mobility@lse seminar

The Commodification of Location: Privacy, Power, and Location-Based Systems

Paul Dourish
Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine

Monday 26 October 2009

view slides from this presentation

Ubiquitous computing and wireless networking has enabled a significant rise in location-based applications -- systems and applications in which device location (and by implication, human location) becomes a form of system input. In these systems, the production of location is potentially transformed -- rather than a socially situated account of context and activity, location becomes a technologically tradable object.

In collaboration with colleagues at UCI, I have been examining these issues through a study of the experiences of paroled sex offenders and parole officers in the recent adoption of GPS tracking technologies. One reason to pick this particular context is that it renders the notion of "privacy" analytically unavailable to us, a deliberate choice that allows other considerations to come into view. In this talk, I'll provide an overview of our work in this area and suggest some alternative approaches to social interaction following the commodification of location.

Paul Dourish is Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, with courtesy appointments in Computer Science and in Anthropology. He also teaches in the interdisciplinary graduate program in Arts, Computation, and Engineering. His research lies broadly at the intersection of computer science and social science, with particular interests in ubiquitous computing, human-computer interaction, social studies of science and technology, and the culture of digital media. He is the author of Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction (MIT Press, 2001) and is currently completing a new book on the social and cultural aspects of ubiquitous computing. http://www.dourish.com

If you are a visitor from outside LSE, please send a confirmation to c.m.bonina@lse.ac.uk. You will need to sign in at the reception desk of the New Academic Building. Please note places will be available on a first-come-first-serve basis - registration is not required for LSE students and staff.

For any further queries regarding this seminar or to request information about future events please contact Frances White. Research Coordinator.

page last updated 12 January, 2010

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