The Place of Social Media

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.

This should be an interesting discussion about out-of-the-ordinary applications of virtual world technologies.  I will have the opportunity to speak about Hub2 along with John Lester from Linden Lab and Drew Harry from MIT’s Media Lab.  It’s happening May 1 from 6-7:30 at the MIT Museum.

An article of mine, entitled “The Metageography of the Internet: Mapping from Web 1.0 to 2.0″ was just published in Mediengeographie: Theorie - Analyse - Diskussion.  It’s an amazing collection, with articles from Bruno Latour, Paul Virilio, Lev Manovich, Saskia Sassen, and many more.  Of course, for all of you who don’t speak German, only a few of the articles are actually in English.  Sadly, my ability to converse on a 3rd grade level in German doesn’t allow me to read (or understand) what appear to be fascinating articles.

My article on Network Locality has finally appeared in the journal First Monday.   Hey, and it’s free and online.  Go figure.  Academic papers that people can actually read.

It’s fall in New England.  That means farms all over the region are opening their doors to locals and tourists alike to pick over their crops so that they might have that unique New England experience of working for their food.  For only $20, you can get a bag and walk through the orchards and the opportunity to fill the bag with apples.  Hours of fun (labor) for only about 20% more money than picking them up at the grocery store!  And as you walk through the pristine New England orchard and enjoy the crisp fall air, one can’t help but notice the vast amounts of apples that have been discarded for one reason or another that will remain unpicked.

So what is the logic of this pick-your-own phenomenon?  As local farms struggle to eek by in a global food context, turning working farms into a consumer experience has become the economic model du jour.    Hay rides, apple cider, and some good clean labor, rounds out the apple experience during a New England October.  But why are people willing to give up their labor for free?  The answer is simple: the experience of certain kinds of labor is worth paying for, even if it is wasteful.

While gleefully picking my apples at a farm just northwest of Boston, I found myself thinking less about apples and more about the Internet.  Is the reason I’m building up a sweat picking apples the same as the reason I contribute to YouTube, fan sites, or political poles?  Perhaps I’m not giving up my labor for free as much as I’m paying to consume a work experience.  Perhaps the experience of participation is the commodity.  New Media theorist and commentator Trebor Scholz makes a convincing argument that sociable web media is premised on the unequal ideological platform of consumer labor for corporate gain - that users willingly give up their labor to aid a few corporations in profit-making.  But what if it’s not about giving up free labor, but about paying for commodified experience.  The pick-your-own Internet is premised on the assumption that participation is itself worth the price of time - that the experience of contributing to a fan site or a growing database is worth paying for.

As the production economy continues to give way to the experience economy, the pick-your-own Internet will become even more normalized.  Just as a working farm in New England that doesn’t sell the experience of labor will become a thing of the past.

I’ve been thinking about how we might begin to think about relationship model versus transaction model when it comes to digitally augmented government.  In most configuations of e-government there is a choice between open dialog and collective decision making.  This leaves two options: unstructured talk and structured input.  It would seem that there is something in between.   Consider something like YouTube as a platform for relationships.  If the real value in video sharing is building personal and / or intellectual connections, then the platform plays the role not of content provider, but arbiter of relationships.  Shouldn’t the government characterize its role similarly?  Shouldn’t the government be tasked with the responsibility of providing the framework for relationships, person to person, person to group, group to group, person to institution, etc.?  And not just the framework for individual transactions, but a framework that transforms transactions into a relationship investment.  For instance, one doesn’t post to YouTube simply to add to a database of videos.  The single transaction is a building block on which relationships can be built.  In other words, engagement doesn’t end with the transaction, that’s where it begins.

The most prominent examples in the States include Minnesota e-democracy or iBrattelboro, or even some of the attempts by various states, most notably Virginia, to provide web access to senate hearings.  These are all premised on the notion that the transaction itself is the act of participation (civic engagement measured by voter turnout, for instance).  Outside of the United States, there are some more interesting examples like Digital Birmingham, which has a complex big picture idea of digital democracy, and a bunch of examples in Sweden where the public is invited in to design and or participate.  Interestingly, a project in Stockholm to invite the public into the design of a new airport forced the government to pull the plug on the project because they couldn’t control the overwhelming resistance that built up against it.  But, in these participatory processes, or as one person put it, design by committee situations, problems arise when participation is limited to individual input.  The role of government is obfuscated by very specific features of the technology.

What is promising about the model of digital government as relationship platform is the possibility of turning priorities away from civic management and towards civic engagement.  Sure, efficiency and economy are important, but I think there are interesting opportunities to expand the role of government to include these more nuanced aspects of relationships.  This is what requires a change in culture.  Can digital media change the attitude that government is in place only to control or manage?  Can it instead be in place to foster opportunities for connections?

I wonder if this proposition is too heavily steeped in neoliberal discourse, or if its just the opposite?  Perhaps it succeeds in taking the emphasis away from the individual and away from established institutions by placing it on this yet-to-be-defined third space?