As you will have noticed I do no longer contribute to this blog. It will however stay up and running for future reference.
Anybody interested in the art of reportage may follow me over at Reportagenblog (in German).
Urban alienation through communication technology?
In a contribution to Online Opinion, an Australian e-journal on social and political debate, Marcus Foth asks, wether networked communities are an answer to urban alienation:
Widespread use of mobile and ubiquitous information and communications technology by urban dwellers remains in stark contrast to endemic forms of urban alienation – and the disappearance or non-existence of urban neighbourhood community identity. [...] Neighbours may still be part of a resident’s social portfolio, but the communication devices used to maintain social ties are inherently place-independent and ephemeral.
Citing Sociologist Barry Wellman Marcus Foth argues that
nature of the social ties people establish and maintain is changing. What used to be door-to-door and place-to-place relationships are now person-to-person and role-to-role relationships. Wellman terms the emerging qualities of this behaviour “networked individualism�. [...] Place and proximity continue to matter in every socio-economic aspect. This is evident, Wellman argues, by rising car and air travel sales, by people commuting to work instead of working from home, and by the formation of economic clusters, precincts and hot spots where industries based along the same value chain co-locate to take advantage of synergy effects.
“Networked individualismâ€? comes close to what Ethan Watters describes as “urban tribesâ€? or – in the words of Marcus Froth – “social clusters of under 35-year-old urban dwellers [...] who supplement face-to-face interaction with new media and ICT applications.” Networked individualism changes the way we use space:
Networked individualism introduces challenges to conventional understandings of place and public places. It opens up opportunities for architecture, city planning and urban studies to reconceptualise understandings of community and neighbourhood planning in the light of new media and network ICTs.
Froth calls on urban researcher Brendan Gleeson who
“contends that in master-planned communities, traditional conceptual models of community development limit action to tangible places of public interaction such as kindergartens, public schools, parks, libraries, and so on. This “build it, they will comeâ€? approach lacks engagement with recent community development and community informatics research findings that call for an engagement with yet unanswered questions around the significance of social networks in urban neighbourhood community building.
While Marcus Froth adresses an interesting question – and brings together quite a handfull of authorities on the subject (including his own) – the question of departure remains unanswerd: are urban communities being alienated (from each other? their localities?) by the internet and other communication technologies? Too early to answer, Froth might say: “there is a need for a theoretical and practical understandings of the freedom and constraints, and the social and cultural meanings that urban dwellers derive from their use of location-based ICTs.”
One step further in that directin is this recent paper (pdf, 275kb) he has written together with Barbara Adkins.
Floating Places
Space and place are not the same with telecommunications technologies becoming ubiquitous. How is space extended by our digital connections, we might ask? Or is networked mobility — quite to the contrary — «the ‘death’ of geography» because place just doesn’t matter any more in a world where everybody (and increasingly everything) can be contacted by mobile phone in a second?
In the network society according to Manuel Castells «localities become disembodied from their cultural, historical, geographic meaning, and reintegrated into functional networks [...] inducing a space of flows that substitutes for the space of places.» (Castells, 1996).
So instead of living in a stable space of familiar places — it might seem — we are thrown into an anonymous amorphous and floating space. Is this the end of place?
No, argues Rowan Wilken in a very fine paper recently published in fibreculture, the Australian Journal for «critical and speculative interventions in the debate and discussions concerning information technology».
Place is, however, deeply transformed. What we experience according to Wilken is a move from stable places towards mobile places or what he calls «from Stabilitas Loci to Mobilitas Loci»:
«…mobile phones are said to operate ‘independent of place’ [...] they appear [...] to insulate their ‘users from the geographical place that they are actually in’ by creating [...] a kind of ‘psychic cocoon’ around each user. [...] The result, it is claimed, is ‘the rise of networked individualism’: the shift from ‘place-to-place’ communication to ‘person-to-person’ communication».
«But», Wilken continues, «networked mobility enjoys a far more ambiguous relationship with place than is perhaps suggested.» The mobile phone does not annihilate space it rather establishes (in the words of David Morley) «parallel communications networks in the same space», for instance, when people arrange meetings by first giving only broad indications of time and place that are refined during following communications until they actually meet – often still talking on the phone while walking into each other.
Also, quoting from Mizuko Ito, Wilken notes: «distant others are always socially co-present, and place – where you locate yourself – has become a hybrid relation between physical and wirelessly co-present context». The mobile extends household boundaries by «dislocat[ing] the idea of home, enabling its user, in the words of the Orange advertising campaign in the UK, to ‘take your network with you, wherever you go’» (Morley).
