57,982 research outputs found
The urban screen as a socialising platform: exploring the role of place within the urban space
In this paper we explore shared encounters mediated by technologies in the urban space. We investigate aspects that influence the interactions between people and
people and people and their surroundings when technology is introduced in the urban space. We highlight the importance of space and the role of place in providing temporal and spatial mechanisms facilitating different types of
social interactions and shared encounters.
An emperical experiment was condeucted with a prototype that was implemented in the form of a digital screen, embeded in the physical surrounding in selected
locations with low, medium and high pedestrian flows in the heritage City of Bath, UK.
The aim is to create a novel urban experience that triggers shared encounters among friends, observers or strangers. Using the body as an interaface, the screen acted as a non-traditional interface and a facilitator between people and people and people and their surrounding environment.
Here we outline early findings from deploying the digital screen as a socialiasing platform in a city context. We describe the user experience and demonstrate how people move, congregate and socialize around the digital
surface. We illustrate the impact of the spatial and syntactical properties on the type of shared interactions in and highlight related issues.
The initial findings indicated that introducing a digital platform as a public interactive installation in the urban space may provide a stage for emergent social interactions among various people and motivate users to actively and
collaboratively play with the media. However, situating the digital platform in various locations, and depending on the context, might generate diverse and unpredicted social behaviours designers might be unaware of. In this respect we
believe that the final experience is shaped by interconnection of structural, social, cultural, temporal and perhaps personal elements. We conclude by mentioning briefly our on going work
Situating emotional experience
Psychological construction approaches to emotion suggest that emotional experience is situated and dynamic. Fear, for example, is typically studied in a physical danger context (e.g., threatening snake), but in the real world, it often occurs in social contexts, especially those involving social evaluation (e.g., public speaking). Understanding situated emotional experience is critical because adaptive responding is guided by situational context (e.g., inferring the intention of another in a social evaluation situation vs. monitoring the environment in a physical danger situation). In an fMRI study, we assessed situated emotional experience using a newly developed paradigm in which participants vividly imagine different scenarios from a first-person perspective, in this case scenarios involving either social evaluation or physical danger. We hypothesized that distributed neural patterns would underlie immersion in social evaluation and physical danger situations, with shared activity patterns across both situations in multiple sensory modalities and in circuitry involved in integrating salient sensory information, and with unique activity patterns for each situation type in coordinated large-scale networks that reflect situated responding. More specifically, we predicted that networks underlying the social inference and mentalizing involved in responding to a social threat (in regions that make up the âdefault modeâ network) would be reliably more active during social evaluation situations. In contrast, networks underlying the visuospatial attention and action planning involved in responding to a physical threat would be reliably more active during physical danger situations. The results supported these hypotheses. In line with emerging psychological construction approaches, the findings suggest that coordinated brain networks offer a systematic way to interpret the distributed patterns that underlie the diverse situational contexts characterizing emotional life
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Fragmentation and the digital city: An analysis of Vicente Luis Mora's circular 07. Las afueras
This essay juxtaposes three recent publications, Vicente Luis Mora's Circular 07. Las afueras (2007-), Kenneth Goldsmith's Capital: New York, Capital of the 20th Century (2015), and Jorge CarriĂłn's Barcelona. Libro de los pasajes (2016), in order to explore how contemporary digital technologies construct and fragment urban experience on a global scale. Despite their different political intentions, these three works share a common aesthetic of appropriation, unoriginal quotation, and fragmentation, as they are also all modelled after Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project. Just like Benjamin did with Paris, each of these works focuses on a particular Western city-Madrid, New York, and Barcelona-now being proposed as paradigmatic representations of urban experience, which is meant to mimic digital media's modularity and disintegration. Goldsmith's use of appropriation is read as a blank endorsement of digital mediation of everyday life, which sits in opposition to CarriĂłn's and Mora's political projects. Circular 07 and Barcelona mix unoriginal writing techniques, like Goldsmith's conceptual writing, with other experimental methods to warn readers against apolitical adoption of digital technologies. Fragmentation is still proposed as the most important aesthetic form of twenty-first century writing, but these two Spanish works strive for its contextualization as a complex mechanism structured around reader/writer subjectivity. Finally, this essay ponders how to consider new reader/ writer subjectivities within the larger context of global cities in late capitalism
