IFIP9.5 WG Virtuality and Society Workshop July 26th 2011 ThinkLab, University of Salford [location] <location> {location;} Call for Papers Workshop Guide IFIP9.5WG’s Workshop 2011 will be a mixed physical and virtual workshop, including physical attendance at the ThinkLab, University of Salford, UK, and virtual attendance by video-conference. It is envisaged that European colleagues will attend physically, and those further afield, virtually, but this is not a hard-and-fast rule. Details concerning virtual participation are included below. It is intended that the entire proceedings will be webcast for those who cannot attend. Call for Papers Smartphones have enjoyed phenomenal growth in the latter part of the first decade of this century. By 2012 sales of such devices are predicted to outstrip sales of PCs, and by 2015 more people will be accessing the internet with such devices than they will be with a PC. Key to the growth and popularity of such devices has been the convergence, not just of telecomms and photographic equipment, which helped drive mobile phone sales, and the addition of internet access, which defined the smartphone, but the addition, following the success of in-car satellite navigation devices, of GPS receivers into mobile internet devices. The integration of GPS technology into smartphones, coupled with the consumer-led approach of Apple’s iPhone, gave birth to a whole new class of location-based services for mobile internet devices, available in particular for the iPhone, but also for Android, and other devices. As our lives become increasingly encroached upon by the digital virtuality of our exponentially advancing information society, will this be at the cost of our humanity? Writers such as Sherry Turkle and others seem to believe this is already happening in circles of people sitting together in silence engaging with their smartphones. When our senses are surrounded by interactive exposure to telepresent realities – the faces of those we are speaking to across the world overlaid upon the world before our eyes, streams of data passing across the pavements and shopfronts as we pass, electronic voices calling our name and tantalising us with goods they know we want (famously envisaged in the movie, Minority Report) – when the worlds around us are both real and virtual, will this grant us additional scope to express our humanity, or constitute such an overload that engagement fatigue exhausts our faculties? At our off-grid holiday resorts in rugged mountainous territory or remote wilderness encampments, luxuriating in isolation-downtime, delighting in the simplicities of one-to-one, face-to-face conversation with no distractions, in natural landscape with no overlaid streams of historical and commercial data, out beyond the boundaries of location aware personal shopping avatars telling us where to get what they already know we would ‘Like’, will we savour a richer, more traditional humanity we feel the hi-tech virtuality-soaked everyday of our lives has come to miss? Or does this vision of a virtu-reality that beckons in the coming decade mistake digital virtuality for something other than simply the latest manifestation of the - very human – dreams our ingenuity and inventiveness has managed to create? Extended Deadline - Submission of papers:April 29th 2011 Submissions must be sent by email to info@ifip95wg.org Instructions for virtual participants Virtual participation is welcomed via video-conference link. Please contact David Kreps in the first instance with details of the technologies available to you. Please see www.ifip95wg.org for full details.