Place the Networking of Public Space

From Cyborg Anthro Wiki

Authors

Kazys Varnelis, architectural historian and theorist, then director of the Network Architecture Lab at Columbia University, and Anne Friedberg (1952–2009), film and media scholar at the University of Southern California and author of The Virtual Window.

Publication Details

"Place: The Networking of Public Space," in Kazys Varnelis, ed., Networked Publics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008, 15–42.[1]

Networked Publics was the product of a year-long collaborative research project at the Annenberg Center for Communication at USC, with chapters on place, culture, politics and infrastructure.

Description

The chapter's argument is a correction to two positions that dominated earlier writing about networks and place.

The first is the death of distance thesis: that networked communication would dissolve the significance of location, disperse cities and make physical place irrelevant. The second is its mirror image — that virtual space constitutes a separate realm which people enter and leave.

Varnelis and Friedberg argue that neither happened. Networked communication did not replace place; it augmented it. People did not leave cities; the most networked populations concentrated in them. And rather than dividing life into online and offline domains, network technology produced a condition in which physical location and networked communication are experienced simultaneously and continuously, so that being somewhere now includes being reachable from everywhere.

Key Ideas

  • Networked place. The condition the chapter names: place that is constituted jointly by physical location and by the networks running through it. A café with Wi-Fi is not a café plus an internet connection; it is a different kind of place, with different norms about attention, occupancy and what one is doing there.
  • Augmentation, not substitution. The general finding. Networked communication overwhelmingly supplements existing relationships and existing places rather than replacing them — people use it most with those they also see.
  • The privatisation of public space. Networked devices allow a person to carry a private envelope through public space, extending an older process — the car, the personal stereo — and raising the question of what remains of the public in a space where everyone is elsewhere. Compare Goffman on involvement shields.
  • Infrastructure is not neutral. Where networks are available, at what speed, and to whom, is a determinant of place — which returns the analysis to zoning, property and municipal policy rather than to technology.
  • The window as a persistent form. Friedberg's contribution connects the chapter to her larger argument that the screen inherits the cultural logic of the window and the frame, and that the multiplication of windows changes the structure of attention.

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

This chapter is the most economical statement available of a correction this field needs repeatedly. The two-worlds model — a real world and a virtual one, with people travelling between them — is intuitive, wrong, and remarkably persistent, and it produces bad analysis every time it is used. Varnelis and Friedberg replace it with a single augmented condition, which is also the premise of digital anthropology and of Mitchell's work.

References

  1. ↑ Place: The Networking of Public Space, in Networked Publics, MIT Press.
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