Theory, Culture & Society - Special Issue on Complexity

Thought this new special issue might be of interest to people following mobilities:

Theory, Culture & Society is at the cutting edge of recent developments in social and cultural theory. The journal has helped to break down some of the disciplinary barriers between the humanities and the social sciences by opening up a wide range of new questions in cultural theory. Theory, Culture & Society builds upon the heritage of the classic founders of social theory and examines the ways in which this tradition has been reshaped by a new generation of theorists.

Complexity Special Issue Editor John Urry Lancaster University, UK

Articles in the special issue include:

· The Complexity Turn John Urry

· Coping with Complexity: On Emergent Interfaces Between the Natural Sciences, Humanities and Social Sciences Helga Nowotny

· Complexity and Life Fritjof Capra

· The Problem of the Attractor: A Singular Generality Between Sciences and Social Theory Adrian MacKenzie

· Reflexing Complexity: Post-Genomic Knowledge and Reductionist Returns in Public Science Brian Wynne

· Complexity, Configurations and Cases David Byrne

· Complexity, Science and the Public: The Geography of a New Interpretation Cristian Suteanu

· Complexity, Ecology and the Materiality of Information Chris Jenks and John Smith

· Ex-orbitant Globality Nigel Clark

· Complexity and Social Movement: Process and Emergence in Planetary Action Systems Graeme Chesters and Ian Welsh

· Complex Global Microstructures: The New Terrorist Societies Karin Knorr Cetina

· The Complexities of the Global John Urry

· Complexity, Deconstruction and Relativism Paul Cilliers

ISSN: 0263-2764

Amazing Statistics of children in Israel Using Mobile Phones

An interesting article at Ynetnews has various cell phone usage stats for children in Israel. The statistics are revealing. Here are some details:

• 10% of children ages 5-7 have cell phones
• 45% of children ages 8-9 have cell phones
• 66% of children ages 10-11 have cell phones
• 90% of children ages 12+ have cell phones

According to the article, escalating violence and concern for safety a major reason behind growing phenomenon.

Via 'Mocoblog'

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Cities of the Future

According to a recent BBC article: 'Globalisation has done its best to push constant migration deeper into the urban from the rural with the promise of work. But cities have failed to cope with it, physically, emotionally or mentally. They cannot sustain the flow and they are not sustainable and fair places to live.'

Read full article at 'Eco-designs on future cities'

New 'Mobilities' journal

The new 'Mobilities' journal for 2006, edited by Kevin Hannam, Mimi Sheller, and John Urry, will have its first issue Janurary 2006:

Mobilities encompasses both the large-scale movements of people, objects, capital, and information across the world, as well as more local processes of daily transportation, movement through public space, and the travel of material things within everyday life. Recent developments in transportation and communications infrastructures, along with new social and cultural practices of mobility have elicited a number of new research initiatives for understanding the connections between these diverse mobilities.

Mobilities will publish original, theoretically-informed research which is international in scope as well as in authorship. The journal seeks to address topical issues and foster scholarly debate. All submissions will be subject to double-blind peer review.

Areas of Interest
Papers in the following areas would be considered for publication in Mobilities:

• Travel and communications
• Migration, diasporas & families
• Tourism and business travel
• Mobile risks
• New social networks
• Transportation & communication technologies
• Mobilities and new social exclusions

Notes for Contributors
Manuscripts should be between 8,000 and 12,000 words, and should be sent electronically to: mobilities@lancaster.ac.uk (Harvard layout).

Green Car Congress: Texting (SMS) for a Shared Taxi

A seed-stage company in the UK has developed a system that collates requests for point-to-point travel from a dispersed set of travellers via SMS (they text-message by cellphone their destination postcode to the system), and then packages travellers going in the same direction into one vehicle at a discounted fare.

Texxi (“Texxi, the taxi you text”) is a demand-responsive transit brokerage (DRT Brokerage) system.

Prospective passengers send their postcode to the Texxi SMS number. The system then aggregates other passengers wanting to go to the same area and confirms details of the taxi driver’s name and badge number to the passengers.

Passengers are instructed to go to pre-determined pickup points to meet the driver who will have received a text confirming each passenger’s booking reference.

In the prototype demonstration in Liverpool, each passenger will pre-pay a flat fee of £5.

Benefits of this approach include:

• Lower passenger fares for point-to-point travel.

• Increased revenue for the taxi driver for essentially the same work.

• Reduction of potential CO₂ emissions and fuel consumption as the total number of trips are reduced.

See project at

Texting (SMS) for a Shared Taxi: Demand Responsive Transit Brokerage

A Transparent Society?

Following on from David Brin's work of 'The Transparent Society', recent articles such as The Gurdian's 'The age of sousveillance ' discusses how ordinary people using their ability for someone to be in someplace at all times, have the true mobility of surveillance using their own tools - such as phone-cameras and other recorders.

