Jabberwocky

Jabberwocky is a mobile phone application for visualizing our urban Familiar Strangers. It is an outcome of the Familiar Strangers project at Intel Research Lab Berkeley’s Urban Atmosphere. Social psychologist Stanley Milgram mentioned
“familiar strangers” as people (not friends) you have very little in common with them, but share something very important: proximity.

In the idea of Jabberwoky I especially like the fact that “Strangers are strangers exactly because they are not our friends, and any such system should respect that boundary” that goes against the current web2.0 frenzy of attempting by all means to convert our strangers into our friends.

Here the goal of exploring the Familiar Stranger is to promote discussion around Jabberwocky to improve community solidarity and sense of belonging in urban spaces. It is very relevant to the ICING project that finances my research at UPF. It deals with intelligent cities and ambient intelligence. I am always very skeptical when we start to use the term “intelligence” for abstract metaphors.

Technically Jabberwocky is very easy. It contacts a Bluetooth device, it compares the radio’s identifying MAC address to a log of addresses stored in its memory.

Jabberwocky can also become location aware as it allows users to create their own locations (like “work” or “my commute”) and link groups of phones to them. That way, Jabberwocky can give us some clues to our previous encounters with familiar strangers (that is, “office,” “corner café”). It is a very clear example of defining location not as a static set of coordinates or fixed location but as a personally defined shifting region.

Elizabeth Goodman talks about the project in Jabberwocky: Your Personal Compass