Great question, Sonya! This question immediately made me think of apps like Yelp, TripAdvisor, and UrbanSpoon. Users create reviews about different attraction in a city, which then gives each attraction a rating, generally on a 5 star rating scale. 

TripAdvisor also does a ranking of the best cities to visit. This means that the users have the ability to write how a city is viewed by others, especially for those who are using these types of apps to base their decisions on for traveling. In this sense, these apps allow individuals to write cities in ways that they would have never even been considered before. The ranking of these cities on these apps also puts cities in a different light that was never considered before, first time visitors to everyday locals of the city have the ability to RANK the city. Visitors reading these cities will also have a different perspective that they may not have even considered before. I also feel that some reviews online are pretty biased, in both  good and bad rankings. These biased reviews could really sway people's decisions and that doesn't seem completely honest. I know that in Hawaii, there are a couple tour companies that pay people (some are employees, others they recruit on sites like Craigslist, etc.) to write reviews about tours they haven't even been on. This really isn't fair to me and is not ethical, it's actual become a legal issue that TripAdvisor is looking into. YIKES! 

Sonya, excellent way to start out this week's discussion! I'll be talking about apps like these in class tomorrow! 

Another perspective to consider is the ways in which cities are read and written/rewritten as maps; a traditional map shows roads and maybe some landmarks, like city hall, or the police station, or hospitals, but people generally were left to their own experiences when trying to figure out a new place, with only the most rudimentary directional orientation provided, to complement their sensory information. With locative-based services, though, suddenly anyone can leave behind traces or whispers that inscribe new kinds of discourse onto our maps in very durable and persuasive-looking forms, and users can join those conversations, participating or simply lurking and gathering information.

Mari raises an interesting accompanying point, which is based in ethics but also could be considered a question about information reliability, about trustworthiness of this inscription. On a traditional map, you probably would be really surprised to find an error. On the LBS maps, of information provided by people whom you have no sense of their trustworthiness, the inscription is a bit more sketchy, almost like graffiti.

I have been snookered more than once by unreliable LBS information, sometimes when I thought something was going to be good (like a restaurant), and it was terrible. And other times, I think I was scared away by what I read, only to learn later, from trusted sources, that the information was faulty. This dynamic brings ethos into the LBS discussion.

I think Instagram is also a good way to look at how users are changing the way some local community business and new locations are being advertised. People are entice with new, fun, and cool locations to go to whether it be a new hiking trail and food place by looking at pictures on their Instagram feeds. The geolocation on the app is a cool way for people interested in a specific place to see your photos by clicking a location you can see a whole collection of photos tagged from that specific location. 

I think apps help you learn from other people on where you should go and where you shouldn't. And the way that this changes your view of the city is because a lot of the time, you are not the one discovering the place for yourself. For example, most people want to check out a restaurant via Yelp. And generally, people look for pictures of food or other reviews on the food, prices, atmosphere, and location. If someone writes that a certain dish was not that great, then when you go to that place, you are likely not to try that dish On the other hand, if you had not read that post, then you may have gone to the location and ordered that dish and actually thought it was delicious. In a lot of ways, I think apps help you to save time of not having to explore the place yourself or it also shortens the distance it takes to get to that location. I think there are pros and cons to using apps but in our high-paced world, I think it helps to make things more efficient.