Future Internet Symposium 2009: 2nd International Workshop on Blending Physical and Digital Spaces on the Internet :: September 1-3, 2009 :: Berlin, Germany :: Call for Papers.

One of the most important effects of the Internet and of the Web has been to relax spatial and temporal constraints on human activities – the so called “space-time collapse” – allowing fast global access to information as well as to physical resources and services. Recently this movement accelerated, due to the success of mobile devices such as the iPhone allowing almost ubiquitous mobile access to the Internet, to the generalisation of digital social interaction through platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, to the virtual environments provided on gaming platforms enabled by the Internet, instant communication supported by popular VOIP providers such as Skype, and an emerging web of things. Many now spend as much time involved in digital spaces over the Internet than in “real” ones, and continuously update the digital with elements of their physical life in “lifestreaming” process. Moreover reality itself is augmented by information collected from the Internet, through the increasing availability of GPS devices that ease location based search, or through “magic-lense” based applications that add information to recognized physical elements, or reconstruct them in digital space from various media collected on the Web.

While allowing users to experience a profound modification of their interaction space, the Internet has familiarised us with new topologies – alongside the prominent hyperlinked topology exhibited by the Web, Deleuze and Guattari’s “rhizome”, which has become the model of many new forms of organization – leading to the creation of new virtual spaces and communities. Indeed, P2P networks of devices create semi-private sharing environments; (micro-) blogging and lifestreaming induces new notions of spatiotemporal as well as social proximity, while sensor and controller networks enable ubiquitous access, sensing and interaction with the real world. Furthermore, Virtual globes and GIS technologies continue to improve and to blur the boundaries between spatial representation and perception by providing mashup opportunities, photorealistic visual navigation, and three-dimensional representations.

Many agree with what came to be known as Waldo Tobler’s first law of Geography: “Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things.” The Internet, by establishing new connections between geographically distant entities cannot but provide us with a radically new image of Space and Time that this workshop is aiming to explore in an interdisciplinary way. OneSpace proposes to take the measure of the aforementioned developments and their repercussion as well as to identify trends and directions for a new future blended Internet.