The End of Cyberspace

Anthony Townsend on presence

My colleague Anthony Townsend recently gave a talk in Newcastle about mobility and presence:

[W]hat I want to talk about is not the future of mobility but rather, the future of presence. By “presence” what I mean, is that if movement or travel is a means - then presence is the end. And so I want to broaden the discussion of mobility to include technologies and practices of telecommunication - ways of being "present" at remote locations....

I keep looking at the map of my social network on Dopplr, a site that lets people share trips, and realizing that young people are defining their very identity through mobility, and network-enhanced and augmented mobility. We need to appreciate just how deeply embedded this high degree of personal mobility has become in our lives, and plan for lots of it rather than pretending we can socially engineer ourselves to stop. This is not just my group here of globe-trotting hipsters, its also the millions of Britons who'll holiday in Spain and Greece this year.

Technorati Tags: mobility, place/space, travel

Another Internet-meets-tourism sign

via flickr

Technorati Tags: Budapest, end of cyberspace, Hungary, travel

Cyberspace as place

A sign for an Internet salon in Budapest:

via flickr

Interestingly, many of them cater to foreign travelers by having currency exchange services in the same location.

via flickr

[ Posted from Hotel Art, Budapest via plazes.com ]

Technorati Tags: Budapest, end of cyberspace, Hungary, internet, travel

Jeremy Shapiro and Linda Crafts, "The Streaming Body as the Site of Telecommunications Convergence"

Talk at the Philosophy of Telecommunications Convergence conference (caveat).

People's bodies are interfaces for media, and the processes by which people import media and radiate their bodies out into the world of media and networks (the streaming body) are the subject of Shapiro and Crafts' talk.

Inscribing the Body. We do lots of things to inscribe cultural values and representations onto the body: think of tattoos, scarification, piercing, etc.. The Apple iTunes ads suggest how we sync our bodies to devices; we also stream bodies, posting videos of everything from lip syncing to sex, contributing to diet or medical advice Web sites, etc..

Synching and Streaming.

Action and Perception --> Technical world --> Simuli (ICTs, media, Internet, etc.) --> Embodied Human -->

We're familiar with the technical structure of convergence; we have some knowledge of the cultural dimensions of convergence (this is what Henry Jenkins talks about); what we want to do is talk about the corporeal, drawing on phenomenology, science studies, etc..

[ Posted from Hungarian Academy of Sciences via plazes.com ]

Technorati Tags: mobility, philosophy, Budapest, pervasive computing

Albert-Laszlo Barabasi on "Time and Motion in Mobile Communications"

Talk at the Philosophy of Telecommunications Convergence conference (caveat).

(Author of Linked, and various other cool things. Now at Northeastern University and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard.)

When do events take place? When doing things like calculating the capacity of communications system, we assume that it's random, uniform in time, and the timing follows a Poisson process. In reality, communication tends to be bursty: e-mail, for example, tends to be sent in clumps. It follows power laws, and can be mapped as a straight line on a log-log scale. This same distribution is also the case for library visits (measured by checkout records), document printing, web page views, cell-phone calls, and just about everything else we can measure.

Why does life work in bursts? Look at to do lists. We tend to assign priorities to tasks, rather than do them randomly or treat a list as a stack. When you follow priorities, high-prority tasks are completed quickly, and some will be done after a long time: you end up with a power law.

Does the length of the queue matter? No-- you get the same kind of behavior.

Random Walks. Lots of things follow random walks, or Levy walks (where jump size can vary). Studies of animal motion follows Levy laws, and humans do too: an analysis of money movement from Where's George also follows Levy laws, as does the motion of cell phones detected from tower triangulation.

[ Posted from Hungarian Academy of Sciences via plazes.com ]

Technorati Tags: pervasive computing, ubicomp, conference, Budapest, mobility

Jane Vincent, "Emotion and My Mobile"

Talk at the Philosophy of Telecommunications Convergence conference (caveat).

There are 2.5B users, and in some countries more phones than people; there are more Internet-enables phones than PCs. So there are lots of people using mobile phones, and using them in lots of ways.

Vincent's interest is in the emotional dimension of mobile phone use. She uses it do some familiar things-- talk, take pictures, write to others-- and this familiarity is important in the object's ubiquity. She also uses it to remember things: they take pictures of stuff in stores, posters for upcoming events, ads, etc..

On the other hand, there are differences: photos 100 years ago were memorabilia, while today's cell phone pictures are often completely disposable. The picture-taking itself can also be the point, rather than the pictures. People also use it to capture more ephemeral memories: to record things that might not have been commemorated (it's more ethnographic than ritualistic).

The research. Looking at emotional relationships or attachments to phones. Working out of the interactionist theory (following Goffman), emotion work (Hochschild on managed emotions and "moments of pinch").

