Marcela's Musing

Posting: http://raindrop.msresearch.us/id/1000146/default.aspx
Defining Mobile Social Software (with your help)
Posted: Jul 15, 2004 2:59 AM I have been working/thinking in the mobile social space for the last year and see it as three distinct areas. See if my classification system makes sense and give me your feedback.

Anytime/Anyplace Coordination and Convergence: Providing loose or tightly defined groups to chat and plan activities. Systems like 'upoc', and 'blah' mainly focus on more-anonymous group communication; 'swarm' is meant for smaller intimate groups to keep in touch and coordinate on-the-fly. My feeling is that 'dodgeball' is less for coordination but more about last minute convergence through location broadcasting.

Proximity-based profile sharing: The dream of any single person, being able to walk into a bar/club and find out who are the single men and women. Better yet, who are the single men and women who like the same activities that you do or who know some of your friends. While the lovegety is the original high tech love beacon, systems like 'mobule', and 'proxidating' have taken it to the next level by allowing you to setup a profile and filter people based on different features.

Mobile Social Games: This is not like walking in the park with your gameboy! These are games that get you off the couch and interacting with other people. I have heard about games like 'noderunner', and 'digital street games' but don't know much about them first hand. If anyone has played any mobile social game, please let me know about your experience.

The other areas that I haven't classified yet are things like mobile photo blogging which fall more in the realm of long term community building. I am ending this post with a big question mark for people to contribute how they see this space and what aspects they think I need to include.

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/hgroteva/innergeek/041806.html
March 28, 2006
Absent Presence
I've been traveling lately and continue to marvel at how different people are in terms of the physical and psychological space they occupy. For some reason, my mantra has always been "leave a small footprint." In places like airports, I have no interest in standing out - that's pretty adaptive, I suspect. But the guy sitting down the row from me in the departure lounge had a really different goal. He had one of those Borg earpieces on and was carrying on business conversations loud enough for everyone on our outbound flight to overhear. "Justice department ... blah blah blah ... attorneys ... blah blah blah... blah blah blah"

Then I noticed the NY Times story (Sunday 3/26) called "The disconnect of connection." "Does anyone really need anyone at parties anymore? Instead of working the room, guests are busy working phones and BlackBerrys, surrounding themselves with electronic entourages. Kenneth J. Gergen, a sociologist, calls this constant need to be in a technologically mediated world of elsewhere while in public 'absent presence.' " Thanks for the new word, Ken - it describes this situation perfectly.

I see this in my students too. They come into class plugged into iPods and cell phones. Then they open up their laptops (and I'm SURE they're paying close attention to everything I say and taking diligent notes). At the end of class, in go the iPods and up go the cell phones again. Now, I have nothing against iPods or cell phones - I have them both and use them. But we do seem to be missing what's around us. Those things that are "hidden in plain view" (as the mystics say) are never revealed to us, because we are totally absent to them.

Second Life is becoming an interesting possible sub-topic.
A Swedish embassy in Second Life?
Technologies of Cooperation
January 29, 2007 0 c | 0 t by Jim Downing
This smh article says "Sweden is to become the first country to establish diplomatic representation in the virtual reality world of Second Life, officials said."We are planning to establish a Swedish embassy in Second Life primarily as an information portal for Sweden," Swedish Institute (SI) director Olle Waestberg has told AFP.The embassy would not provide passports or visas but would instruct visitors how to obtain such documents in the real world and act as a link to web-based information about the Scandinavian country."Second Life allows us to inform people about Sweden and broaden the opportunity for contact with Sweden easily and cheaply," Waestberg said.The Swedish Institute is an agency of the Swedish foreign ministry tasked with informing the world about Sweden. The ministry fully backed the initiative, he added".

Strange Culture: First Feature Film Shown in Second Life
The Era of Sentient Things
February 1, 2007 2 c | 0 t by Emily Turrettini

Nework_Performance picks up on SecondWatch's experience of watching the first-ever feature film shown in Second Life.


This week we were invited to attend the premiere of Strange Culture, an independent film by Lynn Hershman. The film was shown at the Sundance Film Festival last week and has the distinction of being the first-ever feature film shown in Second Life.

