Constructing Public Discourse with Ethnographic/SMS "Texts"

We are interested in how individuals and communities develop opinions as they design and use new mobile, public-sphere technologies. We situate our work among new considerations of ethnography, mobile technologies and rhetoric and describe the design and pilot installation of a new technology called TexTales designed to support mobile public discourse. Mobility in the end may supply the means by which the spoils of remote and indirect interaction and independence flow back into local life, keeping it flexible, preventing the stagnancy which has attended stability in the past, and furnishing with it the elements of a variegated and many-hued experience. – John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems.