Shaping Boundaries within the Flow: Workspaces, Environments, Identities.

This paper explores how, within the flow and its technology-enabled eradication or blurring of boundaries, individuals and groups create new workspaces, environments, and identities through constructing new, albeit provisional and porous boundaries. Following Manuel Castells's observation that "wireless communication technologies diffuse the networking logic of social organization and social practice everywhere, to all contexts—on condition of being on the mobile Net", we observe how people are dealing, from inside the flow, with technology-enabled boundary loss and, simultaneously constructing new, albeit porous boundaries to enact new workspaces, environments, and identities, as well as with the loss and refashioning of traditional "third places" (Oldenburg) occasioned by that boundary loss. As the flow surges through knowledge workers and citizens today through the increasing ubiquity of the Internet and mobile technologies, pre-flow workplaces, environments, and identities are being replaced by work-space-flows, liquid environments, and multiple co-existing identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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