// new media class

The term Data-Smog was firstly introduced and coined in American journalist David Shenk's equally named book. Its subtitle "Surviving the information glut" refers to a concern deriving from an always progressing information technology, enabling an exorbitant and thus unmanageable amount of available data on the internet. A new trend, driven by smart phones and the uncountable number of location based services such as google maps, layar, facebook's places or geotagged flickr images create a new kind of data-smog, one which you can imagine as a cloud of information particles floating above the referring location, referable as "Geolocative Data Smog". This new notion of virtual smog literally levitating in our environment is this unit's starting point. Any given place has a unique geolocative data-smog index, represented by a numeric number, the FOVO-Index. Via a Text Field one can type in a Street-Address or whatever kind of location and the software will calculate the index of that given place with a given radius, a numeric representation of how much virtual data is located to this real location.

First used cases show to some extend strong relation between the FOVO-Index and other location based statistics such as prosperity or unemployment rate.

The FOVO-Index will be further developed to provide possibility of a personalized "FOVO-Index-Search". Users can search for specific words deriving from their interests in music, sports or any other thing and they will find places that have a high FOVO-Index for their search terms. Resulting in people finding real places that match their interests.