Sharon Kleinman is a Professor of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, USA, who focuses on the social implications of communication technologies and on issues concerning on-line and place-based communities. Currently, her work centres on sustainability, in every meaning of the word. She is the editor of Displacing Place: Mobile Communication in the Twenty-first Century, which was published in 2007 by Peter Lang. Right now, she is editing a reader on The Culture of Efficiency: Technology in Everyday Life, to be published by Peter Lang in summer 2009. This collection of essays was inspired by Kleinman's fascination with innovations and motivated by the desire to learn more about sustainable environmental, societal, and human health. In her receiver article, Sharon Kleinman reflects on some of the demands of living in cultures of efficiency and offers suggestions for enhancing satisfaction and well-being, drawn from lessons learned the hard way.

Website: http://www.quinnipiac.edu/x1288.xml? Person=14226&type=5

Illustration by Ben Voos ...........................................................................................................................................................................

Innovations of all sorts fascinate me, but most especially, pocket-sized technologies that are highly efficient and effective, like the ΄space pen΄ that can write upside down, designed for NASA astronauts in 1965. Mine is in my pocket or briefcase almost all the time, along with two USB thumb drives that store digital backup files of my favorite photographs and nearly everything I've written since 1993. My forthcoming edited collection, The Culture of Efficiency: Technology in Everyday Life, was inspired by this fascination with innovations. I want to put forward some of its core findings in this article and reflect on our use of innovative technology that provides us with anytime-anyplace connectivity, in cultures of efficiency – contexts in which the optimization of time and resources are emphasized.



Our cultural transformation

We are in the midst of a cultural transformation: the digitalization of just about everything. We enjoy ever-increasing technological capabilities for bending and transcending spatial and temporal constraints, as well as unprecedented consumer opportunities. We routinely transmit photographs, video, text, and audio instantly to individuals and groups all over the planet. We work, play, bank, learn, communicate, create, flirt, and shop on-line, and often while we're on the move, using powerful, portable devices. We shift time to watch television shows and movies on-demand, viewing them on matchbook-sized mobile phone screens and on super-sized home theater screens. We vicariously experience events happening in distant places, including outer space, in real time. The entire world is accessible at our fingertips, 24-7, 365 days a year. But most of the time we take all of this for granted – our technologies, our opportunities, our resources – because we are so busy doing something, or many things, all the time.

Tools for mediated communication were developed to satisfy needs for contact and exchange with others and to help people to achieve more, with less effort. Today's equipment and applications make it possible to build and access information in dimensions that were unthinkable only a generation ago. They enable us to convert dead time into productive time, to use time more efficiently, so we can rid ourselves of tiring routines and toilsome processes, expand our range of movement, and have more time for the people and activities that mean the most to us. Does your everyday experience tick all these boxes? If so, then you're lucky...

  
Left: How we envision the future, according to Daniel Gilbert
Right: John Maeda's laws of simplicity



As information and communication technologies, such as computers, mobile phones, and global positioning systems have become progressively more robust, user-friendly, and affordable during the last two decades, they have been integrated into nearly all aspects of everyday life for many people. But the early twentieth century dream that modern technology would lead to increased leisure time for people to enjoy, has morphed into a nerve-wracking, twenty-first century reality for some who are compelled to be electronically accessible to others virtually all the time, even when they are in bed, bathrooms, and restaurants; as well as for those who must take their work with them everywhere, even on vacation, if they take vacations at all. A quarter of all workers in the US, for example, do not take vacations. Many give up earned time off, year after year.



Extreme working

There are extreme workers everywhere who overwork voluntarily, because they love what they do. In other cases, though, where corporate-downsizing has left workplaces understaffed, there are fewer people to do the work that needs to be done. The remaining employees must work harder and longer hours, in order to maintain the same level of productivity and quality. Yet many people overwork and stay continuously connected and available to their employers, co-workers, and clients because of job insecurity. This phenomenon has been called ΄presenteeism΄; the opposite of absenteeism. Workers exhibiting presenteeism perform their jobs in ways that sometimes negatively impact their personal lives. Those who routinely deal with work-related interruptions during leisure time (researchers call this ΄spillover΄) experience higher stress levels that have been correlated with a wide variety of physical and mental health problems.

Perhaps those people who are always ΄on΄ and always available for work, as well as those who habitually overwork, are acting prudently and proactively in today's extremely challenging global economic climate. Unfortunately, many people have good reasons to feel insecure about their employment in belt-tightening times like these, in which there has been wave after wave of job layoffs throughout the world. Moreover, businesses automate processes and outsource an expanding range of work to countries where cheap(er) labor is readily available. So, in the scheme of things, individuals who are gainfully employed and have comfortable homes and enough food to eat, and who are healthy and have healthy loved ones, are very fortunate. But they still might be time-crunched.



Strategies for thriving in the culture of efficiency

When we are time-crunched, we multitask. Research indicates that using mobile phones while driving increases the likelihood of crashes by four times, and, surprisingly, it doesn't matter whether the devices used are hand-held or hands-free. Eighty percent of mobile phone users, surveyed by University of Michigan researchers, expressed their belief that it is a safety hazard to use a mobile phone while driving. But many who are aware of the risks do it anyway. Often, they multitask because they are trying to keep up with everything that they need to do. Which leads me to the first suggestion: selectively embrace technologies.

Selectively embracing technologies means being more mindful about how and when you use them. It means making forward-thinking and healthy choices; such as ending a mobile phone call before putting the car keys in the ignition to go for a ride, or pulling off the road to stop at a safe place, before reading a text message or checking email.

Selectively embracing technology could also mean introducing a type of technology sabbatical into the work routine. For example, committing to email-free mornings a few days a week, in order to focus attention and energy on one thing at a time; rather than toggling back and forth between applications and projects which may seem to be efficient, but is not. Neuroscience research has shown that when people go off-task, for instance, to read and respond to an email message, it takes significant time and effort to ramp back up to where they were on their original project. Which brings me to the next suggestion: opt for face-to-face encounters when feasible.

Many of us race so hard through our lives that our thoughts, actions, conversations, and even our meals, are often fragmented and abbreviated. Taking time to consider and reconsider is a luxury many of us don't have, or perceive that we don't have. In this era of ubiquitous anytime-anyplace connectivity, it appears that everybody else acts and reacts right away, so we feel that we need to do so as well. It reminds me of a spatial analogy: if everybody in a crowd stands up on their tippy toes, nobody can see any better. Instantaneous electronically-mediated communication doesn't give anybody the competitive edge if everybody is using it. And everybody seems to be using it all the time.

One ramification of the ease and convenience of anytime-anyplace connectivity is that people sometimes communicate messages on-the-fly, that have not been carefully thought through and that might be counterproductive or damaging. Most of us have received and sent missives like this, and post hoc, we don't feel good about them. So, consider taking a different approach and don't let face-to-face contact slide.

Even when it takes extra time and effort to arrange in-person meetings, your exchange of ideas will be more efficient and more effective because the non-verbal aspects of face-to-face communication facilitate enhanced understanding. Proxy encounters might seem efficient, but sometimes they aren't in the long-run, and we find out the hard way. Which brings me to the final suggestion: strive for balance.

