This panel is concerned with how augmented reality is shaping personal identity and public communications, it’s social construction as media technology, and the outcomes of these trends for society. AR creates new kinds of digital relations for the physical world. It does not just layer over physical reality with virtual information (cf Azuma 1997, Kim et al. 2018), but helps us perceive and act in a world of novel personal, professional, and civic experiences. However, a dearth of knowledge on AR’s role in shaping and being shaped by society arrests the ability to steer AR’s social impact. And there is a clear and present need to do so: 2020 iPhones now incorporate novel AR-LIDAR surveillance sensors that map faces and the inside homes; there is growing acceptance of body-dysmorphic ‘lenses’ on social media that modify human appearance in real-time to, narrow, sexualise, add privacy, or otherwise reconfigure identity in public and private communication

This panel welcomes contributions across AR’s 1) Conceptualisation: how AR is imagined by those making AR experiences, as well as larger social discourses that enable and encourage its imaginaries; 2) Concretisation: how process of potential imaginaries succumb to market forces, civic pressure, technological limits, that deform any ideals of AR into material systems of media (Flusser, 1999) that design constraints towards specific properties and dynamics that mediate a specific reality; and 3) Contextualisation that reflects on how new media, despite their intended public debut, suffer continued social and cultural appropriation (Gitelman, 2006, p. 27).