Wilken brings this together with a quote from Derrida:
«…we are witnessing such a radical expropriation, deterritorialization, delocalization, dissociation of the political and the local, of the national, of the nation-state and the local, that the response, or rather the reaction, becomes: ‘I want to be at home, I want finally to be at home, with my own, close to my friends and family.’»
«Domestication» (domus = home) is the term Wilken adopts to describe the process by which communication technologies gets embedded in cultural practices:
«…domestication [...] refers to the home as a techno-social site for the consumption of new technologies, as well as constituting a particular method [...] for making sense of the processes by which these new technologies are consumed and ‘domesticated’ (or naturalised) within and beyond this site. [...] New technologies [...] are considered exciting but also potentially threatening and in need of being ‘brought under control’ [...]. Yet, as soon as they are ‘domesticated’ through ownership and appropriation into the culture, flows and routine of family, household and everyday life, these technologies are cultivated.
So one may say, «mobile phone use ‘transports’ or ‘dislocates’ domesticity», or the locus is mobilized.
What would better illustrate this mobilized locus than the 1970ties Media Van of the Group Ant Farm, «an electronically equipped customised 1971 Chevrolet»:
«The media van idea was one of total documentation, so that while trucking you have the capability to record via videotape, photographs, film, and mental notes what’s going on around you».
«Such a deliberate artistic exercise in spatial and ‘placial’ documentation» Wilken continues «has rapidly become largely routine practice for many users of networked telecommunications technologies, especially those with camera phones. Indeed, so commonplace has this process of documentation become that it has given rise to the phenomenon of ‘life-caching’: the use of digital cameras and picture phones and software such as Lifeblog to create digital diaries, scrapbooks and photo albums which serve as mnemonic devices for sifting through and recollecting daily experiences.»
So in conclusion «rather than ‘liberate’ us from place, as Wellman would have us believe, these technologies arguably refocus the individual on the fluctuating and fleeting experiences of place/s and their impact on the fabric of everyday life».
And offering some outlook: «…the increasingly mediated nature of our engagement with place – especially via mobile telephony – would seem to suggest the need for some kind of hybrid approach to visual perception (at very least) which bridges established understandings of landscape structure and perception, such as by Higuchi (1983), with more recent analyses drawn from VR, cinema studies, interface design, and other sources.»
[via space and culture]
Thinglinks to Link the Virtual to the Material
Ulla introduces us to thinglinks, “a unique identifier for a thing – just like the ISBN number for a book”:
A thinglink identifier is based on the idea that many of the things we use in our daily life are quite particular. Perhaps we know their origin (who has made them, when and how) and something about their
history or previous use (like with furniture and cars). Some things have more meaning to us than others. [...]The ability to find and to refer to a specific thing is typically based on a system of identification. Whereas people are identified with a name and a personal identification number, web pages have urls, and commercial products have unique product codes. There are however lots of things that fall outside these categories. These include most of the non-mass manufactured items, such as works of art, design. Without a unique identifier, finding and recommending these things in the Internet is difficult.
Thinglinks are unique, 8-digit identifiers that anybody can use for connecting physical or virtual objects to any online information about them.
Several things come to my mind when reading this. First is the famous novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad) by Gabriel GarcÃa Marquez, where he discribes how the village of Macondo is haunted by a strange disease of amnesia. The villagers fight the disease by posting small notes to the object the fear to forget about. First they only note names but then — as they gradually realize that names alone are of restricted use — include detailed prescriptions like a cow being tagged “milk me, mix the milk with coffee and drink it in the morning” (I’m quoting from 15 year old memory…).
The second thing that comes to my mind are the various projects about annotating space like Yellow Arrows, Urban Tapestries or dencity.net. Apparently thinglinks might also be used for spatial purposes as shown by the category places at wikiproducts, one of the content repositories linking the 8-digit identifiers to their respective description.
The last thing is — of course — the Internet of Things which got quite some attention during its recent presentation at WSIS in Tunis.
[via pasta and vinegar]
Why Digital Writing Differs
The new editon of KAIROS – the “online journal exploring the intersections of rhetoric, technology, and pedagogy” (selfdeclaration) features a convincing piece on why digital writing is not the same as old paper writing:
Computers are not “just tools� for writing. Networked computers create a new kind of writing space that changes the writing process and the basic rhetorical dynamic between writers and readers.
