Download In so many public squares in cities throughout the world, people are

Net-local public spaces: Towards a culture of location
Adriana de Souza e Silva (North Carolina State University)
Eric Gordon (Emerson College)
www.urbancomm.org
1. Introduction
In public squares in cities throughout the world, people are walking, sitting,
talking, and increasingly, they are doing these things while speaking into their
phones or staring down into tiny screens cupped in the palms of their hands.
They are sharing physical space, but they are simultaneously involved
elsewhere. Many critics have lamented the decline of public spaces as they have
become cluttered with outside connections, drawing positive correlations
between global connections and local disconnections (Goldberger, 2003, Uzzell,
2008). David Uzzell has declared that technology use in public space is
equivalent to a virtual crime against humanity, where “places are being stolen
right from under our noses” (2008). We however, suggest that the practices of
engaging with net-local interfaces are altering the nature and use of public space.
Mediated by local devices, decisions about what to pay attention to are being
made in very different ways (Gordon and Bogen, 2009, Lanham, 2006); the
purview of what is near has expanded beyond the physically proximate, and
paying attention to an anonymous user at a neighboring street corner, visualized
on your Brightkite map for instance, can now be just as legitimate as paying
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attention to the unknown person standing next to you. This phenomenon does
present a challenge to commonly held attitudes about public space. As so
forcefully argued by urban historians and activists over the last several decades,
public space is a product of co-located individuals engaging in any variety of
social rituals and interactions (Whyte, 1980, Jacobs, 1969), resulting in stronger
communities (Leccese et al., 2000, Haas, 2008, Putnam, 2000) and safer streets
(Jacobs, 2002). When mediated interaction is added to the equation, the
apparent cohesion of public space is, indeed, brought into question. If someone
is talking on a phone, sending a text message, checking their Loopt map, or
uploading a Wikipedia article they may not smile at a passer-by or properly thank
the street vendor from whom they purchased a pretzel. While the use of mobile
devices in public might reduce the frequency of these familiar social rituals, it is
simultaneously extending and modifying those rituals into less familiar mediated
contexts. Contemporary society has created new contexts for interaction, not all
of which are solely determined by physical co-presence (Ling, 2008). Mediated
by net-local interfaces, co-presence can extend beyond the physical into a
networked environment. People can be aware of others’ presence through
markers on a map or a local tweet. Licoppe & Inada (2006) call this an onscreen
encounter. What’s interesting about these encounters is that they don’t exist in
opposition or even in parallel to physical co-presence, but increasingly, they are
experienced in dialogue with the physical situation.
“It is progressively more common to navigate two spaces simultaneously,”
argue Kazys Varnelis and Anne Friedberg, “to see digital devices and telephones
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as extensions of our mobile selves” (2008). While we agree with this general
sentiment, implicit to our understanding of network locality is that the self is not
mobile, but located. As such, the ability to navigate two spaces simultaneously is
actually the ability to consolidate and locate the spaces and information that they
associate with our “digital selves” into something of a hybrid space. Hybrid
spaces create “situations in which the borders between remote and contiguous
contexts no longer can be clearly defined" (de Souza e Silva, 2006). In this
paper, we examine the practices in which people engage to locate themselves
within these hybrid spaces. And more directly, how these practices are changing
the meaning and engagement with public space. We are not interested in
rehearsing the arguments against distraction. Certainly, if people are texting
while operating commuter trains, there is increased potential of accidents. We
whole-heartedly support the idea that people operating heavy machinery of any
kind should reduce all other activities while doing so. We seek to move beyond
the “texting while driving” debate (Kee, 2009) and are interested in how the
integration of information flows from digital networks into a local physical context
changes the nature of the local space and, cumulatively, changes the cultural
meaning of public space. People who are engaged with net-local interfaces
experience physical spaces differently. They engage with physical space as a
hybrid of physicality and virtuality, instances which are actually re-configured in a
constant process of mutual influence (de Souza e Silva & Sutko, virtual). In this
paper, we address how individual experiences are translated into an emerging
form of public space. What we call net-local public space is any space wherein
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people move between the immediately proximate and the mediately distant within
a carefully crafted set of social rituals that ultimately serves to extend the purview
of local space. Net-local public space involves all those sharing physical space,
and those connected to that physical space via networks. It involves all the
information and people immediately perceivable, and it involves the information
and people accessible via networks. As such, net-local public spaces include
those doing the navigating (the people with mobile devices), as well as those
being navigated (the people and information brought into the space through
physical co-present interactions and networked interactions). Furthermore,
because net-local public spaces, in essence, also correspond to urban spaces,
they also include all those people who are co-present in a physical setting, but
not necessarily using net-local interfaces.
Some critics have argued that any connection to a network in public space
removes the user from that space, removes them from the context of public, and
places them squarely within their familiar networks, thus posing a serious threat
to the future of public space and the social capital that would be built and
exchanged there (Wellman, 2002; (Hampton et al., 2009). This anxiety about
technology mediating distance is nothing new. Georg Simmel, in describing
technologies like the telescope and microscope, argued that these tools
transform what was “instinctive or unconscious” into something “more sure but
fragmented.” “What was distant before now comes closer, at a cost of greater
distance to what was previously closer” (Zeuner, 2003, Simmel and Frisby,
2004). And many critics have applied this idea to the mobile phone. Mobile
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phones build confidence and connection to that which is distant, but they do so at
the expense of that which is near (Gergen, 2002; Puro, 2002; Plant, 2001;
Habuchi, 2005).
But we diverge from this position. We argue that these new rituals
developing in public space around net-local interfaces are providing new contexts
for interaction and, by extension, new contexts for social cohesion, in such a way
that does not simply pull people out of the local space, but pulls the network into
local space. Co-presence is not mutually opposed to networked interaction—and
as emerging practices of technology develop, it is imperative that we see these
practices as constitutive of emerging forms of public space, and not simply as
threats to existent forms of social interaction.
We begin the paper by reconsidering the concept of public space as it
pertains to net-local interactions. Then, borrowing from sociologist Erving
Goffman, we focus on the traditional rituals that transpire within public spaces,
and we demonstrate how these rituals of co-presence are being challenged to
accommodate elements of network locality. As the nature of the situation
changes in these new public spaces, so, too, do the everyday rituals that
maintain the situation. In other words, how people make it clear to somebody
else that they’re paying attention to what they’re saying, or how someone carries
themselves in public so that they appear engaged. As people are being asked to
accommodate multiple levels of participation at once, the accepted behaviors
and social regulations in each of the levels changes to accommodate the new
scale of the situation. This is not simply a matter of multi-tasking; it is a matter of
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convincingly performing one’s engagement in the net-local situation. In the last
sections of this paper, we look at how net-local public space is represented and
understood in the collective practices of performing in these situations.
