On PlaceMark: Collaborative Authoring, Place, and Identity

Abstract

Mobile, digital technologies are thought to augment and transcend the limits of our places, yet they raise the issue of what our places are. PlaceMark is a simple, distributed collaborative authoring environment constructed in conjunction with a site-specific writing activity. This system is examined as a cultural probe, investigating how new media students engage in collaborative writing and how they construct place. Findings include that students engage in the activity as if in parallel play (influencing one another implicitly rather than explicitly), that approaching the notion of place through writing may require development (working through issues brought to the place and the exercise), and that students' relationship to place, at least when asked to write about places that may be considered natural, is not characterized by certainty in behavioral framing.