To me “writing space” could mean at least three different things:
- the physical environment including the computer used for typing and editing or the internet used for delivery
- the public space or audience a writer imagines when writing
- the social interactions that inspire and contribute to the writing
The authors at the Writing in Digital Environments (WIDE) Research Center of Michigan State University also provide some definition of digital writing:
We use the term “digital writing” here rather than computers and writing, online writing, or other combinations of terms in part because we anchor writing practices to digital spaces. Digital writing is the art and practice of preparing documents primarily by computer and often for online delivery. Digital writing often requires attention to the theories and practices of designing, planning, constructing, and maintaining dynamic and interactive texts — texts that may wind up fragmented and published within and across databases.
In a more historical perspective they note:
Many writing technologies have streamlined the writing process (the typewriter is one example), but only a few writing technologies have had truly dramatic social impact. The printing press is one; the networked computer is another. It is the networked computer, the spaces to which networked computers provide access, and the public ways in which individuals are writing that are together changing the cultural landscape. The way that people are using the Internet and the sheer numbers of people writing on and with the web is having significant social and cultural impact. A February 2004 Pew Internet & American Life study [pdf, 2.2MB] reported that “44% of U.S. Internet users have contributed their thoughts and their files to the online world� through posting written and visual material on web sites, contributing to newsgroups, writing in blogs, conversing in chat spaces (such as instant messaging), and via other digital means.
And to their fellow teachers nagging “Back in the old days we didn’t teach TYPING in writing classes. Why should we teach computing now?� they respond:
We are not “teaching computing.â€? We are teaching writing-with-the-technology, because the technology fundamentally changes how writing is produced, delivered, and received. [...] We didn’t teach typing back in the old days [...] However, we did teach students how to write for print distribution — that is, all our pedagogies for arrangement, our focus on modes, unity, and coherence, all of those principles presuppose print delivery. When we put it all together, the ability to compose documents with multiple media, to publish this writing quickly, to distribute it to mass audiences, and to allow audiences to interact with this writing (and with writers) challenges many of the traditional principles and practices of composition, which are based (implicitly) on a print view of writing.
And this is what they say about the activities involved when one is actually writing:Â
To most people, the word “writingâ€? means words on paper, prose in sentences and paragraphs. And from this perspective, computers (or any technology) are incidental to writing, simply a means of producing it but not actually part of the art of writing. But not to us. We instead view writing as a process of discovering meaning or knowledge, not as simply a way to present it. [...] What is included when we say “writing?” From a rhetorical viewpoint, writing concerns not only the words on the page (the product), but also concerns the means and mechanisms for production (that is, process, understood cognitively, socially, and technologically); mechanisms for distribution or delivery (for example, media); invention, exploration, research, methodology, and inquiry procedures; as well as questions of audience, persuasiveness, and impact.
I found reading this piece very rewarding as it takes an alternative perspective to the online writing and usability literature I am used to.
via smartmobs
Tagging New York for your mobile
Few weeks after its launch the New York Times runs a story on Socialight, a new location based service to be used with your mobile.
“Socialight leaves virtual Post-it notes, called sticky shadows, in specific sites around the city. A text message pops up when a cellphone is carried into the designated space, which is generally smaller than a city block but larger than an intersection. Started last month in a Chelsea loft by two 2004 graduates of New York University, Socialight now has dotted the metropolitan region with more than 500 stickies.”
The posts so far include the spot where Malcolm X was killed, Great Lawn in Central Park (explaining that it was a shantytown during the Depression) or the site of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire in 1911.
“So far, Socialight functions only with the Motorola i860 because that phone’s built-in global positioning system chip and camera provided the most fertile ground for the program’s growth” the article goes on, “But [...] federal regulations are mandating the increased use of G.P.S. chips in cellphones for emergency-response services, and [the developpers] hope to spread Socialight along with that technology.
The Guardian explains a further application of the technology (1 july 2004): “Socialight turns your mobile phone into a ‘friend radar’, alerting you whenever anyone on your Socialight buddy list is nearby. A central Socialight server tracks the whereabouts of each user using location data provided by mobile phone carriers or from a global positioning system (GPS) module in the phone.”
There are similar applications like Yellow Arrows (also in New York) or dencity (in Aachen, Germany).
Wireless Colonialism
The BBC reports “formerly part of Yugoslavia and previously better known as a potential ethnic trouble spot, Macedonia is now rapidly becoming a wi-fi hotspot. [...] Macedonia is dotted with villages. The mostly ethnic Albanians who live here are poor and rely for their livelihood on working whatever land they have. Their day-to-day lives rarely involve computers, let alone the internet. But a project funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) has brought broadband internet access to hundreds of such remote villages in Macedonia by putting the country’s 460 primary and secondary schools online”.