2. Good Public Spaces
Questions about urban public space have been vigorously debated for at least a
century. Georg Simmel (1971), writing in 1901, noted that the rapid increase in
external stimuli found everywhere in the city, was constructive of a new urban
subject, one capable of blocking things out at will and developing what he called
a “blasé attitude.” This metropolitan man, as he described it, was rational and
calculating. To accommodate everyday life (talking to strangers, buying food or
commuting to work) he had to exercise a kind of mental reserve. According to
Simmel: “If so many inner reactions were responses to the continuous external
contacts with innumerable people as are those in the small town, where one
knows almost everybody one meets and where one has a positive relation to
almost everyone, one would be completely atomized internally and come to an
unimaginable psychic state.” As such, the city was incomprehensible in its
unfiltered form, so having reserve was required to parse out the various social
situations from the aural and visual chaos of the urban street. Simmel’s “blasé
attitude,” in this sense, can be considered a type of interface that the urban
subject had to put on in order to filter the increasing amount of external stimuli
originating from urban public spaces. The city in its unfiltered form was
incomprehensible to the modern subject (Gordon, 2010). While Simmel was
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highly critical of this new urban subjectivity, he acknowledged the unprecedented
freedom enjoyed by the metropolitan man. Life in the metropolis forced a
seemingly unnatural rationalization of everyday life, but at the same time it
enabled a freedom to transgress social categories and transcend the traditional
limitations of public space.
Fast forward one hundred years, and Simmel’s observations still resonate.
At the time of Simmel’s writing, he noted that the city, and its associated
technologies, forced individuals to mentally adapt to its form. And ultimately, the
metropolis and its resulting metropolitan man, forced a restructuring of public
space. The town square in the small town, where everyone knew everyone else,
was considered the ideal form of public. But the new form of metropolitan life at
the turn of the 20th century changed that by adding anonymity and increased
sensory stimulation to the experience of being in public. Simmel comments that
the metropolitan man cannot return to the small town, as he would feel too
restricted. The smaller the social circle, he contends, “the more anxiously the
circle guards the achievements, the conduct of life, and the outlook of the
individual.” In the metropolis, and in what came to be celebrated as urban public
space, the individual reigned supreme even as he accommodated the limitations
of his reserve.
Today, there is a different kind of rationalization and compartmentalization
that take place within the minds of “metropolitan man.” Instead of the blasé
attitude, however, this relationship with the city is partly filtered by net-local
interfaces. The stimuli that compose the metropolis are no longer proximate in
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the traditional sense. The individual no longer has to deal only with what is in
front of him. Following the logic of the space of flows as defined by Manuel
Castells (2000), the metropolis extends into digital networks and its perception is
dependent on net-local interfaces. The rationalization of the metropolitan man is
aided by the hardware and software that he carries with him, such as mobile
phones, GPS devices, laptops, LMSN and mapping software. As formerly
mentioned, many critics interpreted the increasing network connectivity of the
metropolitan subject in urban spaces as a type of network individualism
(Welmann, 2002) in which people connect directly to one-another through the
network, but not to the physical space surrounding them. These types of
“telecocooning”, as defined by Habuchi (2002) or “selective sociality” (Matsuda,
2005), as forms of interaction with (the same) small group of friends via digital
networks while ignoring the larger social public sphere were at the core of
contemporary fears about the introduction of mobile technologies in the public
life. But just as we can characterize this trend as a propagation of the worst
elements of the blasé attitude, where human connections are rationalized into
computer code and public isolation, we can also understand this as yet another
shift in the meaning of public space and the freedoms (perceived or otherwise)
associated with that space. Traditional metropolitan public space is perhaps
becoming like the small town, where purely physically co-present social circles
seem oppressively small. Not being connected to a network, not having access
to information about where you are, is tantamount to being closed off to a
space’s potential (de Souza e Silva & Sutko, virtual). Along the lines of Simmel’s
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metropolis, net-local public space is a new social organization that produces an
increase in mental reserve; but at the same time, it produces a sense of freedom
traditionally associated with the metropolis. The person in net-local public space
is not limited to what is immediately proximate; she has the ability to associate
with information and people that are connected through net-local interfaces. This
perceived freedom of net-local public space is the same as the perceived
freedom Simmel noticed in group affiliations. While we are still dependent on
groups, he says, “it has become a matter of choice with whom one affiliates and
upon whom one is dependent.” As a result, we have expanded our “sphere of
freedom” (1955). So, net-local people not only develop person-to-person remote
connections (Wellman, 2002), but also person-to-space links, as well as personto-person nearby connections. In net-local spaces, users share anonymity by
virtue of being strangers in a city and intimacy through the use of shared
interfaces.
As net-local spaces become the norm, they are not necessarily
normalized, that is, they still might appear disruptive or strange in the larger
social context. From the outside, they might appear to be dead spaces,
collections of co-located individuals with nothing to say to one another (citation).
But in fact there is a great deal of nuance in these spaces, a great deal of social
exchange that is slowly carving out the rules and conditions of this new public
space. To understand net-local public spaces, we need to look at specific
practices of socialization taking place within them. How are people using netlocal interfaces and their corresponding hardware and software to engage with
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the proximate and the remote simultaneously? What rules of conduct are
assumed in these engagements and what new rules are emerging that expand
the possibilities of urban public space?
Traditionally, public spaces have been viewed as self-contained places.
Castells (2000) defined places as locales “whose form, function, and meaning
are self-contained within the boundaries of physical contiguity” (p. 453).
Accordingly, good interactions with public spaces have been considered those,
which were also limited to physical contiguity. The architectural critic Paul
Goldberger asserts that “you are not on Madison Avenue if you are holding a little
object to your ear that pulls you toward a person in Omaha” (p. ?). Good public
space, in this respect, is a space to which one gives their undivided attention.
“When a piece of geography is doing what it is supposed to do, it encourages
you to feel a connection to it that, as in marriage, forsakes all others” (2003).
