Introduction to Mobile ubiquity in public and private spaces

It has been more than fifteen years since Mark Weiser's and his Xerox Parc colleagues' seminal and trans-disciplinary work on a vision for a ‘calm’ and human-centred kind of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) for the twenty-first century. Although its ongoing realisation is in a number of respects quite different from the original vision, that vision is now considerably more of an actual fact.

Its very realisation, as well as the differences, are due in part to interim economic and technical advances, such as affordable, multifaceted micro-scale sensors and actuators and an expansion of decentralised networking capacities via new Internet protocol practices for the billions of computational entities worldwide, thus paving the way for an adequate ubicomp infrastructure and an actual Internet of Things. Partly, ubicomp has become real in new and different ways because a miniaturisation of components and a global cultural acceptance in practice have permitted mobile wireless devices (such as mobile phones, iPods and other MP3 players (Bull 2007), PDAs and Blackberrys, iPads, notebooks) to achieve an unprecedented distributed pervasiveness—outnumbering humans globally, perhaps only superseded technically by embedded computational units.

Ubicomp infrastructures, stationary units and mobile devices continue to form new hybrid platforms, converging in ever-extending cultures of connective systems available through wireless networks as well as landline broadband networks—as in current cloud computing initiatives. In its cultural practices the resulting third wave of computing continues to permeate and break down traditional modern boundaries of space and time, not least any clear-cut distinctions of the near and the far, the now and the past, the private and the public sense of space and time (Auge´ 1995, Bogard 2007, Colebrook 2004, Crang and Thrift 2000, De Landa 2007, Dourish 2006, Featherstone 2008, Habermas et al. 2004, Lefebvre 2004, Lefebvre and Goonewardena 2008, Manovich 2006, Massumi 1995, Thrift 2008, Willams et al. 2005). Insofar as ubicomp leads to a growing inherence or an immanence of our life form, its technological platforms sink deeper into the skin of human agency—often, if not always, receding from conscious perception and sensation into a peripheral background …

Since its early inception as part of the technologies being deployed through digital media, ubicomp has led to remarkable alterations of our ways of being in the world (Morley 2004). Combining with social and personalised mobile media, as well as with physical tangible interfaces, ubicomp, pervasive computing or ambient intelligence has generated a flow of innovative technocultural developments saturating even the most innocuous activities of our everyday life: the time keeping of daily routines; our communications with family, friends, and colleagues; our performance in work-related tasks as well as hobbies such as gameplay (Flanagan 2009, Galloway 2006, Hjorth and Chan 2009, Montola et al. 2009); the management of personal finances; our meetings and encounters in public and private spaces and places; the sense and sensation of cultural sites and memories; our political acts and expressions of views; and even the character of our work of mourning and our bereavement following tragedy and disaster.

Yet considering the well-nigh global scope and reach of these changes, there is still a relative poverty of research in this young field, although one must appreciate such efforts as Weiser's papers (Weiser 1991, 1993, 1994, Weiser and Brown 1995, 1996, Weiser et al. 1999, 2005), Hiroshi Ishii's (1997, 2008) work on tangible computing, the steadily growing list of conference proceedings dealing with ubiquitous and pervasive computing (Anon 2011, Helal 2009, IEEE Computer Society and University of Texas at Arlington 2010), the specialised technical treatments appearing not least with the Springer Press (Hansmann et al. 2003, Steventon and Wright 2006, Streitz et al. 2007), Paul Dourish's (2001, Dourish and Bell 2007) and Mike Kuniavsky's (2010) work on ubicomp and human-computer interaction (HCI), Malcolm McCullough's (2004) treatment of architecture and pervasive computing, and the broad cultural theoretical engagement by a great many scholars with the implications of ubicomp for our form of life in the Throughout anthology edited by Ulrik Ekman (forthcoming). Thus, even though mobile cultures have also seen a first valuable set of studies of their own—(e.g. by Castells (2007), Goggin (2006, 2008, Goggin and Hjorth 2009), Hjorth (2008, Hjorth and Chan 2009), Ito (Ito et al. 2005), Wajcman Wajcman et al. 2008), Ling (2008)—one would like to solicit more and better treatments of the import and implications for everyday cultures of small mobile devices (Hawt et al. 2008), as well as new physical interfaces such as touchscreens—specifically with respect to their dynamic and ad hoc couplings with ubicomp infrastructures.

