Online maps and minorities: Geotagging Thailand’s Muslims

This article examines whether participatory media such as Flickr, with its seemingly unfettered tools for mapping citizen-created photographs, offers a means for a more comprehensive representation of minorities in a non-Western country. Assessment of geotags – markers designating longitude and latitude on an online map – associated with photographs of Thailand’s Muslims suggests that by replicating common stereotypes, user-generated content may be limiting rather than opening up discourses about minorities and that citizen participation via new media tools is more constrained and less free than commonly believed.