This connection to public space that Goldberger describes is, like absolute
attention in marriage, an ideal. But more than just an affectation that one can turn
on and off, an ideal space, like an ideal marriage, requires a significant level of
trust. Paying absolute attention to any one thing requires that one trusts that not
paying attention to anything else will not put them at risk: at risk of personal
harm, or at risk of missing something important. But there are different kinds of
trust: trust in a close friend or a spouse and a more generalizable trust in “the
way things work.” Robert Putnam calls the latter “thin trust.” Distinct from thick
trust, or “trust embedded in personal relations that are strong, frequent and
nested in wider networks,” thin trust involves “the generalized other” and rests
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implicitly on some background of shared social networks and expectations of
reciprocity” (Putnam, 2000). So, while thick trust is what makes you trust your
spouse when they say they are going to pick up the kids, thin trust is what makes
you trust that the person walking down the street is not going to stab you.
According to political scientists Wendy Rahn and John Transue, this trust in the
generalized other can be viewed as a “’standing decision’ to give most people –
even those whom one does not know from direct experience – the benefit of the
doubt” (qtd. in Putnam, 2000). Thin trust is based on a sense of generalized
reciprocity – that not only will we give people the benefit of the doubt, but we
expect that others give us the benefit of the doubt as well. Trust in a marriage,
therefore, the kind of trust that leads to undivided attention (or the intention of
achieving it), is based both on the thick trust that one has of their spouse, and the
thin trust that one has in the institution of marriage. Likewise, trust in a public
space, the kind that leads to undivided attention (or the intention of achieving it),
might include trusting in familiar people that occupy the space (neighbors,
friends, shopkeeper, etc.), but it also likely includes thin trust in the anonymous
people who occupy the street, perhaps even the street itself.
The idea of thin trust is challenged by Turo-Kimo Lehtonen and Pasi
Mäenpää’s (1997) notion of street sociability, which they derive from Simmel’s
concept of sociality. Street sociability is “a particular form of sociality, of being at
once interested and indifferent and anonymous” (Lehtonen & Mäenpää, 1997, p.
156). Street sociability thus is based on the aleatory nature of street life, which
includes the playful excitement of walking on the streets that comes from the
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chance that something special, unusual and unexpected could happen. While we
are supposed to trust anonymous others while on the streets, there is also a
tension that arises from the intrinsic unpredictability of public spaces. However,
as Lehtonen and Mäenpää also note, every form of public sociality carries implicit
and unspoken rules, and “if the implicit rules of street sociability are not followed,
the aleatory element, the feeling that ‘something unexpected might happen’,
starts to generate fear” (p. 161). So sociability in urban environments is created
by a balance between trust and unpredictability, that is, the intrinsic trust in
others based on the unspoken rules of street sociability allows us to comfortably
walk on the streets, even if those around us remain anonymous. This trust is
generally based on the assumption that others are like us, and will therefore
behave like we would (de Souza e Silva and Sutko, MCS).
For Lehtonen and Mäenpää, as for Simmel (1950), anonymity provides a
safe façade for the individual self. Differences among strangers congregating in
an urban environment are masked and mitigated by the shared anonymity of the
individuals. But while Simmel emphasizes the freedom of the metropolitan man in
the form of anonymity and privacy, Lehtonen and Mäenpää note that this does
not signify freedom of expression, since people are bonded to each other in a
complex network of expectations and social norms, which constitute thin trust.
Thin trust can be divided into two categories: thin trust in institutions or
interfaces and thin trust in the users of those institutions or interfaces. In the first
category, as it pertains to net-local spaces, there needs to be trust in all the
interfaces involved in the situation—that means, the interface of the physical
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space as well as any digital interface that may be augmenting that space. We
have a generalized trust in the civility of people in public space—we know that
they will mostly keep to themselves and any interaction will be prescribed by
other familiar social rituals. We also have a generalized trust in the digital
interface with which we are engaged—including operating systems, applications,
and particular functions within applications. The second category of thin trust is
the generalized trust in the people using the interfaces. Trusting that someone
talking on a mobile phone is acceptably present in the situation, and not mentally
disturbed, requires not only a trust in the interface, but also a trust in how that
person is using it. We have a generalized trust that the phone will not be used to
ignite a bomb. Just as we have a generalized trust that automobiles on the road
will not cross over into opposing traffic or drive onto the sidewalk. While these
things do happen, while there are breaches in this trust, they are rare enough so
that we can still generally trust users to behave in ways that are conducive to
public gatherings.
But more than being constructed through individual desires, isolated from
historical and cultural influences; thin trust is determined by evolving social
norms. The familiarity of social rituals, or practices within interfaces, becomes the
background to any successful situation. Emile Durkheim emphasized the
importance of what he called totems, or recognizable symbols, that function to
organize social rituals. So, for instance, the cross is a totem for a certain kind of
religious ritual, or the lights dimming in a theater is a totem to mark the beginning
of the show. They are shorthand versions of complex instruction manuals.
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Richard Ling (2008), in his analysis of social rituals as they pertain to mobile
phone use, suggests that the Durkheimian totem has been replaced by what
James Katz and Mark Aakhus (2002) call “perpetual contact,” or the persistent
and everyday interactions obviated by mobile phones. In other words, the
discrete totems Durkehim discussed have been diffused into pervasive rituals
because connection is no longer intermittent. Perpetual contact is enough to
organize social interactions. We agree with this sentiment and extend Ling’s
analysis beyond the traditional functionality of mobile phones (voice and text
communication). The pervasiveness of net-local practices are developing and
sustaining new kinds of social rituals in new kinds of hybrid spaces, that are
dependent not only on the outward behavior of using mobile devices, but also on
the located nature of the information retrieved with the devices. When one’s
location is tracked, when one is consistently aware of all the information that is
nearby, the thin trust in the resulting hybrid space is transposed onto the rituals
that organize and maintain those spaces.
Thin trust in net-local public space is thin trust in all the technological
practices that compose that space. Effectively, public space is a collection of
minor social contracts, where the experience of the whole is determined by the
relative intactness of the constitutive parts. But, indeed, the complexity added to
any public space by virtue of mobile devices is going to pose challenges to the
established rituals developed for physically co-present interaction. And it requires
that the participants in any public space share a general understanding of the
technologies being brought to bear on the situation. If someone were to bring a
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hologram machine into a subway, for instance, the situation would almost
certainly be disrupted by the novelty of the technology. There would be no
baseline from which to build trust. As mobile devices are becoming a regular part
of our social landscape, they can now be accepted into the general framework of
social interactions, making it possible for specific net-local interfaces to alter the
situation, without disrupting it. The sociologist Randall Collins (2004) argues that
co-present situations are dependent upon participants being “mutually aware of
each other’s focus of attention.” By that he means that their focus of attention
must be co-located in a physical space. But as net-local interfaces are further
normalized, mutual awareness of attention will take place in a variety of ways,
from the verbal “uh huh” as someone is talking, to the meandering dot on a Loopt
map. In the next section, we take a closer look at the social dynamics of the netlocal situation. Specifically, how do people communicate to one another that they
are sharing a space, and how do people integrate the information from net-local
interfaces into the social rituals that compose that space?
