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In the early 2010s, location-based social networks (LBSNs) received significant attention from both the public and venture capital. The "LBSN moment" was an important period of early mobile geomedia history, and this article argues that the reverberations of that moment still shape the contemporary social geomedia landscape. This article examines the LBSN moment through a media genealogy approach that views the period as a moment of juncture for the development of social location-sharing, which ended up being dominated by large platforms like Facebook and Uber. The article also draws from research on technological development to push back against narratives of inevitability and argue that specific dynamics of the LBSN moment, particularly the double-edged sword of hype, closed-off avenues for the media form. The article ultimately uses an interventionist genealogical approach to explore different paths that could have been—and still could be—taken. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Virtual Reality (VR) has traditionally required external sensors placed around a designated play space. In contrast, more recent wired and wireless systems, such as the Oculus Rift S (released in March 2019) and the Oculus Quest (released in May 2019) use cameras located on the outside of these devices to monitor their physical position. Users can now mark out a physical space that is then digitally tracked within their display. Once a play space has been established, users are alerted if they come close to breaching this boundary by the visual inclusion of a grid. Should this threshold be breached, the headset display shifts to an image of the surrounding concrete environment. We contend that physical space is increasingly being incorporated into the digital space of VR in a manner that meaningfully differs from older systems. We build our argument in the following way. First, the article explores how theories surrounding VR have implicated only a limited relationship with physical space. Second, the article introduces the concept of coextensive space as a way of understanding the developing relationship between the physical, digital and concrete reality enacted by current VR systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Infrastructures support and shape our social world, but they do so in often invisible ways. In few cases is that truer than with various documents that serve infrastructural functions. This article takes one type of those documents—technical standards—and uses analysis of one specific standard to develop theory related to the infrastructural function of writing. The author specifically analyzes one of the major infrastructures of the Internet of Things—the 126-page Tag Data Standard (TDS)—to show how rethinking writing as infrastructure can be valuable for multiple conversations occurring with writing studies, including research on material rhetoric, research that expands the scope of what should be studied as writing, and research in writing studies that links with emerging fields. The author concludes by developing a model for future research on the infrastructural functions of writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The goal of this article is to make the case that technical standards can be valuable educational tools for technical communication teachers. The article argues for the pedagogical value of standards through an examination of one particular standard: the Tag Data Standard, published by GS1. The analysis focuses on areas in which the document could be improved by technical communication practitioners and students. Method: The data for this article come from the 126-page Tag Data Standard. The standard was inductively analyzed using grounded theory and involved a second coder. The research question that guided this analysis was, "How could this comprehensive standard be improved by trained technical communicators?" The goal is to show how technical standards could be used to provide students with real-world texts to analyze and edit. Results: The data show the TDS could likely be improved if technical communication practitioners were more involved in the writing process to focus on issues of consistency, audience, and design. The article uses those results to show why standards could be valuable educational tools for teachers. Conclusion: Standards are a crucial form of technical communication. They are an example of how language shapes the material world. The analysis in this article shows that these crucial documents can be improved by skilled technical communicators and can serve multiple pedagogical goals, including showing students how documents shape materiality and providing students with comprehensive, real-world texts to work with and improve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research in the field of mobile communication studies (MCS) has generally moved away from focusing on how mobile phones distract users from their physical environment to considering how the experience of space and place can be enhanced by locative smartphone applications. This article argues that trajectory may be complicated by the emergence of a new type of mobile technology: mobile virtual reality (MVR). While an increasing number of handsets are specifically developed with MVR in mind, there is little to no research that situates this phenomenon within the continuum of MCS. The intention of this paper is accordingly twofold. First, the article conceptualizes MVR as a connective tissue between the two sequential tropes of MCS: physical distraction and spatial enhancement. Second, the article introduces the concept of 'dislocated space' as a way of understanding the embodied space MVR might configure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Location-based services are mobile applications that use a device’s location to provide relevant results. Spatial search applications are a popular subset of location-based services that enable people to search through their surrounding space to find nearby locations. This article examines spatial search applications through a framework that combines critical geography research with research on the power search engines exert over information visibility. The main argument of the article is that popular spatial search applications, such as Yelp, may subtly reproduce existing forms of spatial segregation by rendering certain location invisible through the mobile mapping interface. