Posts tagged public spheres

New Book: Media, Place and Mobility - a new understanding of media uses as place-making practices in everyday living

With its powerful advocacy of a “non-media-centric” approach, this book offers a new understanding of media uses as place-making practices in everyday living. Drawing primarily on phenomenological perspectives, Shaun Moores focuses on the ways in which people inhabit physical and media environments, and he explores the bodily and technologically mediated mobilities that are involved in this activity of dwelling. His discussion includes many specific examples of mobility, from the manipulation of remote-control devices to the movements of walking and driving in the city or of getting around in online social spaces.

Author: Shaun Moores, Professor of Media and Communications at the University of Sunderland.

Published by Palgrave Macmillan: http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?pid=389674

CFP: New Media and the Public Sphere, (Nov 8-9, Copenhagen)

In the context of media transformation, this event brings together scholars and researchers in the fields of media, ICT, and political science, to reflect and discuss how we can conceptualize and develop empirically the public sphere of the new media-driven society.

Abstracts due July 1, 2012. Conference Nov 8-9, 2012, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Read full CFP here: http://cemes.ku.dk/newmedia/dokument/

Topics

  • Democracy and the online public sphere;
  • Cultural production in the digital age;
  • Identity in the virtual sphere;
  • Net neutrality and public participation.

Call for Papers: New interaction orders, New mobile publics? (due Feb 24, 2012)

We invite researchers, designers, technology developers, architects, urban planners, artists and urban communities to submit contributions that explore aspects of new and old ‘behaviour in public spaces’.

Abstracts due Feb 24, 2012. Workshop 13-14 April 2012 at Lancaster University, UK.

Introduction
Equipped with mobile technologies, people connect in ways that were unthinkable when Goffman wrote Behaviour in public spaces (1963) and William Whyte explored The social life of small urban spaces (1980). The momentous Arab Spring events, London riots and ‘2011 Occupy’ demonstrations are extreme examples that pose old questions about the ‘interaction order’ and its relation to social order and the public sphere in new ways.

On the one hand, mobile connectivity enables micro-coordination of increasingly mobile everyday lives, new modulations of co-presence, absent presence and present absence, and transformations of socio-material practices of availability, obligation, intimacy and strangerhood in public. Some of the social innovations involved also shape emergent new practices of mobilising people in protests and crises.

Arguably new, agile, local and globally networked communities and ‘mobile publics’ are forming. On the other, worries over a loss of civility, community, privacy, and new forms of surveillance enabled by the ever closer intermeshing of digital technology and everyday ‘movement-spaces’ fuel fears over an erosion of civil liberties and ‘capital P’ politics.

Goffman’s insistence that ‘the interaction order’ is the performative locus of such utopian and dystopian transformations and his and Whyte’s attention to detail are the motivation for this two-day interdisciplinary workshop. We would like to bring micro and macro, theory and empirical research, everyday lived practice, design, policy and politics together through collaborative analysis of multi-sited, mobile, ethnographic or otherwise qualitative studies of behaviour in today’s public spaces, zeitdiagnostic theory and avantgarde design.

We invite researchers, designers, technology developers, architects, urban planners, artists and urban communities to submit contributions that explore aspects of new and old ‘behaviour in public spaces’, including (but not limited to):

  • the ‘osmotic’ relationship between physical and virtual spaces, connectivity and mobility the social life of such spaces
  • emergent principles and practices of the 21st Century interaction order
  • augmented embodied and sensory phenomenology, material agency
  • links between the interaction order, public engagement, public space
  • tensions between mobile informationalized everyday lives and movement-spaces and principles of privacy and civil liberty, security, splintering and sorting of ‘access’
  • examples, practices and impacts of improvised communities and mobile publics, and collective intelligence
  • examples and methods of collaborative, experimental, radically careful and carefully radical design of new practices, technologies, forms of public engagement and spaces
  • reflections on the links between theory, empirical studies, design and politics in the broadest sense

Please send a 300 word abstract to p.feron(at)lancaster.ac.uk by 24th February 2012. Notification of Acceptance 9th March 2012.

There is a small amount of financial support available for travel. If funds are an obstruction, please contact p.feron(at)lancaster.ac.uk

Full program: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/events/new_interaction_order/

Aca-articles: Digital Creativity - Mobile Ubiquity in Public and Private Spaces

This issue of Digital Creativity entitled Mobile Ubiquity in Public and Private Spaces seeks to examine cultural formations, practices, processes and movements related to the presence and deployment of ubiquitous information in the lived spaces and recesses of human culture today.

This issue includes: (see all articles here)

  • Towards a theory of pervasive ludology: reflections on gameplay, rules, and space (Bo Kampmann Walther)
  • Ubiquitous apps: politics of openness in global mobile cultures (Gerard Goggin)
  • Urban fictions: a critical reflection on locative art and performative geographies (Petra Gemeinboeck & Rob Saunders)
  • Mobile innovation: designing and evaluating situated simulations (Gunnar Liestøl, Terje Rasmussen & Tomas Stenarson)
  • Good grief: the role of social mobile media in the 3.11 earthquake disaster in Japan (Larissa Hjorth & Kyoung-Hwa Yonnie Kim)
  • Provoking the city—touch installations for urban space (Heidi Tikka, Sandra Viña, Giulio Jacucci & Teemu Korpilahti)

Excerpt from the introduction by Lily Díaza & Ulrik Ekman.

It has been more than fifteen years since Mark Weiser’s and his Xerox Parc colleagues’ seminal and trans-disciplinary work on a vision for a ‘calm’ and human-centred kind of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) for the twenty-first century. Although its ongoing realisation is in a number of respects quite different from the original vision, that vision is now considerably more of an actual fact.

Its very realisation, as well as the differences, are due in part to interim economic and technical advances, such as affordable, multifaceted microscale sensors and actuators and an expansion of decentralised networking capacities via new Internet protocol practices for the billions of computational entities worldwide, thus paving the way for an adequate ubicomp infrastructure and an actual Internet of Things. Partly, ubicomp has become real in new and different ways because a miniaturisation of components and a global cultural acceptance in practice have permitted mobile wireless devices (such as mobile phones, iPods and other MP3 players (Bull 2007), PDAs and Blackberrys, iPads, notebooks) to achieve an unprecedented distributed pervasiveness—outnumbering humans globally, perhaps only superseded technically by embedded computational units.

This special issue emerges from activities instantiated through ‘The Culture of Ubiquitous Information’, a Nordic Research Network devoted to the analysis and evaluation of ubiquitous computing as a contemporary technocultural development. As suggested by the title (‘Mobile Ubiquity in Public and Private Spaces’), this issue seeks to examine cultural formations, practices, processes and movements related to the presence and deployment of ubiquitous information in the lived spaces and recesses of human culture today. Some of the articles included are the result of the workshop held in Helsinki (January 2011) and an open call posted by the research network.

During the workshop, academics, artists, designers and media theorists came together to discuss topics such as: What is the character, place and reach of the new interfaces and types of interaction design for ubicomp? How do social mobile media platforms mediate proximity and intimacy? What do contextualisation and personalisation mean considering technical contextawareness and individuals’ adoption of mobile devices? What is the conceptualisation of agency for creative individuals in a ubicomp culture, and how is this agency transformed through collaborative innovative work (Hemment 2006, Townsend 2006, Tuters and Varnelis 2006)? What different worlds now come together in the practices of art and design, especially with regard to the new digital instruments? How do the multiple dimensions of human experience, such as identity, affect and emotion, sensation, perception, and conscious expression and interpretation, find an outlet in the mobile social experience?

See all articles in this issue of Digital Creativity here.