The Center for Mobile Communication Studies (CMCS) at Rutgers University is ‘trying to get a sense of what leading thinkers see as important issues concerning mobile social networking.’ So if you consider yourself a leading thinker, why not give them a hand and fill out their survey? The final report will eventually be published here.

[…continued from last post] Thursday May 22 2008 I visited the CHI conference The Web and Beyond: Mobility in Amsterdam. Keynote speakers were: Adam Greenfield (Everyware); Jyri Engeström (Jaiku); Ben Cerveny (Playground foundation, Flickr); Christian Lindholm (Fjord, Nokia). Jyri Engeström talked about how mobile technologies have become social objects. Social network theory is good in…

Thursday May 22 2008 I visited the CHI conference The Web and Beyond: Mobility in Amsterdam. Keynote speakers were: Adam Greenfield (Everyware); Jyri Engeström (Jaiku); Ben Cerveny (Playground foundation, Flickr); Christian Lindholm (Fjord, Nokia). I was particularly impressed with Adam Greenfield‘s presentation. He had a very rich and dense talk based on the material of…

The Dutch Daily NRC Handelsblad published a highly interesting interview with retiring law-professor Egbert Dommering. He enters the current debate about new media, personal development and cultural authority by expressing his fear that the dominance of cultural systems for information retrieving like Google or GPS-Navigation will turn us all into ‘Men without Qualities’ (after the…

The people at the Architectural League of New York have been at the forefront of the debate about the Mobile City. In 2006 they organized a symposium on Architecture and Situated Technologies, and in 2007 they launched the Situated Technologies Pamphlet Series. Now it seems, it is time to put the theory into practice. They…

“Internet, television, mobile phones and television..  they don’t destroy the world, they enrich it. More beautiful, warmer and more intense, especially for young people”. From the manifesto of The Music factory (TMF), an MTV-clone owned by MTV. The animation’s rhetoric keeps refering to a generation gap, talking about youth who don’t let themselves be shaped…

Hurray, the web and beyond, a conference on ubiquitous computing, the mother-notion behind all these visions of our computer-infested lives. I’m definitely going, if only to hear how Adam Greenfield is getting along with his fresh perspective on Ubicomp (and to ask him if he would please use a better bibliography-system in his next book).

While here in the Netherlands the month of April is the month of philosophy, with special theme The City, just across the border Belgium hosts some very interesting events the coming month. The first is a symposium in Genk called “De Hybride Stad” (hybrid city) taking place today – April 18 – starting at 15:00,…

Not so long ago, at the Netherlands Media Art Institute, I came across an interesting installation by Martijn Hendriks, called ‘video as suburban condition’. The installation shows a loop of Youtube clips that most likeley we are all too familiar with: teenagers popping mentos in coke bottles on suburban cul de sacs, young girls –…

One of my teachers recently pointed me towards this fun little documentary called “How William Shatner changed the world“. In it, Shatner explains how the concepts created for Star Trek laid the basis for a kind of self-fulfilling prophesy. For instance, during one segment Motorola’s Martin Cooper, proclaimed inventor or the cellphone, claims he got…