Your Smart Phones Are Hot Pockets to Us: Context Collapse in a Mobilized Age

A key guarantor of social trust and a necessary feature of democratic societies is a stable sense of social distance. Social distance is the cultural imaginary within which an individual’s coordinates of social status and contingent social location allow or inhibit contact with similarly and dissimilarly located others. The rearrangement of customary social distances by new communication technologies is a source of considerable social anxiety. In mobile communication, this context collapse is instigated by a distinctive combination of affordances: deep connectivity, the accelerated speed and volume of communicative exchange, enhanced social legibility and asymmetric communicative transparency. Robust and effective levels of social trust depend on a political will to build strong democratic accountability and civil rights guarantees into emerging mobile architectures. Identifying specific recalibrations of familiar social distances by regimes of mobile communication and assessing the effects of these recalibrations in democratic terms is a central task of mobile research

Disaster Planning and Management

Recent events such as hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, power outages, and the threat of pandemics have highlighted our vulnerability to natural disasters. This vulnerability is exacerbated by many organizations\u27 increasing dependence on computer, telecommunications, and other technologies, and trends toward integrating suppliers and business partners into everyday business operations. In response many organizations are implementing disaster recovery planning processes. In this paper we discuss how to identify threats and scenarios; how to articulate the disaster recovery strategies; and four elements of the generic disaster recovery plan: Mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. We then provide examples of software that can help disaster recovery professionals in the planning and implementation process. Finally we present some trends that will reinforce the criticality of the issue

Mobile Technologies: Participation and Surveillance

Mobile phones could become the largest surveillance system on the planet. These ubiquitous devices can sense and record data such as images, sound and location. They can automatically upload this data via wireless connections into systems for aggregation and analysis. But unlike traditional surveillance devices, phone sensors can be controlled by billions of individuals around the world. Are emerging mobile technologies platforms for citizen participation in research and discovery? Or new tools for mass surveillance? Location-based technologies and mobile phone applications like carbon footprint calculator Ecorio and Google’s Latitude are attracting attention and raising new questions for engineers, policy makers, and users. These systems collect and combine data in new ways, and their effects cross political boundaries. Who will build and control processes such as data storage, aggregation, sharing, and retention? What policies are required to control this data, and who sets them? And to what purposes will these systems be deployed? Humanists, social scientists, and technologists all have tools and perspectives to investigate these questions and contribute to a discussion of social issues in mobile sensing. This course brings together students from across campus to use some of those disciplinary tools and explore ethics and social challenges engendered by new technologies. Readings, discussion, design exercises and assignments will provide methods, tools, and contexts for unpacking the social issues embedded in emerging technologies. We will concentrate on the features of mobile technologies and how our worldview – specific cultural lenses, research practices, political orientations, economic pressures, popular narratives and fiction – influences how these features are imagined and built

Representing the Intertwined Visual And Heritage Implications of Sea-level Rise

Visualizing the impacts of urban development, energy infrastructure and forest harvest practices has become a key element in the discussion and approval or rejection of development plans. Great efforts are expended to achieve accuracy and repeatability in representation to ensure that decision-making is well-informed. Professional ethics on the part of those creating the visualizations generally require fact-based representations that minimize appeal to the emotions. “Sense of place”, an aesthetic or culturally-driven response, is implicitly active in determining the appropriateness, or not, of a landscape intervention but has not lent itself to systematic scientific study. Perceived sense of place may, however, be disproportionately active in determining people’s reactions to the incremental impacts of climate change. There is substantial evidence that, despite science-based projections of future flood and damage-prone areas, people will choose to stay in place—for many reasons but importantly because of attachment to place, an emotional response. Addressing the effects of climate change might then require directly representing altered sense of place in order to motivate people to act wisely in the face of unavoidable and unwanted change. We have developed a prototype immersive visualization and verbal elicitation tool to deliberately engage citizens and elicit their responses to projective representations of the future with supporting cultural narratives, for a threatened community with deep cultural roots, and have developed some guidance and prototypes for achieving appropriate citizen engagement. We report here on a pilot study to investigate the linked impacts of landscape visual change and change narratives on place attachment and on anticipated actions in the face of climate-related changes

Sedimentary Ways

This paper is a thought experiment to attune to the geo-physical and geo-political materialities of sediment, a terra-aqueous substance produced when the earth's continental surfaces intra-act with the atmosphere and are chemically transformed by it. The paper is framed by questions of how to engage more closely with the dynamics of earth systems and of how social and political agency emerges alongside earth forces. Sediment is important to such questions because it is the mechanism by which the earth recycles itself and is thick with the climatological and geological histories that have conditioned the possibility of life on the planet. While acknowledging the import of Deleuze and Guattari's metaphysics to such questions, the paper takes a material approach to them. It is based on field work in Bangladesh, but also traverses a range of scientific, historical and theoretical literature. It is arranged in four sections that loosely correspond to the sedimentary cycle. It follows sediment from chemical processes on rock surfaces in the Himalayas, to its lively travels in monsoonal rivers across flood plains to its eventual deposition and subterranean diagenesis. In each section, the paper discusses the material processes at work, their socio-political enmeshments and the theoretical implications of these intra-actions. The paper concludes that sediment serves as a reminder not only of close entanglements of geo-physical and geo-political becomings, but also of the profound indifference of earth systems to human affairs, and asks what this might mean for the re-imagination of politics

Design guidelines : North Cambridge neighborhood intergenerational urban village center

Thesis (M. Arch.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1989.Includes bibliographical references (leaf 42).by Robert D. Fiedler.M.Arch

An absent presence : encountering the state through natural resource extraction in Papua New Guinea and Australia

Publisher PD

Material idea: on the legibility of culture

What we call “the real” is also the result of a protocol of reading. Such a reading is unavoidably historical and contingent, as a product of a specific temporary sense. It also stands within a complex correlation of marked and unmarked spaces, therefore in a spatial sense too. But this latter framework also carries the evidence of time. Such “marks”, taken as individual projections or choices, are not only constantly changing, according for instance to the daylight (or nocturnal illumination, or twilight palettes), to the instant temper or mood, to the physical conditions and the cultural antecedents of the perceiving and exposing subject – to sum up, according to a whole package of conditions and circumstances. If we put together the myriads of individuals on the global surface, we constantly have to redraw the lines of intersection and re-read the mappings of an interactive geography made of partly individual options, partly mimetic movements. Like ruins, views are constantly being destroyed and rebuilt; like lines, they are constantly being erased and rewritten. But this never happens completely anew. Culture work may also be seen as a patient attempt to read palimpsests – which are, as we well know, marked spaces par excellence.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Citizen Empowerment as a Police Force Multiplier: Reproducing Social Domination through a 21st Century Personal Safety App

Citizen is a digital mapping platform and personal safety app that boasts over 10 million users in the United States. Through the platform, users can report crimes, map safe routes, or rely on the app’s other functions to protect themselves from dangerous situations. Sold on a promise of empowerment, Citizen markets itself as a 21st century technology capable of repairing the ills of our social world. In this article we analyze how Citizen taps into the desire for control and safety and urges its users to actively protect their own communities. As such, we suggest that while surveillant in nature, Citizen revolves around the force inherent to police power, transforming its users via police power by first integrating them into their social platform. Ultimately, Citizen reminds us that police power is not limited to ideological or violent exchanges, but can be a compelling solution to community problems. Rather than a progressive fix to the issues between policing and communities, however, we find that Citizen offers an expansion of police power at the individual scale, reproducing social domination both at the level of capital and the state