Colonizing the Spectrum: Demos and the Future Users of Location-Based Technology

‘Colonizing the Spectrum' analyzes the deployment of the user in imagining and assembling location-based mobile phone technologies in the context of UK policy debate. More specifically the authors examination is attuned to the discursive work and achievements of the user in the Demos publication: ‘Mobilisation: the growing interest in mobile technology' (Harkin 2003). Drawing on the burgeoning body of Sociology of Expectations literature, in which the future(s) as an analytical object is addressed, the authors analyze how discourses about users operate in the stimulation/construction and possible enablement of interactive futures. That is to say how the user functions in organizing rhetoric's about persons, mobile phone technologies and the political with a view to determining prospective political and commercial risks and opportunities (arrangements) associated with the management of the electromagnetic spectrum.