allow both for possible explorations to unfold, while at the same time keeping them confined to their limitations. For example, in a different space such one where borders are disputed, the place could be discussed with a higher political content; in a different time, the interface could allow for different interactions; and a different configuration of participants might find different details worthwhile of exploring.

Another important point is that users navigate not only what is mapped in GM, but also depending on how it is mapped. As Ochigame and Ye (2021) note, Google searches are far from neutral representations of spaces, but come to represent geopolitical regimes, examples including controversies such as Kosovo appearing as part of Serbia in Apple Maps (Euronews 2020), or when Israel and Palestine’s names were missing from the China’s Baidu Maps (McCarthy 2023). Google Maps itself has been criticized for the way it has chosen to represent disputed borders differently depending where in the world the users access it (Ochigame and Ye 2021). Such issues move past cartographies and are more symptomatic of an Internet where borders are drawn around information and where more pluralistic solutions are needed (Ochigame and Ye 2021).

Google Maps Street View emerges in the context of this study not as a simple navigational tool, or a repository of images. Unlike static depictions of place, the locations explored through GSV are not merely encountered through a device and its functions, but produced through the intra-actions of human and non-human actors. This becoming of a place experienced digitally is, thus, performative, produced through spacetimemattering agential forces specific to the person navigating it. Through this perspective, and in answering the research question on how familiar places are revisited and, in this process, reconfigured in a digital environment, I argue that they are produced by human and non-human intra-actions through which GSV emerges as more-than-digital.

In the context of this study of GSV, these spaces could be articulated as postdigital. However, scholars such as Gourlay (2023) or Klausner (2022) indicate shortcomings of the concept especially in relation to the ‘post’ prefix which assumes a clear delimitation between a before and after state of digitalisation; instead, they propose the concept of more-than-digital which assumes a stance more in line with understanding digital-related phenomena through a relational ontology.

A more-than-digital (Klausner 2022) understanding of GSV considers the performative aspects of navigating familiar places, focusing on their tensions and disruptions emerging from the intra-actions of humans, non-humans, material, social, digital, or physical environments. The emergent experiences were not confined to the human or technology aspects only, but in their togetherness; in a postdigital conceptualization of the GSV, it would be expected that users saw the tool as an integral part of their lives, in the eventual disenchantment with the digital repurposed it, following a definition proposed by Cramer (2015). However, this perspective falls short in relation to the empirical material, as what emerges is an equal agentic force of both the users of GSV and the technology itself which allows for workarounds, different spatiotemporal engagements, or affects. Thus, in the same manners through which similar concepts of more-than-human would argue that the use of GSV extends past the human body, a more-than-digital label of GSV applies as the places exploration in this study extends past the digital.

The connections between the postdigital, more-than-digital, and meaning-making have been previously discussed by Gourlay (2024) who conceptualizes writing online, more specifically an e-mail, as a more-than-digital meaning-making because of the myriad of elements coming into play in such a seemingly simple yet rather complex act. Similarly, the more-than-digital exploration of known place in GSV is an act through which meaning is ascribed and derived to and from places through the coming together of memories, technology, past histories, education, motherhood, infrastructure, and much more including the very given context of the present study.

Conclusion

This study aimed to understand how familiar place is revisited digitally through the use of the popular Google Maps Street View. Through digital go-along interviews, participants were invited to choose a place of their liking and guide a digital walk in Google Street View. The experience of such navigations emerged as complex through temporally non-linear intra-actions of non-human and human actors. By applying an agential realist understanding of the digital place explored in Google Street View, the place was conceptualized in a state of becoming: it emerged through the mutual constitutions of humans and non-humans (organic or inorganic) in an assemblage which I articulate as more-than-digital. Thus, meaning-making emerges in digital explorations through the coming together of the respective place as existent in the memory of the participants, in its physical materiality, and in its digital form.

The paper contributes through an agential realist understanding of how Google Maps emerges as a more-than-digital tool which can reconfigure the exploration of familiar places in their digital representations. This is not only a theoretical contribution, but also a practical one as the agential realist perspective applied to the exploration of digital place is relevant to the future design of similar technology, the legislation dictating what can be captured digitally, and the ethical implications of what constitutes as public information in such cartographies. Although agential realism is the theoretical tool guiding the analysis of the present paper, similar relational theories can serve well in future works in which different elements, not always obvious at first, can be made visible and understood in how they affect meaning ascribed to digital environments.

The experiences presented in this study are specific to the case of exploring known places. As spacetimemattering forces emerge, they do so because there is an existent memory of the place as experienced in its physicality by participants. By selecting older available timelines in the Google Street View, this can refresh or reassure existent memories and past histories existent in relation to the respective place. As navigating unknown places lacks this aspect, this is a specific characteristic of digital navigation in Google Street View in familiar places. Future studies, however, could aim to uncover how unknown spaces and/or places are experienced digitally. Furthermore, comparative studies could explore differences and similarities between spaces and places explored physically and digitally.