archive
The
Life of Mobile Data: Technology, Mobility and Data Subjectivity
April 15 –
16, 2004
University of Surrey, United Kingdom
On the conference schedule most paper
abstracts are available.
Keynote speakers:
David
Lyon, sociology, Queens University, Ontario
Charles
Raab, politics and affiliate of the AHRB Research Centre in
Intellectual
Property and Technology,
University of Edinburgh
Simon
Davies, informations systems, London School of Economics
and Privacy International
The rapid adoption
and diffusion of mobile devices over the past decade have altered
the way information is generated, organized and communicated about
individuals and their lives. The construction of new mobile data
profiles, and of mobile, informatic selves, hold the potential to
transform what is organizationally and interpersonally meant by
privacy, individuality, community, risk, trust, and reciprocity
in a mobilizing, and globalizing world.
In order to
examine these transformations, the RIS:OME
project at the University of Surrey
is hosting an international, interdisciplinary conference to address
emerging social and cultural relations of mobility, privacy, identity,
information and communication. This conference will bring together
academic, industry and policy researchers and practitioners to critically
address how mobile information and communications technologies structure
relations of privacy, security, trust, power, identity and difference.
There are a
number of questions that inform the themes of the conference. In
what ways, for example, do mobiles reconfigure the relations of
trust, risk, privacy and reciprocity embedded in organizational
and interpersonal data-sharing? In what ways do mobiles contribute
to the construction of identity and of the ‘information self’?
What is the relationship between mobile data and the individual?
Who owns and controls the emerging, individualized mobile data image?
What roles do consumption and consumerism play in the social relations
of privacy, trust and security? Is the development of mobile technologies
associated with emerging relations of risk, uncertainty and privatisation?
What social,
cultural and regulatory factors have influenced the generation of
mobile data in different countries? How do these factors influence
culturally specific understandings and practices of globalized and
transnational privacy, risk and trust? Are regimes of information
sharing and data protection patterned along axes of development
and underdevelopment? What roles do national differences and political
economies play in the construction of emerging mobile data relations?
How are politics reconfigured within and between countries via mobile
data technologies and changing mobilities?
What critical
approaches can be brought to bear on our understanding of diversity,
difference and resistance in the generation of mobile data? How
can we account for the rapid uptake of mobile devices, and the development
of mobile data sharing, both now and in the future?
We seek to bring
critical perspectives to bear on the development and widespread
uptake of mobile technologies and developments in information sharing
and data profiling over the last decade. The conference organizers
thus invite papers presenting empirically grounded and theoretically
informed analyses of the social changes that mobile technologies
and their data relations have brought about. Suggested themes could
include, but are by no means limited to:
• risk,
trust and power in mobile information ownership, control, access
and management
• culturally specific patterns of informational trust and
privacy
• organizational structuring of mobile information paradigms
• data subjectivity and the construction of identity through
mobile technologies
• mobile communications and emerging regulatory environments
• privacy enhancing technologies, their problems, paradoxes
and possibilities
• privacy advocacy in the mobile environment
• organizational and interpersonal information sharing
• the lifecycle of mobile personal data: its generation, integration,
profiling and mining
• mobile surveillance, security and globalization
• mobile data protection, data subjectivity and knowledge
• information gathering and social memory
Conference
Organisers
Dr.
Nicola Green
Dr. Sean Smith
RIS:OME
Project
Department of Sociology
University of Surrey
Guildford
Surrey GU2 7XH
United Kingdom
Phone: +44-1483-689-460
Fax: +44-1483-699-551
With the support
of Intel Corporation, and the
Department of Sociology
at the University of Surrey.