Restrictions and constraints in mobile narratives for place-based community engagement

Abstract

The usage of the mobile Internet increased tremendously within the last couple of years, and thereby the vision of accessing information anytime, anywhere became more realistic and a dominant design principle for providing content. However, this paper presents work-in-progress that challenges this paradigm of unlimited and unrestricted access, and explores and tests how constraints and restrictions may positively influence the motivation and enticement of mobile users to engage with location-specific content. Restrictions, such as a particular time or location that enables a user to access content, may be used to foster community participation and engagement, as well as to support locative media production and to enhance the user’s experience. In the end, we outline the timeline of our current work and further studies planned in order to verify our hypothesis.