... Watching a movie in Second Life was totally weird. When you get to the movie theater, you hit the play movie control on your SL window. We're all watching the same film, but a different times! That seems like the most significant difference from a traditional cinema.

Today's meeting with Yvonne.
Discussed future research plans, upcoming evaluation.
Discussed Meyrowitz,Castells, Drucker (public zoning interaction),Belzer, Terveen (social matching)

From Technopoly by Neil Postman:
p. 152 Freud, Marx, Weber, Jung, Mead not doing science. What these people were doing--and what STanley Milgram was doing is documenting behavior and feelings of people as they confront problems posed by their culture. Their work is a form of storytelling. Science itself is of course a form of storytelling too, but its assumptions and procedures are so different from those of social research that it is extremely misleading to give same name to each. In fact, stories of social researchers are much closer in structure and purpose to what is called imaginative literature, that is to say both a social researcher and a novelist give unique interpretations to a set of human events and support their interpretations with examples in various forms--draw appeal from power of language, depth of explanation, relevance of examples and credibility of their themes
nothing universally and irrevocably true or false about interpretations, no critical tests to confirm or falsify them, no natural laws from which derived. Bound by time, by situation and cultural prejudices of researcher.
both novelist and social researcher construct stories by use of archetypes and metaphors--Mead and Samoa girls, Skinner.
Unlike science, social research never discovers anything. It only rediscovers what people once were told and need to be told again. Science, social research ask different questions, follow different procedures, give different meanins to truth. Social scientists not squemish about imputing to their "discoveries"and rigor of their procedures power to directions in how we ought rightly to behave. Why so often on TV, self-help shelves, not because want to tell us how humans sometimes behave,but how we should behave. We welcome them gladly because we need so desperately to find some source outside frail and shaky judgments to authorize our moral decisions and behaviors.

Free WiFi spawns cafe backlash
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060710-7226.html
But the issue is not just an economic one; it has a cultural side as well. Cafe owners and traditional patrons are concerned that the shops are becoming offices. Confronted by a sea of laptops and hard-working coffee sippers, other guests may feel less able to talk, laugh, and be sociable. The forest of raised laptop screens might also keep patrons from talking with one another, and that social element has long been a part of cafe culture. It was this problem that led one Seattle coffee shop to start shutting off the WiFi on weekends last year. Not only did revenue go up, but the atmosphere in the cafe changed as well.

Coffee shops raise, in miniature, the essential political question: what sort of society do we want to create? Not surprisingly, there's a difference of opinion. Customers who use cafes to meet others and to socialize with friends are disappointed by the many laptops and by the shortage of tables. Those working on laptops find themselves wishing that the retired friends at the next table could talk about their golf game in lower tones. And each owner has a vision of her own.

http://www.textually.org/textually/archives/2007/01/014779.htm
Golf fans are being banned from using mobile phones at The Open Championship, according to the DailyRecord.

"Spectators at this year's The Open Championship at Carnoustie will not be permitted to have mobile phones in their possession within The Open site.

This policy is in line with other major golf championships, including this year's Ryder Cup, and follows comments from players concerning the excessive numbers in evidence last year at Hoylake.

In order to implement the no mobile phone policy, security checks of every spectator will be in operation at the paygates

http://www.rocknscroll.net/
Rock N' Scroll is a software infrastructure for interventions into wifi-equipped public space.

Mobile wireless computing is usually a rather immobile affair: people working on laptop computers commonly stare transfixedly at the device's screen, typing, and occasionally clicking the mouse: computer work does not usually require much physical involvement.

Imagine walking into a coffee shop or another semi-public wifi-equipped place where people normally congregate quietly with their laptops: instead of working unbudgingly on their computers, they are shaking their office equipment and wildly tapping their cell phones. Joysticks and old mechanical mice serve as maracca-type rhythmic instruments or optical mice are used for DJ-like scratching motions, manipulated using fancier gyro mice, computer keyboards used as drumkits. Both mobile phones and computers are connected using Skype voice-over-IP telephony (VOIP) software. This creates delay effects depending on how good the network connection is. The sound itself is a combination of standard macintosh and windows sounds, as well as sounds that included in the Skype software, and pre-made drumloops.

