The Place of Social Media

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?

The goal of Hub2 is to introduce a deliberative process into community meetings that currently does not exist. Who do this by integrating Second Life into the existing community process. We believe that the affordances of the tool and the specifics of the practice we built around it, we are adding the following:

• collaboration - allowing a group of people with a shared interest in a space collaborate with one another to create a product (in our case, this is a “virtual sketch” of the proposed park).
• evaluation - allowing that same group to evaluate their own work, and their own experiences (facilitated by their avatars), instead of simply responding to often confusing plans or architectural diagrams.
• understanding through experience - by turning abstract concept drawings into “concrete” representations, people have a better chance of making sense of complex spatial dynamics or urban planning principals.

As we continue to conduct these community workshops, and continue to adapt our process to the pecularities of the design process, we are realizing that our main purpose is to help the group most productively realize their role as community informant. The city, the developers and the designers come to the community for input, and unless a deliberative process is put in place, that input gathering can be quite shallow. Currently, communities are forced to respond to a problem or a proposal with limited knowledge and limited information.

We’re watching our every move and assessing whether or not this “mixed-reality deliberation” is in fact working. Based on our current observations, we can say that it is working, even though we are constantly pushed up against the limits of the technology and the political realities of any development project. We hope that by the end of this summer, we can say with confidence that we have designed a process that works, with a technology that’s accessible. And once we do that, we can start to consider the implications of virtual technologies on communities more generally, specifically, how the product of mixed-reality deliberation (the virtual sketches produced) can be meaningful in their own right.

The City of Birmingham, UK is working on a significant transformation in image. As it is described on the Digital Birmingham site, the city seeks to transform its industrial past into a digital future. The initiative seeks to tie together all the digital efforts in the city into one portal. Wi-fi initiatives, coupled with resources on online safety, digital film exhibitions, and conferences, are all aggregated through Digital Birmingham. While much of this effort is directed toward PR and tourism, there are other pieces that are legitimately pushing the envelope of participation and transparency in city government. Even those pieces, ironically, that are directed towards PR and tourism.

The Virtual Birmingham initiative is a good example of this. Spearheaded by the company Daden Limited, this initiative is “leading discussions with partners on how Birmingham can be represented and promoted in a 3D virtual environment such as Second Life that would address specific needs from the visitor economy, attracting inward investment and putting Birmingham ‘on the map’.” The results, thus far, are some incredibly interesting designs in Second Life that integrate Google Maps with the virtual environment. The goal here is to make the map immersive - clicking on places and then walking your avatar through them. Currently, in what’s called a “briefing center,” avatars can walk on the map, bring up wikipedia, BBC or CNN newsfeeds, represented by familiar Google placemarkers. When I spoke with David Daden about the project, he expressed interest in turning it into a planning tool - fleshing out the entire map with virtual models to reflect the city’s various uses.

The possibilities here are quite exciting, although I don’t know in what direction the city intends to take this. One could imagine that the Second Life map could function as a portal into a deep urban database, that includes civic information as well as social information. Using the map as the anchor for virtual designs is exactly the right way to go. However, it will take a lot of convincing to get cities to invest in the virtual technologies for the enhancement of their own citizens, as on the surface it appears that the primary use is as spectacle or immersive representation.

That said, my hat’s off to Birmingham, a city that is taking more of a chance than any other I can think of. Certainly, Boston has a ways to go before it adopts virtual (let alone digital) technologies with such enthusiasm.