Media Space 20 + Years of Mediated Life

From holes in space and telepresence to mobile technologies and online communities, media spaces crystallize socially-aware networked media-rich computing. This book provides perspectives on this fast-moving field.

Loosely divided into three different, but interconnected, approaches to media space research, each section implies a different exploration of the connectivity that constitutes a media space: social, spatial, and communications.

Each part opens with an introduction that lays out how readers can best approach the section, and provides a basic guide to the theory and research literature, technological developments and other notable events to help contextualize the book. The ‘social ‘ approach uses the rhetoric and methods familiar to a CSCW audience, but moves into actual situations that involve close working bonds, broken trust, shared joy, community building, interpersonal tension, anxiety and so forth. The section on ‘spatial’ approaches guides the reader through an intellectual landscape of spatiality, the ‘communications’ part is a field guide to sense-making in the as-lived mediated condition, demonstrating that media space sense-making combines an understanding of in-the-moment alongside sense made of existence in the world and reflecting upon it.

Students, researchers and practitioners of CSCW, information and communications technology (ICT), and human-computer interaction will find the book an invaluable reference to the past and an inspiration for the future. Also, historians of science and technology will be interested in the way media space history tracks the growth of CSCW and the expansion of HCI to include video and other communications technology.