Divining A Digital Future

A sociotechnical investigation of ubiquitous computing as a research enterprise and as a lived reality. Ubiquitous computing (or ubicomp) is the label for a “third wave” of computing technologies. Following the eras of the mainframe computer and the desktop PC, ubicomp is characterized by small and powerful computing devices that are worn, carried, or embedded in the world around us. The ubicomp research agenda originated at Xerox PARC in the late 1980s; these days, some form of that vision is a reality for the millions of users of Internet-enabled phones, GPS devices, wireless networks, and "smart" domestic appliances. In Divining a Digital Future, computer scientist Paul Dourish and cultural anthropologist Genevieve Bell explore the vision that has driven the ubiquitous computing research program and the contemporary practices that have emerged—both the motivating mythology and the everyday messiness of lived experience. Reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of the authors' collaboration, the book takes seriously the need to understand ubicomp not only technically but also culturally, socially, politically, and economically. Dourish and Bell map the terrain of contemporary ubiquitous computing, in the research community and in daily life; explore dominant narratives in ubicomp around such topics as infrastructure, mobility, privacy, and domesticity; and suggest directions for future investigation, particularly with respect to methodology and conceptual foundations.

Digital Futures for Learning offers a methodological and pedagogical way forward for researchers and educators who want to work imaginatively with "what’s next" in higher education and informal learning. Today’s debates around technological transformations of social, cultural and educational spaces and practices need to be informed by a more critical understanding of how visions of the future of learning are made and used, and how they come to be seen as desirable, inevitable or impossible. Integrating innovative methods, key research findings, engaging theories and creative pedagogies across multiple disciplines, this book argues for and explores speculative approaches to researching and analysing post-compulsory and informal learning futures – where we are, where we might go and how to get there.

This book provides new critical and methodological approaches to digital humanities, intended to guide technical development as well as critical analysis. Informed by the history of technology and culture and new perspectives on modernity, Smithies grounds his claims in the engineered nature of computing devices and their complex entanglement with our communities, our scholarly traditions, and our sense of self. The distorting mentalité of the digital modern informs our attitudes to computers and computationally intensive research, leading scholars to reject articulations of meaning that admit the interdependence of humans and the complex socio-technological systems we are embedded in. By framing digital humanities with the digital modern, researchers can rebuild our relationship to technical development, and seek perspectives that unite practical and critical activity. This requires close attention to the cyber-infrastructures that inform our research, the software-intensive methods that are producing new knowledge, and the ethical issues implicit in the production of digital humanities tools and methods. The book will be of interest to anyone interested in the intersection of technology with humanities research, and the future of digital humanities.

Digital technologies have transformed archives in every area of their form and function, and as technologies mature so does their capacity to change our understanding and experience of material and performative cultural production. There has been an exponential explosion in the production and consumption of video online and yet there is a scarcity of knowledge and cases about video and the digital archive. This book seeks to address that through the lens of the project Circus Oz Living Archive. This project provides the case study foundation for the articulation of the issues, challenges and possibilities that the design and development of digital archives afford. Drawn from eight different disciplines and professions, the authors explore what it means to embrace the possibilities of digital technologies to transform contemporary cultural institutions and their archives into new methods of performance, representation and history.

Place, Space, and Mediated Communication explores how new communications technologies are able to disrupt our spatial understanding, and in so doing, reorganize the boundaries of human experience: a phenomenon that can rightly be described as ‘context collapse’. Individual essays investigate ‘context collapse’ in a variety of geographical and temporal settings, including: the US drone war in Pakistan, social media and sexuality in Paris, privacy and privilege in Brazil, and videogames and resistance in Iran. This cross-disciplinary collection of essays demonstrates how communication and space are co-constituted, and models exciting new paths of inquiry for researchers. Place, Space, and Mediated Communication is suitable for students and scholars of media and communication studies, cultural studies, urban studies, and sociology.

This book examines the emerging problems and opportunities that are posed by media innovations, spatial typologies, and cultural trends in (re)shaping identities within the fast-changing milieus of the early 21st Century. Addressing a range of social and spatial scales and using a phenomenological frame of reference, the book draws on the works of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Don Hide to bridge the seemingly disparate, yet related theoretical perspectives across a number of disciplines. Various perspectives are put forward from media, human geography, cultural studies, technologies, urban design and architecture etc. and looked at thematically from networked culture and digital interface (and other) perspectives. The book probes the ways in which new digital media trends affect how and what we communicate, and how they drive and reshape our everyday practices. This mediatization of space, with fast evolving communication platforms and applications of digital representations, offers challenges to our notions of space, identity and culture and the book explores the diverse yet connected levels of technology and people interaction.

As the distinction between the digital and the material world becomes increasingly blurred, the ways in which we think about design are also shifting and evolving. How can the human, digital and material be brought together to intervene in the world? What constitutes our digital-material environments? How can we engage with digital technologies to make sustainable, healthy and meaningful decisions, both now and in the future? Digital Materialities presents twelve chapters by scholars and practitioners working at the intersection between design and digital research in the UK, Spain, Australia and the USA. By incorporating in-depth understandings of the digital-material world from both the social sciences and design, the book considers how this combined knowledge might advance our capacity to design for the future. Divided into three parts, the focus of the book moves from the theoretical to the practical: how different digital materialities are imagined and emerge, through software emulation, urban sensors and smart homes; how new digital designs are sparked through collaborations between social scientists and designers; and finally, how digital design emerges from the insider work of everyday designers. A fascinating, ground-breaking book for students and scholars of digital anthropology, media and communication, and anyone interested in the future of digital design.

An argument that as we engage with social media on our digital devices we receive, modify, intensify, and transmit moods. We are active with our mobile devices; we play games, watch films, listen to music, check social media, and tap screens and keyboards while we are on the move. In Mood and Mobility, Richard Coyne argues that not only do we communicate, process information, and entertain ourselves through devices and social media; we also receive, modify, intensify, and transmit moods. Designers, practitioners, educators, researchers, and users should pay more attention to the moods created around our smartphones, tablets, and laptops. Drawing on research from a range of disciplines, including experimental psychology, phenomenology, cultural theory, and architecture, Coyne shows that users of social media are not simply passive receivers of moods; they are complicit in making moods. Devoting each chapter to a particular mood—from curiosity and pleasure to anxiety and melancholy—Coyne shows that devices and technologies do affect people's moods, although not always directly. He shows that mood effects are transitional; different moods suit different occasions, and derive character from emotional shifts. Furthermore, moods are active; we enlist all the resources of human sociability to create moods. And finally, the discourse about mood is deeply reflexive; in a kind of meta-moodiness, we talk about our moods and have feelings about them. Mood, in Coyne's distinctive telling, provides a new way to look at the ever-changing world of ubiquitous digital technologies.