Representing ‘things to come’:
Yesterday’s tomorrows
Last week I attended the RGS-IBG annual international conference, for which I convened a session and presented a paper.
Shamelessly borrowing a title from a paper by Genevieve Bell and Paul Dourish, my presentation entitled “Yesterday’s tomorrows” was concerned with the manner in which Ubiquitous Computing has been envisioned. I largely focussed upon the example of HP Labs’ ‘CoolTown’ agenda/project. This largely stemmed from some of the fascinating conversations I had with various engineers, researchers and scientists during recent fieldwork in and around Silicon Valley.
Promises of ubicomp
My research seems to orbit around the future orientation of ubicomp research and development and in that wavering trajectory I encounter various modes of anticipation. In presenting a semblance of certainty (where there need not be, and perhaps is not), obligations may be construed, and promises apparently made. Promises can be thought of as a ‘giving of ground’ to a potential future, an opening of self to a responsibility, perhaps as Nietzsche suggests, to vouch for oneself as a future. Considerations of promises can be suggested as a reading of our anticipatory knowledges that retains an intention, and perhaps responsibility, for particular futures but, against a prescriptive ‘going forward‘ or technological determinism, includes an inherent potential of uncertainty.
Finding a thesis title
Half-way through my three years of PhD research project I am still mentally searching for, and experimenting with, titles. Thus far I have had the following titles in chronological order:
- Practising Tomorrows’ Today – Examining the anticipatory logics and techniques of urban-ubiquitous computing development
- Practising the technics of disappearance: emergent spatialities and the experimental development of ubiquitous computing
- Mobilising the Socio-technical: The cultural politics of mobile communications technologies
- Socio-technical spatial formations: Living with the cyber-hybrid
- Cybrid Spaces
Bay area fieldwork
In the first week of March I travelled to the San Francisco Bay area. The purpose of my visit was to meet with key people relevant to my research. Continue reading “Bay area fieldwork”
The promise and problematic of Technology: (Re)thinking bodies, spaces and times
For the RGS-IBG annual conference 2008 my colleague James Ash and I are proposing a session on understandings of technology in geography. We welcome expressions of interests. I include the abstract for the session below.
Continue reading “The promise and problematic of Technology: (Re)thinking bodies, spaces and times”
Anticipating futures, engineering expectations
International Science Grid This Week, an online news source for those interested in grid computing and grid-powered science, recently asked me to write an opinion piece about ubiquitous computing, which is featured in this week’s edition. I’d like to thank Cristy Burne at ISGTW for their interest in my research.
Embracing entanglements
I am in the process of revising a paper that is in the process of review for publication entitled Embracing entanglements: Problematising the cosmopolitics of mobile communications technologies. I include below the abstract. If you are interested in this research feel free to contact me to discuss it more.
Researching Ubiquitous Computing as a Geographer
How does one summarise the background to a research project when it makes up an entire research agenda in a different discipline? This is a task I must continue to engage in as my project progresses. I would currently guide social sciences readers from the familiar ground of mobile communications technologies to the less familiar, and experimental, systems and devices of my area of research – Ubiquitous Computing, or ‘ubicomp’. We might start then, with the well-documented and wide-ranging rise in popularity of the capacity to communicate on the move, with mobile telephones and other mobile technologies (see: Harkin 2003, Ito et al. 2005, Ling 2004, Plant 2001).
Continue reading “Researching Ubiquitous Computing as a Geographer”
Notes on ‘doing theory’
When writing as a scholar one is always utilising theory. What is more, the collections and interrelations of ideas mobilised in the process is not a static or staid process – it is dynamic, not in a clichéd way but as a changeable movement of concepts at different speeds and across different durations, in short you are doing theory.