Paracelsus, a sixteenth century Swiss doctor who is often referred to as the father of modern toxicology, wrote: "Alle Ding sind Gift, und nichts ohn Gift; allein die Dosis macht, daß ein Ding kein Gift ist." In English, this translates to, "All things are poison and nothing is without poison, only the dose permits something not to be poisonous."

Many of us are so busy trying to keep up in a lightning-fast world, in which deals and careers can be made or lost in nanoseconds (or so it seems) that we do not take adequate time to rest, recharge, and reflect. In other words, we are overdosing on work, interruptions, information, and mediated communication. We are losing sight of the fact that humans need respite to think, experience, and grow. It is no wonder that people sometimes have ambivalent feelings about their mobile phones and computers, technologies that are undeniably central to daily life and immensely beneficial. And it is no wonder that more and more people are recognizing the benefits of technology sabbaticals and are turning off some of their electronic gear, from time-to-time. Yoga and other types of mindfulness training have become enormously popular in the United States and many other parts of the world, during the last few years. One explanation for this phenomenon is that these practices incorporate techniques for focusing that are profoundly valuable in always-on, multitasking-oriented environments.

Jeremy Rifkin on conceptions of time



To thrive in a culture of efficiency, it is vital to carve out time to foster physical and emotional health, to build and sustain meaningful relationships, to contribute to the communities where we live and work, and to repair the world. For the time-pressed, this is a tall order on an already ambitiously-packed agenda. But even small steps will enhance well-being and personal satisfaction and will have rippling, positive repercussions. So seize the moment: work, play, and rest; balance, breathe, and renew.

  
Left: Displacing Place
Right: The Culture of Efficiency



This article was written for receiver.

Contact: Sharon Kleinman

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Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, PhD, is a historian of science and a futurist. As a research director at The Institute for the Future, an independent, non-profit, think tank in Palo Alto, USA, he conducts research on the future of science and technology, especially in ubiquitous computing and mobile communication. He blogs at Relevant History and is founding editor of Future Now, IFTF's group weblog. Alex Pang is also an associate fellow at Oxford University's Saïd Business School and a visiting scholar in Stanford University's program in History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. Currently, he is working on a book on the end of cyberspace – which he thinks will come as the internet moves off desktops and screens and becomes embedded in things, spaces and minds. And what lies beyond cyberspace? We might find out if we tinker hard enough ...

Website: http://askpang.typepad.com/relevant_history/
http://www.iftf.org/futurenow
http://www.endofcyberspace.com/

Illustration by Daria Rychkova ...........................................................................................................................................................................

Tinkering a better world

Almost forty years ago, the Whole Earth Catalog published its last issue. For the American counterculture, it was like the closing of a really great café: the Catalog had brought together the voices of contributors, readers and editors, all unified by a kind of tech-savvy, hands-on, thoughtful optimism. Don't reject technology, the Catalog urged: make it your own. Don't drop out of the world: change it, using the tools we and your fellow readers have found. Some technologies were environmentally destructive or made you stupid, others were empowering and trod softly on the earth; together we could learn which were which.

Millions found the Catalog's message inspirational. In promoting an attitude toward technology that emphasized experimentation, re-use and re-invention, seeing the deeper consequences of your choices, appreciating the power of learning to do it yourself and sharing your ideas, the Whole Earth Catalog helped create the modern tinkering movement. Today, tinkering is growing in importance as a social movement, as a way of relating to technology and as a source of innovation. Tinkering is about seizing the moment: it is about ad-hoc learning, getting things done, innovation and novelty, all in a highly social, networked environment.

What is interesting is that at its best, tinkering has an almost Zen-like sense of the present: its 'now' is timeless. It is neither heedless of the past or future, nor is it in headlong pursuit of immediate gratification. Tinkering offers a way of engaging with today's needs while also keeping an eye on the future consequences of our choices. And the same technological and social trends that have made tinkering appealing seem poised to make it even more pervasive and powerful in the future. Today we tinker with things; tomorrow, we will tinker with the world.



To tinker is human

What is tinkering? Discovering that certain snack tins can be used to make an antenna that extends the range of your wi-fi network, using electric toothbrush motors to power small robots, building a high-altitude balloon that takes video of the edge of space, are all examples of tinkering. It is technical work and a cultural attitude. Tinkering is customizing software and stuff; making new combinations of things that work better than their parts; and discovering new capabilities in or uses for existing products. Despite its fascination with things and bits, it is resolutely human-focused: you don't make things 'better' in some dry technical sense, you make them work better for you. Tinkerers modify everything from cars, computers, and cellphones, to virtual worlds and computer code. They are driven by a desire to experiment, to make existing technologies more useful, and to customize them to better suit users' needs.

According to MIT professor Mitch Resnick, tinkering might look at first like traditional engineering, but it is very different. Both are about designing and making things; but engineering tends to be top-down, linear, structured, abstract and rules-based - a highly formal, organized activity, meant to be carried out in (and in the service of) large organizations. Tinkering, in contrast, is bottom-up, iterative, experimental, practical and improvisational: informal and disorganized, accessible to anyone who is willing to learn (and fail) and it doesn't follow any plan too closely.

In its improvisational, experimental quality, tinkering is a bit like jazz. The comparison with music can be pushed further: both are forms of human expression shaped by both specific historical forces, and deep human needs. The counterculture is one important influence on tinkering; so is computer hacking, with its casual contempt for established authority, deep respect for arcane technical skills, and refined love of imaginative jokes. The open source movement showed that hackers could create extraordinary things by co-operating on a large scale.

The realization that users are often innovators – that they find new uses for, extend the capabilities of, and expand the appeal of existing products – has further empowered tinkering. Tinkering can also (somewhat paradoxically) be a protest against consumer culture and corporations: in an era of restrictive, end- user license agreements, cracking open a case can be defended as an act of resistance.

But tinkering also taps into human psychology. Tinkering is an amazingly powerful way to learn. It is not about mastering dry, arcane bodies of knowledge: it is about learning how to use your hands, materials, and tools, scrounging stuff and ideas, learning from others and your own mistakes. Educational theorists call this active learning and they love it.

Tinkering is also very social: like members of an artistic or literary movement, tinkerers may often work alone but they share their results, build on each other's work and learn together. Tinkering is about bringing new meaning to objects: when you put yourself into a device, or customize it to better suit your needs, you make those things more personal, both in a user-interface and psychological sense.

Finally, in a prosperous high-tech world, tinkering is fun. In hard times, in Weimar Germany in the 1920s, or post-Soviet Russia in the 1990s, tinkering is not an act of resistance or a cultural statement; it was what you did to survive the winter. But in good times, for people who work in offices or stores and lift things or run for leisure, tinkering is entertainment.

Even if you have never overclocked a CPU or built a robot from Lego and toothbrush motors, you have probably experienced tinkering's combination of manual skill, meaningful necessity and pleasure – in the kitchen. Ever cooked an elaborate dish that required careful planning, a combination of attention to detail and instinct, and a kind of thoughtful inventiveness? Was it made better by sharing it with friends?



Tinkering, consumption and time

Tinkering and cooking are similar in another way: both let you enjoy the results of your work immediately. But they are also different in an important way.

As too many of us know, food can be too delicious and satisfying: it is easy for the pleasure of cooking to turn against you. Indeed, feeding our desires quickly – one of the hallmarks of modern consumption – is often bad for us. (There is a reason the phrase 'instant gratification' is a pejorative.) But tinkering is not about immediate gratification: in fact, it is about as far away from 'consumption' as you can get.

