Augusta App 2.0
AUGUSTA App is the digital supplement to Finding Augusta: Habits of Mobility and Governance in the Digital Era (2014), which earned the Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship Award from the Society of Cinema and Media Studies in 2015. The book explores how mobile devices, GPS systems, haptic technologies, and related media alter individuals’ experience of themselves and by extension shape the social collective. Augusta App takes up this thematic. It tracks participants geo-locatively and in relation to the various Augustas documented by travelling insurance agent and Augusta, GA native Scott Nixon during the 1930s – 1950s. It invites participants to contribute their own images of Augusta (whatever “Augusta” might mean) to the repository of images that populate the Augusta App map. And it provides, by means of QR codes printed in the book, fun facts about the amateur filmmaker whose 16-minute homemovie The Augustas informs the book’s title (see: https://digital.tcl.sc.edu/digital/collection/p17173coll6/id/1139/rec/1). In the process, Augusta App attempts to cultivate a community of participants who think more reflectively about how, like highways and plumbing, mobile technologies have become infrastructure that regulates habits of thinking and doing.