The Place of Social Media

So there is a lot of buzz about Twitter’s new location API released today.  Not quite yet a feature of Twitter.com, the now available API will allow developers to collect location metadata from each tweet, expanding the utility of individual tweets beyond the list of one’s followers.  Who’s tweeting nearby can actually be an interesting search string.  Location data will not be included in the tweet itself, but will travel along with the tweet, just like a time stamp.  This is going to be an opt-in technology - so how widely its effects will be felt is still to be determined.

Despite the immediate scale of its saturation, location-based tweeting is a big move in a digital culture still cozying up to location awareness.  The thing that is most compelling about Twitter’s new feature is its behind-the-scene-ness.  Location is not going to be a central feature of tweeting; it’s going to be just another piece of information captured along with digital activity.  By placing location in the background, it stands to more expeditiously bring location data into the center of the Internet.  When location data ceases to be something we protect as a representation of personal privacy, the Internet can rid itself of its aspatial qualities and better integrate itself into the everyday life of individuals and communities.

There are privacy concerns here and I have no doubt that the debates about this new feature will disproportionately focus on them.  But it is important that just as we consider protecting the limits of the person (in that we shield the individual from contextual intrusion), that we also consider the extensibility of the person (in that we understand the potential of integrating the person with their context).  Twitter might be the service that normalizes location awareness in our social media tools.  It also just might be the service that normalizes location awareness in our personal interactions with our surroundings.

The central premise of the Participatory Chinatown project is the staging of what we call “augmented deliberation.”  We introduce augmented deliberation as a possible design solution that addresses uniquely difficult contexts where deliberation is complicated by one or many external factors, including language barriers, power differentials, visualization and challenges with communicating professional discourses.  It is specifically relevant in the context of urban planning, because the prospect of communicating complex urban concepts associated with rather abstract spatial dynamics is a significant challenge - one that requires creative solutions.  Augmented deliberation is the process whereby a group of people deliberate in a face-to-face setting while they are simultaneously immersed in virtual environments. It consists of three design values: 1) it is a multimedia group communication process which balances the specific affordances of digital technologies with the established qualities of face-to-face group deliberation; 2) it emphasizes the power of experience; and 3) it promotes sustainability and reproducibility through digital tracking.

The Participatory Chinatown project, which is the second iteration of Hub2, is coming close to realizing the goal of augmented deliberation.  We are in the process of designing a 3D game that will run in a web browser.  The goal of this game is to get participants playing a role whereby they accomplish everyday tasks in their neighborhood.  The game board is the existing space of Boston’s Chinatown.  Players are tasked with things like finding a job, finding an apartment, or finding a place to socialize.  In doing this, we aim to create the shared experience of the space in question that can serve as the springboard for productive deliberation.  Once the players have had  the opportunity to explore and complete their quest, they are then asked a simple question: “what does the neighborhood need now?”  They are then given the opportunity to make decisions both individually and collectively as a means of providing input into the process and, perhaps more importantly, to give them the sense that they are engaged in an ongoing conversation about the neighborhood.  They will have the opportunity to go back into the game to play different quests and to read and write comments about the neighborhood.

Augmented deliberation is the process.   The game is the form that we happen to be investigating.  We believe that providing the game scaffolding is going be very useful for getting citizens to deliberate over the complex matters of physical urban transformation.  Specifcally, the qualities of immersion and role play.  We are spending a good deal of time trying to make the game fun and engaging; this is the incentive for participation.  But we remain aware of the potential pitfalls in this kind of project.  If the serious work of community planning is fun, will it be misinterpreted by the community as frivilous?  We will see.

Holly St. Clair writes about the Participatory Chinatown project in an article for the American Planning Association newsletter.  In explaining what PC will do for the planning process, she says:

The emphasis is not just on the computer simulation, but rather on the conversations and learning or rather deliberation that happens in between gaming sessions. Participants are facing each other playing navigating their avatars through quests. The 3-D virtual environment augments the deliberation with additional information, tracking decisions impacts and results of decisions and helping to participants experience the space.  These new 3-D virtual environments are fun but not frivolous. They can help create an understanding grounded in experience and create a common ground for to continue conversations. These virtual works can help participants understand complex urban issues by literally walking in someone elses shoes.