Consumption encourages you to respond to stimuli this second, to 'call now, operators are standing by!' Tinkering encourages you to think about the long-term value of doing something. A project that takes hours (or weeks) needs to pay off over time: you have to really think about whether it is worth undertaking and what you will get out of it.

Consumption works best when you are twitchy and suggestible (studies have shown that people are easier to sell to when they have been drinking coffee). Tinkering, like other kinds of complicated manual work, encourages you to get into what author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls "flow", a state of concentration and awareness that comes from (and helps in) doing difficult things well.

Consumption encourages you to just react; the more thoughtlessly the better. Tinkering forces you to reflect, to learn from your experience, to think about why something has worked or failed, and to consider the possibilities before you.



Pervasive computing, pervasive tinkering

Tinkering has found fullest expression in personal computers and electronics. There are good reasons for this.

In the last thirty years, personal computers have evolved from programmers' toys to word processors to entertainment platforms to social media, thanks in part to the efforts of users. In the 1990s, the PalmPilot showed that you could build a successful platform by letting your users innovate for you: thousands of developers turned the PDA into everything from a stopwatch, to a book reader. Today, mobile phones - which pack the processing power of small PCs with constant network access, in packages that go everywhere with their users – are virtually begging users to tinker with them.

These cases (and many others) show that the flexibility of programmability of electronics opens the door for tinkering. This is clearest with devices like PCs and cellphones, but it is also at work in tinkering and hacks on things we do not think of as electronic, like musical instruments and cars. This points to a deeper rule: moving functionality from hardware to software makes it easier for people to reprogram devices to serve new functions.

What is especially exciting is that this trend is far from playing itself out. The costs of computers and memory are continuing to fall and the demand for digital flexibility and connectivity is growing; aging populations in the advanced world want devices that will help them stay healthy and independent; countries want technologies to monitor emerging threats; companies want to be able to more precisely manage their supply chains and resources; and people show an inexhaustible appetite for connecting with each other.

As a result, every day more objects are acquiring on-board processing, sensors, RFID tags and Wi-Fi connections – the building blocks of what computer scientists call pervasive computing. Pervasive computing is more than just computers being accessible everywhere; it is a qualitative change in the place occupied by computers in our lives. Think they are already pervasive? Computers may seem pervasive because they call attention to themselves: they are sometimes mystifying, occasionally frustrating, and every now and then fail spectacularly. Computing, in contrast, highlights the functionality, while hiding the technology. Because the hardware is smaller, computing can be deployed in all sorts of places, hidden in things, and woven into the daily fabric of life. You interact with computer hardware more but notice it less. Pervasive computing is about verbs rather than nouns. With pervasive computing, you won’t notice you are interacting with computers all the time and that will make your life easier.

What does this mean? As the digital infrastructure of pervasive or ubiquitous computing is woven into more everyday objects, more of the world will be tinkerable. And not just more individual objects. As we start to give technologies greater capacity to work together, to self-organize and share tasks, we will start to see tinkerers working with groups of technologies, rather than single objects. We will also see people tinkering with environments filled with sensors, smart dust computers and other technology. Already architects and activists talk about hacking urban infrastructures and tinkering with cities: in a few decades, the descendants of today's car customizers could be working with city blocks.



Tinkering to the future

In a future in which tinkering-friendly technologies spread out into more and more places, tinkering will cease to be an exception to the way we deal with the world. Tinkering will be the rule. Ultimately, tinkering can help save the world. Here's how.

The world's problems are fiendishly complex. They are what futurists call "wicked problems", , and are defined as a mix of complexity, urgency and uncertainty. They are too complex to be reduced to simple (albeit potentially very difficult) scientific problems; they are too important not to act on, even if we don't have all the information; and it is sometimes not clear if we can ever have certainty about what to do.

These are problems that cannot be entrusted to technocrats or elites: complex problems have to be solved collectively. In such a world, the only way to make a better future is to have people learn to create their own futures: to develop the capacity to solve problems, to see the consequences of their actions, and to be able to act now in ways that help them reach a better future. In other words, people have to learn how to tinker with the future. Not only that, but tinkering's lack of respect for intellectual boundaries, its willingness to experiment, its emphasis on solutions and goals, and its social openness, make it a match for wicked problems.

Maybe the best proof that tinkering and the future can be connected is the career of Catalog founder, Stewart Brand. He proved to be an unstoppable entrepreneur and writer: he went on to a number of other ventures, most notably the Global Business Network, a futures group he co-founded in the 1980s as well as writing several books. Brand's transition from countercultural publisher, to corporate consultant might seem incongruous but it wasn't. Brand's career prefigures the deeper connection between tinkering and the future; and the potential for tinkering to help us make a better future.



This article was written for receiver.

Contact: Alex Pang

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Carl Honoré was born in Scotland, grew up in Canada, and now lives in London with his family. Since 1991 he has written journalism from all over Europe and South America – for the Economist, Observer, Miami Herald, Globe and Mail among others. He is best known as the author of In Praise of Slow, which examines how our compulsion to speed up everything makes it hard to enjoy the moment. Since its publication in 2004, the book has been published in 30 languages. An entertaining and incisive speaker, Honoré travels around the world advocating the Slow Movement. His latest book, Under Pressure, explores how we are raising a generation of over-scheduled, over-indulged and over-stimulated children. Want to know what the leading proponent of Slow thinks of communication technologies that are transporting our words and thoughts faster than ever before? Well, read along and find out!

Website: http://www.carlhonore.com/

Illustration by Antje Herzog ...........................................................................................................................................................................

When Barack Obama became President of the United States in January, his first victory was not steering the stimulus package through Congress or closing the detention centre at Guantánamo Bay. It was persuading his security staff to let him keep his BlackBerry. "I won the fight," declared the new and very relieved leader of the free world.

Obama is not alone in refusing to part with his smartphone. Madonna sleeps with her BlackBerry under her pillow. Celebrities from Paris Hilton to David Beckham are seldom photographed without a mobile in hand. Millions of people are right now communicating on handheld devices in offices, beds, cars, trains, parks, restaurants, on the toilet, in the shower – anywhere they can get a signal. No wonder the BlackBerry has been dubbed the CrackBerry. Or that hardcore fans of Apple's rival handset talk of catching iPhoneitis.But is it fair to liken a smartphone to a hard drug or a mental illness? Or to blame the new tools of communication for knocking our lives out of balance?

People often assume that as a proponent of the Slow Movement I should be against new technology. They think that slowing down, putting your life in balance, means throwing away the gadgets. Yet nothing could be further from the truth.

I am no Luddite; I love technology and own all the latest high-tech goodies. To me, being able to tap the web or speak and write to anyone, anytime, anywhere is exhilarating. By freeing us from the constraints of time and space, mobile communication can help us ΄seize the moment΄ and ΄make the most of now΄, which is what the Slow Movement is all about.

I live in London, and the other day I met with colleagues from Norway and the United States. A few years ago, we would have flown to a hub city, talked and then flown back again. It would have taken at least a day, probably longer. This being 2009, however, we held a web conference and finished inside an hour. That same afternoon I was able to take my daughter rollerblading.

