Entries tagged with “india” from active social plastic

Greetings from lovely San Jose and the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference! I'm here for the first time since 2004. The talks have been terrific. I had the opportunity to give an Ignite talk (5 minutes! 20 slides!) on pneumatic tubes.

I'm giving a talk today called "Shared and Sometimes Stealthy: India's Mobile Phone"-- it's the result of a study I did at Microsoft Research India in 2006. If you're interested in the topic, there are two chapters that I've published about it. I wrote "Beyond the Personal and Private: Modes of Mobile Phone Sharing in Urban India" with Jonathan Donner of Microsoft Research India. It will be published later this month in The Reconstruction of Space and Time: Mobile Communication Practices (edited by Rich Ling and Scott Campbell). And with Jonathan Donner, Nimmi Rangaswamy, and Carolyn Wei, we wrote "'Express Yourself' and 'Stay Together: The Indian Middle Class Family" in the Handbook on Mobile Communication Studies, edited by James Katz. It discusses of the effect of the mobile phone on several domestic situations: home finances, romance and the domestic boundary.

At South by Southwest, Francesca Birks and I organized a panel called Tangible Interactions in Urban Spaces, where we'll be joined by Ben Cerveny and Mouna Andraos. We're on deck on Sunday at 10 a.m. (early! but very cool!).

Do come to see us -- and if any of these subjects interest you, please follow up with me. I have more material to offer.

One of my long-standing projects is understanding the social use of communication technology and how space is changed and structured by these interactions. One of these projects in particular examined how people share mobile phones in urban India, shaped by constraints and contexts, born out of a study I did at Microsoft Research India in Bangalore in 2006. Two articles resulted from the work, one about to be published, the other published in spring 2008.

I wrote "Beyond the Personal and Private: Modes of Mobile Phone Sharing in Urban India" with Jonathan Donner of Microsoft Research India. It will be published later this month in The Reconstruction of Space and Time: Mobile Communication Practices (edited by Rich Ling and Scott Campbell). Here, I looked at sharing in a number of contexts and discovered that across class, caste and gender, mobile phone sharing is pervasive, but constraints (money, family mores, gender, literacy, adjacency) determine how the phone will be shared in different spatial contexts (we looked at domestic, out and about, the marketplace and village-to-urban social ecologies).

With Jonathan Donner, Nimmi Rangaswamy, and Carolyn Wei, we wrote "'Express Yourself' and 'Stay Together: The Indian Middle Class Family" in the Handbook on Mobile Communication Studies, edited by James Katz. It discusses of the effect of the mobile phone on several domestic situations: home finances, romance and the domestic boundary. 

Researching this project opened me up to new ways of understanding how mobile technology can fix spaces that seem transitory -- like a marketplace --  or how it calls attention to the porous nature of other spaces -- like the domestic boundary. It leaves open areas I'd very much like to research: issues of trust, of porosity, of connection across broad social networks in the traditional sense, a reconsideration of the fixed and mobile in a marketplace.