CALL FOR BOOK CHAPTERS ***Please distribute widely — apologies for cross-postings*** The ubiquitous internet This edited collection of work by international scholars analyses aspects of the mobile, platform-independent and interoperable character of the internet and the associated cultural practices. How do users communicate under these circumstances? How do companies orient to political, commercial and regulatory frameworks in order to stay in – and expand – business? What are the key privacy concerns and regulatory practices on the ubiquitous internet, and what are the standards when operating in ubiquitous settings? The user convenience of internet at your fingertips from any device near you and information that floats ‘freely’ and follows you around on the internet through interoperable cloud services potentially set new standards for user behaviour and strategies on the internet in terms of sharing and data connecting that we know very little about (Taddicken, 2012). From a user perspective, Baron (2008) has pointed to the notion of being ‘always on’ as a central experiential quality of mobile media, but we lack a nuanced understanding of how being always on maps onto the practices through which users move seamlessly across services and media platforms in everyday life? From a business perspective, the data generated and shared by users on the ubiquitous internet create new opportunities for revenue, through monitoring, data mining and profiling techniques. However, despite a frequently voiced concern for user ‘exploitation’ and commodification (e.g. van Dijck, 2009; Fuchs et al., 2012), we still know quite little about how exactly companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon and Twitter aggregate and mine user data to generate value. Such knowledge is particularly critical, because the ubiquitous internet challenges institutional and societal concepts of privacy, law and economics of the internet. More and more information on the internet flows only within industry-owned domains such as Facebook and Google and across platforms that have their own internet standards (e.g. apps and browsers for mobile platforms). Business analysts have called this fenced-off internet the ‘splinternet’ (Bernoff & VanBoskirk, 2010; Thomson, 2010) to describe the movement from open shared standards such as w3 to different competitive clusters of standards and internet control. The ubiquitous, seamlessly integrated internet, and the associated data that are produced by user engagement, present significant opportunities and challenges for theoretical as well as empirical research. This book presents state of the art research on the ubiquitous internet, its economic stakeholders and its everyday users. The chapters of this book will focus on companies, regulation and users from different parts of the world. We particularly encourage contributions from Asia-Pacific and South America. Comparative chapters are also very welcome. We welcome chapters that focus on: • Policy, standards and regulation • Strategy and practices in search or social media companies • User studies of ubiquitous internet practices (with emphasis on smartphones, network and/or sensor-based communication) We invite you to submit via email to Anja Bechmann (anjabechmann@gmail.com) or Stine Lomborg (slomborg@hum.ku.dk) by 1 June 2012: - a 500 word abstract of a proposed chapter; and - a preliminary outline of the proposed chapter. The successful abstracts will form part of a book proposal to be offered to academic publishers. -- Anja Bechmann Assistant Professor, PhD The Centre for Internet Research Aarhus University Denmark The university profile: http://person.au.dk/en/abp@hum.au.dk The Centre for Internet Research: http://cfi.au.dk/en/frontpage/ The Council for Greater IT Security: http://rfsits.dk/l/english/<http://www.rfsits.dk/mxcms.aspx?itemId=65> Linkedin: http://dk.linkedin.com/in/anjabechmann Wordpress: http://medianetworks.wordpress.com