The new technology brings us together in ways that seemed like science fiction not long ago. On a recent trip to Canada, I spent a long session on the webcam with my son back in London. We chose the players for our Champions League Fantasy Football team and then watched part of the Chelsea vs Juventus match together. Well, not ΄together΄ in the traditional sense of the word, but we were a lot closer than we would have been without that long-distance link.

Before mobile communication, time, distance and my very poor handwriting killed off most of my long-distance friendships. Today, thanks to email, Facebook and Twitter, I'm in touch with mates on every continent.

One friend recently spent three weeks in Brazil. In the past I would have felt lucky to receive a postcard or two. This time around I got daily on-line updates, complete with photos and video clips. Halfway through his trip, I recommended a bar in Rio de Janeiro. He went along and ended up meeting the woman of his dreams. Here is the text he sent me from the taxi on the way home that night: "Think I just met my future wife. Owe you one."

Thanks to the new technology, I felt like I was right there with him in the back of that Rio cab. My experience of his trip was enriched and our friendship strengthened.

The tin can phone effect

Mobile communication can help us seize the moment in ways that go beyond relationships. Teamed with GPS technology, smartphones turn into wise and well-connected tour guides. As you wander round Florence, your iPhone pinpoints an exquisite medieval chapel hidden round the corner, or a glorious trattoria two streets away. Without the phone, you would miss them both.

Communication on the go is also just plain fun. BlackBerrys and iPhones are like toys: they feel good in the hand, we play with them, they make us smile. It's what we all dreamed about as children when we attached two empty cans to a string and tried to talk to a friend in the next room.

But there is another side to this story. Human beings are hardwired to be curious and to connect and communicate. The problem is that in a world of limitless information and constant access to other people, we often don't know when to stop.

There is a parallel with the obesity epidemic. Designed for a hunter-gatherer existence, our bodies are very efficient at storing excess calories as fat. Today, when calories are permanently on tap and there is less chance of burning them off by hunting and gathering, our waistlines are ballooning. The same thing is happening with mobile communication. Just as we keep on eating even after our bodies have had enough food, we keep on texting, surfing and tweeting long after our minds are overloaded with information and stimulation.

Let's be honest, many of us are hooked on the adrenalin rush delivered by communication technology; the visceral thrill we get when an email pings into our inbox. Last year, an editorial in the American Journal of Psychiatry called for ΄internet addiction΄ to be officially recognised as a mental disorder. That may be going too far, but mediated communication is clearly subject to the law of diminishing returns. When we stay electronically connected all the time, the deluge of messages and information takes its toll.

It can cause our IQ level to fall more than smoking marijuana would. It can also lock us into what a former Microsoft researcher called a state of "continuous partial attention" – constantly flitting from one conversation, one information stream, one stimulus to the next. Sound familiar?

The bottom line is that you cannot be truly ΄in the moment΄ when you're juggling several moments at once. You cannot make the most of now when you turn ΄now΄ into a frenzy of multitasking.

Being ΄always on΄ transforms communication technology into a weapon of mass distraction. An estimated one in ten Britons has been hurt walking into a lamp post, rubbish bin, post box or other pedestrians, while using a phone. To reduce these ΄walk and text΄ injuries, Brick Lane last year became the first street in London to wrap its lamp posts with the sort of white padded cushions usually found on rugby goal posts.

Constant connection makes us chronically impatient. We come to expect everything to happen at the touch of a button – and get angry when it doesn't. As the actress Carrie Fisher once quipped, these days "even instant gratification takes too long."

Being΄always on΄also makes it hard to stop and stare; to smell the proverbial roses. We miss the details, the fine grain of the world around us when our eyes are glued to a screen. We lose the joy of discovering things on our own, or by chance, when we stick to routes prescribed by a GPS download. When travel involves firing off a stream of texts, tweets and audio-video footage to friends and family back home, we never completely immerse ourselves in a new place. Even as I lapped up the electronic dispatches from my friend in Brazil, part of me was thinking, ΄Why are you sitting in an internet café instead of wandering round a street market? Why are you chronicling every twist and turn of your journey, instead of living it?΄.

The truth is that communicating more does not always mean communicating better. In playgrounds across the world, you see parents using phones while spending ΄quality time΄ with their children. Surveys suggest that a fifth of us now interrupt sex to read an email or answer a call. Is that seizing the moment, or wasting it?

One of the cardinal rules of dating etiquette is to turn your mobile phone off. Why? Because the best way to bond with someone is to give them your full and undivided attention. Reaching out to touch someone else at the same time sends all the wrong signals.

Where do we go from here?

The other day, my neighbour, a multitasking marketing executive, lost her BlackBerry; or thought she did. It turned out that her five year old daughter had hidden it. "I thought it would get you to listen to me when I talk," explained the little girl.

This is the irony: that in a thoroughly wired world, many of us end up feeling lonely and disconnected. A major survey found that between 1986 and 2006 the number of British teenagers who say they have no best friend in whom to confide, rose from under one in eight to nearly one in five – and that at a time when any self-respecting teenager boasts dozens, or even hundreds, of ΄friends΄ on his MySpace page.

Overdosing on mobile communication can also mess up the relationship we have with ourselves. Human beings need moments of silence and solitude: to rest and recharge, to think deeply and creatively, to look inside and confront the big questions, ΄Who am I? How do I fit into the world? What is the meaning of life?΄.

That isn't likely to happen when your mind is constantly wondering if you have new email or if it's time for a fresh tweet.

So where do we go from here? Are we doomed to a future of falling IQs, superficial relationships and walking into lamp posts? I hope not. Whenever a new technology comes along, it takes time to work out the cultural rules and protocols to get the most from it. Mobile communication is no exception: it is neither good nor bad, what matters is how we use it.

The challenge now is to find the discipline to deploy communication technology more judiciously. To switch on when it can bring us together and enrich our lives but to switch off when old-fashioned, face-to-face communication – or even just a little silence – is called for.

Already change is in the air. Big companies like Intel and Deloitte & Touche are experimenting with email-free days and letting staff switch off their phones. Members of the digital generation are telling pollsters that rather than working alone at home, they want shared workspaces that combine face-to-face contact with screen-based communication.

Pressure to unplug is building beyond the office, too. Restaurants, bars and travel groups are banning mobiles. Technology-free carriages have appeared on trains in many countries. Like a drug rehab clinic, the Sheraton hotel in Chicago offers to lock guests' mobile phones in a safe to help them conquer their email addiction.

What all of these moves have in common is a desire to build a more measured relationship with communication technologies: to seize the moment, to make the most of now, by choosing when to log on and when to log off.

Can we do it? Can we strike this balance? In the words of President Obama himself: Yes, we can. This article was written for receiver.

Contact: Carl Honore

Martijn de Waal is a writer, curator, consultant and researcher based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Together with Michiel de Lange, he co-founded and organised “The Mobile City”, a conference on locative and mobile media and how they relate to urban culture and questions of identity. The conference took place in spring 2008, in collaboration with the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam. De Waal is currently working on a dissertation on new media and urban culture in the department of philosophy at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. His receiver contribution introduces you to “MySpace urbanism” – the condition of cities saturated with media networks, where physical space is intersected with layers of personalised, spatial orientation.

