Tony Liao

Limiting, leaving, and (re)lapsing: an exploration of facebook non-use practices and experiences

Despite the abundance of research on social networking sites, relatively little research has studied those who choose not to use such sites. This paper presents results from a questionnaire of over 400 Internet users, focusing specifically on Facebook and those users who have left the service. Results show the lack of a clear, binary distinction between use and non-use, that various practices enable diverse ways and degrees of engagement with and disengagement from Facebook. Furthermore, qualitative analysis reveals numerous complex and interrelated motivations and justifications, both for leaving and for maintaining some type of connection. These motivations include: privacy, data misuse, productivity, banality, addiction, and external pressures. These results not only contribute to our understanding of online sociality by examining this under-explored area, but they also build on previous work to help advance how we conceptually account for the sociological processes of non-use.

Mobile Geotagging: Reexamining Our Interactions with Urban Space

Mobile geotagging services offer people new ways to interact with and through urban space. In this paper, we focus on a mobile geotagging service called Socialight and the social practices associated with it. In-depth interviews and participant observation were conducted in order to explore how Socialights virtual “sticky notes” were used in everyday life. Findings indicated how users communicate about place to help build social familiarity with urban places and communicate through place to allow users to create place-based narratives and engage in identity management. Such findings deepen our understanding of the social production of space and have implications for future location-based mobile services.

Layar-ed places: Using mobile augmented reality to tactically reengage, reproduce, and reappropriate public space

As augmented reality (AR) is becoming technologically possible and publicly available through mobile smartphone and tablet devices, there has been relatively little empirical research studying how people are utilizing mobile AR technologies and forming social practices around mobile AR. This study looks at how mobile AR can potentially mediate the everyday practices of urban life. Through qualitative interviews with users of Layar, a mobile AR browser, we found several emerging uses. First, users are creating content on Layar in ways that communicate about and through place, which shapes their relationship and interpretations of places around them. Second, we found a growing segment of users creating augmented content that historicizes and challenges the meanings of place, while inserting their own narratives of place. Studying emerging uses of AR deepens our understanding of how emerging media may complicate practices, experiences, and relationships in the spatial landscape.

Augmented or admented reality? The influence of marketing on augmented reality technologies

As mobile and wearable devices that enable digital content to be displayed over physical surroundings continue to develop, scholars are increasingly interested in these ‘augmented reality’ (AR) technologies. While much of the focus has either been on the technological development of these devices and their potential for changing user perception, there has been less attention paid to the stakeholders and companies developing these technologies. This study examines developments in the industry itself, where companies are finding resources and structuring their businesses, and how this has created a momentum toward marketing and advertising. The intricate link between marketing and AR is one that has implications for how the technology is developing, what experiences are possible through the technology, and the future contexts in which AR is deployed.

A framework for debating augmented futures: Classifying the visions, promises and ideographs advanced about augmented reality

While AR is slowly becoming reality, projections about the technology are divided. The direction that AR will take, the form AR will come in, how it should be used and the societal impact it will have are all being contested. With emerging technologies such as AR, these debates occur in a mostly rhetorical space, as positions and visions of the future are advanced. Some of these are also negative visions, arguing against the technology. These communications, arguments, and positions are how the technology is made persuasive to those in and outside the AR community, but have yet to be empirically studied or understood. This study seeks to map out the rhetorical promises that are being made about AR. Through qualitative interviews with a variety of actors in the AR community, this study advances a taxonomy of technological promises, higher order principles that those promises appeal to, and finally the contested characteristic that can change the valence of the vision. This framework will help make the debate about AR clearer, and help people frame their discussions and debates about AR in a more productive way.

Is it ‘augmented reality’? Contesting boundary work over the definitions and organizing visions for an emerging technology across field-configuring events

Abstract In recent years there has been growing recognition that Field-Configuring Events (FCEs) play an important role in connecting stakeholders, conferring authority to certain members, and shaping the organizing visions surrounding emerging technologies. While much of this work has examined the features of FCEs, the implications and outcomes of FCEs, and the coalescence of FCEs, this study contributes to our understanding of fields that are not converging, rather different stakeholders are actively creating and summoning new FCEs to assert authority. This case also examines the relationship between definitions and organizing visions, as the discursive and social contexts in which these boundaries are being contested. This study follows the emerging interorganizational augmented reality (AR) community, as a group that unites under the term AR but has been continually negotiating its meaning for decades. Through extensive participant observation at numerous global conferences and in-depth interviews, this study shows how various definitions originated and evolved, how new emerging artifacts have challenged definitions, how specific groups have coalesced around definitions, and the various ways that they are organizing at and across FCEs to contest these definitions. These findings of how discourse flows across FCEs contribute to our empirical understanding of the tactics that various actors engage in to draw symbolic, social, and material boundaries around a field, as well as how these debates and commitments ultimately shape the participants in the community and subsequent work that comes out of the community.

Mobile versus headworn augmented reality: How visions of the future shape, contest, and stabilize an emerging technology

This study examines the development of augmented reality (AR) technologies, utilizing theories like social construction of technology (SCOT) and from the sociology of futures literature. While some have criticized SCOT for over-privileging certain social groups, drawing rigid boundaries between groups, and overlooking the role of power between them, this study addresses those critiques by conducting an ongoing mapping of the discussion surrounding AR. Through in-depth interviews and participant observation analyzing the discourse and development taking place at industry, standards, and academic conferences, this study explores a contestation emerging between two coalitions (mobile vs headworn) and how they are using future visions to negotiate the material design of the technology, the policies surrounding the technology, and stakeholder perceptions of the technology. The tactics these coalitions engage in reveal new components of stabilization, specifically deploying a “pre-stabilized ideal” to frame technological development. This case represents an instance where applying SCOT to an emerging technology helps us understand the technology itself while also building on and extending the SCOT model.