Pictures in place: adolescent usage of multimedia messaging in the negotiation, construction and sharing of meaning about local environments

Welcome to voxpopuli.

voxpopuli is a wiki which has as its basis my doctoral thesis on adolescent spatial cognition.

it is structured to mirror as closely as possible the original thesis, which i submitted to the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, on 22 August 2006.

the thesis is also available as a book.

i decided to reproduce the text of my thesis as voxpopuli, in order that the work may not stagnate, but hopefully evolve and grow with the passage of time and with our understandings of the complex relationships between technology, the individual, and society.

just as i started my blog - voyeurism - as an attempt to use social software to learn more about social software, so too i bring you voxpopuli as another experiment in using social software to document my findings on social software.

if you share an interest in wayfinding, spatial cognition, geography education, map skills and interpretation, or any related discipline, i welcome you to register yourself as an authorised contributor to voxpopuli :-)

thank you!

Kenneth Y T Lim 

“Most people don’t take snapshots over little things - the used band-aid, the guy at the gas station, the wasp on the jello.  But these are the things that make up the true picture of our lives.  People don’t take pictures of these things.”

Seymour Parrish - protagonist in One Hour Photo, Twentieth Century Fox 2003

“To become completely lost is perhaps a rather rare experience for most people in the modern city.  We are supported by the presence of others and by special way-finding devices: maps, street numbers, route signs, bus placards.  But let the mishap of disorientation once occur, and the sense of anxiety that accompanies it reveals to us how closely it is linked to our sense of balance and well-being.”

Kevin A. Lynch - The Image of the City, MIT Press 1960