Situating Google’s Alphabet

This chapter considers Google's 2015 decision to rename itself as Alphabet, Inc. in the context of mid-to-late twentieth century media studies claims regarding the western alphabet's phoneticism as well as subsequent critiques of these positions as inherently colonial. Beginning with Marshall McLuhan and Vilém Flusser's writings, the chapter asks the question of what it means for the world’s largest actor in the domain of spatial data, not to mention one of the world’s largest multi-national corporations, to lay claim to, and indeed entangle its very identity with, the concept of alphabet. Building on this, it also speculates more broadly on relationships in the development of location as a medium and the role of situatedness in our understanding of media.