March 23, 2005
Honey, I Geotagged the Kids
How collaborative cartography could enable us...
"...Whether it's wearable computing that tracks our locations no matter what we happen to be doing, cell phones that let us enter our locations, moods or other data, or even all the wireless nodes, satellites and grid networks capable of finding, resolving and comparing all this information, we're talking about an entirely wireless phenomenon. We're also talking about what might prove to the be ultimate legacy of all our hard work here in the wireless trenches: locative media.
The phrase itself was originally coined by Karlis Kalnins, of gpster.net, who applies the precise logic of linguistics to an otherwise seemingly vague field. "Locative is a case, not a place," Kalnins says, meaning it stands for a final location of an action or the time of the action. In other words, it doesn't just happen in space, like a map, but also in time..." From Honey, I Geotagged the Kids by Douglas Rushkoff, theFeature.
Posted by jo at March 23, 2005 10:22 AM
Comments
comments by Mark Tuters (from http://base.x-i.net/mailman/listinfo/locative):
"collaborative conversations
There are also a few projects that approach this from a slightly different perspective, derived from observing (and practising, we’ve all got one after all) how and where people have used ordinary 2G mobile phones.
There is a spontaneously occurring spatial element to how we use our phones – a bus stop is a mobile phone hotspot (built by human behaviour and day-to-day cycles rather than network access), a hospital operating theatre less so. What phone users do in these hotspots is converse, by text as much as voice, rather than tag or annotate. These conversations are ephemeral, but they cluster round locations – there will always be mobile phone conversations at a busy bus stop.
Up till now these conversations have been private, but what these alternative, phone based projects have tried to do is ask if there are public phone conversations that can be had in these places, but only with those who have also been there (in the hope that civic value in some form might emerge from some of these conversations with people we share our everyday physical world with).
They’ve designed systems to enable these public conversations, the first generation using very lo-fi physical markers – signs and stickers – but now moving on to a kind of “del.icio.us for places” concept that an audience member in one of the PLAN discussions neatly named “consensus based location” (which is a lovely sly subversion of Location Based Services).
These systems sit on top of the phone networks, meaning they don’t need to ask for permission from the operators, and why would the networks care anyway, since they’ll be the ones making the money."
Posted by: Jo at March 28, 2005 01:04 PM