3. Defining the Net-Local Situation
We turn to sociologist Erving Goffman to elucidate the actual practice of these
minor social contracts that compose net-local public space. This might seem like
a counter intuitive approach, as Goffman is a theorist of face-to-face interactions,
concerned primarily with a unit of analysis he calls the “situation,” or “the full
spatial environment anywhere” (1963). While Goffman pays little attention to
mediated interactions in situations, he provides a very productive framework from
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which to approach the problem, There are social rituals that compose every
situation; these rituals are organized by a set of expectations and the
performances born of the meeting of those expectations. In his book Behavior in
Public Places, he directly addresses how these expectations and performances
play out in public. Concerning the public street, he says, “there is a tendency in
Western society to define these places as the scene of an overriding social
occasion to which other occasions ought to be subordinated” (1963). The ideal of
the public street, and by extension public space, is itself the overriding social
occasion to which Goffman refers. While he is referring to the physical space of
the street, we will make the argument that Goffman’s formulation of behavior in
public places can appropriately be applied to the net-local public space.
Goffman admits that the society has an expectation that public spaces be
comprised of each individual’s undivided attention. But he is quick to point out
that engagement, even in important matters like public space, is highly variable,
and typically consists of two kinds of involvement: dominating and subordinate.
“A dominating involvement,” according to Goffman, “is one whose claims upon an
individual the social occasion obliges him to be ready to recognize; a subordinate
involvement is one he is allowed to sustain only to the degree, and during the
time, that his attention is patently not required by the involvement that dominates
him” (1963). In public spaces, the situation manufactured by the physical
composition of things and people is dominating in most cases. When we’re
physically proximate to others, even in non-intimate contexts like a public street,
we expect the dominating involvement to be that physical space and co-present
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others. However, in net-local situations, we acknowledge that there are other
outlets for involvement, and we accept them, insofar as they don’t interfere with
the established order of the dominating involvement.
When a person sending a text message while walking, bumps into
somebody else, this is an obvious affront to the social expectations of that
person’s dominating involvement. When a person moves to the side of a
crowded sidewalk to send that text message, the correspondence between the
dominating and subordinate involvements is not as clear. That person is
ostensibly removing themselves from their dominating involvement with the
physical space, but they have not caused any harm or inflicted any injury. They
are, however, seemingly ignoring their obligation to participate in the outward
appearances of a space that feels truly public. We do this all the time, with or
without the aid of mobile devices. Reading on a train removes a person from the
dominating involvement of the space. Walking around with an iPod functions the
same way. Even daydreaming on a street corner can momentarily “take
someone away.” But there is a middle ground created when a person “goes
away,” but does so while maintaining the dominating involvement of the local
space. Goffman recognizes that when people look as though they are coming
from someplace or going to someplace, they exhibit an “objective that leaves the
actual focus of attention free for other things; one’s destination, and therefore
one’s dominant involvement, lie outside the situation” (1963). In this case, there
is a disconnect between the typically dominant involvement of the physical space
and the person’s focus of attention which rests outside of it. But what happens
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when the person’s attention is focused on the map of where they happen to be
standing, or a person in their social network that happens to be down the street?
The dominating involvement is not limited to the physical situation, it is clear that
the physical situation remains integral to the larger situation, or, the net-local
situation. Looking at nearby restaurant reviews on an iPhone map momentarily
distract one’s attention, but with the goal of applying that distraction to the
physical situation. While it might appear that the person is ‘lolling,’ as Goffman
calls it, they are in fact, deliberately extending the purview of the local situation.
But in some ways it doesn’t matter. Looking down at a device in a situation
where other co-present individuals expect that you exhibit attention to the
physical space, might appear disruptive, regardless of individual intent. The user,
then, is often responsible for maintaining two separate situations, each with a set
of rules that need to be followed. In the physical space, there is a rule against
“‘having no purpose’, or being disengaged.” As a result, users appropriate
“untaxing involvements to rationalize or mask desired lolling—a way of covering
one’s physical presence in a situation with a veneer of acceptable visible activity”
(1963). This might mean sitting on a bench, or stopping in a nearby alcove with
one’s mobile phone. In the digital space, there are rules as well. There is
etiquette in updating one’s Loopt account, and there are prohibitions against
ignoring someone in your network that is “very close.” If someone is one block
away, it is rather rude to ignore him or her. This situation would require that the
user cover up their involvement by appearing “otherwise engaged.” Perhaps an
update like: “I’m in a meeting” or, “rushing to get the train.” In both the physical
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and digital spaces, the local space is the dominating involvement; however, the
local space is not always physical. In the physical space of the street, the Loopt
interface is brought to bear on one’s assessment of the “situation,” and likewise,
in the Loopt interface, the physical space determines what one says and to
whom one says it. In net-local public space, local space is the dominanting
involvement, even as one’s attention is directed to a digital interface.
Within the net-local situation, therefore, the coherence of the physical
situation remains, while the user’s attention is freed up to a veritable ecology of
foci that are not only tolerated, but constructive of the experience and
appearance of public space. That person on the street might be sending a text
message to a colleague half way across the world, but they also might be
searching for information about where they’re standing (restaurant reviews,
urban history, etc.), or communicating with a person who happens to be in the
coffee shop across the street. The composition of net-local public spaces can
tolerate a wide variety of attentional foci as long as the physical situation is not
disregarded (as in the case of the texter running into somebody else). In fact, as
the accepted norms of public space shift to accommodate this variety,
expectations will shift along with them. Net-local public space is a place where
one can shift their attention outside of the physical situation, because the
situation is understood to be larger than what is physically near. As such, public
spaces become outlets for what we call attentional diversity and the freedoms
associated with it. What that public space looks like might be quite different than
the one about which Simmel commented; but regardless of appearances, it
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continues to propagate implications of individual freedoms—the freedom to
choose where and how to engage in local space.
