Adriana de Souza e Silva

From Cyber to Hybrid Mobile Technologies as Interfaces of Hybrid Spaces

Hybrid spaces arise when virtual communities (chats, multiuser domains, and massively multi-player online role-playing games), previously enacted in what was conceptualized as cyberspace, migrate to physical spaces because of the use of mobile technologies as interfaces. Mobile interfaces such as cell phones allow users to be constantly connected to the Internet while walking through urban spaces. This article defines hybrid spaces in the light of three major shifts in the interaction between mobile technology and spaces. First, it investigates how the use of mobile technologies as connection interfaces blurs the traditional borders between physical and digital spaces. Second, it argues that the shift from static to mobile interfaces brings social networks into physical spaces. Finally, it explores how urban spaces are reconfigured when they become hybrid spaces. For this purpose, hybrid spaces are conceptualized according to three distinct but overlapping trends: hybrid spaces as connected spaces, as mobile spaces, and as social spaces.Hybrid spaces arise when virtual communities (chats, multiuser domains, and massively multi-player online role-playing games), previously enacted in what was conceptualized as cyberspace, migrate t...

Net Locality: Why Location Matters in a Networked World

Provides an introduction to the new theory of Net Locality and the profound effect on individuals and societies when everything is located or locatable.Describes net locality as an emerging form of location awareness central to all aspects of digital media, from mobile phones, to Google Maps, to location-based social networks and games, such as Foursquare and facebook.Warns of the threats these technologies, such as data surveillance, present to our sense of privacy, while also outlining the opportunities for pro-social developments.Provides a theory of the web in the context of the history of emerging technologies, from GeoCities to GPS, Wi-Fi, Wiki Me, and Google Android.

Location-aware mobile media and urban sociability

Location-aware mobile media allow users to see their locations on a map on their mobile phone screens. These applications either disclose the physical positions of known friends, or represent the locations of groups of unknown people. We call these interfaces eponymous and anonymous, respectively. This article presents our classification of eponymous and anonymous location-aware interfaces by investigating how these applications may require us to rethink our understanding of urban sociability, particularly how we coordinate and communicate in public spaces. We argue that common assumptions made about location-aware mobile media, namely their ability to increase one’s spatial awareness and to encourage one to meet more people in public spaces, might be fallacious due to pre-existing practices of sociability in the city. We explore these issues in the light of three bodies of theory: Goffman’s presentation of self in everyday life, Simmel’s ideas on sociability, and Lehtonen and Mäenpää’s concept of street sociability.

Playful Urban Spaces

This article provides a historical overview of the development of urban, location-based, and hybrid-reality mobile games. It investigates the extent to which urban spaces have been used as playful spaces prior to the advent of mobile technologies to show how the concept of play has been enacted in urban spaces through three historical tropes of urbanity: first, the transformation of Baudelaire’s flâneur into what Robert Luke (2006) calls the “phoneur”; second, the idea of dérive as used by situationist Guy Débord; and last, the wall subculture called parkour. The authors present a classification of the major types of mobile games to date, addressing how they reenact this older meaning of play apparent within these former tropes of urbanity. With this approach, they hope to address two weaknesses in the current scholarship—namely, differentiating among a range of types of games mediated by mobile technologies and assessing the important effects of playful activities.

Locative Mobile Social Networks: Mapping Communication and Location in Urban Spaces

Abstract This study conceptualizes the new spatial logic created by the social use of location aware mobile technologies, analyzing how mobile communities are formed by the mapping of social networks in urban spaces. It explores two main areas with the goal of understanding how locative mobile social networks (LMSNs) challenge the traditional logic of networks. First, it conceptualizes LMSNs by comparing them to (1) traditional transportation and communication networks, and (2) mobile social networks (MSNs). Second, the paper discusses potential social implications of LMSNs, such as privacy, surveillance, and social exclusion.

Hybrid Reality Games Reframed Potential Uses in Educational Contexts

Hybrid reality games (HRGs) employ mobile technologies and GPS devices as tools for transforming physical spaces into interactive game boards. Rather than situating participants in simulated environments, which mimic the physical world, HRGs make use of physical world immersion by merging physical and digital spaces. Online multiuser environments already connect users who do not share contiguous spaces. With mobile devices, players may additionally incorporate interactions with the surrounding physical space. This article is a speculative study about the potential uses of HRGs in education, as activities responsible for taking learning practices outside the closed classroom environment into open, public spaces. Adopting the framework of sociocultural learning theory, the authors analyze design elements of existing HRGs, such as mobility and location awareness, collaboration/sociability, and the configuration of the game space, with the aim of reframing these games into an educational context to foresee how future games might contribute to discovery and learning.

