Shaping Publics

Abstract

Mobility in various forms has been argued to be a feature of modern life, in different ways for many years, whether it is the mobility of ourselves (Sennett 1978), or how it is talked about as enabled by various forms of mobile and ubiquitous computing (Weiser 1991, Weiser and Brown 1997, Weiser et al. 1999, Russell et al. 2005). Such developments have been argued to transgress the boundaries of social situations (Waskul and Douglas 1997) and have changed the relationships between the public and the private, and the online and the physical (Kakihara et al. 2002, Middleton and Cukier 2006). Public spaces are now those where we can work and hang out with digital media (Hampton and Gupta 2008). SNSs have been incorporated into these arrangements and have been shown to hold the potential to change the way we experience public space (Humphreys 2007). In this chapter, I will explore how we might participate with SNSs in the mediation of public life, and more specifically public life that goes beyond the boundaries of work and home — for example, in cafés, as we shop and as we commute. Related to this, I want to consider SNSs in terms of how they and we are implicated in the construction of further public spaces and the extent to which these reflect more general interpretations of decent behaviour. I am interested here, given the technologically deterministic discourses of perpetual contact we are presented with in the mass media, in how disconnective practice is implicated.