Will ubiquitous wireless change the nature of urban spaces?
I am attending the Supernova Conference in San Francisco where the theme is “Change Networks” or how pervasive connectivity has changed how we relate to one another. We usually think of pervasive connectivity in the online context, but how does pervasive connectivity alter physical space, in particular, cities and the human experience the city? That was the subject of an intriguing talk entitled “Public Objects — Connected Things and Civic Responsibilities in the Networked City” by Adam Greenfield (Nokia).
Greenfield began his talk by pointing out that by the end of 2012, 20 percent of non-video Internet traffic will come from networked sensors, generating many of us call machine-to-machine communications, although these communications can also occur between buildings, bus shelters and other objects we do not usually refer to as machines.
Greenfield’s thesis is that networked objects – be they machines, buildings or other urban structures – are changing the way humans experience the urban space and act against the way cities have evolved. The move towards object-to-object communications seems inevitable given that IPv6 provides a seemingly infinite number of IP addresses so that urban space will soon be “addressable, queryable and scriptable.”
One example cited by Greenfield is London Tower Bridge which has its own Twitter account and tweets its status: if the bridge is open, closed, etc. Soon, every object will be alerting us, addressing us, and perhaps monitoring us as well. But where does this lead? Is this what are cities for?
Cities have traditionally been havens of refuge for people escaping the cloying intimacy of small towns and villages. They have always been places where people took on another identity to build a new life and create better opportunities for themselves. They have also been sanctuaries by people called “revolutionaries” and hunted down by those wielding power. In cities it has been easy for these people to blend in and “disappear”. What happens when there’s no place to hide?
But plausible deniability and anonymity are becoming more difficult, says Greenfield, and this is not what cities are for. Greenfield refers to Jane Jacobs’ “eyes on the street” philosophy of urban planning where people are around watching out for their neighborhood, but not delving too much into the lives of their neighbors. He cites a small building in New York where residents knew one another via informal greetings in hallways and elevators. They lived together quite peacefully in that fashion until someone in the building decided to set up a forum/social network for the residents. Suddenly, the neighbors began finding out more intimate details about their neighbors and within six months, many of the residents moved out. The turnover of residents in this building rose dramatically. The key to living together in close quarters with so many people lies in not knowing too much about them.
Greenfield moved on to a more disturbing image of a city where the absence of anonymity infringes upon people’s rights to privacy and their ability to dissent from those who wield political and economic power. In a society where photos are indexable, taggable and uploaded to the Internet, your face can always be found and detected not just by humans, but by facial recognition software. This software is already being used in many cities’ wireless video surveillance projects. Greenfield argues that imposing the logic of networked sociality (e.g. of the Facebook and MySpace variety) onto a city destroys the urban experience.
A question we must ask is this: Who benefits from all this data gathering? Greenfield says that it is those who wield political and economic power who gain from the data that we generate through our movements, our photographic imprints, our own activity on networks, both social and physical. He urges that this data not be monopolized by a few companies, but that they be available for all to use via open source/creative commons licenses. Data should inspire local grassroots control, not control of people by a few who benefit disproportionately at the expense of the public.
Watch Adam Greenfield’s presentation here (video):
Supernova, 1 Dec 2009, Hour 1: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/2688329 (starting at around minute 26, although you should watch the entire hour which begins with the awesome Danah Boyd who talks about youth and social networks).
Mentioned by Adam Greenfield in his talk:
Jane Jacobs’s ground-breaking work, The Death and Life of American Cities
Richard Sennett: The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life
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If you want to see the rest of the Supernova Conference today (Dec 2) and tomorrow, watch the live stream:
http://supernovahub.com/2009/11/supernova-live-stream/
The agenda of the conference is here: http://supernovahub.com/agenda/
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(1) Guide to the WiMAX Band (2.5 GHz): the technology, license holders and future prospects
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Very interesting, thanks for sharing!
Thanks Esme,
This made for good viewing. Very thought provoking. It really comes down to this — we all know what’s coming generically — pervasive computing, the internet everywhere, ubicomp, however you want to label it.
The question is, in whose name will this all be built? To what ends? Who will own it?
Ray Kurzweil’s The Invisible Computer or Michael
Dertouzos’ What Will Be: How the New World of Information Will Change Our Lives both address the inevitability of man, machine and environment all merging, and the social and economic implications of that.
Will our immersion within this web lead to a utopia where man and environment merge, or a dystopia of some Foucauldian Panopticon / surveillance state?
That’s rather up to us, and the answer to that question will be different depending on where you are, that is how oppressive your government happens to be, and how much access the citizenry will have to the data collected, as Adam points out.
Adam argues that the city has been the place where people have gone historically to reinvent themselves, a place of comfortable anonymity. Now he fears that with the pervasiveness of those digital traces we leave everyday, that there will be no escaping our selves in all its moments, and that we will be thus forever stigmatized, labeled, unable to hide from what we’ve been.
Rather than a stigma, though, this will lead to new definitions of identity, self. Like the urban experience that Adam would want to preserve, these are historical constructs. Did people think of their life as a progressive narrative before the novel? When families lived together in one room in the Middle Ages and had no last names (except where they came from) did they think about reinventing the self? It took a Shakespeare to help invent the modern self.
Maybe it’s a post modern self that needs to be invented. Maybe that is what is happening among the youth of Facebook, Twitter, where literally life is an open book.
Adam offers the example of someone at a white shoe law firm finding an embarrassing digital tidbit on a prospective hire that leads to their passing on the candidate. Maybe the problem here is with the traditional normative assumptions as to what is normal and proper.
We have in the last days found just how quickly the web can unravel well constructed public personae. It happens every day, and the more carefully constructed the artifice, the louder the sound when it comes crashing down.
But to Adam’s point — we have to make sure that the mountain of data that our environment will be collecting on us should be made available to us.
For that, I would suggest not leaving everything to some central authority – the state, your ISP — when it comes to the gathering and dispensing of data. We need community intranets, walled gardens within urban spaces.
Whatever happens, human activity will be rather confined within the five square blocks around them. What happens when you map social networking on all that, localize it? It depends. Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs makes this abundantly clear. Depending on where, people will have different social uses for technology, will have different understandings of one’s social space.
While we are increasingly an urban species, as Adam notes, Lagos will be different from Sao Paolo and New York, etc. There will definitely be places you don’t want to live, especially where pervasive computing will be used for political purposes.
We need information technology to be a democratizing force, where the information itself is being generated and processed bottom up as opposed to being passively gathered for the purposes of the few above.
Esme, this is a great find. Thanks for sharing!