Technogenic turns: The production of a public sphere in 21st century urban Morocco

AUTHOR Watson, Bahiyyih D.

DEGREE PhD

SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA CRUZ

DATE 2006

PAGES 259

ADVISER Raffles, Hugh

ISBN 978-0-542-70611-0

SOURCE DAI-A 67/05, p. 1796, Nov 2006

SUBJECT ANTHROPOLOGY, CULTURAL (0326); URBAN AND REGIONAL PLANNING (0999)


The following dissertation provides an ethnographic study of transformations that accompany the emergence of innovative media and communication technologies in the African Muslim nation of Morocco. Drawing on field research conducted in Casablanca, Morocco, this work addresses the moral landscape of everyday life in a Muslim city that is undergoing shifts incurred by the national development of an 'information society.' I investigate how religious beliefs and new technologies of communication mutually impact the character of cultural practices and the production of social space in a Muslim city. Technological advances in communicative practice enable unprecedented forms of public participation. These new features of everyday communication---Internet surfing, satellite broadcast viewing, and cell phone use alike---require a political, economic and architectural infrastructure to operate on a broad scale in the public domain. The structural installation of an information society is analyzed through an exploration of the localized urban planning practices and national legislative procedures that make up the backbone of Morocco's national effort to become a postindustrial information society in the global economy of the 21st century. The following dissertation examines the development of a new technology corridor in Morocco's edge city of Casablanca, 'Californie,' and demonstrates the significance of emergent forms and functions of social space in a technologically saturated Muslim African-Arab city.

Readings:
[Mar, 94] Marx, G. T. New telecommunications technologies require new manners. Telecommunications Policy. 18, 7, (1994) 538-551
www.lex-electronica.org/articles/v1-1/marxfr.html
This paper considers a number of examples of unmannerly telecommunications behavior. Eight factors differentiating new from traditional forms of telecommunication are identified which are conducive to bad manners. Answering machines, call waiting and speaker phones are considered in greater detail. Fifteen principles are discussed which should inform telecommunications manners for the new technologies. These affirm respect for the dignity of the other person and involve reciprocity, honesty, trust and choice.

Current and emerging technologies come with many rough edges in need of the sandpaper of manners. We are now facing a period equivalent in some ways to the introduction of the telephone. The manners that have emerged around telecommunications over the last century for the most part consisted of forms to facilitate interaction absent face-to-face cues.
But in addition the new communications technologies appear to offer increased potentials for harming the other- whether materially or psychologically - absent appropriate standards. New opportunities and temptations for deception and rudeness are provided by technologies that offer remote access and anonymity. The absence of visual or auditory cues makes it easier to conceal, deceive and manipulate
In limiting and channeling response possibilities, the format of the new technologies may alter communication patterns by lessening reciprocal social skills and weakening the ability to express nuance and complexity.

