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Mobile Communication and the Ethics of Social Networking; Budapest, Sept. 25–27, 2008 |
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Monday, 15 September 2008 |
Program and abstracts for this year's mobile communication conference in Budapest are available for download: http://www.socialscience.t-mobile.hu/2008/. In my paper 'Imaging the Moving Community' I will look at how and why we should map social network visualizations onto urban street maps.
Abstract of my presentation Imaging the Moving Community - How Locative Media Pertains to Social Software:
Distance on street maps is usually measured in house blocks, bus stops or subway sta-
tions. Distance between people in social networks is mainly measured by the number of in-
termediate persons that gives the number of intermediate links (that can be weighted based on
the number of common friends of two people for example). The city incorporates social and
physical space, thus both approaches to distance and proximity apply. Yet visualizations of
social networks and street maps live parallel lives. On the one hand adding street maps,
localization features and mobile interfaces to social software and on the other hand the sup-
port of social features in collaborative mapping projects delineate the trend towards a medium
that accounts for the city a both social and physical space and at the same time these efforts
signalize the need for such a medium.
The presentation suggests that in order to create appropriate urban maps we have to
rethink what these maps are good for, what the virtue of these maps is regarding to city life.
The examination of this question will draw on experiences of the emerging field of locative
media that aims to explore the intersection of the internet and physical space by taking an
experimental approach towards mobile urban technology, social networks and as well as
collaborative mapping.
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