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Keith N. Hampton is an Assistant
Professor in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.
He received his PhD and MA from the University
of Toronto in sociology, and a BA in sociology from the University of
Calgary. His research interests focus on the relationship between information
and communication technologies, social networks, and the urban environment.
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Mobile 2.0: Beyond Voice? : Draft program available
There is a draft program available for the ICA 2009 pre-conference Mobile 2.0: Beyond Voice?. I am presenting a paper along with my students, Oren Livio and Lauren Sessions, reporting the results of the Social Life of Wireless Urban Spaces project. The project was inspired by the work of William H Whyte and looks at WiFi use in 7 public spaces in four cities. The paper is currently under review by a journal. Here is the preliminary abstract: This study examines the impact of wireless Internet use (wi-fi) on urban public spaces, wi-fi users, and others who inhabit these spaces. Through extensive observations of seven parks, plazas, and markets in four North American cities and surveys of laptop users in those sites, how this new technology is related to processes of democratic participation, privatism, and social interaction is explored. Findings reveal that wi-fi use within urban public spaces affords interactions with existing acquaintances that are more diverse than those associated with mobile phone use. However, the level of social diversity to which wi-fi users are exposed is less than that of most users of these spaces. Although urban public spaces are not a public realm for wi-fi users, the activities in which they engage do contribute to broader participation in the public sphere.
Mon Jan 5, 2009 @ 1:50:36 pm
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Community and social interaction in the wireless city: wi-fi use in public and semi-public spaces
I have published a new paper with a former student, Neeti Gupta, in the journal New Media & Society (NM&S), on wi-fi use in cafes. This paper explores how wireless internet use influences community, the trend toward privatism, and the social life of public spaces. It is based on ethnographic observations of four coffee shops located in Boston and Seattle: free wifi cafes and Starbucks locations. The paper concludes with mixed findings; that there are two primary types of wireless users that offer divergent implications for community and public sociability: networked individualism and glocalization. This paper also explores the possibility of ‘contextual’ or ‘neighborhood effects’ within cafes, whereby the lack of sociability of some cafe users has the potential to reduce the overall sociability of a public space. We hypothesis about the implications of municipal wi-fi (muni wi-fi) projects for public spaces in general. Coincidentally, this past weekend the New York Times Freakonomics blog posted an article that discussed similar findings to what we reported in our paper, that there is a tendency for cafe owners to view wi-fi users as ‘wireless squatters’ and to push them out. The Freakonomics blog post was based on a study of Paris coffee shops. The NM&S paper was written a couple years ago and ends where a more recent project on the ‘Social Life of Wireless Urban Spaces’ begins. This broader study of wireless Internet use is based on observations of over 1300 laptop users, book readers, mobile phone users, and users of other portable media in seven field sites (parks, plazas, and public markets) located in New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Toronto. A paper based on this project is currently under review. If you do not have access to the NM&S article but would like a copy, send me an email.
Wed Nov 19, 2008 @ 12:41:29 pm
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Keith on Twitter
In the last couple weeks I have made a few minor updates to my homepage. But today I decided to take it to the next level. I have added Twitter and will be making an effort to journal more of my informal life - nothing too personal, but all the things I wish I could put in my blog, but never have time, like what I’m currently reading, conferences I’m attending, interesting lectures, and interesting people. If you want to follow along, you can see it on my website, my Facebook profile, or here on my Twitter site. Stay tuned!
Fri Sep 5, 2008 @ 3:05:27 pm
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