Does mobile technology make us more attuned to our surroundings, or cause us to tune the city out? Assistant professor of communication Lee Humphreys and Ph.D. student Tony Liao are studying the changing mobile media landscape, quite literally, by exploring the impact of new media and technology on the “public-ness” of public space. They’ve started with the spatial mobile media phenomenon Foursquare, which encourages users to “check in” when they visit venues like coffee shops to vie for virtual rewards and “mayor” status. Through in-depth interviews with 18 serious Foursquare users from 10 cities - documented in a paper published in the online journal First Monday and highlighted in this Atlantic post - they found that in many cases the service helped nudge online users toward offline encounters they might not have experienced otherwise, creating closer connections to place and a heightened awareness of the people around them.
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