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= Place: The Networking of Public Space =


Place: Networked Place
=== Citation ===


by Kazys Varnelis and Anne Friedberg
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.<ref name="toc">[http://cast.b-ap.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/37/2016/10/Networked-Publics.pdf Networked Publics], full text PDF, table of contents.</ref>


Introduction
DOI: [https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262220859.003.0002 10.7551/mitpress/9780262220859.003.0002]


Contemporary life is dominated by the pervasiveness of the network. With the worldwide spread of the mobile phone and the growth of broadband in the developed world, technological networks are more accessible, more ubiquitous, and more mobile every day. The always-on, always-accessible network produces a broad set of changes to our concept of place, linking specific locales to a global continuum and thereby transforming our sense of proximity and distance.
''Networked Publics'' is the product of the 2005 to 2006 research year at the University of Southern California's Annenberg Center for Communication.<ref name="toc" /> Other chapters cover culture, politics, and infrastructure, with an introduction by Mizuko Ito and a conclusion by Varnelis.<ref name="toc" />


In the following chapter, we explore both the networking of space and the spatiality of the network, identifying a series of key conditions: the everyday superimposition of real and virtual spaces, the development of a mobile sense of place, the emergence of popular virtual worlds, the rise of the network as a socio-spatial model, and the growing use of mapping and tracking technologies. These changes are not simply produced by technology. On the contrary, the development and practices of technology (as well as the conceptual shifts that these new technological practices produce) are thoroughly imbricated in culture, society, and politics. To be clear, the new is not good by default. The conditions we observe are contested and give rise to new tensions as much as to new opportunities. With connection there is also disconnection, and networks can consolidate power in the very act of dispersing it. We will examine both the plusses and minuses of these conditions throughout the chapter.
=== Authors ===


Taken together, these changes are already radical. But it is likely they will be only the first steps in restructuring our concept of spatiality toward a reality of which we can only be partially aware, just as the first theorists of modernism could only partially understand the emerging condition of their day.
Kazys Varnelis, architectural historian and theorist, then director of the Network Architecture Lab at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.


Simultaneous Place: Networked Publics
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.<ref name="shannon">[https://brettany.wordpress.com/2012/08/11/varnelis-k-and-friedberg-a-2008-place-the-networking-of-public-space-in-_networked-publics_-k-varnelis-ed-cambridge-mit-press/ Varnelis, K. and Friedberg, A. (2008), Place: The Networking of Public Space], Brettany Shannon.</ref> She died in 2009.


“One hundred dollars for three thousand minutes,” a twenty-five-year-old man with a Farsi accent repeats into his mobile phone. The scene is the local Starbucks, where you’ve gone to get away from the all-consuming distraction the Internet introduces into your life. You’ve intentionally left your phone in the car in order to be blissfully unaware of any professional or personal obligations that might take you away from your task. You’ve even left your laptop behind so that you won’t be tempted by the queue of e-mails to catch up to. You’re in the café with your Moleskine notebook—a non-networked object ubiquitous among the digerati—trying to start an essay on the role of place in network culture and finding that the only way forward is to detach yourself from the network as much as possible. But the people surrounding you have other ideas. The man behind you is trying to commit himself more deeply to the network, purchasing a plan that will allow him to talk on his mobile phone for one-tenth of his waking hours every month. A woman next to you is browsing the Internet with her laptop, a late-career executive is thumbing his Blackberry,two students are studying together, and some teenagers are hanging out listening to music on their iPhones. While one texts her friends, the other downloads music from the iTunes store. A thirtysomething man is on his laptop working on a screenplay, while a few people are just reading books or the paper. You are all somehow drawn together by the lure of the generic (but branded) caffeinated beverage and the desire to share a similarly generic, but nonetheless communal, space with other humans with whom you are likely not to have any direct interaction.
=== Description ===


This is, as far as humanity goes, a scene that is simultaneously age-old and unprecedented. We gather at the communal watering hole as we always did; only now we don’t reach out to those around us. Instead, we communicate with far-flung souls using means that would be indistinguishable from magic for all but our most recent ancestors.
The chapter examines both the networking of space and the spatiality of digital networks.<ref name="oxford">[https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262220859.003.0002 Place: The Networking of Public Space], MIT Press Scholarship Online.</ref> 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.<ref name="oxford" />


That we open at a coffeehouse is not incidental. For theorist Jürgen Habermas, when the public sphere emerged in the early eighteenth century, it did so in the context of the café, the learned society, and the salon.[1] Together with the rituals of coffee drinking, the café increasingly provided both forum and fuel for critical debate about the latest pamphlets, newsletters, and broadsides. But the public sphere was not so much a physical place as a discursive site in which a literate public could conduct rational and critical debate. The assembly and dialogue that constituted this emerging public sphere occurred as much within the pages of newly circulated printed materials as it did within the walls of the coffeehouse. And yet, although Habermas’s ideas of the emancipatory potential of the public sphere were dependent on open models of communication and participation, the café maintained its own invisible divides of power and access. The spaces that Habermas championed as the original outposts of this deliberative democracy were not open to women, or to men not of the appropriate race, class, or ethnicity. Instead, women conducted different modes of deliberative discourse in separate spaces, such as the tea table and the public laundry.
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.<ref name="oxford" /><ref name="shannon" />


Read more: http://networkedpublics.org/book/place
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.<ref name="shannon" /> 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.<ref name="shannon" /> Their closing position is that place is not a source of stability but is again undergoing a deep and contested transformation.<ref name="shannon" />
 
=== 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 ===
 
* [http://networkedpublics.org/book/place Full chapter text], Networked Publics
* [https://direct.mit.edu/books/edited-volume/2818/chapter/76203/Place-The-Networking-of-Public-Space Chapter page], MIT Press
 
== References ==
 
<references />


[[Category:Articles]]
[[Category:Articles]]
[[Category:Book Excerpt]]
[[Category:Architecture]]

Latest revision as of 16:25, 24 August 2026

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.[1]

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.[1] Other chapters cover culture, politics, and infrastructure, with an introduction by Mizuko Ito and a conclusion by Varnelis.[1]

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.[2] She died in 2009.

Description

The chapter examines both the networking of space and the spatiality of digital networks.[3] 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.[3]

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.[3][2]

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.[2] 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.[2] Their closing position is that place is not a source of stability but is again undergoing a deep and contested transformation.[2]

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.

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Networked Publics, full text PDF, table of contents.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 Varnelis, K. and Friedberg, A. (2008), Place: The Networking of Public Space, Brettany Shannon.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Place: The Networking of Public Space, MIT Press Scholarship Online.
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