[Air-L] Call for Book Chapters: The Ubiquitous Internet

[Anja Bechmann]

CALL FOR BOOK CHAPTERS
***Please distribute widely — apologies for cross-postings***

The ubiquitous internet

This edited collection of work by international scholars analyses aspects
of the mobile, platform-independent and interoperable character of the
internet and the associated cultural practices. How do users communicate
under these circumstances? How do companies orient to political, commercial
and regulatory frameworks in order to stay in – and expand – business? What
are the key privacy concerns and regulatory practices on the ubiquitous
internet, and what are the standards when operating in ubiquitous settings?

The user convenience of internet at your fingertips from any device near
you and information that floats ‘freely’ and follows you around on the
internet through interoperable cloud services potentially set new standards
for user behaviour and strategies on the internet in terms of sharing and
data connecting that we know very little about (Taddicken, 2012). From a
user perspective, Baron (2008) has pointed to the notion of being ‘always
on’ as a central experiential quality of mobile media, but we lack a
nuanced understanding of how being always on maps onto the practices
through which users move seamlessly across services and media platforms in
everyday life? From a business perspective, the data generated and shared
by users on the ubiquitous internet create new opportunities for revenue,
through monitoring, data mining and profiling techniques. However, despite
a frequently voiced concern for user ‘exploitation’ and commodification
(e.g. van Dijck, 2009; Fuchs et al., 2012), we still know quite little
about how exactly companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon and Twitter
aggregate and mine user data to generate value. Such knowledge is
particularly critical, because the ubiquitous internet challenges
institutional and societal concepts of privacy, law and economics of the
internet. More and more information on the internet flows only within
industry-owned domains such as Facebook and Google and across platforms
that have their own internet standards (e.g. apps and browsers for mobile
platforms). Business analysts have called this fenced-off internet the
‘splinternet’ (Bernoff & VanBoskirk, 2010; Thomson, 2010) to describe the
movement from open shared standards such as w3 to different competitive
clusters of standards and internet control.
The ubiquitous, seamlessly integrated internet, and the associated data
that are produced by user engagement, present significant opportunities and
challenges for theoretical as well as empirical research. This book
presents state of the art research on the ubiquitous internet, its economic
stakeholders and its everyday users.

The chapters of this book will focus on companies, regulation and users
from different parts of the world. We particularly encourage contributions
from Asia-Pacific and South America. Comparative chapters are also very
welcome.

We welcome chapters that focus on:

• Policy, standards and regulation
• Strategy and practices in search or social media companies
• User studies of ubiquitous internet practices (with emphasis on
smartphones, network and/or sensor-based communication)


We invite you to submit via email to Anja Bechmann (anjabechmann at gmail.com)
or Stine Lomborg (slomborg at hum.ku.dk) by 1 June 2012:

   - a 500 word abstract of a proposed chapter; and
   - a preliminary outline of the proposed chapter.


The successful abstracts will form part of a book proposal to be offered to
academic publishers.



-- 

Anja Bechmann
Assistant Professor, PhD
The Centre for Internet Research
Aarhus University
Denmark

The university profile: http://person.au.dk/en/abp@hum.au.dk
The Centre for Internet Research: http://cfi.au.dk/en/frontpage/
The Council for Greater IT Security:
http://rfsits.dk/l/english/<http://www.rfsits.dk/mxcms.aspx?itemId=65>

Linkedin: http://dk.linkedin.com/in/anjabechmann
Wordpress: http://medianetworks.wordpress.com