4. ”Getting Away With Going Away”
Simmel lamented that the metropolis forced individuals, as condition of their
freedom, to shield themselves with a “blasé attitude” —a way of (dis)engaging
with the world characterized by a rational and calculating reserve. Goffman
approaches the problem of continued and intense involvement in public spaces
from a different, yet complimentary angle. Instead of assuming changes in a
permanent mental state to deal with the consistently chaotic state of the
metropolis, Goffman notices that, in public social situations, people grasp on to
opportunities to momentarily escape. He calls this “going away.”
When outwardly participating in a social activity within a social situation,
an individual can allow his attention to turn from what he and everyone
else considers the real or serious world, and give himself up for a time to a
playlike world in which he alone participates. This kind of inward
emigration from the gathering may be called 'away’” (1963).
Away, for Goffman, means a mental retreat into another space. It means not
being in the situation. It doesn’t, however, necessarily imply a disruption to the
situation. Individuals can “get away” while the social ritual that organizes the
situation remains in tact. For instance, letting one’s mind wander on a crowded
sidewalk is often aided by looking at a billboard, staring at a magazine, or a
mobile phone. Goffman calls this “getting away with going away” (1963, 70). We
focus attention on things in the physical environment to create the impression
that we are only momentarily distracted from the situation.
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Or, increasingly, it is not uncommon for people to begin from the state of
“away” so that they have control over when they return. Take, for example, the
use of ear buds and an mp3 player on a crowded street corner. If one runs into a
casual acquaintance while waiting to cross a street, and that acquaintance has
white buds dangling from her ears, she has permission to behave somewhat
differently in the situation. She can smile and nod, while keeping the earbuds in
place, and then turn her head to once again go away. Or, if she really wanted to
talk to the interlocutor, she could remove her earbuds and engage in the kind of
small talk that would normally be required for this casual connection. If, on the
other hand, she did not have the earbuds at all, and wanted not to be insulting,
she would have to go with the latter option. Social regulations would restrict her
from turning away and ignoring the encounter all together. In this case, the
technology provides a means of filtering the city, or creating an outward
appearance of the reserve to which Simmel referred, but in such a way that
empowers the individual to engage in the public situation on her own terms.
In this example, the individual starts from the position of away, and instead
of getting away with going away, she is getting away with being away. And her
dominating involvement is likely someplace other than the local situation. This
example demonstrates how wielding control over the terms of engagement is
important for an individual’s sense of mastery over a space, but may not be
conducive for good public spaces. The net-local situation, on the other hand, is
one in which the individual wields control, but the dominating involvement
remains local. Even when one’s attention is directed towards a device, they are
21
involved in the local situation. Even as they “go away” from the physical situation
to review messages on their iPhone, they are using the local to organize their
involvement in the digital interface. While there are still social regulations that
organize the physical and digital spaces independently of one other, because the
dominant involvement is the same, there is a relaxation on the level of policing
that each situation receives. If three people are walking down a street, looking for
a restaurant in which they want to stop for dinner, and one of the people “goes
away” to look at the Yelp iPhone application that finds nearby restaurant reviews,
it is easy for him to “get away with going away,” as his leaving the physical
situation is understood as being in service to the net-local situation more
generally.
Goffman explains:
In public, we are allowed to become fairly deeply involved in talk with
others we are with, providing this does not lead us to block traffic or
intrude on the sound preserve of others; presumably our capacity to share
talk with one another implies we are able to share it with others who see
us talking. So, too, we can conduct a conversation aloud over an
unboothed street phone while either turning our back to the flow of
pedestrian traffic or watching it in an abstracted way, with the words being
thought improper; for even though our coparticipation is not visually
present, a natural one can be taken to exist, and an accounting is
available as to where, cognitively speaking, we have gone, and, morever,
that this ‘where’ is a familiar place to which we could be duly recalled
should events warrant” (1963).
This is one of the few passages in Goffman’s writing where he actually refers to
mediated conversation. What’s important in this example is not what’s on the
other end of that unboothed street phone, but that the person talking on the
phone has gone away somewhere familiar. As long as the other people in the
situation understand where he has gone, the act of going away is less likely to
22
disrupt the situation. Especially, as is the case in the net-local situation, if one
goes away as a means of enhancing local interaction and convincingly
demonstrates the continuity in their dominating involvement, then it is quite easy
to “get away with going away.”
Simmel’s blasé comportment of the modern metropolitan man may itself
be found or mediated in a different way through net-local mobile interfaces. The
blasé attitude is a form of social non-recognition. To make an anachronistic
metaphor: an urbanite is blasé because she does not recognize you on her
“social radar”. Now with locative applications that literally function as social
radars, our ability to be blasé also has a technological imperative. It is even
possible to be blasé in entirely new ways. If the blasé attitude is a form of social
non-recognition, then on one level, an urbanite can be blasé by simply not
recognizing people who do not have similar applications. Additionally, through
those applications she can also not recognize or take a reserved attitude towards
others that are socially co-present through the interface (de Souza e Silva &
Sutko, MCS).
Consider this example: a woman is sitting in a café sharing a cup of coffee
with her friend. Just as she begins to respond to a question about her family, her
phone, which is sitting on the table, buzzes; the woman pauses her sentence
mid-stream and looks down at her phone to see the incoming message. She tilts
the phone at a 30-degree angle to view the screen, sees that she has been
pinged by a person who happens to be at a restaurant across the street and who
saw her update on Loopt. She pauses for a brief moment, sends off a quick text
23
message, and puts the phone down. Her friend, noticeably disturbed, settles
back in her chair while her friend sends the message. As soon as she was
finished, she explained that her other friend, a mutual acquaintance, was nearby
and wanted to stop by to say hello. After this explanation, the tension was quickly
broken and the conversation turned to how this mutual acquaintance is doing.
The situation was significantly altered by this “interruption,” but because the
excuse for going away was directed at the local situation, it was quite easy for
her to get away with it.
Now consider this: that same woman is sitting in that same café talking to
that same friend. In mid sentence, her phone rings. She stops, looks at the
incoming number, and answers the call. She lifts a single finger and silently
mouths “one moment” to her physically co-present friend. She proceeds to talk
on the phone about plans for the upcoming weekend to her friend on the phone.
