Mobile and Wireless Technologies

Canberra.
We’ve reached the last session of Digital Humanities Australasia 2012, and it’s the one I’m in as well. But we start with Mark Coté, whose interest is especially in smart phones. He begins by asking whether long-term humanists may sometimes feel as overrun by the digital humanities as inner-city dwellers may now feel by smart phone-wielding users.

Nonetheless, the digital humanities are an exciting development, and there’s now a need for some conceptual inquiries into the digital humanities. One area for this is the relationship between the human and technology, which must question the nature of the human …

Seattle.
Finally, we move on to the fabulous Steve Jones and his colleague Rich Wolf to finish this session (and day) at AoIR 2011. Steve notes the degree to which the mobile phone has become a coterminal device in our presence. Through a student project, Steve and Rich led the development of an app for observing and understanding the scaffolding of privacy, security, surveillance and connectiveness. The app provided a location-based as well as social network service for students on the University of Illinois-Chicago campus.

Rich says that this was using a REST-based architecture, in which clients request representations …

Seattle.
The next speaker in this bumper session at AoIR 2011 is Andrea Guzman, who’s interested in the media framing of mobile phones. She has worked through a range of media texts from the New York Times and the Washington Post in the years 2006 and 2010 which discuss such issues, focussing especially on articles which mention mobile phones in their lead paragraphs.

Where mobile phone uses by adults are discussed in such articles, they are framed most of all as a necessary tool for coordinating work, coordinating life activities, and living in modern society. They are portrayed as especially …

Seattle.
The next speaker in this AoIR 2011 session is Miao Feng, who asks about the privacy consequences of a site like Foursquare? Location-based services are nothing new, and address a local mass audience; what needs to be examined is how technology is diffused, what social change it promotes, and how it is culturally and socially negotiated.

Perceptions of personal computers since the 1980s were largely positive; such computers came to our houses as inevitable improvements to our lives. Perceptions of the Net turned from the overwhelmingly positive to a more speculative perspective; with location-based services, privacy concerns were …

Seattle.
The next speaker at AoIR 2011 is Adriane Stoner, whose focus is on the historical trajectory of mobile media development. There are three ideological themes which can be observed in the rise of all new media, as James Carey argued: capitalism, popular imagery, and universalism.

New media were often accompanied by the rise of a powerful capitalism – new media is economically powerful, and existing economic systems usually need to be reconstructed as a result of their emergency, as powerful new monopolies are naturalised. Popular imagery associated with new media points to the notion of the electronic sublime – …

Seattle.
The next speaker at AoIR 2011 is Meghan Grosse. She begins by pointing out how mobile devices have changed how we function in public and private spaces – not least also with the rise of apps, which have enabled us to personalise our mobile experience. The road here has been long; mobile phones have gradually added functionality, and the explosion in the range of apps has been a recent development which now no longer relies on hardware changes, but software development.

With the emergence of these tools also came the presumption that people should take advantage of these. These …