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M. Mitteregger:
"Drawing a circle: Search on mobile devices";
Talk: MediaCity 2010, Weimar (invited); 2010-10-29 - 2010-10-31; in: "Media city project", (2010), ##.

In 2007, the iPhone introduced a new cultural technique, mobile computing, to a broad audience. Essentially a handheld personal computer, it enables its users to access information and media (stored or online), to communicate and use other integrated hardware (camera, media player, GPS) - everywhere from subways to school desks. Its launch did not only have an enormous impact on the communications and entertainment industry; the technology it
introduced will have profound effects on the built environment in the immediate future. This paper focuses on mobile computing as a tool for local search and navigation. From a historic perspective I want
elaborate the argument that any search conducted (from libraries to newspapers) is essentially a productive process;
as it includes and excludes; as it creates an inside and an outside. For most successful applications for local search organize spatial relations in the same way as search engines structure the web; results are ranked according to their link structure. The user history is then used to optimize or "personalize" the results. Thus local search on mobile devices renders some places (i.e. their functions) visible to some but concealed to others. Personal experience may be then predefined by an individual profile and is shared only with the "demographic others". Starting with the modern
footnote I want to follow the development up to the hypertext and recent search engines. This is to better grasp the ontological constrains and capabilities of search engines, and to argue that both constrains and capabilities may not be as unprecedented as so often claimed.

iPhone new cultural technique mobile computing Media City 2010 Weimar Mitteregger