Website: http://www.martijndewaal.nl

Website: http://www.themobilecity.nl

Illustration by Dennis Schuster ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

“Great cities are not like towns, only larger”, urban activist and writer Jane Jacobs observed almost half a century ago. But what then is it that makes a city into a city? Now that telecom operators, handset builders, and media companies are churning out new media technologies that promise to drastically alter our sense of place, this question has once again become very urgent. Whether we call them locative media, contextual media, or placed-based media, these technologies promise to change the way we interact with our surroundings. Let me call this new way of experiencing the city “MySpace urbanism”.

If you ask urbanists, city planners, architects, economists, sociologists or urban anthropologists about the essence of a city, you will probably get as many different answers as there are disciplines concerned with the study of the urban fabric; each answer somewhat cloaked in its own jargon. Yet, if you closely observe what scientists in all these different domains have written about the city, two common themes usually float to the surface: heterogeneity and density. The city is a place that brings together people with a broad variety of different backgrounds, in a heavily built up area. People with different ethnicities, lifestyles, professions, economic status, outlook, religion etc, all find themselves cramped together in a few square kilometres.

It is exactly this diversity that leads to what has often been called “urban culture”. Even in the 1920s a scholar of the famous Chicago School of Sociology observed that “it is characteristic of city life that all sorts of people meet and mingle together who never fully comprehend one another. The anarchist and the club man, the priest and the Levite, the actor and the missionary who touch elbows on the street still live in totally different worlds.” Yet, ideally, the city is not a mere collection of “urban villages”; isolated enclaves of the like-minded. What makes a city a city is that these people with different backgrounds and identities observe each other, interact and confront one another. This process leads to a cross-fertilization of ideas and makes the city a stronghold of innovation, economists might point out. This is what leads to the creation of new lifestyles and identities, anthropologists would say. And sociologists would argue that this very eclectic mix of lifestyles downplays the effect of social control that has characterised traditional societies.

At the same time, some philosophers claim, the city also provides a spatial composition that enables all these different lifestyles to live together in spite of all their differences. The city, in their view, is a stage on which people display their identity, often unconsciously, just by acting out their everyday life. Everyone is a performer and an observer at the same time, constantly making comparisons; are those people behaving in such and such a way like us? Or do they belong to other social groups? “We identify ourselves socially by continuously comparing ‘us’ with ‘them’”, writes Dutch sociologist Talja Blokland. This process has different consequences: it helps us to define who we are ourselves, mixing and matching, rejecting and dismissing elements of lifestyles that we see around us. At the same time, this process could also produce a certain form of trust between citizens, even if they do not belong to the exact same lifestyle group. Some theorists have called this “public familiarity”: we’ve become familiar with unknown others in public places. “The trust of a city street”, wrote Jane Jacobs, “is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts”. Finally, this process could also produce a political community: we all share the same city space, so whether we like it or not, we just have to deal with each other.

Many of these accounts describe idealised (some would say nostalgic) versions of the city, and often refer to cities of a bygone era. It is the boulevards lined with cafés and pedestrian passageways of Walter Benjamin’s Paris that is often evoked in these theories. Therefore, we could label these ideas “BLVD-urbanism” – referring to the broad boulevards that formed the heart of public life in late nineteenth century Paris.

Over the last few decades, quite a few critics have pointed out that many of our cities have stopped to function as such, due to several different causes. Suburbanization and gentrification have isolated different lifestyles in their own enclaves, limiting the nodal contact points between different groups. The rhythms of our daily lives run less synchronously as well, so that haphazard meetings between different people become less likely. We drive around in automobiles to commercialised “non-places” such as shopping centres rather than strolling around public piazzas. Yet, in many accounts the ideal remains: the city as a site of physical exchange and interaction between citizens, that fosters different communities, enriches the life of the individual, leads to innovation and creates what Dutch philosopher René Boomkens has called, a “community of strangers”.



The city of the digital natives

Most of these theories see the city as a purely physical space. So, how do these theories hold up in the era in which the city is saturated with media networks such as, to name just a few, GPS, WIFI, UMTS, HSDPA, GSM? Now that mobile and locative media change our interaction with our environment, no longer do we just experience the physical city itself: we SMS and chat with distant friends who in our minds are near at hand. We can inquire about our location, or leave virtual graffiti for those who’ll pass by after us. We can withdraw our attention from our actual surroundings, and into the mediated spaces of these networks. Or we can actively engage with our surroundings through the screens of our mobile phones.

Recently, a range of discussions have arisen around these themes. Let’s have a look at some of the points that were brought up. One of the central tropes of BLVD-urbanism is the idea of the city as a stage for comparison, interaction, confrontation and innovation. As Mark Shepard (http://www.lulu.com/content/1554599), Danah Boyd (http://www.receiver.vodafone.com/18-socializing-digitally) and others have pointed out (in, amongst other places, this journal), at least for the generation of “digital natives”, the urban stage has now broadened extensively with the rise of social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Livejournal, Cyworld or QQ. There, identities are displayed through profiles, pictures and widgets, in two different ways. On the one hand, these webpages are performance-sites in the literal sense: constructing a profile is akin to putting up a carefully directed stage act, or dressing up for a night on the town. Which picture, which catchy status-update, which profile description matches best the image that the user wants to portray to the outside world?

On the other hand, new iterations of these sites can also display the unconscious rhythms of everyday (urban) life. It is easy now to add widgets to your profile that automatically show the last song that you listened to on your iPod, the last article you read, the last bookmark you made on Del.icio.us, and even your exact whereabouts in the real city. Sites such as Plazes or Bliin let users update each other about their physical location in the city. The places that one visits – tracked and broadcasted by mobile phones with GPS receivers – become automatically a part of one’s performed identity, both in the actual city as well as on-line.

On a personal level, these developments mean that we can continuously receive “status updates” from our friends. Adam Greenfield uses the term “the big now” to describe this experience (http://speedbird.wordpress.com/2008/05/04/the-long-here-and-the-big-now/). Through services like Twitter or Facebook on our mobile phones, we are in continuous touch with those we feel close to, even if they are on the other side of the planet. “For me, at least”, Greenfield writes, “it’s been difficult to see my New York through quite the same eyes, when every time I get my phone out I feel the entire planet’s deeper rhythms working themselves out.”

On a higher level, something interesting is going on as well: all these tracks and traces that we are leaving behind can be aggregated. These aggregates can be visualised and projected on to maps and portray a collective culture of what is happening where in the city. MIT’s Senseable City Lab ( http://senseable.mit.edu/ ) and Citysense ( http://www.citysense.com/home.php ) are early experiments with these new cultural forms that show us the city and its collective rhythms in new and possibly interesting ways.

“Today’s intelligent maps don’t just represent spatial relationships”, Kazys Varnelis has written ( http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/thinktank/tt_varnelis.html ).

“They reveal conditions in the city that were previously hidden in spreadsheets and databases.” They are not just maps in the old sense. They show us real time representations of events in the city, ranging from a traffic jam, to a gathering of our friends in a neighbourhood bar. We can even adjust our own behaviour in the city on these maps.

We could also use these maps to collaborate on assembling information about the city. During a lecture at a conference we organised in Rotterdam, artist Christian Nold showed the audience a collective map of nearby gardens in Los Angeles that featured trees with low-hanging, ripe fruit, there for the taker (http://www.softhook.com/). Other wiki-style maps are currently emerging that can be updated right from a mobile device, varying from restaurant reviews and personal memories, to local news. This means that geographic visualisations – not necessarily the Cartesian grids that are the basis of most of our current on-line maps – are becoming an important interface through which we experience the city.