mentions cell phones in passing, focuses more on call waiting,caller id, speaker phones and answering machines
Some principles to guide mannerly telecommunications
Given the rapidity of change and the immense variability in communication contexts, there are no universal rules. Yet without denying the needto be sensitive to local subcultures and specific contexts, I think there are some core societal principles that can help define communications etiquette for the new technologies. These are offered as guidelines intended to inform discussion, rather than as rigid rules. They may conflict and their meaning and applicability are subject to interpretation. These principles affirm respect for the dignity of the other person and imply a golden rule - reciprocity. They involve politeness, honesty, trust and the maximization of choice.
The principles are offered as empirical predictions and as normative directives. I think research would identify them as the background assumptions that inform how people respond to new communications technologies. In confronting the examples given at the beginning of this paper, many persons experience consternation and even outrage. They feel something is not quite right, but just what it is can be difficult to define. I suggest that underlying such feelings is a violation of one or more of these principles. Even if they are not present, I think they should inform the evolution of manners.
(l) Respect social boundaries and spaces (intrusions and invasions).
(2) Inform people of the capabilities and risks involved in the communication technology being used (informed communication).
(3) Do not impose costs on a party to a communication that they are unaware of or cannot control (externalities).
(4) Do not deceive (authenticity).
(5) Respect confidentiality (discretion).
(6) Use communication technologies in ways that respect the intentions of the communicator(s); for instance, the only parties having access to a communication (absent informed consent) should be those directly engaged in it. Do not consume communications erroneously sent to you beyond what is required to identify the mistake (respect intentions).
(7) Communications are jointly owned by those who are parties to them (joint ownership) [11].
(8) Communications should not be recorded without the knowledge and consent of the parties involved (reproductive rights).
(9) If a consensual record is made it should be accurate (validity).
(10) The recipient possessing technologies such as a telephone, fax or computer invites communication but is under no obligation to sustain or respond to it once it has been determined to be unwanted (receptivity).
(11) The initiator of the communication must respect the recipient's desire not to sustain the communication (non-coercion).
(12) An unsuccessful effort to reach another party carries no obligation to leave a record of the attempt (non-accountability regarding attempts).
(13) Request another co-present person's permission to engage in a conversation that they are not a direct party to (eg use of a car phone with a passenger present) (politeness).
(14) Request permission (and offer an apology?) for interrupting (leaving) a communication (continuity).
(15) Communicate politely and in good taste (civility).
Finally, technologies can be developed that deny individuals the opportunity to show bad manners, just as they are now developed (although not necessarily intentionally) to do the opposite. Technologies should be designed to increase choice and to give recipients warnings. Enhancing the equity which already adheres in the idea of reciprocal communication ought to be taken as a design goal. The enhancement of control and expanded opportunities for all parties to a communication should be foremost.

[4] In the broadest sense manners are about showing respect for the other s personhood. Demonstrating bad manners can communicate a view of the other person as an object to be manipulated and treated as a means to your end (however noble or ignoble). The assessment of manners depends on the context and on intentions, and not on the behavior or the technology as such. Codified rules usually come with formal sanctions. But with manners the sanction is informal and involves viewing the violator as rude or socially incompetent. Most conformity with manners is unreflective and seemingly natural. Yet to the extent that it involves calculation, what is at stake is the desire to create a good impression and to have others think well of us. To show good manners affirms social solidarity. It communicates something about how the person involved in the interaction views himself or herself, as well as the other person. Major sociological statements about manners include Elias, N The History of Manners Pantheon, New York (1978) and Goffman, E On the nature of deference and demeanor American Anthropologist June 1956 58

Partridge, C., (2005) Social Change, Time Use and ICTs – A Literature Review, Chimera Working Paper 2005-05, Ipswich: University of Essex.

This literature survey considers the impact of ICTs on society. It will consider the five main areas of interest to the time-use & ICT project: the impact of ICTs on social life, social communication, leisure, media, transport and shopping, as well the over-arching themes of polychronicity (multitasking), heterogeneous time (sequences of activities) and geographical mobility (where activities take place). It will focus on time-use studies carried out in these areas to date, but where there is paucity in the research, it will also consider other studies that may inform the area. In particular, gaps in the research will be identified, as well as interesting research questions that the current study examining the impact of ICT on society may address.
Looks at mobile phones, SMS, internet and television
Increasing time pressure not necessary accurate perception, differences in way data analyzed, flexible working, general social changes (esp for women), self-comparisons as age, more to fill time, busyness=social status,time displacement vs efficiency hypothesis
SMS as aid in initiating romance, gifting
Polychronicity: related to multi-tasking, common esp for women
cites Ling: ability to multi-task using mobile phone provided relief from stress rather than being a cause of it. "Using the mobile phone in passive travel periods for organizational activities that would otherwise have taken up time elsewhere thus provides participants with a sense of satisfaction at having not "wasted"that extra time in mundane activities. Texting from a mobile phone is another activity that can fill in odd unfilled moments in time with social interaction, or be a secondary activity. Ling (2004) notes that ÿou can chat or joke with remote friends, gather news, or coordinate further interaction in these otherwise unoccupied spaces in our life. Indeed, mobile phones more than any other ICT may facilitate polychronicity. However, given how little work has been carried out on time-use and multi-tasking and most of that is focusesd on gender divisions of labor, all evidence about the mobile phone to date is strictly anecdotal. It seems intuitively obvious that the mobile phone must be used for multi-tasking...Yet actual time-use data with regard to when, how and for how long people use their mobiles as secondary activities is scarce.
Starting hypothesis would be that secondary activites will increase with mobile phone ownership

