Local Treasures: Geocaching across America (Center for American Places - Center Books on American Places) - Hardcover

Margot Anne Kelley

3.93

14 ratings by Goodreads

9781930066366: Local Treasures: Geocaching across America (Center for American Places - Center Books on American Places)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1930066368 ISBN 13: 9781930066366

Publisher: Center for American Places, 2006

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In the spring of 2000, a man in Oregon hid a box of toys in the woods, posted the geographic coordinates of its location on a Web site, and issued a challenge for others to find it. People used their GPS receivers to find his treasure, and a new game was born. Today over a million people worldwide participate in geocaching, hiding stashes of trinkets in a variety of locations—from a grove of trees to a cliff ledge to the depths of a riverbed—and then inviting others to find them, leave a note, and swap a treasure of their own. In Local Treasures Margot Anne Kelley offers one of the first books on "geocaching," exploring what compels ordinary people across the world to take part in these extraordinary treasure hunts.

Kelley traveled throughout the U.S. to chronicle the sites and stories of geocaching adventures, from the rocky coasts of Maine to the deserts surrounding Las Vegas to the starting point of the Mason-Dixon Line. Each striking, full-color photograph exposes a vision of America quite unlike that presented in a traditional guidebook: truly off the beaten path, these are non-idealized landscapes, often places with special meaning for the players alone. Kelley's accompanying writings explore the world of geocaching communities, their rare ability to integrate new technologies with the natural world, and their complex and often ambivalent relationships to the surveillance technologies that sustain the game. In this era when people are increasingly disconnected from the land that surrounds them, geocaching offers an unusual and technologically savvy vision for the future. Kelley's text is a fascinating examination of a new and creative diversion emerging from the intersection of the virtual world with the real.

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About the Author:

Margot Anne Kelley is a photographer and writer who teaches at Bentley College. She edited Gloria Naylor's Early Novels, and her writings have appeared in Antipodas, African American Review, Modern Drama, and many anthologies including Ethnicity and the American Short Story and American Women Short Story Writers.

Review:

“A fascinating introduction to a true treasure hunt for the twenty-first century—the GPS-enabled game of geocaching. By way of her remarkable photographs and poetic descriptions, Margot Kelley takes us along for an aesthetic hike rich with cross-disciplinary associations. In words and images, Kelley touches on everything from history to politics to philosophy, allowing us to experience this cultural phenomenon while at the same time re-experiencing our own environment. An adventure from coast to coast and cover to cover, this book raises a whole host of issues revolving around the land and landscape.”

(Leslie K. Brown, Curator, Photographic Resource Center at Boston University 2005-01-01)

"What Margot Anne Kelley finds is how this oddly compelling amalgamation of technology and nature provides fresh insight into the 'places that people . . . treasure enough to share freely.'" (Paul Rauber Sierra Magazine 2007-03-01)

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