The utopian promises of these technologies go one step further. When social networks, and the traces we leave in the city are combined, mobile media might start to work as an enhanced “city guide”. Just like Amazon might recommend to you a book based on aggregated purchase patterns, mobile media might start recommending new places to visit and people to meet. The media will “filter” the city for its users and guide them to the places they would like to go. They could even help us to engage in new communities, or forge “smart mobs” – spontaneous get-togethers in real space with unknown others to achieve a common goal.

Adam Greenfield has called this a shift from “browsing”, where we just wander around in the city, to “searching”, where we are more actively looking for a particular area, function or person in the city. The buzzword language of the dotcom-industry takes the metaphor even one step further. We are not just searching for what we already know, industry pundits argue. These services will help us to “discover” places and experiences that we didn’t even know we were looking for.



The city: OurSpace

Of course it’s easy to be critical about these utopian visions, often put forward by marketing departments of commercial companies that want to sell these services, and certainly not all of these features will become popular. Yet the general direction of these developments is taking shape right now, and could be labelled MySpace urbanism.

First, this term refers to the role of social networks, on-line profiles and tracking sites, as spaces where we project our identities, through which we connect and which could lead to interaction in the real city. Secondly, the term “myspace” also implies that these media can help us to personalise the city: to focus only on the bits and connections that are of specific interest to us personally, to remake the city in our own image.

In this way, locative and mobile media promise to make the experience of the city more pleasant, more efficient, more exciting and more manageable. Yet there are also critics who point out that these exact developments endanger one of the central concepts in BLVD-urbanism: serendipity. Serendipity means that it is never completely predictable what or who you may encounter in the city, nor are these unexpected encounters avoidable. It is exactly these inevitable confrontations with unknown others, this experience of “social seams”, that are important: through these confrontations trust is built up, a community is forged, and (cultural) innovation is achieved. But when you start “searching” the city, rather than “browsing” around, this quality might get lost. Do these critics have a point? They might. In the most extreme negative scenario, public space might evaporate. People will use locative media to filter out serendipitous encounters as much as possible. This is a very defensive interpretation of MySpace urbanism, where people use technology to demarcate their space and refuse to let anyone else in – “this is my space, now get out!”.

But there is also another way in which MySpace urbanism can be interpreted. A space becomes “yours” when you engage with it. Not to claim it as solely yours, but to actively take some responsibility for that space; when you are actively (and collectively) taking part in its shaping. The collective maps mentioned above can be used as platforms for exchange and confrontation. They could even help to make visible collective rhythms that until now have gone unnoticed.

In reality, we will probably see a combination of both scenarios. People who use mobile media often find themselves shifting between different modes of being in the city. Sometimes they use their technology to withdraw from their actual surroundings, to form a private bubble, to demarcate TheirSpace: at other times, they will use the same devices for more public acts. They will engage in the space around them, and participate in OurSpace.

This article was written for receiver

Contact: Martijn De Waal

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Professor Arno Scharl is Head of the Department of New Media Technology at the private MODUL University, Vienna. Holding a PhD in Economics and Business Administration, he wrote his habilitation thesis on “Evolutionary Web Development” and currently focuses his research on text mining, integrating semantic and geospatial web technology, media monitoring, virtual communities and computer-mediated collaboration. Prior to his MODUL appointment, Scharl held professorships at Graz University of Technology and the University of Western Australia, and he was also a key researcher at the Austrian Competence Center for Knowledge Management. Last year, Springer published “The Geospatial Web”, a book co-edited by Scharl. His receiver contribution explains why geography is emerging as a fundamental principle for structuring information.

Website: http://www.geospatialweb.com

Illustration by Thomas Wellmann ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Contrary to early predictions that the internet will render geography obselete, the discipline is increasingly gaining importance. In a 1998 speech at the California Science Center, former US Vice President Al Gore, called for replacing the prevalent desktop metaphor with a “multi-resolution, three-dimensional representation of the planet, into which we can embed vast quantities of geo-referenced data” (Gore 1998). After the successful introduction of virtual globes such as NASA World Wind, Google Earth and MS Virtual Earth, achieving the vision of a Geospatial Web seems more realistic than ever. By integrating cartographic data with geotagged knowledge repositories and environmental indicators, the Geospatial web will revolutionize the production, distribution and consumption of media products.

Thanks to human space exploration, most users will instantly recognise our planet and find it an intuitive and effective metaphor to access and manage geotagged information. The appearance of geobrowsers in mainstream media coverage, further increases public acceptance of geospatial technology and results in keen competition between software and media companies. The underlying platforms are evolving quickly, gaining new functionality, data sources and interface options in rapid succession. Yet the currently available applications only hint at the true potential of geospatial technology. The Geospatial Web will have a profound impact on managing individual and organisational knowledge. It will not only reveal the context and geographic distribution of different types of location-based resources and services, but will also act as a catalyst for virtual communities by matching people of similar interests, browsing behaviour or geographic location.



Production, distribution and consumption of electronic content

While many innovations that gain ground in the media industry are largely invisible to the end user, geobrowsers have a direct impact on the consumption of news media; they change mainstream storytelling conventions and provide new ways of selecting and filtering news stories. By facilitating the access of annotated knowledge repositories, geobrowsers set the stage for the Geospatial Web as a new platform for content production and distribution. With little effort, users can upload geo-tagged stories and photos to central repositories, making them available to a global audience at the touch of a button. Such user-generated content is either provided publicy to create awareness and visibility, or to keep in contact with friends around the globe through social networking platforms. Technological advances, eg in terms of the resolution, bandwidth or GPS capabilities of mobile devices, also revolutionise the consumption of user-generated content – integrating various channels, making them available anywhere and anytime, and tailoring the information to the user’s current task and location.

Hybrid models of individual and collaborative content production are particularly suited for geobrowsers which can integrate and map individual sources (monographs, commentaries, blogs), edited sources (encyclopaedias, conference proceedings, traditional news services), evolutionary sources (Wiki applications, open-source project documentations) and automated sources (document summarisers, news aggregators). Geobrowsing technology not only affects the production of content, but also its distribution, packaging and consumption. For example, when specifying preferences for personalised news services, geobrowsers are effective tools to pinpoint locations and specify geographic areas to be covered by the news service.

The widespread availability of metadata will drive the transition towards the Geospatial Web. Emerging geospatial technology supports restructuring processes within the media sector, enhances the workflows of virtual newsrooms and promotes locally dispersed content production. It also facilitates the distribution of (customised) electronic content, which is usually characterised by network effects. Metcalfe’s law describes such effects by stipulating that the aggregate value of networks increases with approximately the square number of adopters. This results in first-mover advantages and lock-in effects, due to high switching costs once a network technology dominates the market. Consequently, successful business strategies, for providers of geobrowsing platforms and distributors of media products, build on top of these platforms, using innovation to attract and retain users and so quickly grow a community of like-minded individuals around a new technology, and successively enlarge this community through synergy effects with other products and services.