In this case, she turns her dominating involvement away from the local space
with little intention of covering up her absence. She keeps the conversation short
and returns to the physical situation with “I’m sorry about that, I’ve been trying to
connect with her for weeks.” Her friend smiles and they continue talking. While
the phone call did not permanently disrupt the situation, and the woman showed
deference to her physically co-present friend, she did not integrate the phone call
into the local situation. This was not a net-local situation. There are a number of
ways this encounter could have played out, from relatively innocuous to
downright rude (Plant, 2000), but in the example above, the phone call was
disconnected from the local situation. The phone call is taking place in spite of
24
the space. In the net-local situation, despite one’s need to “go away” to engage
with a device, going away reinforces the dominant involvement with the local.
In reference to another kind of device all together, Keith Hampton and
Neeti Gupta (2008) study the use of public wi-fi in coffee shops as a means of
evaluating mediated public space. Their study produced mixed results. On one
hand, they warn against what they call “public privatism.” It is possible, they
argue, that “public wi-fi will consist of private cocoons of interaction that benefit
existing close ties, distract from interactions with co-present others and ultimately
reinforce the existing trend toward privatism” (page). But they also contend that
the opposite may be true – that people might use the technology to engage more
deeply in the places they occupy. In their study of café’s in Boston and Seattle,
they identified two types of wi-fi users: true mobiles, where the coffee shops
functioned as a “backdrop for activities focused on the completion of work,” and
placemakers, who “used their laptops as a premise to enter and engage in the
‘social hubbub’ of the space.” Whereas true mobiles use their laptops as a shield
against public interaction, placemakers use their laptops as an excuse to
integrate into the scene. They seem eager to engage in conversation about what
they’re doing and provide openings, like looking up from their screens and even
turning their screens so that others can see. The true mobile goes away in the
device in spite of the local situation, whereas the placemaker goes away to
attract local attention. This study is instructive, in that it calls attention to varied
approaches to the same interface—in this case, the general category of the
laptop. The difference between approaches lies entirely in the intention of the
25
user and how those intentions are communicated within the context of the local
situation.
There is evidence that people are becoming more brazen with their
decisions to go away, choosing remote contacts over proximate connections
(Gournay, 2002, Habuchi, 2005). But there is also evidence that going away
does not require turning one’s back on the dominating involvement of the local
situation. So rather than banning the use of technology from public spaces in
order to preserve the local situation, as it occurs with silent cars in passenger
trains, and signs suggesting that passengers shouldn’t use their phones in
Japanese subways, net-local interfaces are actually providing the tools with
which the local situation maintains its dominance in the perpetual contact with
networks. And as these interfaces become more pervasive, practices will shift to
accommodate them. So far in this paper, we have addressed the promise of netlocal public spaces and then the reality of net-local situations. In the next section,
we look to how the net-local situation is translated into public space through very
specific and deliberate acts of performance.
5. Net-Local Performance
Information is not just something to consume. One’s awareness of proximate
information (and people) can also be a context for performance. When urbanist
William Whyte described “good public space,” he referred to the Seagram
Building plaza in Manhattan, where: “on a good day, there would be a hundred
and fifty people sitting, sunbathing, picnicking, and schmoozing—idly gossiping,
26
talking ‘nothing talk’” (1980). For Whyte, the publicness of the space was the
outward appearance of people engaging with one another, even if those
engagements had no content (‘nothing talk’). Architects and urban designers
have so completely bought into this representation of public that, for decades,
they have tried vigorously to reproduce similar spaces, if not in actual fact than
only in appearance, by designing pedestrian intersections and street furniture to
produce the appropriate impressions (Leccese et al., 2000). This
conceptualization of public has a long history in the digital realm as well. Since
the 1990s, designers of chat rooms, MUDS, and MOOs have represented
spaces that gave the impression of being public (Dibbel, 1993, Rheingold, 1993).
In LambdaMOO, an early chat room, private spaces were referred to as
“bedrooms,” and public spaces as “living rooms.” The intention was to create
spaces for idle talk, for serendipity, where in the spirit of “good public spaces,”
people would just happen upon one another.
So, while good public spaces were spaces that invited idle chatter, great
public spaces were spaces that mandated it. Whyte refers to the plazas in
Rockefeller Center in midtown Manhattan as a great space. It is great because it
maintains its publicity through performance. Despite popular opinion, he says,
“the lower plaza is only one part, and it is not where most of the people are. They
are in the tiers of an amphitheater. The people in the lower plaza provide the
show. In winter, there is skating; in summer, an open-air café and frequent
concerts. The great bulk of the people—usually about 80 percent—are up above:
at the railings along the street, along the mezzanine level just below, or on the
27
broad walkway heading down from Fifth Avenue” (59). While praising the space,
he laments that it is often misunderstood. Architects are constantly borrowing
from the design of the plaza, but as means of creating a space for crowds, they
typically reproduce only the lower plaza, without its context. “They wind up
having a stage without a theater, a hole without the doughnut. And they wonder
what went wrong” (1980). Watching a performance (or performing), whether
official or unofficial, is part of what makes public spaces work. Watching the ice
skaters from Fifth Avenue is an acceptable form of going away. And, indeed, iceskating in Rockefeller Center, as a kind of performance, is also a kind of going
away. In the ideal situation, the occupant of the space can move between these
two practices near seamlessly.
Goffman acknowledges the importance of performance in everyday
interactions. He goes so far as to use the analogies of a stage with its front and
back regions (1959). When on stage, people behave in a manner dictated by the
rules and regulations of a performance. Actors remain loyal to the script and the
audience expects that they do so. But they do not have to always remain on
stage; they may retreat backstage where social regulations are not quite as
policed. After a scene, an actor may leave the stage and complain to the
stagehands that the “audience seems really dead tonight.” And yet, when he
returns onstage, he is expected to conceal this opinion. In one example, Goffman
describes a waiter (1959). The waiter behaves differently when in the dining
room (front-region) than when in the kitchen (back-region). He speaks to the
patrons of the restaurant in one way and he speaks to the other waiters and
28
kitchen staff in quite another. What is interesting about this situation is that all the
actors understand the distinction between the front region and back region. The
restaurant patrons know that the waiter might retreat backstage and speak in a
different manner; and of course the kitchen staff knows that the waiter will have
to perform when he goes “onstage.” The performance remains stable just as long
as the regions do not blur. If the kitchen conversation were to be overheard in the
dining room, the performance would be disrupted. So consider again what makes
Rockefeller Center work. It’s not just that there are the two plazas: one for the
performer and one for the audience. But it is a “great public space” because one
doesn’t have to remain on or off stage. There is fluidity between the two
spaces—where performance can become voyeurism, and voyeurism can
become just an appearance of voyeurism as one attends to other matters. And
each act of performance and voyeurism references the other. The local situation
is central.
