Towards new Mediapolis: Networks, identities, and agents

The discourse within the public realm and, to some extent, the physical shape of the urban spaces are defined by contemporary electronic culture. Electronic devices augment our daily lives and the ways we function within them. Distributed sensory networks connect individual data nodes into an interdependent system-organism that monitors its own behaviours as well as its participants. At the same time, individual users and their mobile devices extend these data networks through location-based and personal content to form user-centred data landscapes. Peer-to-peer user-powered networks allow for direct, yet often anonymous communication that leads to new forms of social participation. They provide unique opportunities for creativity and respond to our new expectations of globally connected, locally situated lives. This new urban dimension is enabled by ubiquitous mobile devices. Always connected, context-aware mobile devices serve as gateways into these multimodal data-infused landscapes. Social networks link individual users and form asynchronous spatially discontinuous community that challenges the conventional definition of the public realm. However, in contrast to past media environments, participants in these emerging e-landscapes are both recipients and agents operating within the single media culture-location continuum. Due to their bidirectional operability, mobile devices serve both as receivers and as originators of data.