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28 Dec 07

Portable Objects in Three Global Cities: The Personalization of Urban Places (PDF)

The abstract: "The mobile phone has become the central node of the ensemble of portable objects that urbanites carry with them as they negotiate their way through information-rich global cities. This paper reports on a study conducted in Tokyo, Los Angeles, and London where we tracked young professionals’ use of the portable objects. By examining devices such as music players, credit cards, transit cards, keys, and ID cards in addition to mobile phones, this study seeks to understand how portable devices construct and support an individual’s identity and activities, mediating relationships with people, places, and institutions. Portable informational objects reshape and personalize the affordances of urban space. Laptops transform cafés into personal offices. Reward and membership cards keep track of individuals’ use of urban services. Music players and mobile devices colonize the in-between times of waiting and transit with the logic of personal communications and media consumption. Our focus in this paper is not on the relational communication that has been the focus of most mobile communication studies, but rather on how portable devices mediate relationships to urban space and infrastructures. We identify three genres of presence in urban space that involve the combination of portable media devices, people, infrastructures, and locations: cocooning, camping, and footprinting. These place-making processes provide hints to how portable devices have reshaped the experience of space and time in global cities."

www.itofisher.com/...portableobjects.pdf - Preview

camping cities cocooning footprinting locative_media mimi_ito mobility socialcomputing socialtheory urbanism

Mimi Ito - Statics: Portable Objects in Three Global Cities: The Personalization of Urban Places

- portal page to PDF on locative media, chapter for "The Reconstruction of Space & Time through Mobile Communication Practices"

www.itofisher.com/...portable_object.html - Preview

locative_media mimi_ito mobility socialtheory urbanism

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