Category: 2006: Vol. 1 No. 1 (Fall)

By Barbara Crow and Kim Sawchuk

Welcome to the first issue of Wi, a publication initiative of the Mobile Digital Commons Network. The purpose of this online journal is to highlight and disseminate the on-going research results of two years of collaboration amongst designers, theorists, artists, engineers, software developers as a research network in mobile, wireless and gaming technologies. The title for our journal, a homonym for “why,” reflects the spirit of critical and creative self-reflection on the process of inter-disciplinary digital media production.

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By Michael Longford

This map visually represents the disparate elements of the MDCN network. The Mobile Digital Commons Network is a national collaborative research network launched a year ago by the Banff New Media Institute and Concordia University. Situated in Banff, Toronto and Montreal the network is made up of designers, engineers, and communications scholars from a number of institutions that also includes the Ontario College of Art & Design and Concordia University.

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By Maroussia Lévesque, Lucie Bélanger & Jason Lewis

The proliferation of large-scale commercial video screens is reshaping the notion of public space and significantly transforming many urban landscapes (Boeder, 2006). As vectors of consumer culture, these giant displays tend to normalize the space around them towards a globalized media aesthetic. The commercialization of public space that these displays represent is part of a larger dynamic effecting urban centers, where opportunities for individuals to exercise personal agency are increasingly restricted. Cityspeak (Lewis, Cityspeak installations reel, 2006) engages this issue by providing individuals with direct access to these broadcast points.

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By Alison Harvey

While the emphasis in traditional game theory has been on the rule formations and zone demarcations that distinguish games from play, mobile games tend to deliberately and thoughtfully blur the lines, not just between games and play but between a game and an experience, as well as between places of play (the “magic circle”) and places of everyday life. Mobile games often create moments of liminality as they are driven by the idea of playing with and within everyday spaces, technologies, and objects. In this brief paper, I will discuss these boundaries and the liminality of mobile games to date, and focus on one particularly difficult ethical area- that of player and non-player participation.

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By Andrea Zeffiro

In July 2003, a group of international artists and researchers congregated in Karosta, Latvia on an abandoned Soviet-era military city, united by a common interest in the social and cultural potential of mobile ad-hoc social networks, and location based technologies. The outcome of this meeting was the inauguration of locative media, which according to Finnish artist and activist Minna Tarka, is a sub-area within the ubicomp (ubiquitous computing) environment and is a loose term for artists, developers and activists exploring the possibilities of mobile, location-based technologies. According to the event’s organizing group, the idea behind the workshop was twofold: first, as “an explicit acknowledgment of Virilio’s idea that ‘one cannot understand the development of information technology without understanding the evolution of military strategy’; and second, as an attempt to locate the event outside of the global market from which these technologies have emerged” (Locative Media).

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By Janice Leung

While new media analysts insist that mobile games will “replace ringtones, logos and other mobile phone personalisation services as one of the key drivers of the handset market” (Finn, 2005, p. 32; Edwards, 2006), it should come as no surprise that the North American game industry has been relentless in trying to capitalize on the buzz and hype surrounding mobile entertainment content. With a cell phone in hand, consumers today can take on the role of rap artist Lil Jon and participate in a game of “crunk golf” amidst the confine of an urban metropolis. Similarly, gamers can transform themselves, vis-à-vis their cell phones, into CTU agents and work alongside Jack Bauer in preventing a nuclear attack in 24—a mobile game based on the popular television series.

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By Neil Barratt

Alternatively labeled ‘digital public space’ by some, and decried as the ‘extreme sports’ of research by others, blogs, wikis, and other digital tools have become an extensive part of online life, as well as social science research. Their presence is so ubiquitous that they are used in fields as diverse as accounting and organ transplant (Bean and Hott, 2005; Sauer, et al., 2005). Through their iterative and participatory format, these tools have facilitated collaborative group research in new ways. This paper will serve not to develop a theory of this use of digital technologies, but will instead survey the practices that accompany these technologies, using my experience on the Mobile Digital Commons Network (MDCN) project as a touchstone. Indeed, it is method and process more than theory that have been changed in social science research by these emergent digital strategies.

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