Lecture ppt notes for Theories and Interpretation of Interactive Media course by professor Frans Mäyrä

1. Theories and interpretation of
interactive media 5 /
Vuorovaikutteisen median
teoriat ja tulkinta 5
Frans Mäyrä
Professor of hypermedia,
esp. digital culture and game studies
University of Tampere, Hypermedia Laboratory
frans.mayra@uta.fi

2. Lecture 5:
Laptop / ubiquity: Approaches to
omnipresent IT

3. Outline
• Increasing ubiquity of ICT
• Ubiquitous computing, pervasive computing
• Calm technology, ambient intelligence etc.
• Being augmented by technology, being amputated
• Pervasive new media as prosthetic technology
• Laptop, a symbol of “digital life”
• Augmented memory, perception
• Location based media

4. Number of computers
• The number of personal computers in use is currently
estimated to approach 1 billion (expected to reach 2 billion in
just five more years of time)*
• Simultaneously, UN estimated in 2004 that 1 billion people, 20
% of global population lacks any contact to ITC
• In developed countries the Internet penetration has rapidly
risen and is over 50 %, while growth in developing countries
development is slower (c. 6-7% of population)**
• Most new computers are connected to the Internet
• Internet usage through mobile phone has been increasing
• Majority of microprocessors is used in embedded IT
*) Source: Forrester, via http://www.techworld.com/news/index.cfm?NewsID=9119
**) http://www.sanalnair.org/articles/vital_statistics.htm

5. Directions of omnipresence
• Traditionally only God was granted omnipresence
• Today, computers and telecommunication networks (ICT) are
linked to vision where they become ubiquitous, omnipresent
• There appears two directions of ubiquitous ICT: the
“mundane” ubiquity will involve particularly the near future of
smart phones and laptop computers
• The “sublime” version of ubiquity is more focused on radical
and revolutionary potentials of artificial intelligence/life,
embedded and proactive computing and distributed sensor
networks
• Roles of individuals and media are different in these visions

6. Ubiquitous computing
• As proposed by Mark Weiser (Xerox PARC), “ubicomp” is third
wave of computing, following mainframe (single machine,
many users), and personal computing era (single PC, single
user)
• In an ubicomp environment, many computers continuously
serve any single individual
• Embodies principles of calm technology where computers are
not the focus of attention but rather remain in the background
and periphery
• Philosophically the opposite of VR (virtual reality): the goal is
not to move people to the world of computers but to force
computers to live in the world of humans
See: http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/UbiHome.html
http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/SciAmDraft3.html

7. Everyware
• Adam Greenfield’s book (2006) aims to put forward central
“theses” of ubiquitous computing
• About “vision of processing power so distributed throughout
the environment that computers per se effectively disappear”
(cf. Disappearing Computer, Ambient Intelligence, EU
initiatives)
• In everyware, “all the information we now look to our phones
or Web browsers to provide becomes accessible just about
anywhere, at any time, and is delivered in a manner
appropriate to our location and context”
See: http://www.disappearing-computer.net/

8. “The average employee’s attention span is, at
most, 12 minutes. The average worker switches to
a different task every three minutes and gets
Pervasive
interrupted every two minutes, says Gloria Mark,
a professor at the University of California-Irvine
who studies the effects of multitasking on
absentmindedness
workers.”*
• What are the social and cultural conditions associated with
pervasive, ubiquitous, ambient media or ITC?
• In cognitive terms, it is impossible to design information
systems so that they would still convey information, and not
create cognitive load
• When there is an increase of information sources, danger of
“information glut” (information fatigue, anxiety) also increases
• In addition, increasing multitasking can be associated with
attention problems
• ADHD (Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder): the new most
“symptomatic” disease of our time?
See. A. Toffler (1970) Future Shock; P.J. Jennings (2006)
http://cs.gmu.edu/cne/pjd/PUBS/CACMcols/cacmJul06.pdf & *)http://www.playattention.com/attention-
deficit/articles/multitasking-add-and-the-workplace/

9. Being amputated by ITC
• According to McLuhan, being extended by technology also
means being subjected to “self-amputation”
– “Any invention or technology is an extension or self-amputation of our
physical bodies, and such extension also demands new ratios or new
equilibriums among the other organs and extensions of the body (...).
Physiologically, man in the normal use of his technology (or his variously
extended body) is perpetually modified by it (...).” (Understanding
media, p. 8)
• As we delegate our physical motions, sensations and even
memory and thought processes to technology, our intrinsic
capabilities are simultaneously reduced
• Theorists of “cyborg subjectivity” often describe our relation
to e.g. car, calculator or Internet in terms of prosthesis
See: Donna Haraway (1991), Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature; p.149-
181: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html

10. Laptop as prosthetic
technology
• In the following portable personal computer (laptop
PC) is taken as an exemplary context for mundane
“everyware”
• Laptop is where PC becomes particularly personal
• The physical characteristics of a laptop PC are
important, since it is tool which is typically carried
around and used in multiple situations and positions
• The archaeology of data captured by our laptops
provides particular, filtered and selected mediation
of our lives, stratified in historical layers

11. Source: http://www.apple.com/macbook/macbook.html
Quotes: “perfectly designed for your mobile lifestyle” … “Every MacBook
comes with iLife ’08 — an amazing suite of applications that make it easy
to live the digital life” … “share entire high-res photo albums” … “Record
your own songs and podcasts” … “Break into indie filmmaking” … “take all
the stuff you made on your MacBook and share it on the web in one click”