This special issue emerges from activities instantiated through ‘The Culture of Ubiquitous Information’, a Nordic Research Network devoted to the analysis and evaluation of ubiquitous computing as a contemporary technocultural development. As suggested by the title (‘Mobile Ubiquity in Public and Private Spaces’), this issue seeks to examine cultural formations, practices, processes and movements related to the presence and deployment of ubiquitous information in the lived spaces and recesses of human culture today. Some of the articles included are the result of the workshop held in Helsinki (January 2011) and an open call posted by the research network. During the workshop, academics, artists, designers and media theorists came together to discuss topics such as: What is the character, place and reach of the new interfaces and types of interaction design for ubicomp? How do social mobile media platforms mediate proximity and intimacy? What do contextualisation and personalisation mean considering technical context-awareness and individuals' adoption of mobile devices? What is the conceptualisation of agency for creative individuals in a ubicomp culture, and how is this agency transformed through collaborative innovative work (Hemment 2006, Townsend 2006, Tuters and Varnelis 2006)? What different worlds now come together in the practices of art and design, especially with regard to the new digital instruments? How do the multiple dimensions of human experience, such as identity, affect and emotion, sensation, perception, and conscious expression and interpretation, find an outlet in the mobile social experience?

Engaging with a contemporary information culture that lives on with mobile computing and mediation as part and parcel of a third wave of post-desktop and post-graphical user interface (GUI) computing, one is perhaps struck not least by its creative processes of making new digital artefacts, new types of (multimodal) interaction design (Jacko 2007), and new kinds of information intensive environments. A case in point is presented in ‘Mobile innovation: designing and evaluating situated simulations’, where the authors showcase the situated simulation (or sitsim) as a new digital genre combining augmented reality with mobility in order to enhance our perception of specific places. Both views from the real world as well as the one generated by the system are synchronised so that, as one moves through the environment, the synthetic computer-generated objects appear on the screen of the mobile device in the same perspective as those of the real world. The essay also showcases the design and implementation of one of such systems in the cultural heritage sector and highlights user experience research through two case studies carried on at major heritage sites, namely the Roman Forum and the Parthenon in the Acropolis.

Contending from a critical perspective that cartography is an epistemic instrument that has been used to make borders, mask differences, and produce coherent identities, ‘Urban fictions: a critical reflection on locative art and performative geographies’ examines mapmaking practices in an urban landscape. The authors propose that locative art opens new forms of practice and knowing that enable embodied participation and subjective investigation. From an experiential perspective, they argue, it should be possible to observe the dissonance between location as data and location as a lived negotiated place. The essay presents two versions of an artistic intervention and installation, Urban Fiction and Urban Fiction 2.0. In this installation that involves the mapping of interactions and transversals through the multiple spaces of a city, mobile devices are reconfigured as lenses affording readings outside the fixed relations inscribed through traditional cartography. The city is revealed as a multilayered, multi-authored fabric subject to multiple tensions, constant re-weaving and occasional tears.

Extending the theme of the politics of embodiment in the city landscape, ‘Provoking the city—touch installations for urban space’ describes the theoretical and practical concerns involved in the creation of an interactive touch-based installation situated in a public space. The authors seek to further develop a notion of touch not only as embodiment but also as a relational concept with potential to open up new affective spaces.

While economic forces relentlessly continue to drive the development of mobile devices so that more and more sophisticated visual and aural communication modes become available, the role and potential contribution of new media in solving and untangling the problems and complexities of contemporary societies remains unclear. In this context, how we deal with larger than life events including disaster and tragedy and what use we make of mobile media devices is the main topic of ‘Good grief: the role of social mobile media in the 3.11 earthquake disaster in Japan’. By exploring the use of social media in the management of crisis and grief, the essay seeks to probe into the notion of how co-presence is instantiated through mobile social media and how this in turn might promote ambient forms of intimacy. Do contemporary mobile social media provide the potential for greater affective personalisation? Are there new affective economies and micro-narratives that coalesce alongside the old analogue media formations? Can we say that indeed mobile social media has a role in the emergence of new affective cultures?