Hybrid Reality and Location-Based Gaming: Redefining Mobility and Game Spaces in Urban Environments

Hybrid reality games and location-based mobile games use urban spaces as the game scenario and are played with the aid of mobile technologies equipped with location awareness and Internet connection. This article conceptualizes hybrid reality and location-based mobile games within the area of game studies via their three main characteristics: mobility, sociability, and spatiality. In addition, the article proposes a theoretical framework for studying these games focusing on the possible implications of transforming urban spaces in playful environments. Last, one location-based mobile game, BOTFIGHTERS, and one hybrid reality game, CAN YOU SEE ME NOW? are used as examples of how these games (a) create a new logic of game space, (b) transform the relationship between serious life and playful spaces, and (c) transform the perception of urban spaces and patterns of mobility through the city.Hybrid reality games and location-based mobile games use urban spaces as the game scenario and are played with the aid of mobile technologies equipped with location awareness and Internet connection. This article conceptualizes hybrid reality and location-based mobile games within the area of game studies via their three main characteristics: mobility, sociability, and spatiality. In addition, the article proposes a theoretical framework for studying these games focusing on the possible implications of transforming urban spaces in playful environments. Last, one location-based mobile game, BOTFIGHTERS, and one hybrid reality game, CAN YOU SEE ME NOW? are used as examples of how these games (a) create a new logic of game space, (b) transform the relationship between serious life and playful spaces, and (c) transform the perception of urban spaces and patterns of mobility through the city.

Location-aware mobile technologies: Historical, social and spatial approaches

With the popularization of smartphones, location-based services are increasingly part of everyday life. People use their cell phones to find nearby restaurants and friends in the vicinity, and track their children. Although location-based services have received sparse attention from mobile communication scholars to date, the ability to locate people and things with one’s cell phone is not new. Since the removal of GPS signal degradation in 2000, artists and researchers have been exploring how location-awareness influences mobility, spatiality, and sociability. Besides exploring the historical antecedents of today’s location-based services, this article focuses on the main social issues that emerge when location-aware technologies leave the strict domain of art and research and become part of everyday life: locational privacy, sociability, and spatiality. Finally, this article addresses two main topics that future mobile communication research that focuses on location-awareness should take into consideration: a shift in the meaning of location, and the adoption and appropriation of location-aware technologies in the global south.With the popularization of smartphones, location-based services are increasingly part of everyday life. People use their cell phones to find nearby restaurants and friends in the vicinity, and track their children. Although location-based services have received sparse attention from mobile communication scholars to date, the ability to locate people and things with one’s cell phone is not new. Since the removal of GPS signal degradation in 2000, artists and researchers have been exploring how location-awareness influences mobility, spatiality, and sociability. Besides exploring the historical antecedents of today’s location-based services, this article focuses on the main social issues that emerge when location-aware technologies leave the strict domain of art and research and become part of everyday life: locational privacy, sociability, and spatiality. Finally, this article addresses two main topics that future mobile communication research that focuses on location-awareness should take into considerati...

Playing Life and Living Play: How Hybrid Reality Games Reframe Space, Play, and the Ordinary

Hybrid reality games (HRGs) employ mobile technologies equipped with Internet access and location awareness to create a multiuser game space that occurs simultaneously in physical, digital, and represented spaces as denoted by the players mobility. This essay analyzes and compares two HRGs: I Like Frank and Day of the Figurines. The goal is to understand games and play as activities intrinsically and inseparably connected to our physical spaces and to our daily lives by focusing on the interconnection between play and ordinary life, game community, and player identity. The essay also interrogates how these games reconfigure and reflect current concepts of surveillance, community and anonymity in city spaces. The development of these concepts expands current research about how new Internet-connected mobile communication technologies change our experience of physical spaces by adding to them imaginary playful layers that influence player mobility through the city and promote singular types of interactions among physical, digital and represented spaces. Our analysis considers the intertwined and complex consequences of HRGs and other locative media, illustrating how such media can both normalize and provide modes of resistance to certain power relationships.

Pokémon Go as an HRG: Mobility, sociability, and surveillance in hybrid spaces

In July 2016, Niantic Labs released the hybrid/augmented reality game Pokémon Go. Due to the game’s sudden enormous success, many mobile phone users all over the world could experience for the first time playing a hybrid reality game. Hybrid reality games, however, are not new. For at least 15 years, researchers and artists experiment with the affordances of location-based mobile technology to create playful experiences that take place across physical and digital (i.e., hybrid) spaces. Blast Theory’s Can You See Me Now?, developed in 2001, is one of the first examples. Yet for a long time, these games remained in the domain of art and research, and had therefore a very limited player community. Previous research has identified three design characteristics of hybrid reality games: mobility, sociability, and spatiality; and three main aspects to analyze these games: the connection between play and ordinary life, the relevance of the play community, and surveillance. With hybrid reality games’ commercialization and popularity, some of the issues that have been at the core of these games for over a decade will remain the same, while other aspects will change. This paper uses Pokémon Go as an example of a hybrid/augmented reality game to explore the main social and spatial issues that arise when these games become mainstream, including mobility, sociability, spatiality, and surveillance.In July 2016, Niantic Labs released the hybrid/augmented reality game Pokemon Go. Due to the game’s sudden enormous success, many mobile phone users all over the world could experience for the first time playing a hybrid reality game. Hybrid reality games, however, are not new. For at least 15 years, researchers and artists experiment with the affordances of location-based mobile technology to create playful experiences that take place across physical and digital (i.e., hybrid) spaces. Blast Theory’s Can You See Me Now?, developed in 2001, is one of the first examples. Yet for a long time, these games remained in the domain of art and research, and had therefore a very limited player community. Previous research has identified three design characteristics of hybrid reality games: mobility, sociability, and spatiality; and three main aspects to analyze these games: the connection between play and ordinary life, the relevance of the play community, and surveillance. With hybrid reality games’ commercializat...