The full article is available here.

Methods of engaging communities in urban planning decisions have remained relatively stagnant. Groups of people are assembled into community centers, school cafeterias, and libraries and are asked to provide input on the professional discourse of architects and planners. They are shown drawings, computer generated renderings, even 3D models and are then “listened to” as a means of informing the process. While these practices are designed to elicit useful, one-time feedback, they are not designed to build real understanding, or to provide the framework from which to build trust between the constituents, designers and stakeholders. Cities, towns, neighborhoods, and blocks are lived spaces. Design facilitates social interaction, individual perceptions and cultural production - but it is not an end in itself.

The strategy of “Immersive Planning,” on the other hand, begins from the assumption that community engagement through shared, collaborative experiences of space provides the necessary framework from which people can meaningfully engage in the urban planning process. Inviting communities to participate in the transformation of their lived spaces is not simply about assisting in the design; but also, and more importantly, it is about creating the trust and understanding necessary for trained professionals to collaborate with the lay public on reaching good decisions. Immersive planning typically implements new media tools to reproduce the qualities of urban space, including:

1) an individual’s co-presence with others (public spaces are typically not solitary)

2) participation (public spaces typically invite some kind of participation from shopping to talking to eating);

3) social experience (public spaces are not experienced out of context - individuals bring financial hardships, fast pace of modern life, and relationships to them).

Immersive planning builds off of some existing experimentation in planning practice: Participatory GIS (PGIS), where groups collaborate on designing and plotting maps, and visualization, where 3D, realistic fly throughs are created to give lay people a sense of cinematic realism.  But these existing methods of engagement are lacking in some important ways.  While PGIS is collaborative, it is largely abstract and cerebral; and while visualization implies immersion, it does so only through cinematic distance.  Immersive planning, on the other hand, is an attempt to correlate the best qualities of these various techniques, providing a platform for collaboration and cooperation, while also providing a premise for presence through narrative and role play.

In short, immersive planning connotes immersion both in a virtual space, but also in issues and social experience.  After all, urban space is nothing, if not immersive.

We’ve made some good progress on the Participatory Chinatown (PC) project.   Building off of the first iteration of Hub2, PC will continue with the focus on creating platforms for “augmented deliberation,” but it will do so by more thoroughly exploring the power of role play in people’s ability to understand urban issues.  In the past project, we experimented with role play by giving participants a piece of paper with a character description on it and asking them to “inhabit” their avatar “as if” they were that person.  They were immersed in the space via Second Life, but they weren’t sufficiently immersed in the character.  This time, we’re taking role play to the next level by building the experience around character identification.  I’ve partnered with Eric Klopfer at MIT to develop the game concept and we’re using a new platform called Sandstone, developed by the good folks at Muzzylane, to build out the game.

The premise is simple: we want people who come to a community meeting to have the experience of Chinatown as someone other than themselves so that they might  be better able to make good decisions about the neighborhood.  By getting people out from behind their own concerns (if only for a few minutes), we hope to create the kind of empathy and civic mindedness that is ideal for providing valuable input into a planning process and also for developing trust amongst stakeholders.   The idea stems from some research done by Nick Yee and Jeremy Bailenson at Stanford.  In their article, “Walk a Mile in Digital Shoes: The Impact of Embodied Perspective-Taking on the Reduction of Negative Stereotyping in Immersive Virtual Environments,” they demonstrate how the strength of stereotypes that college students hold about the elderly is reduced when they inhabit an avatar of an elderly person.  By being in someone else’s digital shoes,  a player is able to identify with that person in a substantial way.  Yee and Bailensen develop their study from the concept of perspective-taking.  