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Capitalismâs Cynical Leviathan: Cynicism, Totalitarianism, and Hobbes in Modern Capitalist Regulation
In this paper I have tried to show the symbiotic relationship between discursive systems of totalitarianism and cynicism. Whether speaking of a social Leviathan a la Hobbes or localized capitalist regulation each relies upon the symbiotic combination of total governance with the positive allowance for internal individual dis-identification. The inherent failures of totalitarian discourses to fully interpellate a subject requires a subjective freedom of thought expressed via an ineffectual cynicism, a point borne witness to in the theoretical work of Zizek. Individuals are thus, either implicitly or explicitly, encouraged to manifest their discontent through a non-active liberty in thought or an âideology of cynicismâ (Zizek: 1989). By providing the space to think resistance these systems are able to legitimately demand and make easier obedience in action. Thus the liberating effect of cynical rebellion is the foundation for an acting compliance
Space, Place, Common Wounds and Boundaries: Insider/Outsider Debates in Research with Black Women and Deaf Women
The chapter discusses issues of identity in research. It does this by examining the impacts of the identity of the researcher, participants, and the various identity interchanges that take place. This chapter draws on the perspectives and experiences of participants and researcher in a PhD study with five (Six Deaf women were interviewed but one withdrew due to a conflict of interest.) culturally Deaf (white) women and 25 Black (hearing) women discussing their world of work in UK public sector organizations. The theoretical framework of âAfricanist Sista-hood in Britainâ is that which underpins the positioning of the research and researcher. The chapter provides a reflexive account of the research but in a way that centralizes participant perspectives. Two goals have been achieved; firstly, it adds further contribution to the insider/outsider debate by adding participant perspectives on the issue, and secondly, it demonstrates the ways in which the theoretical framework of âAfricanist Sista-hood in Britainâ can be used in research not just with Black women but also via collaborative approaches with other social groups. In so doing, the chapter raises a number of important questions: Should researchers seek out participant perspectives on the insider/outsider debates in research? In what ways does the identity interchange between researcher and researched have an impact on the research process? What does Africanist Sista-hood in Britain have to offer to Black women and others carrying out research in the field
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Multi-channel customer management: A case study in Egypt
Channel management is one CRM systems component much influenced by the behaviour of customers in relation to the implementation and use of channel management CRM component. The consumersâ behaviours, preferences, perceptions and expectations are crucial for the implementation and use of channel management. Customersâ contact with the organizationâs multi-channels can occur at several touch points through out customer lifecycle. Customersâ behaviours may be differentiated according to the individual or micro level, but it might also differ at an ecological or macro level of analysis (Ramaseshan et al., 2006). In this paper the author has conducted a case study in Egypt to analyze customersâ behaviours at a macro level and customers channel choices, through out the customer lifecycle. The author has used a Structurational Analysis model (Ali and Brooks, 2008) to identify the cultural factors (Ali, et al. 2008) that influence the multi-channel customer management in Egypt
The Museum on the Edge of Forever
This article argues that understanding any space or site relies on a knowledge of its fourth dimension - the timescape. It will explore this by situating the investigation in the museum - a place of heightened contrivance which could easily be shallowly interpreted as "mere style". It will defend a new method of investigating museum temporality which combines both phenomenology and literary theory, and will replace the idea of geo-epistemology with geochronic epistemology: an understanding of context and situation which takes on time as well as spatial location. In so doing, it moves on from notions of the museum as a place out of time, situating it in the networks of meaning, power and politics in which we have lived and are living. Thus, "the whole space of the exhibition" as Lyotard said, "becomes the remains of all time": the Museum on the Edge of Forever
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