8.6 The effects of the mobile phone on travel
Ling (2004) suggests that mobile phones are changing the way we keep time.
affects sequence of activiies, no pressure to keep to prescribed times,
Ling states that “social coordination, mediated through our sense of punctuality, allows for more or less harmonious interaction. From a social perspective, time and timekeeping are generalized, robust, and easily accessible to all. Beyond being a functional system for the coordination of interaction, we have also developed rituals, manners, and courtesies associated with timekeeping. Thus, there is also a moral dimension to observing time, to being late, or to being obsessed with time.” (p57)
As the mobile telephone becomes ubiquitous, Ling suggests that it competes with and supplements time-based social coordination. In essence, people are beginning to move away from the parallel interpretation of a common metering system, i.e., time, and replace it with the possibility for direct contact between those who are coordinating their interactions. Instead of relying on a mediating system, mobile telephony allows for direct contact that is in many cases more interactive and more flexible than time-based coordination. Ling (2004)
does not offer any evidence for this assertion, and as such, it may constitute an ideal question for the research project that follows this review.
may allow greater geographical mobility, flexibility, micro-coordination iterative

Khallil-thesis (skimmed, a lot already covered in his papers):

This research presents several contributions aimed towards minimizing
inappropriate cell phone interruptions through making cell phones more aware of the
user’s current situation and adapting their configuration accordingly.
The main research questions included whether people would like context-aware
telephony and interact positively with it, whether context-aware telephony would
decrease inappropriate interruptions and contribute to more socially intelligent mobile
devices, how context-aware telephony can be achieved, and what implications they
may have for the users regarding privacy, loss of control, and acceptability.
First, we have shown that people are willing to adopt context-aware telephony
services, which requires a sacrifice of some control in exchange for convenience. This was achieved by conducting a user study that used the Experience Sampling Method
to study peoples’ reactions in real life. We then presented three different approaches
to minimizing cell phone inappropriate Interruptibility: Calendar-based, caller-based
and collaborative. We were the first to employ the calendar-based and collaborative
approaches in enhancing cell phone awareness with the aim of minimizing
disruptions and were also the first to examine the feasibility of the caller-based
approach from the user’s perspective. In addition, we have conducted usability
studies to examine the feasibility, acceptability, limitations, and privacy issues of
each of the approaches. For the calendar-based and caller-based approaches, we used
the Experience Sampling Method to examine the users in the field and to capture
subtle factors that influence people’s concerns and reactions which could not be
captured otherwise. The user study for the collaborative approach employed the fill-in
diary method.

