Thomas A. McGonagle

Who cares about Big Brother, what happens when your spouse knows where you are and what you are doing.

Thomas A. McGonagle's photo
Thomas A. McGonagle
·

2 min read

Who cares about Big Brother, what happens when your spouse knows where you are and what you are doing.

This blog was originally published on October 12th, 2007. It was published on TypePad and can be found here.

6a00d8341c815953ef00e550085ed78834-250si.jpeg

I received a call for papers today from the Second Annual URI Graduate Student Conference. It is being held on March 29, 2008. The conference is titled "Space, Place and Imagination". My imagination instantly led me to geo-tagging and twitter.

The call for papers goes on to elaborate: "The graduate community at URI invites submissions for presentations and panels pertaining to issues of space, place, and imagination. We anticipate a wide range of presentations from a variety of disciplines. Possible topics and areas of interest include, but are not restricted to:

  • Cultural Uses of Space/ Place (Urban/ Rural Spaces, Cemeteries, Public Sculptures, Native Peoples’ Reservations, Internment/Refugee Camps, etc.)

  • Portrayals of Space/ Place (Geography, History, Cartography)

  • Written and Spoken Uses of Space/ Place (Journalism, Mass media, Literatures)

  • Environmental Spaces/ Places (Land, Oceans, Outer Space)

  • Scientific Uses of Space (Medicine, Pharmacology, Psychology, Biology, Chemistry, etc.)

  • Arts and Uses of Space (Visual Arts, including Architecture, Film, Interior and Landscape Design, Drama, Dance, Photography, and Music)

  • Virtual and Cyber-spaces

  • The Body and Space/Place (Acting, Dance, Race, Class, Gender)

  • Institutional Spaces/ Places (Education, Justice, Church, Business)"

My idea is to develop a paper on space, presence and GPS enabled geo-tagging with mobile applications such as mologogo.com and twitter.com.

The paper would explore what happens when we track our own location via GPS and Google Earth. Track our activities via geo-tagged photos and videos, and micro blogging via twitter and jaiku. What does it mean to space, if we don't disconnect. And people have way too much information about us. There is a known problem with justin.tv and justin.tv/ijustine where viewers will send pizza deliveries and even call in fire alarms to Justin's and Justine's homes.

3sty netlixir