If surveillance becomes part of people's everyday mobility, will this lead to increased transparency - as in the recent case of the Korean "dog-shit-girl" - a test of the Internet's Power to Shame:

According to Japundit, "it began in a subway train with a girl whose dog made a mess on the train floor. When nearby elders told her to clean up the mess, she basically told them to f... off. One of the train riders took pictures of the incident with a camera phone of her and posted it, without any masking, on a popular website which started a nationwide witchhunt.

Within hours, she was labeled gae-ttong-nyue (dog-shit-girl) and her pictures and parodies were everywhere. Within days, her identity and her past were revealed. Request for information about her parents and relatives started popping up and people started to recognize her by the dog and the bag she was carrying as well as her watch, clearly visible in the original picture".

Is mobility merging with forms of social transparency and self-organising order?

Perplexed? Virtual gaming in the physical world

Here's something I thought was interesting - and somewhat 'mobility' related: the first major alternative-reality game that combines to such a degree virtual movements with 'physical gaming' in daily life. Perplex City is a collaborative puzzle game that combines online adventure with adventure on the streets.

It says: "Imagine a game played by thousands of players around the world. A game played through websites, text messages, billboards, magazine adverts, sky-writing"

And there is a £100,000 prize for the one who solves the puzzle and finds the 'Cube' - now are we moving into the realm where the virtual and physical blurs....?

Time for some sociological research on the gaming world?

It’s official: more cellphone lines than landlines in the US

The FCC just released a report confirming that as of late last year the number of cellphone lines in the U.S. officially surpassed the number of landlines, [via Engadget]

According to the LA Times, the number of mobile-phone users in the U.S. surpassed the number of conventional land-based phone lines in the second half of 2004, the government said Friday.

"By the end of the year, there were 181.1 million cellphone subscribers, compared with 177.9 million access lines into U.S. homes and businesses, the Federal Communications Commission said in a biannual report."

Some other countries where cell phones outstrip landilines:

-- Cellphones outstrip landlines in India

-- More mobiles than fixed phones in China

-- Mobile users overtake landlines in Arab Countries

-- Norway's Mobile Telephony

and wild:

-- More cell phone subscriptions than inhabitants in Sweden

Via SmartMobs

Going Wireless in the Air

Airbus will allow passengers to use their mobile phones during commercial flights starting next year the IHT reports."Airbus last year completed its first in-flight trial of phones that use the global system for mobile communications,or GSM,which is the dominant wireless technology in Europe and Asia.Passengers' phones will hook up to a base station placed behind the ceiling panel of a plane, which will also allow for reception of wireless data from personal computers or hand-held devices,Siemens said.The signal from the base station on the plane will then be routed via satellite to the ground".

See full article via International Herald Tribune

Castells on 'The mobile communication society'

Rich Ling offers us Castell's latest research, and says this long PDF is "a pretty massive analysis of research on mobile communication. If you don't have any books for the beach, this might be the one." I know Castells to be thoughtful, insightful, and thorough. Castells, M., Fernandez-Ardevol, M., Qiu, J. L., & Sey, A. (2004) The mobile communication society: A cross-cultural analysis of available evidence on the social uses of wireless communication technology.

Via 'Mobile Society' digest

The way to go for Business Social Networking?

This article from CIO - 'Who Knows Whom, And Who Knows What?' - looks at the new ways in which a company's knowledge base can be 'smartened' through innovative use of RFID tagging to form contacts:

"At first glance, it looked like your typical networking event. Three hundred research scientists from packaged-food giant Mars gathered in a Las Vegas ballroom last June, wearing name tags and working the floor. But instead of discussing the latest in M&M packaging or pet food nutrition, the scientists were roaming the room like a band of eager salespeople. Their RFID-enabled name tags lit up each time they met someone they didn't know, and their eyes widened as they watched diagrams of their social networks form on giant screens at one end of the ballroom. The diagrams expanded like giant molecules each time a manager spoke with a person new to him or her. To encourage the networking, Mars promised prizes to those with the most contacts or "points." The scientists—a largely introverted group from separate divisions in Los Angeles and New Jersey—were moving in a blur of handshakes, nods and cards changing hands."

Virtual mobility in a Virtual Country?

This post may not be purely about mobilities, but I feel it's interesting enough to warrent attention: the Los Alamos research labs in the US are creating the most sophisticated simulation computer programs to inhabit them with virtual cities, virtual people and lives...to track all possible movements, habits, and lifestyles...why?

An extract:

"Deep inside the cave-like laboratories of the legendary research center that created the atomic bomb, scientists have begun work on a Manhattan Project of a different sort.

In the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, they have been constructing the most elaborate computer models of the United States ever attempted. There are virtual cities inhabited by millions of virtual individuals who go to work, shopping centers, soccer games and anywhere else their real life counterparts go. And there are virtual power grids, oil and gas lines, water pipelines, airplane and train systems, even a virtual Internet.

