[ecrea] cfp - /Locative Media/ edited volume

/Locative Media/  edited volume

Call for papers --- abstract proposals due 7 May 2012//

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*/Locative Media: Culture, Economy, Policy/*

*edited by Rowan Wilken (Swinburne Uni of Tech) *

*&  Gerard Goggin (University of Sydney)*

Location technologies have experienced a relatively long and complex
incubation. Satellite-based global positioning system (GPS) commenced
life as a military technology before finding its wayinto wider
commercial and consumer uses (not least being used in mobile phones
along with triangulation of cellular networks for services such as
enhancedemergency calling). Location-based services for cellular mobile
networks and devices were the subject of much experiment and
anticipation in the 1990s. Mobile social networking applications first
emerged in the 1990s, with the celebrated Lovegety gadget in Japan, and
pioneering efforts such as Dodgeball in NorthAmerica. Technologies
predicated on location also were pieced together through
telecommunications, Internet, and web-based friendship, dating, and
hooking-up services and sites such as Gaydar.

The early 2000s witnessed a wave of location-based experimentation
around location and mobile devices across art, urban design, ubiquitous
and pervasive computing, and strands of gaming cultures. These
experiments included locative art, performances, activist interventions,
location-aware fiction, location-based games (famously those of Blast
Theory), annotation and story-telling, and a wide range of other
manifestations. As mobile phones developed into fully-fledged media
devices, various affordances led to new kinds of socio-technical
marshalling of location. The ubiquity of camera phones allowed
innovative visual and textual instantiations and representations of
place. Cross-platform game developments increasingly relied on locative
media as a key part of integrated, transmedia forms. Music and sound
moved to the foreground of media imaginatively yoked to location.

Towards the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, two
major developments put locative media squarely at the centre of
contemporary cultural and social dynamics.

First, new kinds of locative media emerged through the 'geoweb' --- the
combination of the Internet with mapping, place-making, and locational
technologies. Since the Google's embrace of geolocation services in 2005
--- with the fascination attracted by Google Earth and Google Maps,
mainstream interest in and uptake of locative media services flourished.
Such Internet-based locative media increasingly coincided with the
widespread diffusion of mobile phone, mobile broadband, wireless
Internet, and portable, networked media technologies. Consumers are now
well accustomed to using sat nav devices in their cars, or while
walking, Google Maps on desktop and laptop computers and mobile devices,
and geoweb, geotagging and other mapping applications from all manner of
places, and various apps on iPhones and smart phones that
uselocation-aware technologies.

Secondly, with the phenomenal growth of smartphones following the launch
of Apple's iPhone and Google's Android plaforms in 2007-2008, the mobile
Internet firmly took hold. As inadvertently revealed, smartphones gather
unprecedented amounts of longitudinal data on their users' locations ---
data which can support new kinds of tailored retail and consumer
services, lifestyle profiling and mapping, and surveillance, with
considerable privacy and social implications. Such mobile media built on
the success of user-generated content and social networking systems
(Cyworld, Mixi, Flickr, YouTube, QQ, Renren), and brought the locational
aspects of these systems to the fore --- especially with extensions such
as Facebook Places, iPhoto tagging, and so on. The arrival of apps on
smartphones --- supported by Apple's apps store, Google market, Window and
Nokia's shared apps --- was also fuelled by the incorporation of
locational capacities into this new wave ofmobile computing and software.

In short, not only are locative media one of the fastest growing areas
in digital technology, questions of location and location-awareness are
increasingly central to our contemporary engagementswith online and
mobile media, and indeed media and culture generally. Whilelocative
media, especially in its recent North American incarnations, has become
an fertile topic for research, policy, and public debate --- and the
subject of important recent studies such as de Souza e Silva and Frith's
/Mobile Interfaces in Public Spaces /(2012), Gordon and de Souza e
Silva's/Net Locality/  (2011), and Farman's/Mobile Interface Theory/
(2012) --- there are many aspects of the international phenomenon of
locative media that need research and critical discussion.

Thus the central aim of the /Locative Media /collection is to bring
together a comprehensive account of the various location-based
technologies, services, applications, and cultures, as/media/  --- and to
identify, inventory, explore, and critique their cultural, economic,
political, social, and policy dimensions internationally. In particular,
the collection is organized around the perception that the growth of
locative media gives rise to a number of crucial, as yet clearly
articulated and addressed questions concerning the areas of culture,
economy and policy.

Accordingly, we welcome proposals for papersthat address any aspect of
culture, economy, and policy, and the constitution, functions, and
effects of locative media, especially (but certainly not limited to) the
following:

How do we understand and theorize locative media /as /media? What are
the interactions, affiliations, and remediations, between locative media
and other media, especially Internet and mobiles?

How have locative media developed? What are their different histories
that influence their present forms? What are the cultural, economic, and
political economies that have shaped location-basedservices, locative,
and geo-media?

How do locative media differ across national markets, geo-linguistic
communities, and cultural contexts? What are the specificities of
locative media in countries and regions that remain understudied in the
anglophone literatures?

What the contrasting, or shared, meanings or practices associated with
locative media in particular societies or groups of users? And what are
the particular affordances of locative media in different settings and
configurations of the technologies?

How have locative media been imagined as a policy object and regulated
to date? What are their implications for current and future policy and
regulation? In what ways can new frameworks be devised to capture and
respond to the challenges of locative media?

What are the privacy ramifications oflocative media? What are the new
concepts of privacy evolved alongside locative media? How do we
understand the important concept of sharing --- or its obverse,
withholding information, emerging with locative media?

What are the implications of locative media are for broader
understandings of media and technology? How do locative media fit into
with new accounts of media, mobile, and networked publics?

* *

*Proposals:*

Please send proposals to both editors by 7 May 2012:

Rowan Wilken ((rwilken /at/ swin.edu.au)  <mailto:(rwilken /at/ swin.edu.au)>)

Gerard Goggin ((gerard.goggin /at/ sydney.edu.au)
<mailto:(gerard.goggin /at/ sydney.edu.au)>).

* *

Proposal should include:

· title

· abstract of up to 500 words

· short biographical details for author and affiliation.

* *

Provisional acceptance will be advised by 19 May 2012.

* *

*About the editors:*

Rowan Wilken ((rwilken /at/ swin.edu.au)  <mailto:(rwilken /at/ swin.edu.au)>) is
Australian Research Council DECRA (Discovery Early Career Researcher
Award) Fellow in the Swinburne Institute for Social Research, Swinburne
University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia. His books include
/Mobile Technology and Place /(2012; with Gerard Goggin), and
/Teletechnologies, Place, and Community /(2011).

Gerard Goggin ((gerard.goggin /at/ sydney.edu.au)
<mailto:(gerard.goggin /at/ sydney.edu.au)>) is Professor and Chair of Media
and Communications at the University of Sydney. His books include the
/Routledge Companion to Mobile Media /(2013; with Larissa Hjorth), /New
Technologies and the Media /(2012), /Global Mobile Media /(2010),
/Mobile Technology: From Telecommunications to Media /(2009; with
Larissa Hjorth), and /Cell Phone Culture /(2006).


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Gerard Goggin
Professor and Chair
Department of Media and Communications
University of Sydney

Adjunct Professor, Social Policy Research Centre
University of New South Wales

e:(gerard.goggin /at/ sydney.edu.au)
<applewebdata://58CAECF0-6F6E-47A3-9980-953EE0F9094E/(gerard.goggin /at/ sydney.edu.au)>
p:  +61 2 9114 1218
m: +61 428 66 88 24
w:http://sydney.edu.au/arts/media_communications/staff/ggoggin