(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2010-04-08)
Hicks, Cinque
Designers of information communication technologies (ICTs) in public space often fall into the trap of designing only for the "flaneur," an unembedded mobile subject in the generic global city. They deracinate the experience of space and support the global flâneur as the paradigmatic deracinated subject. In this thesis I propose a specific vision of "en-racinating" media, that is media that takes the specificity of place seriously. A careful consideration of public art can help us in this endeavor by leveraging the artistic notion of "site specificity" in the most culturally grounded meaning of the term. I examining three public digital media/information-based public art works through the lens of urban informatics in order to see how the works do or do not en-racinate experience in a specific city: Atlanta
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009-02-12)
Riley, Will
Anonymous signatures pose a significant threat to the legitimacy of the online petition as a persuasive form of political communication. While anonymous signatures address some privacy concerns for online petitioners, they often fail to identify petitioners as numerically distinct and socially relevant persons, Since anonymous signatures often fail to personally identify online petitioners, they often fail to provide sufficient reason for targeted political authorities to review and respond to their grievances. To recover the personal rhetoric of the online petition in a way that strikes a balance between the publicity and privacy concerns of petitioners, we should reformat online petitions as pseudonymous social networks of personal testimony between petitioners and targeted political authorities. To this end, the pseudonymous signatures of online petitions should incorporate social frames, co-authored complaints and demands, multimedia voice, and revisable support.