Adam Greenfield: Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing (2006)

Ubiquitous computing–almost imperceptible, but everywhere around us–is rapidly becoming a reality. How will it change us? how can we shape its emergence?

Smart buildings, smart furniture, smart clothing… even smart bathtubs. networked street signs and self-describing soda cans. Gestural interfaces like those seen in Minority Report. The RFID tags now embedded in everything from credit cards to the family pet.

All of these are facets of the ubiquitous computing author Adam Greenfield calls “everyware.” In a series of brief, thoughtful meditations, Greenfield explains how everyware is already reshaping our lives, transforming our understanding of the cities we live in, the communities we belong to–and the way we see ourselves.

Publisher New Riders, 2006
Voices That Matter series
ISBN 0321384016, 9780321384010
267 pages

publisher
google books

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Richard Coyne: The Tuning of Place: Sociable Spaces and Pervasive Digital Media (2010)

How do pervasive digital devices—smartphones, iPods, GPS navigation systems, and cameras, among others—influence the way we use spaces? In The Tuning of Place, Richard Coyne argues that these ubiquitous devices and the networks that support them become the means of making incremental adjustments within spaces—of tuning place. Pervasive media help us formulate a sense of place, writes Coyne, through their capacity to introduce small changes, in the same way that tuning a musical instrument invokes the subtle process of recalibration. Places are inhabited spaces, populated by people, their concerns, memories, stories, conversations, encounters, and artifacts. The tuning of place—whereby people use their devices in their interactions with one another—is also a tuning of social relations.

The range of ubiquity is vast—from the familiar phones and handheld devices through RFID tags, smart badges, dynamic signage, microprocessors in cars and kitchen appliances, wearable computing, and prosthetics, to devices still in development. Rather than catalog achievements and predictions, Coyne offers a theoretical framework for discussing pervasive media that can inform developers, designers, and users as they contemplate interventions into the environment. Processes of tuning can lead to consideration of themes highly relevant to pervasive computing: intervention, calibration, wedges, habits, rhythm, tags, taps, tactics, thresholds, aggregation, noise, and interference.

Publisher MIT Press, 2010
ISBN 0262013916, 9780262013918
344 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2013-2-6)

Nigel Thrift: Knowing Capitalism (2005)

Capitalism is well known for producing a form of existence where `everything solid melts into air’. But what happens when capitalism develops theories about itself? Are we moving into a condition in which capitalism can be said to possess a brain?

These questions are pursued in this sparkling and thought-provoking book. Thrift looks at what he calls “the cultural circuit of capitalism,” the mechanism for generating new theories of capitalism. The book traces the rise of this circuit back to the 1960s when a series of institutions locked together to interrogate capitalism, to the present day, when these institutions are moving out to the Pacific basin and beyond. What have these theories produced? How have they been implicated in the speculative bubbles that characterized the late twentieth century? What part have they played in developing our understanding of human relations?

Building on an inter-disciplinary approach which embraces the core social sciences, Thrift outlines an exciting new theory for understanding capitalism. His book is of interest to readers in Geography, Social Theory, Antrhopology and Cultural Economics.

Publisher SAGE Publications, 2005
Published in association with Theory, Culture & Society
Theory, culture & society
ISBN 141290059X, 9781412900591
Length 256 pages

publisher
google books

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