Jyri Engeström
The Social Implications of Location Awareness in ‘Third Places’: Learnings from Aula Helsinki
Biography
Jyri Engeström is a Ph.D student at the Department of
Organization, Work and Technology in the Management School at Lancaster
University, UK. His research focuses on the relationship between technical
innovation and organizational transformation. To develop a take on this, he
draws on theories of practice, activity, and situated action. The working title
of his PhD thesis is ‘The Practice of Innovation: How New Technology Gets
Defined as Sustaining or Disruptive.’ It is based on an ethnographic study of
corporate venturing at Nokia.
Before attending Lancaster, Jyri worked for Tera Group, a
venture capital partnership, and co-founded ShiftControl Finland, an online recruiting company based on friend-to-friend referrals. Prior to that he worked
as a Concept Designer at Satama Interactive, an internet consultancy, where he
co-led the design of Nokia.com. He also co-founded Aula, a nonprofit
cooperative to advance the vision of a creative society. Aula has designed
so-called ‘third places’ in cities and regularly organizes talks and gatherings
in Helsinki. Jyri continues to manage Aula’s operations, and is a member of the
Aula cooperative board.
Position Paper
A large part of mobile messaging traffic is about
coordinating face-to-face meetings, many of which take place in so-called ‘third
places’ between home and work. A growing number of mobile social softwares
(e.g., Imahima, Dodgeball, Plazes, GeoNotes) allow people to define a physical
location, announce their presence in that location, and see who else is now
checked in, was there earlier, or plans to head there in the future. However,
we know relatively little about how these services actually affect the usage
patterns of cafés, bars, and other third places. In our research on the use of
the Hunaja (Finnish for ‘honey’) system at Aula’s social club in Helsinki, we found that new forms of serendipity, self-promotion, stalking and avoidance
emerged when club members used their mobile phones to check who was in the Aula
space. The focus of the talk will be on an ethnographic case study of these
emerging social uses of the Hunaja system. The case will be related to the
broader social implications of proximity and location sensors in mobile
devices. The central argument is that location-awareness services can turn
third places into physical buddy lists where comings and goings become ways to
change one’s status from ‘online’ to ‘offline.’ To the users, such services can
function as symbolic instruments for acquiring and maintaining membership in a
community and marking territory; practical tools for optimizing paths in the
city to initiate and avoid encounters with specific others; and playful objects
for expressing a sense of humour. However, they are also a rich source of
misunderstandings and afford ways to purposefully deceive other users.
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