Intimations of Everyday Life

Author

Anne Galloway, a Canadian sociologist and design researcher, now at Victoria University of Wellington. She wrote this article while a doctoral student at Carleton University, working at the intersection of science and technology studies, urban sociology and ubiquitous computing.

Citation

Galloway, Anne. "Intimations of everyday life: Ubiquitous computing and the city." Cultural Studies 18, nos. 2–3 (2004): 384–408.

Description

The article was among the first pieces of cultural-studies scholarship to take ubiquitous computing seriously as an urban rather than a technical development, and it did so before the field had a name outside computer science.

Galloway's argument proceeds by putting two literatures together that had not been in contact. From computing, Mark Weiser's programme at PARC and the emerging work on context-awareness, pervasive computing and locative media. From social theory, Lefebvre's critique of everyday life and production of space, Michel de Certeau on tactics and walking in the city, and the Situationist practices of dérive and psychogeography.

Her central move is to insist that ubiquitous computing is a project about everyday life — that is its explicit ambition — and that everyday life is precisely what Lefebvre and de Certeau identified as the site where power operates and is resisted. This means ubicomp cannot be evaluated as a technical programme. To embed computation in the routines of a city is to intervene in the production of urban space, whether or not the engineers involved understand it that way.

Key Ideas

• Ubicomp as spatial production. Following Lefebvre: an instrumented street is a differently produced space, not the same street with added services. See The Production of Space.
• Tactics against strategies. De Certeau's distinction, applied to pervasive systems. Institutions deploy strategies from a fixed position of power; users improvise tactics within them. Galloway's interest is in the tactical — the appropriations, misuses and workarounds that pervasive systems do not anticipate.
• Everyday life is not residual. The routine, unremarkable and habitual is where technology becomes consequential, because that is where it stops being noticed.
• The politics of seamlessness. A system designed to disappear is a system that cannot be inspected, contested or refused. Galloway's argument here anticipates Mark Weiser's own later ambivalence and the "seamful design" position developed by Matthew Chalmers and others.
• Playful and artistic practice as research. Her sustained attention to locative art and urban games as legitimate investigations of the same questions, rather than as diversions from them.

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

This article is the bridge between critical urban theory and ubiquitous computing, and it was built early. Its lasting contribution is the insistence that a technology whose stated goal is to become invisible has thereby made a political choice, and that the design literature's vocabulary of "seamlessness" and "calm" needs to be read alongside a literature that has been studying the politics of the taken-for-granted for fifty years. Compare Everyware, which reaches similar conclusions from the design side two years later.

Related Reading

• Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing
• Henri Lefebvre
• The Production of Space
• Calm Technology
• PARC Research
• Beyond Locative Media