Research Issues in Mobile Informatics : Classical Concerns , Pragmatic Issues and Emerging

The rapid diffusion of mobile Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) such as laptops, mobile phones and to some extent Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) has along with the uptake of email, instant messaging and other networking services (Sørensen et al., 2002; Mathiassen and Sørensen, 2003) rapidly fueled the mobilisation of interaction (Kakihara and Sørensen, 2001). Since technological innovations easily serve the purpose as focal points for ICT research, the wide-spread diffusion of “mobile” technologies has subsequently led to the emergence of research addressing sociotechnical aspects of the use of these technologies. This research has characterized the technology use as ubiquitous computing (Weiser, 1991), nomadic pervasive computing (Lyytinen and Yoo, 2002), or mobile informatics (Dahlbom and Ljungberg, 1998). Lyytinen & Yoo (2002) characterize these as applications using common infrastructures based the combination of mass scale diffusion, mobility and technological convergence. Intuitively, it seems quite straightforward for us to attempt making sense of the rapid technological developments we observe and place the technical characteristics of the emerging phenomena at the center and make it the most important. Hence, we can observe a number of research efforts studying mobile computing, mobile informatics and mobility in general. The commonsensical understanding of mobility in terms of geographical movement is the common denominator distinguishing the mobile phone from the fixed-line phone and the PDA and other hand-held computer devices from the mainframe and the PC.