Net-local public spaces: Towards a culture of location
Adriana de Souza e Silva (North Carolina State University)
Eric Gordon (Emerson College)
www.urbancomm.org
1. Introduction
In public squares in cities throughout the world, people are walking, sitting, talking, and increasingly, they are doing these things while speaking into their phones or staring down into tiny screens cupped in the palms of their hands. They are sharing physical space, but they are simultaneously involved elsewhere. Many critics have lamented the decline of public spaces as they have become cluttered with outside connections, drawing positive correlations between global connections and local disconnections (Goldberger, 2003, Uzzell, 2008). David Uzzell has declared that technology use in public space is equivalent to a virtual crime against humanity, where “places are being stolen right from under our noses” (2008). We however, suggest that the practices of engaging with net-local interfaces are altering the nature and use of public space. Mediated by local devices, decisions about what to pay attention to are being made in very different ways (Gordon and Bogen, 2009, Lanham, 2006); the purview of what is near has expanded beyond the physically proximate, and paying attention to an anonymous user at a neighboring street corner, visualized on your Brightkite map for instance, can now be just as legitimate as paying attention to the unknown person standing next to you. This phenomenon does present a challenge to commonly held attitudes about public space. As so forcefully argued by urban historians and activists over the last several decades, public space is a product of co-located individuals engaging in any variety of social rituals and interactions (Whyte, 1980, Jacobs, 1969), resulting in stronger communities (Leccese et al., 2000, Haas, 2008, Putnam, 2000) and safer streets (Jacobs, 2002). When mediated interaction is added to the equation, the apparent cohesion of public space is, indeed, brought into question. If someone is talking on a phone, sending a text message, checking their Loopt map, or uploading a Wikipedia article they may not smile at a passer-by or properly thank the street vendor from whom they purchased a pretzel. While the use of mobile devices in public might reduce the frequency of these familiar social rituals, it is simultaneously extending and modifying those rituals into less familiar mediated contexts. Contemporary society has created new contexts for interaction, not all of which are solely determined by physical co-presence (Ling, 2008). Mediated by net-local interfaces, co-presence can extend beyond the physical into a networked environment. People can be aware of others’ presence through markers on a map or a local tweet. Licoppe & Inada (2006) call this an onscreen encounter. What’s interesting about these encounters is that they don’t exist in opposition or even in parallel to physical co-presence, but increasingly, they are experienced in dialogue with the physical situation.
“It is progressively more common to navigate two spaces simultaneously,” argue Kazys Varnelis and Anne Friedberg, “to see digital devices and telephones as extensions of our mobile selves” (2008). While we agree with this general sentiment, implicit to our understanding of network locality is that the self is not mobile, but located. As such, the ability to navigate two spaces simultaneously is actually the ability to consolidate and locate the spaces and information that they associate with our “digital selves” into something of a hybrid space. Hybrid spaces create “situations in which the borders between remote and contiguous contexts no longer can be clearly defined" (de Souza e Silva, 2006). In this paper, we examine the practices in which people engage to locate themselves within these hybrid spaces. And more directly, how these practices are changing the meaning and engagement with public space. We are not interested in rehearsing the arguments against distraction. Certainly, if people are texting while operating commuter trains, there is increased potential of accidents. We whole-heartedly support the idea that people operating heavy machinery of any kind should reduce all other activities while doing so. We seek to move beyond the “texting while driving” debate (Kee, 2009) and are interested in how the integration of information flows from digital networks into a local physical context changes the nature of the local space and, cumulatively, changes the cultural meaning of public space. People who are engaged with net-local interfaces experience physical spaces differently. They engage with physical space as a hybrid of physicality and virtuality, instances which are actually re-configured in a constant process of mutual influence (de Souza e Silva & Sutko, virtual). In this paper, we address how individual experiences are translated into an emerging form of public space. What we call net-local public space is any space wherein people move between the immediately proximate and the mediately distant within a carefully crafted set of social rituals that ultimately serves to extend the purview of local space. Net-local public space involves all those sharing physical space, and those connected to that physical space via networks. It involves all the information and people immediately perceivable, and it involves the information and people accessible via networks. As such, net-local public spaces include those doing the navigating (the people with mobile devices), as well as those being navigated (the people and information brought into the space through physical co-present interactions and networked interactions). Furthermore, because net-local public spaces, in essence, also correspond to urban spaces, they also include all those people who are co-present in a physical setting, but not necessarily using net-local interfaces.
Some critics have argued that any connection to a network in public space removes the user from that space, removes them from the context of public, and places them squarely within their familiar networks, thus posing a serious threat to the future of public space and the social capital that would be built and exchanged there (Wellman, 2002; (Hampton et al., 2009). This anxiety about technology mediating distance is nothing new. Georg Simmel, in describing technologies like the telescope and microscope, argued that these tools transform what was “instinctive or unconscious” into something “more sure but fragmented.” “What was distant before now comes closer, at a cost of greater distance to what was previously closer” (Zeuner, 2003, Simmel and Frisby, 2004). And many critics have applied this idea to the mobile phone. Mobile phones build confidence and connection to that which is distant, but they do so at the expense of that which is near (Gergen, 2002; Puro, 2002; Plant, 2001; Habuchi, 2005).
But we diverge from this position. We argue that these new rituals developing in public space around net-local interfaces are providing new contexts for interaction and, by extension, new contexts for social cohesion, in such a way that does not simply pull people out of the local space, but pulls the network into local space. Co-presence is not mutually opposed to networked interaction—and as emerging practices of technology develop, it is imperative that we see these practices as constitutive of emerging forms of public space, and not simply as threats to existent forms of social interaction.