First-mover advantages gained through network effects might allow innovative media companies to dominate the information spaces built on top of these platforms. The content management systems of media companies often contain rich geospatial annotations, reflecting both the source and target geography of articles. For articles without geospatial references or only partial annotations, geotagging as outlined in the following section can add the missing information.



Mapping physical spaces

Information retrieval research has discovered geobrowsers as an effective platform to identify and access relevant information more effectively. An increasing number of applications use geospatial extensions for specifying queries and structuring the presentation of results. The availability of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) is largely responsible for the growing popularity of such applications, since they facilitate building third-party, on-line services on top of geospatial platforms.

The lack of geo-referenced data often hinders an even quicker adoption of geospatial technology, which has led to concentrated efforts to create the required annotations. This process of assigning geospatial context information is usually referred to as “geotagging”. It can either be performed manually by the author (through location-aware devices such as GPS-enabled cellular handsets when the document is being created) or automatically through natural language processing techniques to retrofit existing documents – eg on-line news media articles or other types of unstructured textual data found on the web. Such electronic resources usually contain metadata as explicit or implicit geographic references. News articles are particularly rich in such identifiers, since they usually discuss the location where an event took place, or where it was reported from. The New York Times article “Brazil, Alarmed, Reconsiders Policy on Climate Change”, for example, has a target geography of SOUTH AMERICA/BRAZIL/MANAUS and a source geography of NORTH AMERICA/UNITED STATES/NEW YORK. Once a location has been identified, precise spatial coordinates – latitude, longitude and altitude – can be assigned to the documents by querying geographic databases for matching entries.

Annotating documents with geospatial metadata paves the way for a range of geospatial applications. Figure 1, for example, shows how geographic visualisations of search results can improve the user interface of news media portals. The portal “Media Watch on Climate Change” (shown below) filters and visualises environmental web content from 150 news media sites across the US, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. The web portal has been developed as part of the IDIOM research project ( www.idiom.at) and uses the webLyzard suite of text mining tools ( www.weblyzard.com) to aggregate and annotate large collections of web documents. The consortium partners behind the project share an interest in the determinants and impacts of anthropogenic climate change, and in the potential of three-dimensional interface technology to support communication and collaboration in virtual communities.

Figure 1. Geographic visualisation of results for a query on ‘hybrid cars’; (Media Watch on Climate Change; www.ecoresearch.net/climate)

Mapping virtual spaces

Besides displaying geospatially referenced information, geobrowsers can also serve as a generic, image rendering engine to project other types of imagery. Diverting them from their traditional purpose, they can also be used to visualise “knowledge planets” based on layered thematic maps – visual representations of semantic information spaces based on a landscape metaphor. This metaphor allows the visualisation of massive amounts of textual data. At the time of map generation, the knowledge planet’s topography is determined by the content of the knowledge base. The peaks of the virtual landscape shown in figure 2 indicate abundant coverage on a particular topic, whereas valleys represent sparsely populated parts of the information space.

Figure 2. Knowledge Planet based on the NASA World Wind Java SDK

Summary and conclusion

In the competitive environment of new media, geography is emerging as a fundamental principle for structuring information. By integrating cartographic data with geotagged hypermedia, the Geospatial Web will serve as a catalyst of social change and enabler of a broad range of, as yet, unforeseen applications. Methods to “geo-enable” existing knowledge repositories through parsing geospatial references, deserve particular attention, since they represent a further step towards the “earth as universal desktop”, an idea widely popularised in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel “Snow Crash”:

“A globe about the size of a grapefruit, a perfectly detailed rendition of Planet Earth, hanging in space at arm’s length in front of his eyes. … It is a piece of CIC [Central Intelligence Corporation] software called, simply, Earth. It is the user interface that CIC uses to keep track of every bit of spatial information that it owns … It’s not just continents and oceans. It looks exactly like the Earth would look from a point in geosynchronous orbit directly above L.A., complete with weather systems – vast spinning galaxies of clouds, hovering just above the surface of the globe, casting gray shadows on the oceans and polar ice caps, fading and fragmenting into the sea. … The computer, bouncing low-powered lasers off his cornea, senses this change in emphasis, and then Hiro gasps as he seems to plunge downward toward the globe, like a space-walking astronaut who has just fallen out of his orbital groove.” (Stephenson 1992, 100ff.)

Besides changing individual working environments, geobrowsers are ideally suited for creating and maintaining location-aware communities, bringing people together who share common needs or desires – eg communities of friends and social contacts, gaming enthusiasts, political activists or professional acquaintances.

The compatibility of geospatial technology with current internet communication models, might help explain its unprecedented rate of adoption, from both organisational and individual perspectives. It integrates well with current protocols and therefore does not replace but complements established modes of navigating web resources. This process goes hand-in-hand with the transition towards the Web 2.0, a term that describes advances in web technology governed by strong network effects, and the harnessing of collective intelligence through customer self-service and algorithmic data management.

This article was written for receiver

It is based on updated material from the introductory chapter of The Geospatial Web, a book in Springer’s Advanced Information and Knowledge Processing Series ( www.geospatialweb.com). The Media Watch on Climate Change has been developed as part of the IDIOM and RAVEN research projects ( www.idiom.at; www.modul.ac.at/nmt/raven), funded by the Federal Ministry of Transport, Innovation & Technology as well as the Austrian Research Promotion Agency within the FIT-IT Semantic Systems Program ( www.fit-it.at).

Contact: Arno Scharl

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Anne Galloway recently completed a PhD in sociology and anthropology at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, which involved conducting an ethnographic study of the design of mobile and pervasive technologies. She is interested in connections between technological, spatial and cultural practices, and her current research explores design as a social and cultural activity and asks how social and cultural relations are designed. Galloway’s work has been presented to international audiences in technology, design, art, architecture, social and cultural studies, as well as published in a variety of books and journals. She currently teaches design and computation arts at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada. In her receiver contribution she takes a close look at community mapping and sensing projects, and points out both the opportunities and challenges for activism made possible by locative technologies.

Website: http://www.purselipsquarejaw.org

Illustration by Nadine Redlich ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

We often think of mobile technologies simply in terms of their communication capabilities, but their increasing ability to trace our movements and collect information about the spaces through which we pass, can also make it easier for people to keep track of the places and things that matter most to them. From geo-visualisations and mapping mash-ups, to the mobile geospatial web and location-based services, people’s relationships to places (and each other) are changing.

Community mapping and sensing projects that use commonly available consumer electronics as environmental measurement devices, enable people to collect and view a wide array of location-based data. As a form of public science, such projects stand to reinvigorate environmentally focused civic engagement. However, given public concerns around environmental risks and their connections to technological progress, I believe that this kind of active citizenship should promote more critical reflection on the values and goals of the very projects that expect to create such profound changes in these domains, and carefully consider the limits of its own power.


Urban sensing

Over the past few years major global industry players have increasingly partnered with university researchers and artists around the world to investigate the potential of large-scale and publicly accessible environmental sensing projects. Historically, environmental monitoring has been limited to fixed sensors, embedded in particular locations, under centralised control. In contrast, what Jeff Burke and his colleagues at UCLA call “participatory sensing”, or the ability of individuals to act as sensor nodes and come together with other people in order to form sensor networks, emphasises a more grassroots and decentralised approach to urban sensing.