When we judge ourselves, we tend to rely on situational factors (i.e., “I did poorly on the test because I didn’t sleep well the night before.”).  On the other hand, when we judge others, we tend to rely on dispositional factors (i.e., “He did poorly on the test because he’s not that bright.”).  Thus when people are forced to observe their own actions (via a video tape), they tend to make more dispositional rather than situational attributions.  The reverse is also true.  When participants are asked to take the perspective of the person they are observing, participants tend to make situational rather than dispositional attributions (148).

This is precisely what we’re trying to accomplish in PC.  We want players to make situational observations about their characters so that they might be better able to put their needs into a situational rather than dispositional context.  For instance, we want people to say “gentrification might affect that person adversely because of their social circumstances,” not simply to say “those people don’t know what they’re doing and what they’re missing.”

There are lots of questions remaining about the nature of the game we’re designing, but the goals are becoming quite clear. We want empathy to enter into the practice of community deliberation.  And we think we can get there by allowing players to literally walk a mile in someone else’s digital shoes.

I just returned from a very interesting conference called Communicative Cities: Integrating Technology and Place in Columbus, OH.  The main goal of the conference was to explore the concept of the “communicative city” and question exactly how cities communicate (as singular entities or as facilitating containers of social activity).  The presentations ran the gamut from Peter Hecht’s rather dystopian talk about the risks of cell phone use in public spaces to Andrew Miller’s presentation of strategic integrations of social media into urban life.  In all, the conference seemed to veer more prominently towards suspicion, doubt and lamentation of the potentially caustic effects of social media on the urban public sphere.  Many concluded that the use of cellular devices disconnected people from their environment, causing them to not pay attention and as a result, put themselves at risk.   Keith Hampton echoed this concern with a good deal of empirical evidence, noting that cell phone users are less likely to notice their surroundings than are readers of books or even laptop users.  The recurring theme was distraction.  Of course, within this discourse of distraction is the normative assumption that somehow outside of technological mediation, we pay absolute attention.  Sure, cell phones fragment attentional focus, but was it not fragmented before?  The over stimulation produced by the city has been a theme in critical theory for well over a hundred years.  The city fragments attention.  New portable media technologies - laptops, cell phones, portable gaming systems, iPods  - continue this tradition.  So, the question is really about the quality of distraction, not so much the quantity.  What is the nature of this distraction prompted by portable technologies, and does the individualized nature of the distractional technology somehow transform distraction from a public event to a private one?

I believe that personal attention is important to consider when evaluating the urban public sphere.  But instead of lamenting its loss, we need to consider the nature of its fragmentation.  The manner in which we pay attention to the urban environment is different, but instead of assigning moral value and counting losses, shouldn’t we in the tradition of Walter Benjamin, identify opportunities?  Benjamin understood that while modernism threatened aura, it opened opportunities for democratic access.  When we lament the loss of attention in the city, we’re really lamenting the loss of aura.  We’re suggesting that people aren’t paying attention and they can no longer experience the real city.  We need to consider that the real city is not what we assume; and as it always does, the city will emerge alongside technological and cultural changes.

Attention is transformed with each technology.  And if you look at the history of technologies in the city, changes in attention are designed into the form of the city.  Consider the carbon arc light and its role in urban form, the motor car, the street car, or the portable camera, radio, television, and video cameras.  Technologies manipulate our attention and urban spaces are eventually designed to accommodate the changes in attentional structures.  What we see with the inundation of portable technologies in our cities is not a threat to the public sphere; it is an opportunity.

Many of the conference participants, myself included, tried to steer the conversation towards the opportunities of digital design for the communicative city.  Kyle Ezell and Mike Reed presented an early version of their sensory planning tool.  This tool, as far as I could understand it, is meant to aggregate many existing social media data sources into a single platform to assist in a particular planning task.  The presentation was a bit disorganized, making it rather hard to follow, but my basic understanding of the tool is that it wants to work with the myriad technologies of urban distraction to formulate an attentive public on particular issues.

I hope that the debate about communicative cities moves more in the direction of discovering opportunities within the new landscape of distraction and less in the direction of legislating normative behaviors in public space.

