Place: Networked Place

Place: The Networking of Public Space

Citation

Varnelis, Kazys, and Anne Friedberg. "Place: The Networking of Public Space." In Networked Publics, edited by Kazys Varnelis, 15-42. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.

DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/9780262220859.003.0002

Networked Publics is the product of the 2005 to 2006 research year at the University of Southern California's Annenberg Center for Communication. Other chapters cover culture, politics, and infrastructure, with an introduction by Mizuko Ito and a conclusion by Varnelis.

Authors

Kazys Varnelis, architectural historian and theorist, then director of the Network Architecture Lab at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.

Anne Friedberg, film and media theorist, holder of a PhD in Cinema Studies from NYU, and Chair of the Critical Studies Division in the School of Cinematic Arts at USC. She was named an Academy Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2009. She died in 2009.

Description

The chapter examines both the networking of space and the spatiality of digital networks. Varnelis and Friedberg argue that the spread of mobile phones and broadband has made technological networks accessible, ubiquitous, and mobile in daily life, and that this has altered the concept of place along with the sense of proximity and distance.

They identify five conditions: the everyday superimposition of real and virtual spaces, the rise of a mobile sense of place, the emergence of popular virtual worlds, the network as a socio-spatial model, and the growing use of mapping and tracking technologies.

The authors are explicit that these conditions are not produced by technology alone, and that technological development and practice are thoroughly imbricated in culture, society, and politics. They decline to treat the new arrangement as an improvement by default. Connection brings disconnection with it, and networks can consolidate power in the same act by which they disperse it. Their closing position is that place is not a source of stability but is again undergoing a deep and contested transformation.

Opening

The chapter opens in a Starbucks, with a narrator who has left phone and laptop in the car in order to write about place in network culture and finds that everyone around them is doing the opposite: buying mobile minutes, browsing, thumbing a Blackberry, downloading music. The observation is that people still gather at a communal watering hole and no longer reach across it, communicating instead with people far away.

The coffeehouse setting is chosen deliberately. Jürgen Habermas located the emergence of the public sphere in the early eighteenth century in the café, the learned society, and the salon, and Varnelis and Friedberg note that the sphere was a discursive site rather than a physical one, conducted as much in circulated print as within the walls of the coffeehouse. They add the qualification that the café carried its own divisions of power and access, being closed to women and to men of the wrong race, class, or ethnicity, and that women conducted deliberative discourse in separate settings such as the tea table and the public laundry.

Related Reading

• Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity
• The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces
• Digital Ground: Architecture, Pervasive Computing, and Environment
• Societies and Cities in the Age of Instant Access
• Placing Words: Symbols, Space, and the City
• The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape
• Else/Where: Mapping - New Cartographies of Networks and Territories
• Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance
• The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles
• In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture
• The Image of the City
• Equipotential Space: Freedom in Architecture

External Links

• Full chapter text, Networked Publics
• Chapter page, MIT Press