For example, the US-based artists, activists and technologists of Preemptive Media have been exploring how both people and animals can be used as technologically enabled environmental sensors:

AIR (Area’s Immediate Reading) http://www.pm-air.net/index.php

“AIR is a public, social experiment in which people are invited to use Preemptive Media’s portable air monitoring devices to explore their neighborhoods and urban environments for pollution and fossil fuel burning hotspots … While AIR is designed to be a tool for individuals and groups to self identify pollution sources, it also serves as a platform to discuss energy politics and their impact on the environment, health and social groups in specific regions.”

Moving beyond people for data collection, Preemptive Media’s PigeonBlog (→ realtime map http://pigeonblog.mapyourcity.net/map/index.php) project recruits homing pigeons and equips them with sensors that relay data on-line and allow it to be plotted and visualised, in real-time, to anyone with an internet connection. By focussing on air pollution, both of these projects take up pervasive computing’s familiar mandate to make the invisible visible and demonstrate locative media’s interest in collective political action. Embodying what sociologist Bruno Latour has called “collectives of humans and non-humans”, AIR and PigeonBlog reconfigure political networks in terms of their capacity to collect and disseminate sensor data.

UK-based creative studio Proboscis, in collaboration with university researchers, has similar interests in using sensor technologies to enable public action around environmental issues:

Robotic Feral Public Authoring http://socialtapestries.net/feralrobots

“The Robotic Feral Public Authoring project seeks to bridge the fields of experimental robotics and pervasive place-based public authoring. It combines low-cost robotics with geo-annotation in an innovative way, to develop a novel approach for galvanising social activism, on a local level, around environmental issues. By adapting commercially available toy robots with a variety of sensors and uploading the readings to a spatial annotation database for visualisation, we have explored new ways in which the exclusiveness of pollution sensing and robotics can be dispelled, and a new sense of empowerment promoted for grass roots communities.”

Proboscis follows up on these ideas with Snout, a project that embeds sensor technologies in carnival-inspired costumes and encourages communities to “scavenge” free on-line mapping services to help put the data to use. Moving more explicitly into the realm of potential political action, the Robotic Feral Public Authoring and Snout projects make direct connections between the public’s ability to collect scientific data and the ability to effect social change. Similar to the Preemptive Media projects described above, these interventions focus on enabling local, non-expert knowledge production and sharing.

Another example with a pronounced emphasis on distributed environmental monitoring as a form of public science and political action, can be seen in the Common Sense research project. A collaboration between US-based university and industry partners, the project website employs clever wordplay and conjures revolutionary thinking by using Thomas Paine’s famous 1776 political tract, Common Sense, as its background image.

Common Sense http://citizensensing.org

“The Common Sense team is developing mobile environmental sensing platforms to support community action and citizen science. An increasing number of mobile devices have the potential to become personal environmental sensors. To this end, we are developing sensing platforms that allow individuals to collect environmental information [and] software applications that allow people to analyze, share and discuss this information, in order to influence environmental regulations and policies. We aim to develop new communication paradigms that empower communities to produce credible information that can be understood by non-experts, in order to effect positive societal change.”

Most recently working with City of San Francisco street-sweepers to map the city’s air quality on a street-by-street basis, the project is part of a larger effort to enable what the researchers call “citizen science”. By turning mobile phones into sensing devices, the researchers hope that public understandings of science and environmental issues will be improved, scientists will have access to larger and more detailed data sets, and people will be better prepared to participate in government and policy making activities.

Citizens as sensors / sensors as citizens

What all these exploratory projects have in common is a shared expectation that mobile sensing technologies can be effectively used to effect social or political change. Despite the timeliness and politically progressive nature of such endeavours, by focussing on environmental data as products or objects that can be used for future political action, all the projects shift attention away from the present politics of the data collection and interpretation processes.

For example, projects in this domain rarely, if ever, question the environmental or political impacts of the technologies they seek to employ for environmental and political activism. For example, the United Nations now estimates that almost 50 million tonnes of electronic waste are discarded each year. While the environmental costs of toxic e-waste are substantial and can be added to the environmental impact of manufacturing new electronics, the problem is exacerbated by a variety of related practices that disadvantage developing nations. While all of the projects discussed above advocate using technologies for socially, politically and environmentally positive ends, they also implicitly support existing consumption practices in the developed world, and hide the role that technological progress has played in creating the very problems they seek to improve.

When active citizenship requires access to particular technologies, people without access are effectively excluded from the democratic process. While it may be accurate to point out the ubiquity of mobile phone use, it is also worthwhile to account for how new technological applications stand to impact those who are absent from typical-use scenarios. Furthermore, while promoting public science is undeniably a laudable goal, it is also a rather complex one. Despite the emphasis on local knowledge production in such projects, the data collected still speak the global language of science. By implicitly supporting the notion that scientific data are the appropriate types of evidence a citizen can collect, political action relies on conformity to existing structures of knowledge and power. In other words, local knowledge is primarily configured as a matter of location, rather than definition, and the transformative power of the sensor citizen is limited to pre-existing interests. Finally, this complexity is further compounded by the capacity (or incapacity) of people to make sense of the data collected, not to mention their willingness (or unwillingness) to act as data collectors in the first place.



Emotional mapping

Now, what if technologically enabled activism was explicitly more playful, or fun, than simply collecting scientific data? Certainly PigeonBlog offers an unexpected twist on data collection, and both Snout and Robotic Feral Public Authoring emphasise the value of embedding these activities within existing cultural practices that are more creative and community-oriented. Yet, what if such objective or rational evidence was supplemented with more subjective or emotional evidence? What if sensing technologies were also used to record people’s fears or concerns about particular environments? And what if the public environmental record mapped our pleasures and joys too?

Since 2004, over 1500 people around the world have participated in the Bio Mapping project to create “emotion maps” of their cities and neighbourhoods. While all the projects mentioned above allow non-experts to collect data and share it in ways they find meaningful, the Bio Mapping project is unique in its desire and ability to collect more ambiguous data.

BIO MAPPING http://www.biomapping.net/

“Bio Mapping is a community mapping project in which … participants are wired up with an innovative device which records the wearer’s Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), which is a simple indicator of the emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location. People re-explore their local area by walking the neighbourhood with the device and on their return a map is created which visualises points of high and low arousal. By interpreting and annotating this data, communal emotion maps are constructed that are packed full of personal observations which show the areas that people feel strongly about and truly visualise the social space of a community.”

Since the project’s GSR device measures intensity of emotion, without being able to identify if an emotion is negative or positive, people must more actively interpret the collected data. Rather than treating data as a final product that can be used in particular ways, these data act more like materials that people can shape and reshape as they see fit. Not only does Bio Mapping locate individual bodies in shared environments, but in doing so it supports the collection and production of different kinds of knowledge. In turn, the political action it affords is arguably less normative and prescriptive, but no less effective.

Ultimately, I believe that researchers, artists and citizens should be encouraged to experiment with new ways of using mobile technologies, and to explore new forms of political action. Indeed, given the growing impact of global climate change, our pressing need for environmental activism opens up a productive space for critical intervention, and all of the projects discussed in this essay do just that. However, I also believe that we need to approach our activities in this area with a clear understanding of their boundaries and biases. Because, in the end, I believe that it will take working through – or around – these limitations in order to effect the most profound and lasting changes.

This article was written for receiver

Contact: Anne Galloway

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