We begin the paper by reconsidering the concept of public space as it pertains to net-local interactions. Then, borrowing from sociologist Erving Goffman, we focus on the traditional rituals that transpire within public spaces, and we demonstrate how these rituals of co-presence are being challenged to accommodate elements of network locality. As the nature of the situation changes in these new public spaces, so, too, do the everyday rituals that maintain the situation. In other words, how people make it clear to somebody else that they’re paying attention to what they’re saying, or how someone carries themselves in public so that they appear engaged. As people are being asked to accommodate multiple levels of participation at once, the accepted behaviors and social regulations in each of the levels changes to accommodate the new scale of the situation. This is not simply a matter of multi-tasking; it is a matter of convincingly performing one’s engagement in the net-local situation. In the last sections of this paper, we look at how net-local public space is represented and understood in the collective practices of performing in these situations.
2. Good Public Spaces
Questions about urban public space have been vigorously debated for at least a century. Georg Simmel (1971), writing in 1901, noted that the rapid increase in external stimuli found everywhere in the city, was constructive of a new urban subject, one capable of blocking things out at will and developing what he called a “blasé attitude.” This metropolitan man, as he described it, was rational and calculating. To accommodate everyday life (talking to strangers, buying food or commuting to work) he had to exercise a kind of mental reserve. According to Simmel: “If so many inner reactions were responses to the continuous external contacts with innumerable people as are those in the small town, where one knows almost everybody one meets and where one has a positive relation to almost everyone, one would be completely atomized internally and come to an unimaginable psychic state.” As such, the city was incomprehensible in its unfiltered form, so having reserve was required to parse out the various social situations from the aural and visual chaos of the urban street. Simmel’s “blasé attitude,” in this sense, can be considered a type of interface that the urban subject had to put on in order to filter the increasing amount of external stimuli originating from urban public spaces. The city in its unfiltered form was incomprehensible to the modern subject (Gordon, 2010). While Simmel was highly critical of this new urban subjectivity, he acknowledged the unprecedented freedom enjoyed by the metropolitan man. Life in the metropolis forced a seemingly unnatural rationalization of everyday life, but at the same time it enabled a freedom to transgress social categories and transcend the traditional limitations of public space.
Fast forward one hundred years, and Simmel’s observations still resonate. At the time of Simmel’s writing, he noted that the city, and its associated technologies, forced individuals to mentally adapt to its form. And ultimately, the metropolis and its resulting metropolitan man, forced a restructuring of public space. The town square in the small town, where everyone knew everyone else, was considered the ideal form of public. But the new form of metropolitan life at the turn of the 20th century changed that by adding anonymity and increased sensory stimulation to the experience of being in public. Simmel comments that the metropolitan man cannot return to the small town, as he would feel too restricted. The smaller the social circle, he contends, “the more anxiously the circle guards the achievements, the conduct of life, and the outlook of the individual.” In the metropolis, and in what came to be celebrated as urban public space, the individual reigned supreme even as he accommodated the limitations of his reserve.
Today, there is a different kind of rationalization and compartmentalization that take place within the minds of “metropolitan man.” Instead of the blasé attitude, however, this relationship with the city is partly filtered by net-local interfaces. The stimuli that compose the metropolis are no longer proximate in the traditional sense. The individual no longer has to deal only with what is in front of him. Following the logic of the space of flows as defined by Manuel Castells (2000), the metropolis extends into digital networks and its perception is dependent on net-local interfaces. The rationalization of the metropolitan man is aided by the hardware and software that he carries with him, such as mobile phones, GPS devices, laptops, LMSN and mapping software. As formerly mentioned, many critics interpreted the increasing network connectivity of the metropolitan subject in urban spaces as a type of network individualism (Welmann, 2002) in which people connect directly to one-another through the network, but not to the physical space surrounding them. These types of “telecocooning”, as defined by Habuchi (2002) or “selective sociality” (Matsuda, 2005), as forms of interaction with (the same) small group of friends via digital networks while ignoring the larger social public sphere were at the core of contemporary fears about the introduction of mobile technologies in the public life. But just as we can characterize this trend as a propagation of the worst elements of the blasé attitude, where human connections are rationalized into computer code and public isolation, we can also understand this as yet another shift in the meaning of public space and the freedoms (perceived or otherwise) associated with that space. Traditional metropolitan public space is perhaps becoming like the small town, where purely physically co-present social circles seem oppressively small. Not being connected to a network, not having access to information about where you are, is tantamount to being closed off to a space’s potential (de Souza e Silva & Sutko, virtual). Along the lines of Simmel’s metropolis, net-local public space is a new social organization that produces an increase in mental reserve; but at the same time, it produces a sense of freedom traditionally associated with the metropolis. The person in net-local public space is not limited to what is immediately proximate; she has the ability to associate with information and people that are connected through net-local interfaces. This perceived freedom of net-local public space is the same as the perceived freedom Simmel noticed in group affiliations. While we are still dependent on groups, he says, “it has become a matter of choice with whom one affiliates and upon whom one is dependent.” As a result, we have expanded our “sphere of freedom” (1955). So, net-local people not only develop person-to-person remote connections (Wellman, 2002), but also person-to-space links, as well as person-to-person nearby connections. In net-local spaces, users share anonymity by virtue of being strangers in a city and intimacy through the use of shared interfaces.