Can CSCW Technologies Help Us Re-construct Places?

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. Here, we examine it as a cultural probe, investigating how new media students engage in collaborative writing and how they construct place. We find 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 candidate images and issues brought to the place and the exercise) and that their relationship to place, at least when asked to write about places that may be considered natural, is not characterized by certainty in behavioral framing. Author