Kods betydelse för människors rörelse i offentliga rum

Sammanfattning: This study takes recent philosophical and theoretical developments in the field of virtualgeographies into consideration. It seeks to apply these developments throughethnographic research centring on if and how code can influence human movement inpublic spaces. The main purpose is thus to answer the following question: if and howcan code influence human movement in public spaces? The study was conducted inKalmar city in Sweden and focused on the augmented reality game Pokémon GO to tryand determine code’s influence on human movement. The reason for picking PokémonGO as an object of study was because of its popularity after its release in summer 2016.Many people has thus experienced Pokémon GO and it’s conceivable that just as manymay have experienced the same kind of control exerted by the game, if it exerts any atall. A systematic literature search was conducted to find previous research but fewresults were found. Research that was included mainly presented theoreticaldevelopments which ended up forming the basis for the study’s theoretical key terms.The key terms were code, software, virtual geographies, transduction and technicity.The methods used to conduct the study were of qualitative tradition and ethnographic inpractice. Introspection and self-observation were the specific methods used. Thus thestudy consists of only one informant. Each game session took place in inner-city areasof Kalmar during which field-notes were kept in order to write a more detailed researchdiary. The research diary constituted the material later analysed. This analysis yieldedfour categories which were themselves analysed through theoretical key terms. Thisresulted in two conclusions: that code can can control human movement, thoughconditionally, and that code creates “problems”, which modify space, that only exists inrelation to the code.