We just finished our mock-up of the Neighborhood of Tomorrow game.   The game tries to do something a little different than most location-based games.  Instead of encouraging urban mobility and networking, this game is about location and social cohesiveness.   It asks players to focus their attention on their geographical neighborhood.  This is a tall order when so many people in urban neighborhoods see their own block as mere transit to their living rooms.    The goal of NOT is to get people who share a geographic community to work together to devise their ideal neighborhood 5 years in the future.  They do this by posing and accepting challenges, reviewing current businesses and services and proposing new ones, and organizing their neighbors to get things done.   The game is about community engagement in that it requires people to collaborate and cooperate to achieve common goals.  And the goal of the game is to build stronger communities by providing a playful space capable of increasing weak ties within geographical neighborhoods.

Community Engagement Games are a subset of Location Based Games.  While they are “about” a location, game-play emphasizes local attention over mobility, and local knowledge over located information.  It is about collaborative knowledge production for a geographical community and not cooperative data collection for a geographic space.  These are big differences.  While each has its function, I believe that community engagement games are better equipped to address real urban problems, because they look inward and not outward.

Here’s the cover of my book.  It’s finally going to come out, even though it’s still months away.  The book looks at something I call possessive spectatorship in the American city, a way of looking that doubles as a kind of collecting.  I trace this idea from the late 19th century to the early 21st century, culminating in a discussion of what I call the digital possessive, which is manifested in the Database city - a city with no content other than to grant access to content.  The book covers a good span of American urban history, but I’m careful not to characterize the book as an urban history.  It does not  really tell the history of the American city; however, that history is a backdrop to a history of urban spectatorship.

While new mobile technologies are often characterized as distractions from the world around us - just consider the outcry over train operators texting while driving - they are, in fact, technologies of attention.  They get us to pay attention to them.  Actually, that’s not true.  We don’t pay attention to our devices, we pay attention to what our devices mediate.  We pay attention to our girlfriend (as is the case of the Green Line operator in Boston); we pay attention to restaurant reviews; we pay attention to that latest iPhone app.  These little devices have the remarkable capacity to organize our attentional allocation away from the living, breathing world around us and towards miniaturized icons and intermittent text.  It’s remarkable when you consider how critics of modernity lamented the presence of the very large and present in our urban landscapes as defilers of focus.  And crtics of post-modernity (if that’s what we want to call it) lament the presence of the very small and distant as instigators of distraction.

But the truth is - these very small devices don’t only distract us from the world that is in some a priori manner; they focus us on certain things that are equally constructive of our worlds.  I am not saying they can’t take us away from where we are; in fact, that’s very possible, even probable.  But that is just one of their capabilities.  Mobile technologies can also draw our attention to things that matter in the environment.  Consider Wikitude.  They can attach our focus to the world around us, even if that happens by pulling information from the web or connecting to a friend not physically present.   It is all a matter of design.  Mobile technologies should be considered tools for the urban attentional architect.  How can they be used to draw attention to certain things while not precluding experience outside of their mediating power?  How can they make a user aware of the architectural significance of a building, while encouraging an interaction unmediated by the device?  Mobile technologies do not have to dominate any given experience.  Properly designed, urban experience can be a complex interweaving of networked information, face-to-face encounters and the presence of physical structures.  Urban architecture is not just physical.  It is attentional.  What we pay attention to in the urban environment is subject to design well beyond the boundaries of buildings.   But architects and technologists are largely ignoring this aspect of urban experience.  I wonder if there can be a role for attentional architects in the future of urban design.

Hub2, along with our community partners, the Asian Community Development Corporation and the Metropolitan Area Planning Commission, has been awarded a MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Award.  This project is a continuation of the work we started last summer in Allston, MA employing a virtual world platform to enable augmented deliberation in community meetings.  This opportunity provides some exciting new research challenges for us, as we begin to explore gaming components in the community meeting and dig more deeply into the qualities of augmented deliberation for civic engagement.