12. Images source: photos tagged ‘laptop’ in www.flickr.com

18. Digital life?
• Nicholas Negroponte, the founding director of MIT Media Lab put
forward in his book (1995) views that were influential in defining a
“digital lifestyle”
• In a 1996 column, Negroponte wrote how “portable computers are
also for peripatetic, digital people. These are people who need
more than a high-octane computer - they need a constant digital
presence”* (opened in 2005 One Laptop Per Child initiative)
• Laptop can be read as a symbol for symbiotic relationship with
ICT: memory, communication, self-expression, leisure, work,
private and professional identity are all relayed and acted out
through the laptop
• Mobile phones and home media centres compete for similar roles
Source: http://archives.obs-us.com/obs/english/books/nn/bd41296.htm

19. Augmented memory?
• As memory is augmented by digital media, the properties of
media entangle with memory processes
• E.g. as personal discussions are remembered with the help of
archived email or chat discussions, it becomes possible to refer
back to “evidence”
• Forgetting and change are parts of organic evolutionary
processes
• Digitally augmented memories are hybrid creations,
recreations with partially objective and subjective elements
• Cf. Roland Barthes’s analysis of photography and memory in La
Chambre claire (1980): studium vs. punctum (meaning derived
from shared, cultural/political codes vs. personally
touching/wounding detail)

20. Theory into
experiment
• MyLifeBits project: aims for a lifetime store of “everything”
• MS researcher Gordon Bell who has “captured a lifetime's
worth of articles, books, cards, CDs, letters, memos, papers,
photos, pictures, presentations, home movies, videotaped
lectures, and voice recordings and stored them digitally. He is
now paperless, and is beginning to capture phone calls, IM
transcripts, television, and radio”*
• Cf. Steve Mann, who uses wearable IT to record everything he
sees, wherever he goes
• A politically utopian and activist project, to attack increasingly
ubiquitous institutional surveillance with personal
“sousveillance”
Sources: *) http://research.microsoft.com/barc/mediapresence/MyLifeBits.aspx

21. CyborGLOGGING, ‘glog’: “a first-person recording of
an activity, in which the person doing the recording is
a participant in the activity” - see a video sample,
www.glogger.mobi
Image source: www.wikimedia.org

22. Location based new media
• As ICT becomes mobile and attached as augmentations to our
personal space, increasing contextual awareness will be
required
• Location based media is related to the concept of “augmented
reality” (AR): multimedia content that is somehow tailored for
this particular location, or provided as an “overlay” on top of it
• Typical implementations include multimedia tours and AR
systems whose uses range from tourism to gaming
• Location based services more generally play an increasing role
in mobile media
• Galloway and Ward have theorised “locative media” as form of
social interaction with a place and with technology*
Source: *) http://www.purselipsquarejaw.org/papers/galloway_ward_draft.pdf

24. From laptop to
mobile phone
• The dominant interface of PC is based on a
typewriter, suggesting document-based mode of use
(cf. media archaeology of telephones)
• The ‘media ecology’ surrounding mobile/pervasing
ICT use has produced increasingly hybrid
configurations in both socio-cultural (use) and
technological areas (device multi-purposing)
• Detachment of phone from home/office has allowed
more individualised phone cultures to evolve
• E.g. Japanese culture of emailing through mobile
phones, Finnish mobile culture with SMS & ‘häläri’
calls (pager style use of mobile call)
Image sources: http://www.craphound.com/images/typewriterclassic.jpg &
http://www.mountebank.org/blog/images/phone.gif

25. Image sources: Google Mobile Maps, http://www.google.com/gmm/ -
Nokia Maps http://plaza.fi/muropaketti/artikkelit/sekalaiset/gps-
navigointia-matkapuhelimella,4

26. Location
based audio
• Mobile phone’s “native” modality is audio communication
• Yet, most mobile media efforts are emphatically PC-centric in their
focus on keyboard & screen interaction
• Experimental audio dramas have made use of location awareness,
e.g. Riot! 1831 (Mobile Bristol), Murmur (2003) and Static (2007)
implemented in Toronto
• As user generated content is combined with location awareness, an
expanded design space is achieved
• E.g. WikEar: draws information about sights in Berlin from
Wikipedia articles and organises it into automatically generated
spatial narrative structures
• Even location based audio shooter has been developed: Demor
(2004)
Sources: http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/Publications/Papers/2000261.pdf, http://staticexperience.com,
http://murmurtoronto.ca, http://rhizome.org/art/exhibition/location_is_everything/home.html & http://www.deutsche-
telekom-laboratories.de/~rohs/papers/Schoening-WikEarDemo-Ubicomp2007.pdf, http://student-
kmt.hku.nl/~g7/site/index_.html

27. Image source: http://student-
kmt.hku.nl/~g7/site/about.html

28. Location based media vs.
mobile social service
• “Mobile media” can be conceptualised in
multiple ways
• If taken as availability of traditional media
through mobile devices, it will not radically
alter the character of media per se
• If taken as a site for the communicational,
participatory potentials, decentralisation of
authorship, new forms of collaboration and
social networking, more novelty value, hype and
transformative potential is perceived