In the Wired UK edition from November, Andrew Blum wrote about the relationship between physical and virtual space in cities, how technology - social networking, mobile phones, etc. - are adding a layer to the physical cities. He argues that technology is not killing real communities but reshaping our interactions inside these communities (in organization studies, work on online communities such as open source (O’Mahony and Ferraro, 2007) or my work with Gerry DeSanctis on public online forums show the importance of geography and location for these online communities). It also reminded me a post  discussing an article in the NY Times on local communities blogs and how they ‘enhanced’ the physical.

Andrew Blum quoted Anthony Townsend, an urban planner and forecaster at Silicon Valley’s Institute for the Future who talks about “blended urban reality”: “neither cyberspace nor an urban landscape blanketed with blinking television screens, but the regular old city, albeit socially fused with real-time electronic interactions”. It evokes for me the move in organizational studies on the importance of materiality in organizations (despite the increasing number of “virtual” organizations, “virtual” teams and “virtual” communities). It also highlights the complexity and subtlety of the phenomenon, where usual interaction patterns, communicative practices are blurred and redefined - something we started exploring in building_space_with_words.

Townsend makes a surprising argument that as cities grow bigger, and mega-cities multiply, technology make them manageable: “Cities maybe be much bigger, but the social graph is the same” (Townsend quoted by Blum).
Yet Blum rightly reminds us that even if technology is a tool that helps coping with the city’s chaos and scale, it does not mean that physical space should be not taken into account, on the contrary I would argue.

“Density increases the need for thoughtful public space. For the cities of the future to work, the physical and the virtual have to stick together” - Stick together to allow people to develop a sense of place…

on the relationship between virtual and physical space… when the “nomad” finds a home - “virtual” yet “real”.

“I soon realised that the site would evolve into some parallel living space, some sort of lateral existence in connection with a different world, through the lens of design. (…)”

See “behind the scenes” at  http://www.bazartropicando.com/home_works.html

Hi,

just read an interesting article, My Living Room, in the Urban Omnibus by James Reeves, writer and designer.

James Reeves describes his perception of New York as he has just moved to Helsinski and that leads him to reflect of what makes him feel comfortable in New York and what is different in Helsinki. He highlights how cities, places in general (and our perceptions of it) emerge from structures, material dimensions (size of the blocks, street labels, stoops vs. court yards, etc.) but also social affordances - which includes mores and practices: cheap food, stores open all night long, etc. in NY which allows a certain life style and a certain type of interactions, and defines your personal space in a different way - your apartment is not the walls of the space you rent, but it extends out in the street. It reminded me my friend John Klima who always told me that “the city was his kitchen”.

Reeves notes:

“There are probably just as many people who prefer a city like Helsinki over New York, so perhaps it’s easier to tackle the question from another direction: is a personal connection to one’s environment simply a function of time and familiarity, or is it possible to arrive in a new city and, after taking a look at its buildings and establishments, immediately have a gut feeling that says, “Yes, this feels good. I could get comfortable here”? ”

I guess this article also touches me as I’m moving soon from NY after 3 1/2 years and my walks through Brooklyn and Manhattan take another dimension. I could empathize with his feelings as he’s reflecting on the places he knows, his routines as I feel the same when I go down Smith Street in the morning, stop by at Victory to get my coffee, or bike up to Prospect Park. Like Reeves I feel like I might not have taken enough photos and I do take some. My next stop is not Helsinski, but London - more exciting than Helsinksi many might say. I’ll tell you more in a couple of months.

I guess these issues can also be linked to the different ways people experience online spaces. We had lunch with two friends yesterday and we were discussing social networking platforms and other online tools. Two of us did not feel comfortable with facebooks and the type of interactions it supported but we loved skype which we perceived as a one-on-one communication tool which allowed us both fast (”peripheral” in some ways in the sense of “peripheral vision”)  and long (in-depth) interactions with people we know and like… More to be discussed here.

al

During the fall, Anne-Laure invited me to become a member of this blog. I agreed. And life was as complex as ever, and I did not get around to thinking about this until flying to California (I live in Connecticut) for Thanksgiving. I printed out the postings and began working through them from the start. Very thought-provoking. Lots of notes. Not enough time. So I continued the effort over Christmas, with additional posts of course. More thoughts. In January I explained the situation to Anne-Laure who encouraged me to make a contribution. And just about the point that I was going to post, I noticed that all I had been looking at were the posts, and none of the comments. Well, that stopped me cold. As did work, and the pressures of life. I had to miss the opening of the installation, and feared that I would miss the whole thing.

So finally, I set aside a day - this Monday -, and Lynne (my wife) and I headed into “The City” to have lunch with Anne-Laure and experience the installation before it was only a memory. And so I found myself walking into the space. And enjoying it immensely.

And then it occurred to me that I had not been worried about entering the space even though much had already gone on there and I was clearly not “up to speed.” But in contrast, I had been seriously blocked about just entering the blog without having “done my homework” - reading what had gone before. What was the difference?

