Information Technology and People Special Issue on [location] {location;}

Information Technology and People
Special Issue on
[location] {location;}

Call for Papers
Smartphones have enjoyed phenomenal growth in the latter part of the first decade of this century. By 2012 sales of such devices are predicted to outstrip sales of PCs, and by 2015 more people will be accessing the internet with such devices than they will be with a PC.

Key to the growth and popularity of such devices has been the convergence, not just of telecomms and photographic equipment, which helped drive mobile phone sales, and the addition of internet access, which defined the smartphone, but the addition, following the success of in-car satellite navigation devices, of GPS receivers into mobile internet devices. The integration of GPS technology into smartphones, coupled with the consumer-led approach of Apple’s iPhone, gave birth to a whole new class of location-based services for mobile internet devices, available in particular for the iPhone, but also for Android, and other devices.

As our lives become increasingly encroached upon by the digital virtuality of our exponentially advancing information society, will this be at the cost of our humanity? Writers such as Sherry Turkle and others seem to believe this is already happening in circles of people sitting together in silence engaging with their smartphones. When our senses are surrounded by interactive exposure to telepresent realities – the faces of those we are speaking to across the world overlaid upon the world before our eyes, streams of data passing across the pavements and shopfronts as we pass, electronic voices calling our name and tantalising us with goods they know we want (famously envisaged in the movie, Minority Report) – when the worlds around us are both real and virtual, will this grant us additional scope to express our humanity, or constitute such an overload that engagement fatigue exhausts our faculties?

At our off-grid holiday resorts in rugged mountainous territory or remote wilderness encampments, luxuriating in isolation-downtime, delighting in the simplicities of one-to-one, face-to-face conversation with no distractions, in natural landscape with no overlaid streams of historical and commercial data, out beyond the boundaries of location aware personal shopping avatars telling us where to get what they already know we would ‘Like’, will we savour a richer, more traditional humanity we feel the hi-tech virtuality-soaked everyday of our lives has come to miss? Or does this vision of a virtu-reality that beckons in the coming decade mistake digital virtuality for something other than simply the latest manifestation of the - very human – dreams our ingenuity and inventiveness has managed to create?

In the light of smartphone and GPS convergence, this workshop aims to explore and examine the implications of digital virtual technologies on our sense of place, our relationship with location(s) both real and virtual, and welcomes papers from any related disciplinary background on topics including, but not restricted to:

• The impact of GPS app(s) on social, organisational, political and other activities
• Theorising location in a smart world
• Down-time / going ‘off-grid’
• Emerging technologies likely to impact our sense of place
• Surveillance, privacy, trust – is it a generational issue?
• Locating ‘location’ – the evolution of our sense of place in the history and philosophy of technology
• Local / Global – are smartphone GPS systems a chainstore takeover of our traditional highstreet localisms?

Instructions for paper submission
Papers must not substantially overlap with papers that have been published or are simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference with proceedings. Papers must be written in English; they should be at most 6000 words in total, including references and (well-marked) appendices. Papers should be intelligible without appendices, if any. See http://www.emeraldinsight.com/products/journals/author_guidelines.htm?id... for author guidelines.

Submissions must be made via the IT and People site at Manuscript Central:
http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/itp

Important dates
Deadline for Submission of papers: October 15th 2011
Publication of Special Issue: by April 2013

Special Issue Editors

- David Kreps

Salford Business School, Salford University, UK

- Martin Warnke and Claus Pias

Computer Science & Culture, Leuphana University, Lueneburg, Deutschland.

http://www.ifip95wg.org/sicfp