Richard Coyne: The Tuning of Place: Sociable Spaces and Pervasive Digital Media (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · culture jamming, facebook, gps, locative media, mobile technology, networks, pervasive media, rfid, ubiquitous computing, wireless networks
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
PDF (updated on 2013-2-6)
Comment (0)Kazys Varnelis (ed.): Networked Publics (2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · blogging, capitalism, filesharing, information economy, internet, internet of things, locative media, mass media, media ecology, network culture, network society, networks, p2p, rfid, viral marketing, web 2.0, youtube
Digital media and network technologies are now part of everyday life. The Internet has become the backbone of communication, commerce, and media; the ubiquitous mobile phone connects us with others as it removes us from any stable sense of location. Networked Publics examines the ways that the social and cultural shifts created by these technologies have transformed our relationships to (and definitions of) place, culture, politics, and infrastructure.
Four chapters—each by an interdisciplinary team of scholars using collaborative software—provide a synoptic overview along with illustrative case studies. The chapter on place describes how digital networks enable us to be present in physical and networked places simultaneously (on the phone while on the road; on the Web while at a café)—often at the expense of non-digital commitments. The chapter on culture explores the growth of amateur-produced and -remixed content online and the impact of these practices on the music, anime, advertising, and news industries. The chapter on politics examines the new networked modes of bottom-up political expression and mobilization, and the difficulty in channeling online political discourse into productive political deliberation. And finally, the chapter on infrastructure notes the tension between openness and control in the flow of information, as seen in the current controversy over net neutrality. An introduction by anthropologist Mizuko Ito and a conclusion by architecture theorist Kazys Varnelis frame the chapters, giving overviews of the radical nature of these transformations.
Contributors: Walter Baer, François Bar, Anne Friedberg, Shahram Ghandeharizadeh, Mizuko Ito, Mark E. Kann, Merlyna Lim, Fernando Ordonez, Todd Richmond, Adrienne Russell, Marc Tuters, Kazys Varnelis.
Publisher MIT Press, 2008
ISBN 0262220857, 9780262220859
176 pages
author (includes a research blog and lecture videos)
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PDF (updated on 2012-8-7)
Comment (0)Byron Hawk, David M. Rieder, Ollie O. Oviedo (eds.): Small Tech: The Culture of Digital Tools (2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · augmented reality, blogging, cyberculture, gadgets, google, hypertext, industry, interface, locative media, media ecology, mobile technology, peer production, posthumanism, simulation, sousveillance, technology, telematics, virtual reality, wearable computing, youtube
Experts examine the ways digital tools affect social and cultural experience.
The essays in Small Tech investigate the cultural impact of digital tools and provide fresh perspectives on mobile technologies such as iPods, digital cameras, and PDAs and software functions like cut, copy, and paste and WYSIWYG. Together they advance new thinking about digital environments.
Contributors: Wendy Warren Austin, Jim Bizzocchi, Collin Gifford Brooke, Paul Cesarini, Veronique Chance, Johanna Drucker, Jenny Edbauer, Robert A. Emmons Jr., Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Richard Kahn, Douglas Kellner, Karla Saari Kitalong, Steve Mann, Lev Manovich, Adrian Miles, Jason Nolan, Julian Oliver, Mark Paterson, Isabel Pedersen, Michael Pennell, Joanna Castner Post, Teri Rueb, James J. Sosnoski, Lance Strate, Jason Swarts, Barry Wellman, Sean D. Williams, Jeremy Yuille.
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2008
ISBN 0816649782, 9780816649785
236 pages
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PDF (updated on 2012-7-29)
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