A conference took place in Park Shops from Friday to Sunday that featured expert speakers in communications from around the country, as well as the world.
The Local and Mobile Conference 2012 served as the third annual research symposium for the program of Communication, Rhetoric and Digital Media at N.C. State. It also marked the third joint international conference of the Pan-American Mobilities Network and the Cosmobilities Network.
Adriana de Souza e Silva, an associate professor at the department of communication, was chair of the conference. Silva is also the interim associate director of the CRDM program and affiliated faculty at the Digital Games Research Center.
While the head of the conference was a local, many of those involved came to Raleigh from across the globe. Keynote speakers included Rich Ling, professor at the IT University of Copenhagen and Telenor’s Research Institute in Norway, Paul Dourish from Irvine, Ca. and Teri Reub from Buffalo, N.Y.
The three days consisted of 21 panel discussions led and moderated by dozens of mobile communications and information technology specialists, as well as professors of communication from countries like France, Canada, the U.S., Denmark, Netherlands, Nigeria, Brazil, Germany, Ireland, Italy and Germany.
The culturally diverse panels served as a platform for discussion of the application of mobile resources in today’s world. The audience gained insight into how mobility and location influence the world around us, and also heard expert ideas of how these resources could be applied more effectively.
Several students had the opportunity to work the conference. Caroline Funkhouser, junior in communications, had the position of tech support in one of the panel rooms. As she helped presenters with microphones and PowerPoint presentations, she observed several of the speakers present.
One of these presentations was that of Armond Towns from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“[Towns] talked about the L.A. gang tours, which are tours you can pay to take through the ghetto of L.A. led by real gangsters, and how these tours affect the mobility of the black and Latino populations living in these communities,” Funkhouser said. “He spoke about how these tours are interpreted differently by different people. This one was probably my favorite.”
Another talk was N.C. State’s Ryan McGrady’s “Wikipedia Zero and the Encyclopedic Ideal.”
“[McGrady dealt with] proliferation of Wikipedia in our society and how Wikipedia is attempting to become a force to gather all human knowledge for our benefit,” Funkhouser said.
Communications senior Khang Ngo also worked the conference.
“Being at the conference and hearing the panel, as well as getting to know the presenters, gave me an inside look at what our professors actually do outside of teaching,” Ngo said. “They try to analyze and advance current topics on a scholarly level and redefine the old.”
Ngo enjoyed the event because he could relate. “It is exactly like research papers that we do except on a more in depth level, and you get catering.”
The weekend conference culminated in a presentation on Locative Media as Generative Displacement by keynote speaker Teri Rueb from the University at Buffalo, followed by closing remarks from conference chair Adriana de Souza e Silva.