Possibly it was the fact that my entry into the installation was understood (by me, and the culture I live in) to not carry any expectation that I know what was happening. Walk into a space, and it is assumed that you will be able to join in even if it takes some effort to feel out the scene, align with what’s happening, and then engage. And this expectation is based on the reality that the hjstory of the preceding activity has not been is captured and made available by the space. In contrast, all that has gone before in a blog is available. And so feeling out, and aligning before engaging is a much taller task.

A second reason that when I walked into the installation, I could see who I was engaging, I could evolve my interactions with them with awareness of the effect that I was having. I could limit my interaction to one or a few at a time, I could make “turns at talk” suit the immediate and local situation and correspondents; I could practice “recipient design.”  In contrast, in the blog, Without reading everything, or at least a lot, I could not know who my recipients were. Indeed, with lurkers, even reading would not help. I was flying blind, interacting without any sense of the “audience” and their purpose.

Thirdly, in the installation I knew why I was there. I wanted to see the embodiment of a word-based virtual space.  I was aware of the difficulties and a-priori non-alignments of the installation space and the virtual words-space, and was there to experience the installation as a provocation around the metaphor of space. But with the blog, I was not so sure why I was there - other than that Anne-Laure had invited me. And this was less about the subject matter - it was the same as the installation - and more about the genre. For in truth, as all the above shows, I am not at all competent in the the dance that is participating in blogs.

So my opening thought is this: spaces built with words have accessible history, and that can be understood by newbies to imply something very different that is understood by experienced bloggers - namely, that you are responsible for everything that is there. Instead, Anne-Laure tells me that you have already discussed the sense that a blog is (like) a party - A Blog Party - something that you can enter into and accelerate into. It seems like an excellent metaphor.

And so here am I, late to the party, and looking to accelerate into whatever is happening.

Thanks to one of my students,  I read this recent NY Time article reviewing a book by Andrew Lih, The Wikipedian Revolution and compares Wikepedia to a city (referring also to the History in the City by Lewis Mumford):

“[…] Like a city, Wikipedia is greater than the sum of its parts; for example, the random encounters there are often more compelling than the articles themselves. The search for information resembles a walk through an overbuilt quarter of an ancient capital. You circle around topics on a path that appears to be shifting. Ultimately the journey ends and you are not sure how you got there.Wikipedia articles can send you down unlikely alleyways in two ways. First, there are links that direct you to the same article in another language, a trippy experience that sheds light on a culture. Spend time in German Wikipedia, and you find jazz musicians likeThelonious Monk with articles far longer than those written in their own language; you may also come upon odd areas of deep interest, like “pecherei,” the extraction of resin from trees — no English equivalent provided — and 15 different tools needed for the job.Second, at the bottom of most articles, there are the categories — impromptu neighborhoods, or perhaps civic organizations, that bind together the virtual encyclopedia. […] 

Mumford elaborates: “Even before the city is a place of fixed residence, it begins as a meeting place to which people periodically return: the magnet comes before the container, and this ability to attract nonresidents to it for intercourse and spiritual stimulus no less than trade remains one of the essential criteria of the city, a witness to its essential dynamism, as opposed to the more fixed and indrawn form of the village, hostile to the outsider.”The marvel of Wikipedia — and cities — is that all the intercourse and spiritual stimulus don’t make living there impossible. Rather, they are exactly what makes living there possible.  […]”

Of course I found the comparison between the virtual space of Wikipedia and the physical space of a city a compelling comparison. I also found interesting the comments on the role of social practices (trust, behavior, etc.) which once again highlights the discussion we had about the intertwining between social and physical spaces. Last, I could not be insensitive to the description of the journey through Wikipedia similar to a journey through a maze!

al

Published a few days ago in the NY Times (and thanks to Yasmine’s blog), there was an article about Grand Central the new Google application:It was intended to solve the headaches of having more than one phone number (home, work, cellphone and so on): Having to check multiple answering machines. Missing calls when people try to reach you on your cell when you’re at home (or the other way around). Sending around e-mail at work that says, “On Thursday from 5 to 8:30, I’ll be on my cell; for the rest of the weekend, call me at home.” And having to change phone numbers when you switched jobs or cities. Many notions come to mind: mobility, neo-nomads, technology, digital cities, but also space and the intermingling of physical and virtual space. I remember the time where you would never ask someone when calling her “where are you?” as the number you dialed told you where the person was - at home, in the office, at X’s house. The cell phone changed the practice and the usual “Hi, how are you?” became “Hi, where are you?”. You still knew where the person was if you were calling her on a land line and she picked up the phone. Grand Central promises to blurry the frontiers between physical and digital even more by eliminating any clues of location.  al 

I could relate something from the movie “The Matrix”. A virtual world and how things happens inside. I liked it and interested in research on this new idea on depicting virtual interactions in to physical world…I will do some more analysis and come some other time to understand in detail and see how ideas live in this virtual world…

Friday, Aileen and I were talking about the visitor account that is available on a computer at the installation site and how it was changing the affordances of the blog space - in this case increasing propinquity, and decreasing privacy. Interesting to see how a blog which is usually seen as public by essence has in fact degrees of privacy… Interesting also to increase propinquity (”traffic”) by adding an access in a physical location - as if the installation was becoming an extension of the blog, a door to its conversation space.