The scientists build them. And then they destroy them.

On a recent weekday at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, researcher Steve Fernandez took several power-relay plants in the Pacific Northwest offline with a few clicks of his keyboard while Kristin Omberg and Brent Daniel were working up mathematical models that calculated the worst places to release biological agents in San Diego."

See full article at: 'Computers Simulate Terrorism's Extremes'

We are all reporters now

This time the Guardian writes about how mobile phone picture and video captured the eye-witness accounts of the recent London events:

"It was a new kind of story. Not in the sense of what happened, which was thoroughly and depressingly as anticipated, but in the way it was reported and disseminated. The mobile phone photographers, the text messagers and the bloggers - a new advance guard of amateur reporters had the London bomb story in the can before the news crews got anywhere near the scene."

A rise of citizen journalism - of 'mass amateurisation'? Is this an indication of street mobilities substituting for traditional hierarchical flows?

See full article at: 'We had 50 images within an hour'

UK Mobility Roadshow

At the UK Mobility Roadshow a new vehicle is the star of the show:

A new British-made motorcycle for wheelchair users was the start of this year's Mobility Roadshow in the UK.

See the BBC article: Wheelchair bike is star of show

AlwaysOnGPS

Jim Parsons at Mexens technology has recently released AlwaysOnGPS - which successfully blends GPS positioning and Wi-Fi positioning together into one accurate system.

When GPS signals are available, the software uses them to construct a map of the Wi-Fi "landscape" around the receiving device. When GPS signals are lost or dropped (which occurs frequently with client vehicles, assets and cargo in big cities, indoors, etc.) this WiFI map
provides accurate geo-positioning information to maintain an accurate track and location determination -- all the time and in every situation.

In a recent email, Jim said that "So far, all our tests and real world applications have produced amazing results . AlwaysOnGPS has proven itself to be an indispensable companion for customers who simply can't afford to be without GPS signals when entering and operating within big cities or large buildings (warehouses, distribution centers, etc)."

It seems that mobility is now about never being lost again!

You can find Jim and more details on his product at: www.AlwaysOnGPS.com

Car System Lets Voice Drive the Web

In an attempt to explore the safety issues surrounding Internet navigation while behind the wheel, Meirav Taieb-Maimon, a faculty member at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, designed a voice-activated search engine.

The system allows drivers to dictate a query and navigate the results while keeping their hands on the wheel.

Read full article on Discoverychannel.com

Cities Without Borders: Digital Culture and Decentralization

Paul Hartzog, a political scientist and creator of the theory of Panarchy, rethinks sociologist Saskia Sassen's idea of the Global City and how it may or may not apply to digital culture. The article can be found at Mindjack.

Mobiles in a Crisis: 'pocket journalism'

Much has been said on the response to the London attacks: here I wish to focus attention on the role of mobile phones in feeding back information to the news channels and emergency services in a way that allowed direct access to witness information.

A BBC article -Mobiles capture blast aftermath states:

"Within minutes and hours, news of explosions filtered through other blog sites and many moblogs - blogs which use mobile phone photos - collected the images.

The BBC News and Sky News websites, among others, immediately responded and called for readers to send in their images, footage and accounts of the events.

Around 1,000 photos and 20 pieces of amateur video were sent in to the BBC News website, with many being featured on the site.

"Within minutes we were receiving people's written accounts and their still pictures," said BBC News Interactive editor Pete Clifton."

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The L.A. Times has an article: Cellphones Change the View of Disaster :

"Shortly after bombs ripped through London's transportation system Thursday morning, U.S. and British television networks began airing the first footage of the aftermath — dim images of shaken commuters streaming through a smoky underground tunnel.

The video provided an immediate and intimate look at the scene but was hardly polished or professional. That's because it was shot by passengers with mobile phones — the first widespread use of that technology in covering a major breaking news story."

Obviously, technologies of collective particpation are changing not only the face of journalism and news gathering, but also the networks of information flow and cooperation.

BT's 21st Century Network

BT plans to replace the old phone network - used for almost 100 years - with a broadband-based connection - a 21st Century Network

Up to £10bn is being spent over five years, and eventually every exchange in the UK will be updated.

The eventual plan is to move all BT subscribers from the traditional PSTN (public switched telephone network) to a new IP (internet protocol) network.

Via BBC

The Complexity of City Street Networks

City street networks are similar to other information networks, such as the Internet or social networks. Street and roads are the links while the crossroads are the nodes of these networks. So it is tempting to use physics to map city complexity, as is reporting Technology Research News.

Several physicists from Sweden and Denmark have compared the complexity of finding an address in Manhattan and in several Swedish cities. Not surprisingly, Manhattan, with its checkered grid plan, is easier to navigate than the older European cities. The scientists think their model could be "used to allow city planners to see how street changes affect navigability."

Via 'SmartMobs'