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People use location-aware mobile applications to both produce and organize information. As scholars have noted, digital information is increasingly being organized by physical location. This article examines how new forms of location-based writing represent an important development for composition scholars. Increasingly, people use mobile applications to write about locations, and those texts then appear when other people travel to those locations. This form of location-based composition shows the potential of understanding how texts can impact how people experience physical space. To understand these forms of writing, this article develops a theoretical framework for understanding these texts and then historicizes location-based writing by discussing earlier forms of locative media art. The article then examines the location-based texts found in the mobile application Foursquare to show that instructors can use mobile applications to teach students about attaching texts to the physical places they describe. This article ultimately argues that location-based texts represent a new form of text, a form of text that should be taught in the composition classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides background on social network analysis, an innovative research paradigm that focuses on the importance of social networks. The article begins by giving background on the development of social network analysis and different methods used by social network analysis researchers. The article then examines how these methods can be used in the field of technical communication by focusing on how technical communicators form social networks and connect diverse audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: his article examines online help forums as a form of technical communication. The purpose of the article is to explore the similarities between moderators of help forums and technical communicators. The article argues that technical communicators are uniquely suited to step in as "community managers" of companies' official online help forums. Method: his study reports on qualitative research done with 23 help forum moderators. The researcher used an iterative grounded theory approach to seek out research participants and code the interview data to examine emergent data categories. The research was also supplemented by six months of observation and an extensive memoing process. Results: The interviews with forum moderators show that help forum moderation requires many of the skills technical communicators already possess. Moderators play an important role in the health of online help forums, and they must be able to work with subject-matter experts, edit content, organize material, create content, and shape the overall tone of the forum. Conclusion: Many companies now sponsor official help forums, and these companies need community managers to run these sites. The data reported in this study show that technical communicators possess the skills to succeed in these positions and help develop professional online help forums. In conclusion, technical communicators have a strong case to make that they are well positioned to step in as community managers, especially of professionally sponsored online help forums. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early theories of the internet imagined that individuals would begin living most of their lives online, decreasing the importance of physical mobility and urban spaces. With the development of internet-enabled mobile phones, these early predictions have been proven false. The internet has not decreased the importance of physical mobility; instead, the digital information of the internet has begun to merge with physical space, leading to new types of hybrid spaces. These hybrid spaces are becoming increasingly common, and they may change the way physical space is negotiated and understood. At this early juncture, however, it is crucial to critically examine the development of hybrid spaces and how they may lead to issues of exclusion and exacerbate issues of access. This essay takes a critical approach to the development of hybrid spaces, arguing that what is often lost in discourses about these new understandings of space are questions of who gets to experience this convergence of the digital and the physical. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study conceptualizes the new spatial logic created by the social use of location aware mobile technologies, analyzing how mobile communities are formed by the mapping of social networks in urban spaces. It explores two main areas with the goal of understanding how locative mobile social networks (LMSNs) challenge the traditional logic of networks. First, it conceptualizes LMSNs by comparing them to (1) traditional transportation and communication networks, and (2) mobile social networks (MSNs). Second, the paper discusses potential social implications of LMSNs, such as privacy, surveillance, and social exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on locative media ethics and presents several responses to questions regarding locative media ethics. Topics include the relationship between communication and media, the communication design intersections of disability and accessibility, and the journalistic concerns associated with locative media ethics.

Over the last decade social scientific researchers have examined how the public perceives risks associated with nanotechnology. The body of literature that has emerged has been methodologically diverse. The findings have confirmed that some publics perceive nanotechnology as riskier than others, experts feel nanotechnology is less risky than the public does, and despite risks the public is optimistic about nanotechnology development. However, the extant literature on nanotechnology and risk suffers from sometimes widely divergent findings and has failed to provide a detailed picture of how the public actually feels about nanotechnology risks when compared to other risks. This study addresses the deficiencies in the literature by providing a comparative approach to gauging nanotechnology risks. The findings show that the public does not fear nanotechnology compared to other risks. Out of 24 risks presented to the participants, nanotechnology ranked 19th in terms of overall risk and 20th in terms of 'high risk.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]