The sociologist Joshua Meyrowitz (1985) provides an interesting
addendum to Goffman’s formulation. He contends that Goffman too heavily relies
on physical metaphors for his explanations and, in fact, the distinction between
the front and back regions can also be prescribed by “information flows.” The
movement between and front and backstage in Goffman’s example is quite
literally tied to space. The actor has to move from one space to another. But
Meyrowitz contends that “the patterns of information-flow, whether direct or
mediated, help to define the situation and the notions of appropriate style and
action” (1985). In other words, the nature of the performance, while partly
29
determined by the physical setting of the plaza, can be influenced by an
informational change in the situation. For example, Meyrowitz uses the example
of the waiter’s boss walking into the kitchen. All of a sudden, the backstage
transforms into the front; the relaxed social regulations corresponding with the
kitchen conversation are now transformed, and the waiter is forced to reconfigure
his performance accordingly. Or in some cases, we might imagine that instead of
the binary between front and back, there is reason to construct what Goffman
calls a “double-front stage” (Goffman, 1959).
But instead of two stages, per se, the net-local public space requires
performing for two audiences on a hybrid stage. Playing a location-based-mobile
game like Botfighers, for example, necessitates that the player performs for other
players while she simultaneously performs for bystanders sharing the physical
street. That Botfighters’ players could be at the other side of the city, or sharing
the same street block, complicates the situation. So, the distinction between local
and remote is blurred, since even remote players can be digitally co-present on
the player’s cell phone screen and therefore “participating” in the local situation.
Additionally, there is another tension that arises between physically co-present
people, who might or might not be part of the game. The distinction between
players and bystanders is complicated. Even though bystanders are likely not
playing the game, they are integrated into the net-local situation by virtue of
being part of a game audience. However, in some cases, this audience is pulled
into the game space. For example, in the hybrid reality game Uncle Roy All
Around You, street players are supposed to ask for information to people on the
30
streets in order to find the location of uncle Roy’s office. Likewise, Botfighters
players might get directions from strangers in order to find a place where a
“robot” (another player) is. If an anonymous stranger is influencing the outcome
of the game, is that person considered part of the game or the game audience?
The net-local public space creates a hybridized front stage while blurring the
distinction between audiences.
We can also look to the practice of live-tweeting as an example of netlocal public spaces working within hybridized front stages. While there are many
ways to use the micro-blogging service Twitter, including advertising and political
campaigning, professional networking and socializing, it is primarily used for
individuals to provide updates to friends or colleagues about what they are
thinking or doing.. The practice of “live tweeting” is particularly interesting for
network locality. A “performer” documents with updates and photographs
everywhere they happen to be. In some respects, this is about inhabiting the
lower plaza while one’s Twitter followers gather around to observe. The person
doing the live tweeting needs to work at the performance and as such needs to
go away for the amount of time it requires to create a tweet. While one could
argue that this practice primarily serves to disengage the performer from the
situation, it is possible to say the same about the ice skater in Rockefeller center.
The dominating interest of the ice skater is clear and observable; and the
dominating interest of the Twitterer is less clear. However, the outcomes are
comparable. The space of the performance becomes the spectacle for the
observers (whether standing on Fifth Avenue or following on Twitter), and the
31
space of the observers (again, whether standing on Fifth Avenue or following on
Twitter) becomes the context from which the public space garners meaning.
While the rules of the immediate situation still apply for the performer sending the
tweets (in that they need not run into somebody else while doing it), the audience
(people who are reading the tweets) produces an additional set of rules for the
performer: The tweets need to be somewhat consistent and the images
engaging. However, like in the Botfighters case, it is no longer clear whether the
audience is local or remote—and in fact, this distinction might no longer apply.
With the new location-based API, Twitter has also become location aware, which
means that people physically sharing the same location with the tweet sender
(let’s say Rockefeller Center) are also able to read about the space just by
standing at that location and opening the application on their phones. So, the
audience might be either at the other side of the world or in Rockefeller Center, in
which case the very act of reading a real-time tweet about Rockefeller Center
might change how they pay attention to that space. Therefore, the net-local
public space is an amalgamation of hybrid audiences and hybrid rule sets for
interacting with local and remote contexts, which are increasingly blurred with
each other.
This would tend to reinforce Meyerwitz’s point: the design of physical
space matters for the organization of the social situation, but information flows
can be equally as influential. With this, Whyte’s concern about the architect’s lack
of consideration for the variable spaces of performance is brought into relief. Just
as people often misunderstand the functionality of the plazas at Rockefeller
32
Center, so too do people misunderstand how information flows influence the
possibilities for engaging in a space.
All good public spaces require performance. Net-local public spaces
require a more nuanced performance whereby the connections between the
physically proximate and networked spaces are convincingly portrayed as a
hybrid. In the plazas at Rockefeller Center, the rules of performance are clear.
Even though there are considerable circumstances for one to get away with
going away, there is a persistent thin trust in the rules of the space and a
corresponding comfort level in arranging one’s attention to the various aspects of
public performance. But in net-local spaces, the rules are not so clearly
established because they exist within multiple communication contexts. The
norms of the digital interfaces are coupled with the norms of the physical
interfaces. And the thin trust in the correspondence between the various
information flows is not necessarily well established. This hybridity of public netlocal spaces in regards to its rules and the way it reshapes the relationships
between people and places is also highlighted when we consider how public
spaces acquire different meanings and values via net-local interfaces.
6. Attributing value to net-local public spaces
Steven Johnson (2003) once suggested that locative media “will help amplify the
existing character and value of urban places” (p. 101). As we have described in
this paper, especially with mobile net-local interfaces, these applications and
software act as filters of public spaces, they challenge and strengthen traditional
33
social norms of trust and anonymity in local and remote situations, and they
coordinate information flows within net-local spaces through acts of performance.
In this last section, we address how local spaces take on meaning and value for
the individuals and groups who perceive them.
In writing of the experience of meeting strangers and getting to know
someone, Goffman (1959) suggests that, “since the reality that the individual is
concerned with is unperceivable at the moment, appearances must be relied
upon in its stead. And, paradoxically, the more the individual is concerned with
the reality that is not available to perception, the more must he concentrate his
attention on appearances” (p. 249). In short, people rely on the little they know
about others to make judgments about all they do not know. In Goffman’s terms,
we might be able to speak of the social experience of using net-local interfaces
not just as a presentation of self, but as a presentation of space in everyday life.
