COMMUNITIES | DIGITAL EXPERIENCE | GEOMATICS | BEST OF TIMES
Rethinking Communities, Rethinking Place
ROCHELLE MAZARFrom discussions on ubiquitous computing and sentient cities to using digital tools, the Association of Internet Researchers' 9th annual conference, "Rethinking Communities, Rethinking Place," held Oct. 15 to 18 in Copenhagen, Denmark, dismissed the fabled death of geography, reiterating the importance of place, connection and "realness" as part of our digital lives.
The keynote address by University of Durham professor Steven Graham, "Ambient Intelligence and the Politics of Urban Space," emphasized that the future of interfaces lies in both our current physical spaces and in our budding surveillance society. Graham predicts that we will opt out of our current keyboard/monitor computing structure in favour of using our existing environment as an interface. With more smart machines and an increasingly surveilled society both on and off line, details about us continue to shape our interface and interaction. The line between the real and the digital is fading.
In her conference presentation, "Tunes that Bind? Predicting Friendship Strength in a Music-Based Social Network," the University of Kansas' Nancy Baym argued that while digital files were once understood as "not real" and ephemeral, that perception has been steadily changing as applications such as last.fm and software like iTunes allows users to feel increasingly connected via their digital audio files. Users even feel a sense of ownership over metadata and organizational principles. A playlist, for instance, is increasingly understood as a valuable product.
A similar consensus emerged in the pre-conference workshop "Second Life in Teaching and Research." Merging the real into the digital has both emotional and pedagogical value to participants. The concept of "real" is being redefined: the digital is increasingly becoming immersive and the virtual is developing "physical" properties.
A particularly poignant aspect of the conference was the way local attendees shared insights and responses with each other. Using the conference hashtag (#ir9) on Twitter, attendees found each other on the fly and commented on conference sessions and each other's reactions. While many tech conferences organically acquire a back channel, Twitter is the new public, visible, archived, searchable back channel that allows the participants engaged with each other in the same room to create a constant and engaged digital feedback loop.
The conference demonstrated that we may be turning more and more to digital tools, and less and less to keyboards and monitors. And in spite of what years of naysayers have predicted, we are also increasingly turning to each other.