A recommended approach to future work on this topic has been to integrate the
approach of empowering cell phones to be more context-aware (by using calendar
information and collaborative applications) with the approach of empowering the
caller to be aware of the receiver’s context. We believe this method offers the most
promising solution provided that the right balance between the two approaches can be
established.An interesting type of future work will be to implement the collaborative
approach and study it in real life. Finally, we also plan to repeat some of our experiments using real cell phones in order to validate the results and avoid any biases that could be introduced by the simulation. It is also important to examine the preferred direction of error in a context-aware configuration. The error of such an application can be of two sorts: fewer missed calls but higher probability of inappropriate interruption or fewer inappropriate interruptions but higher probability of missed calls.
***********************************************************************************
Another look at mobile research questions: (CHI 2006)
The goal for this workshop is to explore the research questions, coming directions, and relevant technologies surrounding expanded adoption of mobile social software. We plan to address issues in the following areas:
• How will mobile social software change existing social dynamics?
• How will location services and other new technologies change the game? What are the privacy risks and research challenges of these technologies?
• Next generation of mobile social software: What is it and when will we have it?
• How can we build a coordinated, cross-cultural research effort?
This workshop seeks to bring together social and computer scientists, designers, and other stakeholders to address research questions, directions, and technologies involved at this critical juncture of rapid expansion of social software to mobile devices.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
• Context sharing: Under what conditions are people unwilling to share context information (e.g. location, history, etc); how do factors such as privacy, reciprocity, and trust play into that?
• Incentive structures in mixed digital-physical systems
• Reputation systems in mixed digital-physical systems
• Who can, should, and will control location data?
• Capturing and visualizing time: When was I there? When were you there? When were we there together? When will I/you/we be there?
• Role of mobile social software in supporting or detracting from face-to-face interactions
• Incorporating social networks in areas like:
o Mobile dating systems
o Conferences and special events
o Ad-hoc meetings
o Avoidance services
o Recommending people, places, and services
• Media sharing and the particular relationship between mobile photography and social behavior
• Social software to support an aging population
• Mobile social gaming and other forms of entertainment
• Moblogging and flash mobs
• Research/evaluation methods and tools for mobile social software, e.g. evaluation tools for studies in context
• Applications of mobile social software (design/evaluation):
• Hardware and new sensing technologies to support sociability
Revisiting Place Site questions:
http://info.placesite.com/research.html
Our research: PlaceSite, Inc. grew out of Project PlaceSite, a final Masters project undertaken by two of the founders at U.C. Berkeley.
We went into the research to chip away at two key long-term research questions:
1) What information, if any, would people like to share digitally with others in the same public place? Social scientists have studied people's face-to-face behavior for decades, and online social behavior has been the subject of countless papers and research projects over the past 20+ years. But what of the new hybrid: face-to-face behavior enhanced on the fly by digitally-mediated interaction? Mobile phones, laptops and handheld computers are new enough that there's still plenty of research to be done in this hybrid realm.
2) How will the introduction of a digital information service by, for and about people in a physical café affect social interactions in that café?
PlaceSite also provides new explorations of much bigger questions:
1) Many have complained that use of certain technologies, including laptops and mobile phones, insulate people from others nearby, thereby weakening neighborhood community and detracting from the ambience of public and semipublic gathering places. (For a full explanation of this, see "The Zombie Effect" on the key concepts page.) As computation continues to move beyond the desktop and into our everyday environments, can we use these technologies to strengthen local community?
2) As pervasive computing becomes more of a reality (i.e., as networked digital communication pervades our real-world physical spaces and places), how can we maximize social benefit, and minimize any social harm, that accompanies these developments? So far, we've tapped knowledge from the fields of urban planning, architecture, the social sciences and software design to develop basic design philosophy starting points for hybrid online/real-world place design. We hope to refine these strategies for minimizing harm and maximizing benefit, as the project progresses.
3) What social changes will accompany pervasive computing? How will it affect the way people interact with one another and with the city? How will awareness of physical proximity alter the ways in which people interact online? How will digital connections among people in the same room affect their face-to-face interaction? How will these things affect comfort, community, and people’s experience of a place?.
What did you learn from your research?
We'll publish a longer, formal paper conveying our results. But here are a few highlights:
• 68 percent of respondents in the Bay Area, and 89 percent of respondents in the Seattle area, expressed some interest in sharing personal information with other wi-fi users nearby. But only 15 percent in the Bay Area, 12 percent in the Seattle area, expressed strong interest in participating in such activity.
• People liked to use our "only share when I'm here" privacy setting, a feature that most social networking services can't offer. The following chart illustrates how participants in the cafe rollout at A'Cuppa Tea in Berkeley used this setting. The bars show how many people filled in each listed field. Colors indicate how many of these pieces of information were set to each privacy setting. (The chart represents people's settings as of one moment in time: a "snapshot" taken during late May 2005. Remember that people are encouraged to change their settings on the fly; so people often would put a piece of information into the system, but keep it hidden some times and reveal it other times).
• During interviews, cafe patrons suggested many other uses and venues for PlaceSite, including municipal wi-fi clouds, Korean PC Baangs, classrooms and dormitories, conferences, airports and airplanes.
• Users also requested other features. Repeated suggestions included those for built-in chat, music sharing, other forms of neighborhood content, and proximity alerts when friends are nearby.