Such a project of course invites critique and so the article continues: “Some question whether many of these people really need broadband connectivity, and others insist the internet should stand alongside roads, water and electricity as essential infrastructure.”
But optimism prevails: “In Macedonia [...] there is faith that the internet might ease community tensions. In schools, for example, ethnic Macedonians and ethnic Albanians are often taught separately. [...] The hope is that the Macedonia Connects project will bridge some of these divisions.”
Somehow the story reminds me of the Transamazonia, whre a huge infrastructure was built without asking the indigenous about wether they liked it. Is it safe to assume that wi-fi is per se more benign than roads?
via SmartMobs
People Make Places
I finally finished reading “People Make Places: Growing the Public Life of Cities”, an excellent report by British think tank DEMOS on public spaces in Cardiff, Preston and Swindon. Their original apporoach takes off with ten types of public space users:
- Home Birds live cocooned lives. They rarely come into contact with public venues or public spaces. They centre their lives on their own homes, their work and essential tasks such as going to the supermarket.
- Mall Walkers are not always elderly though they often are. They are not always female but they usually are. What brings them together is their need to fight boredom and low self-esteem. They can frequently be found in shopping centres, department stores, fast food outlets and bus stops. Often they combine a trip to the supermarket with having a coffee with their friend in the store restaurant. [...]
- ’Hoodsters stay in their own postcode and don’t like to venture outside. However, unlike Home Birds they like the public spaces around their home and make high use of them – including shopping centres, religious centres and parks. ’Hoodsters can be on low or no income. They are often mums with young children. [...]
- Patriots are born and bred in the town. They want to be proud of their town and feel personally implicated if it is criticised. Patriots tend to fall into two types – Nostalgics or Optimists. There are a lot of older white people who are Nostalgic Patriots. They tend to be occupied by the past, which can limit their horizons as there is a limited (and declining) pool of peoplewho can share their same social and economic memories. Optimistic Patriots tend to be younger and often from minority ethnic groups. [...]
- Displayers use public space as their theatre. They prefer to be in town rather than in the confines of home. There are a lot of young males in this group, but the group also includes night-time revellers out on the town, skateboarders, bladers, joggers and street entertainers and evangelists. [...]
- Brand Addicts are often full-time workers and have highly structured lives. One result of this is that their favoured places are often empty when this group is at work. They like to go to the cinema, bowling, restaurants, superstores, theme bars and the gym. They are concerned with symbols of success . [...]
- Bright Lights are the newcomers to the city. They are enamoured with the bright lights, facilities, shops and job or cultural opportunities. They can find great advantage in the anonymity of a city compared to rural communities or smaller towns but enjoy the increased chance of meeting like-minded people. [...]
- Hobbyhorses live for their non-work, nonfamily-based activities [...]. They can be any age, ranging from kids DJ-ing, young executives doing a bit of acting on the side, or retired people working their allotment. [...]
- Urban Safarians deliberately go out and track down different places and types of places to consume. They like to mix the rough and ready with the glam and shiny; and like the idea of diversity even if they don’t have so many friends of different cultural or ethnic backgrounds. They often have money and are university educated but not always. [...]
- Public Spirits read books on benches, collect conkers in parks and gaze at monuments. [...] They are out and about come rain or shine. They are heavy users of traditional public spaces such as parks, squares and facilities such as libraries and art galleries and spend more time in them than most other people. They are very public spirited and are likely to intervene, or at least want to intervene, to stop anti-social behaviour [...]
Next thing is a description of ten “hubs of public life”, e.g.
- The Car Boot Sale in Preston, where “people reported that there was a high incidence of bumping into people that they knew and people would stop for a chat; a high proportion also reported they were comfortable passing the time of day with people they didn’t know.” Also roles are far from fixed and shoppers can become traders or vice versa.
- The Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff, “home to over 50 studios, containing everything from working artists and creativ industries to after-school maths and yoga sessions. It also has exhibition and performance space and a cinema.” Public experiences include tolerance “most people we spoke to reported that this was one of the main reasons they liked it” as well as status and esteem: Chapter “ist the place to be seen if you are interested in the latest art house film or this month’s most fashionable beer.”
- The Asda Wal-Mart in Swindon, which recently lost its title as the biggest shopping park in Europe to a new store in Manchester. Visitors appreciate “the smiling faces at the counter, and unhurried atmoshphere” all contributing to create a relaxing environment for people to take a break.
Â