From an ontological perspective, ‘Towards a theory of pervasive ludology: reflections on gameplay, rules and space’ seeks to describe the boundaries of pervasive gaming. A key characteristic to this genre is how, by reconfiguring the social landscape of the city, it expands the gaming space into a dense grid of game objects, game goals and game worlds. Drawing a distinction between playing and gaming is paramount to understanding the power of mobile game experience for humans: whereas gaming is connected to rules and strategy, playing enacts a meta-narrative that reconciles paradoxical communication (Bateson 1972), thus blurring the boundaries between the real and the virtual; it is this liminal state of being in between that supports the illusion.

With the widespread diffusion and impact of mobile platforms comes the promise of software cultures already presupposing and building upon a notion of ubiquitous information. As mobile-based distributed software applications, apps are usually deployed on devices such as the iPhone, iPad or Blackberry that can also be accessed and utilised over a network. More recently, apps have come to the fore as key components in the information ecologies sustained through these platforms. The author of ‘Ubiquitous apps: politics of openness in global mobile cultures’ calls for a reality check and a critical rethinking of this aspect of mobile computing. The reality for us as users is that we actually know very little about apps and their supporting technological systems. Who, why and for what purposes can apps be accessed? What are the contingencies in social and political relations that regulate access to apps? The article thus presents an inquiry that begins to reveal how the space where apps co-exist is neither neutral nor decentralised but rather fuelled by the profit-driven agendas of large corporations.

Whether in economic or technical discourses, the very terms ‘ubiquity’, ‘pervasiveness’ and ‘ambience’ come silently freighted with a notion of totalising universality or even certain ontological and metaphysical remainders (altogether abstract idealisations and/or excessively essential or substantial extensions). Both the editors and the authors contributing to this special issue approach this as a call for ongoing deconstruction and reconstruction, so that remainders and implications of onto-theological and sovereign ideological notions must be questioned reasonably so as to be put under critical erasure in one or more ways. In other words, the essays include an implicit orientation towards rather unconditional critique of the idea that ubicomp is, should or could be ‘ubiquitous’, that pervasive computing is, should, or could be ‘pervasive’, or that the discourses, practices and inventions involved extend, penetrate and invade ‘throughout’, or are always already at stake all over. Instead, one would like to put the emphasis on the multiple ways in which ‘ubiquity’ partakes of infinite finitude, and perhaps the investigation of the relations with contemporary mobile cultures is one of the best ways to illustrate that the general problem of a culture of ubiquitous information exists not as one of totality or infinity but rather as one of immanent complexity. Hence, in this emergent third wave of computing, its mobile devices and co-developing cultural practices might be one of the best foci because they make felt a culture of ubiquitous information qua the dynamics and energies of ad hoc network theories and practices, because they make felt the ways in which complexity arises from a vast number of distinguishable relational regimes and their associated state spaces, promising a defined system (yet to come).

Paying more attention to the mobilities of glocal information cultures (qua the processes and dynamic relationalities of regional, national, and local singularities) holds a certain priority of interest here. For when treating of ubicomp it is perhaps still too easy to underestimate how much the dynamically mobile unfolding of Hertzian space has meant to the differentiated technical development and culturally lived experience of spaces (public, private, mediatory and transportational flows) in the network and information societies of the world. Without the mobile phone, how conversant would we be today with information-intensive environments and their variants of mixed realities (augmented reality as well as augmented virtuality)? If the vibrations of the mobile phone and the multi-sized touch screens had not already come along as corporeal cultural affordances or facilitators, how far would we have got with respect to a competent and liveable decoding and recoding of the primordially tactile and haptic dimensions of our psychic and social envelopes vis-à-vis computational infrastructures with context-awareness? Likewise, one wonders exactly how much the mobiles have been contributing to begin meeting the demand for a more finely differentiated set of notions and practices to take care of the relations between ubicomp systems and cultural economies of attention—spanning phenomena from the invisible computers to the very visible glut of information overloads, from embedded through calmly peripheral, affectively ambient and atmospherically sensible computing to installations actively and overtly calling, via your perception, upon conscious curiosity and a desire to explore, or play.