To speak of the presentation of space in everyday life is to suggest a relationship
between the nature and appearance of a place, in relation to the people that it
contains. A place that is unfamiliar might gain familiarity by virtue of the
appearance–literally—of one or more friends. Let’s say there is a place
downtown that you have never been, but suddenly when you open Loopt in your
mobile phone, you see there are 10 friends in your buddy list in that location. The
knowledge of the presence of friends in a certain location can transform that
location into something desirable. This exemplifies the presentation of space,
whereby the qualities of an unknown location are judged by the quality of the
people present (de Souza e Silva & Sutko, MCS). By accessing locative
34
information created by others, in the forms of Yelp restaurant recommendations,
local Wikipedia articles, or location-based tweets, users might feel more intimate
with urban spaces, developing a (previously lacking) sense of familiarity with
them. So, connections with known users might lead to connections to unknown
places. If you know there are people like you around, you might be able to trust
those places and feel more comfortable in them.
Conversely, unknown people who are in a known place may themselves
be deemed acceptable based on a person’s prior knowledge of that place. For
example, the net-local mobile application Citysense displays heatmaps that
illustrate spatial concentrations of people in a given space. If you notice that a
number of people are congregating at a little known public beach, which you are
particularly fond of, you might, by extension, feel fondness for them and be
compelled to meet them. This follows the traditional public space model, as
presented by Whyte (1980), by which the presence of co-located people
validates a place. For example, he considered the Seagram Building plaza in
Manhattan a “good public space” because of the likelihood of interpersonal
encounters. The people one encounters in familiar places are themselves
somewhat familiar because of their presence and affinity for the shared place.
The difference, however, is that in the case of Citysense, the assessment of a
place is done remotely via the mobile interface.
These examples demonstrate “the social navigation of space” or the
“spatial navigation of sociability”. In other words, the social network informs and
influences the space, and the space informs and influences the social network.
35
This observation is significant not because it is new, since philosophers of space
have often pointed to the role of the social in constructing space (Lefebvre, 1991;
de Certeau, 1988), but because net-local mobile interfaces highlight and bring to
the fore those connections between the social and the spatial.
A concern that might arise with the use of net-local interfaces in public
spaces, however, is a tendency to “over-filter” the situation, opting for
encountering the same, and excluding the different. In her empirical study of
Dodgeball, Humphreys (2007) observed that Dodgeball users do not necessarily
meet more (new, diverse) people but instead hang out at different places with the
same people. Humphreys also found that people use Dodgeball to meet existing
friends out on the town, and in meeting those friends, do not necessarily connect
to the general public, “thus leading to a kind of social molecularization” (p. 356).
He affirmed that even when users did “meet new people through Dodgeball,
these people were fairly demographically similar” (Humphreys, 2007, p. 356). In
other words, the diversity of the urban may become masked by these
technologies. Rather than chance encounters of difference, this suggests that
Dodgeball facilitates chance encounters of sameness.
Negroponte already warned that the logistical centering of the subject
encouraged by the use of digital technologies would result in a self-centered
apprehension of media and the world—what sociologists call homophily
(McPherson et al., 2001). When everything extraneous (information or people)
can be filtered so easily, it replaces curiosity with convenience, and serendipity
with perceived relevance. New media critic Ethan Zuckerman describes the “odd
36
paradox at work in the world of the pervasive web. On the one hand, it’s easier
than ever before for an individual to share her ideas with the entire world. On the
other hand, the mechanisms we use to discover ideas may make it harder for us
to discover different ideas from different people” (2007). Or even to discover
different people.
Homophilous tendencies, however, are not solely a consequence of the
use of new digital interfaces, nor are they new phenomena in social interactions
in public spaces. Simmel theorized that the blasé attitude of the metropolitan
man was a cultivated appearance of indifference in order to psychologically
protect the self from the constant flood of difference. The urbanite adopted a
façade of disinterest to remove himself from the masses. Likewise, Lehtonen and
Mänpää suggested that part of the fun of street sociability derives from the
uncertainty of specific events coupled with the certainty that those events will fall
into familiar event categories.
However, as we have seen, net-local mobile interfaces, by making
homophilous tendencies explicit and visible, can turn public unknown spaces into
familiar places. If you know there are people like you around, you might be able
to trust that place and feel more comfortable in it. Furthermore, when homophily
is correlated with location, as in the case of LooptMix, or Brightkite, or Twitter, the
situation changes. It is difficult to conclude that a local geographical filter leads to
homophily. In fact, it may be that just the opposite is true. It would seem to
contradict those critics who decry the deteriorating effects of network
technologies on public space (Hampton et al., 2009, Katz and Rice, 2002).
37
Instead of redirecting users’ attention to like-minded and physically absent
networks, it directs attention to one’s immediate surroundings, and its possibility
of heterogeneity. The user can be near a diversity of things and people because
the search filter is that which is physically near.
So, net-local interfaces can also encourage heterophilous tendencies, by
allowing users to infer qualities about anonymous strangers based on a place.
The thin trust one has in and about a place can transfer over to the strangers
amassing in that place. Trust, prior knowledge, and sociability are mediators of
the relationship between the known and the unknown, connecting the familiar
with the unfamiliar and people with places and with each other.
7. Conclusion
Simmel ends his 1901 essay ”the Metropolis and Mental Life” with this: “Since
such forces of life have grown into the roots and into the crown of the whole of
the historical life in which we, in our fleeting existence, as a cell, belong only as a
part, it is not our task either to accuse or to pardon, but only to understand”
(italics added). Likewise, we seek to understand net-local public spaces so that
we might begin to understand how net-local interfaces are integrating themselves
into everyday urban spaces and how this integration is altering the promises and
practices of good public spaces. People are using these tools in a variety of ways
and on a regular basis bringing the reality of network access to bear on everyday
interactions in public space. In some cases, they are using these tools to
distance themselves from public life, “getting away with being away,” but in other
38
cases, they are using the tools to expand the purview of public space by bringing
local information in networks to bear on local physical space. What we want to
communicate here is that the pervasiveness of mobile technologies in public
spaces does not necessarily lead to their disintegration. Net-local public space
provides a counter example for all of those who decry the effects of technology
on public space. Network locality suggests that public space is far too complex to
diagnose. And as the imperative to locate people and things within pervasive
networks continues to grow in influence, so, too, will the resulting public spaces.
As a result, good, vibrant public spaces will have to accommodate this
imperative, and become a platform for the various modalities of engaging with
local life—whether physically proximate or in digital networks.
39
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