This blog was conceived as a semi-public space with a certain number of contributors who can write posts, while others can only post comments. We decided to create this account for visitors to interact with the maze and “build the space with their words” and suddenly the space changed with a diversity of potential authors and discursive practices - shorter messages, some “chat” style on the day of the opening night (the maze had then become a giant bulleting board), and others related to the experience of the space (the latests posts are more of this type).

One person mentioned to us if we were not willing to have these visitors’ posts posted on another page; he was worried that it might kill the discussion between the original contributors. We thought of it but Aileen and I agreed that it was part of the experiment and that it would be great if visitors read some of the posts and posted comments, and that it will be also great if the contributors to the blog kept posting while the installation (and the blog consequently) is open to the public.

The reading of the visitors’ posts is also a great source of learning. To see how people interpret our work and what it evokes to them - in some cases, their views of space. One visitor added the tag “body”: it was interesting that despite many of the discussions we had on this blog about materiality (particularly on how virtual was not synonym to immaterial), about sensory experiences, this tag had not been created.

Cassim  Shepard wrote about maps on the Urban Omnibus yesterday: 

” The map provides one of the principal governing metaphors for how we organize and navigate information. According to New York Times technology reporter John Markoff,

With the dominance of the cellphone, a new metaphor is emerging for how we organize, find and use information. New in one sense, that is. It is also as ancient as humanity itself. That metaphor is the map… As this metaphor takes over, it will change the way we behave, the way we think and the way we find our way around new neighborhoods.

Understanding where we are in the world usually involves a singular conception of location. Phrases like “from point A to point B” reflect the common view: you are either here or there. And if you are in between, you are at a single point in between. Mapping fields of action is far more complex – activity is zonal, concentrations are unequal – and the two together often lead to muddy and busy if not downright confusing results. “

I could not help thinking of the discussions on this blog and how one might be involved in several conversations online (through email, chat, facebook, posting on a blog etc.) and thus involved in many different “spaces” while sitting at “point A” - whether it’s your home, a coffee shop, your office or an airport. This notion of space and geography is indeed challenged by the current development of the technology…

As noted by Cassim “One of the many gaps in the existing literature that STEW-MAP seeks to redress is that notion that no two bodies occupy the same space. Common sense tells us otherwise, yet the most popular and accessible forms of geographic information (note the google map on your right) still make it easier to drop a pin than to draw a polygon. ”

Questions discussed with Yasmine Abbas   on physical, digital and mental mobility: e.g. one can be physically in a place but longing for another place, or Turkle’s work on people who feel that they are more present to the MUDs they are involved in than to the physical space in which they sit while playing, are relevant to these issues.

There is also a second of issues highlighted by Cassim linked to our definition of the geography of the city (cf. Latour’s book on Paris Invisible): there is the level of the streets but there are many other layers, spatial but also of practices involved in the making of the city that we are often not aware of.

Yesterday was the opening night and things went very well… It was a great party, thanks to Liz DiNapoli…

It was very nice to see people going through the maze, to see the text reflecting on them, enveloping them, diffusing through the different layers of fabrics. Someone told me that it was hard to read and I agreed and replied that we did not aim people to be able to read. Text was for us  a material, a texture. The panels are not screens; they are support for diffusion… they are the invisible structure for the text to “materialize”.

A few people ask us about the structure and why we chose to use this “structure”: a maze “floating” from a web structure. Part of it was because of the experience we were trying to convey: we explored many materials; we thought at one point of having a stand alone structure (in plexiglass or glass) but we thought it would then become a form of its own - a sculpture - instead of just being the support for the words. We wanted the fabric to disappear behind the words. We also responded to the structure of the building: we could not touch the ceiling or the floor; there were symmetrical ledges…

Another thing that occurs to me yesterday listening to people was how the installation conveys an idea of lightness and of materiality. It made me think of the discussions we had about virtual space and the fact that virtual space is not immaterial, but in fact it is deeply material. In a similar manner, the light structure of the maze requires the wired structure.

As Laura’s noted in her post (thanks for the nice pictures!), it was amazing to see people constructing the space through their posts. One more step toward collaboration!

From a personal perspective, it was really neat to see an idea that I had a bit more than a year ago “materialized” and it was as I “wanted” it to be. Aileen and I had this big smile Tuesday night when we were nearly done and we stayed in the space with. Yet, the form could have been enacted differently (through different materials), but the experience could be the same.

And that’s the experience, the environment, that we created that mattered to us… and the questions it raised.

Thank you to all the members of this blog and for their great conversations and insights (and we hope this will continue) and thanks for all the visitors…

al