• Relationships and mobiles are integral but not always symbiotic.
• Communications occur in the "middle stage" of interactionist theory.
• There's an emotional paradox of wanted and unwanted communications.
• Managing the intrusions of Back Stage-- dealing with "moments of pinch."
• Using emotion work to manage mobile phone communications.

Some "events... occur in a special or unique way when mediated by the mobile:" some users have practices that are unique: some couples talk while commuting on different systems, or use the phone to take pictures of kids because the kids react in certain ways. What they love is not the device, but what you can use it for.

[ Posted from Hungarian Academy of Sciences via plazes.com ]

Technorati Tags: ubicomp, mobility, conference, pervasive computing, Budapest, communication

Mark Turner, "What Are We: Convergence of Self and Communications Techology"

Talk at the Philosophy of Telecommunications Convergence conference (caveat).

"I'm going to talk about everything in the world:... self and technology." 10 minutes on nothing about technology, then 10 minutes connecting the first 10 to mobile communications.

Humans are "designed to operate with objects:" we're the only species who also engage in conceptual blending, to take things that are complex and diffuse, and to integrate them into familiar frameworks.

Take cause-motion constructions: I threw the ball through the window, but "England pushed France to war" is a cause-motion construction at a vastly different scale, and even though they're different phenomena, we use the cause-motion construction to make sense of it. This allows us to turn unfamiliar things into familiar ones, make big phenomena into ones at human scale, develop and evolve culture, etc..

Ironically, we're not built to understand ourselves: we're built to understand our world well enough to avoid being eaten and to find things to eat, but self-consciousness is an accident rather than an evolutionary advantage. We can describe ourselves in terms of stable identities, even though we vary greatly over our lives. We explain our actions in terms of desires or rationality, even though we often act first and "make" the decision a few milliseconds later.

What has all this to do with technology?

We have always blended our selves with our technologies. Writing and language are technologies, and are especially powerful ones. (The metaphor of communications is especially powerful in cause-motion constructions: we think of the self as converser, talk about "peoples of the book," etc.) These days, we think of ourselves in terms of our communications technologies, by blending our general concept of ourselves with our understanding of how the communications technology works. In a sense, we know our technologies better than we know ourselves.

This matters because of the addictive power of communications technologies; the ease with which we can create avatars or online identities radically different from the ones we have in real life; the opportunities it creates to merge with others (or at least to engage in collective action), to differentiate or contextualize our identities (e.g., having different SIM cards that work in different countries, have different contacts).

[ Posted from Hungarian Academy of Sciences via plazes.com ]

Technorati Tags: Budapest, cognition, communication, conference, mobility, pervasive computing, philosophy, psychology, ubicomp

Kristof Nyiri, introductory remarks

Opening remarks at the Philosophy of Telecommunications Convergence conference (caveat).

Recapitulates his own move into this subject. Worked in traditional subjects like philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, but in the late 1980s rediscovered 1920s and 1930s Hungarian philosophy of communication writing on silent reading, writing techniques, film theory. (They were read by Marshall McLuhan, and influenced his work; it sounds like their relationship to McLuhan is like Ludwig Fleck's relationship to Thomas Kuhn.)

"When the Internet arrived, we were conceptually equipped to understand it," likewise for mobile communications. In 2001, launched the first conference on the mobile information society.

In 2005, just when it seemed like the field has been worked through, convergence started getting real, and it all started again. Today, we don't have a good vision of what telecommunications convergence means, or where it's headed; "the road ahead in bumpy, theoretically speaking."

The one thing that's clear is that convergence is no simple matter: it means convergence in the digital sense (when everything is zeroes and ones), essential objects (digital device platforms), cultural sense (convergence of activities), action/activity spaces, language, philosophical and literary theory, and the body itself. The purpose over the next few days is to map this territory.

[ Posted from Hungarian Academy of Sciences via plazes.com ]

Technorati Tags: Budapest, communication, conference, history, language, pervasive computing, philosophy, ubicomp

Blogging the conference

I'm posting about the the Philosophy of Telecommunications Convergence conference, but with the usual caveat that these notes are my impressions of the talks, not a definitive record, and all quotes are tentative.

Technorati Tags: Budapest, communication, conference, mobility, travel

At the conference

I made it to the conference, which is in a beautiful old building (1850s, if memory serves) along the Danube. I got a solid nine hours' sleep, though I'd meant to only get seven. Still, I'm here, and all's well. More blogging until the power on my laptop is exhausted.

[ Posted from Hungarian Academy of Sciences via plazes.com ]

Technorati Tags: Budapest, communication, conference, Hungary, mobility, wireless, work