Categories: placeofmedia

CCTV is a community media center in Cambridge, MA that is doing some fascinating work in the integration of web media to the mission of community television. My grad student, Colin Rhinesmith, is doing his master’s thesis on this topic and has done some exemplary research thus far on the implications of this integration. […]

Categories: placeofmedia · civic_engagement · net-locality · Community_Informatics · cities

In class last week, we spent about 90 minutes arguing over the merits of community networks. The real question was: why would we want network technologies overlaying physical space? Don’t we have enough “connection?” Shouldn’t urban planners and architects help us figure out ways to “disconnect?” The argument I offered against […]

Categories: placeofmedia · boston · citygovernment · SecondLife · city · hub2 · civic_engagement · net-locality · Community_Informatics

One of the things I’ve been struggling with lately is the premise that the addition of the virtual onto individual consciousness somehow alters that consciousness such that it cannot integrate the virtual into its horizon. Let me try putting it another way: when we interact with screens, we are simply experiencing reality within some […]

Categories: placeofmedia · SecondLife · augmented_place · mixed_reality

Knowledge Politics just released a pamphlet on the topic of “Localism and the Information Society.” This collection of brief essays is motivated by the desire to see better integration of ICTs into neighborhoods and cities. As stated in the introduction:

“new communication tools actually have the ability to strengthen traditional, local relationships. This premise […]

Categories: placeofmedia · citygovernment · city · civic_engagement · net-locality · Community_Informatics

My colleague, John Craig Freeman, and I recently received funding from the NEH (as part of their digital humanities start-up program) to work on a project entitled “The Digital Lyceum.” This project explores the virtual architecture of the live humanities event. In other words, we’re interested in identifying how back-channels (from virtual worlds […]

Categories: placeofmedia · augmented_place · NEH · back-channels

Myspace and Facebook have gone mobile. And new companies are cropping up each day to get in on the new mobile socializing. An article in the Boston Globe this morning featured two companies seemingly making a dent in this field - Utterz and MocoSpace each offer phone-based services for the never-disconnected set. […]

Categories: placeofmedia · phones · net-locality

The Hub2 initiative started this week in the form of an upper-division class at Emerson College. The community class is set to begin next Tuesday. At this point, we are enrolled to capacity, and are quite eager to get started. The Emerson class is conceived a little differently than the community class. […]

Categories: placeofmedia · boston · SecondLife · hub2 · civic_engagement

Allen Smith, who works for WHERE, contacted me about my last post with an interesting corrective:
“I always thought about recent phone technology as allowing the
internet to come out into the world and overlay it with information, I
never thought of it the other way around, “extending the idea and
functionality of location into the network.”
I agree that […]

Categories: placeofmedia · city · play · phones · net-locality

Location is the next frontier in computing. The company uLocate has announced a competition for developers to make location-based widgets. uLocate’s new location-widget feature, called simply Where, is essentially a collection of little programs that mash-up data from the Internet with a user’s location. And this competition is intended to facilitate the […]

Categories: placeofmedia · city · play · phones · net-locality