(Via Grinding).
Tagcities
They talk to my friend Kelly at the beginning.
Banksy contributed several pieces to Santa’s Ghetto an “anarchic concept gallery” in Behleham.
BBC gallery of Banksy’s pieces.
(via Digg).
I have a piece up on Alterati today about M.I.A and her new album Kala:
M.I.A’s new album Kala whips listeners through the poorest corners of the world, moving too quickly to quite distinguish between the various locales. Is this Rio or Trinidad? Calcutta or London? Wait, the Australian outback? It’s all blurred, mashed-up.
M.I.A brings us straight to the bleeding edge of modern culture. While indie rock endlessly recycles the past, M.I.A is busy remixing the future. In his essay The Sudden Stardom of the Third-World City†Rana Dasgupta wrote “Is it going too far to suggest that our sudden interest in books and films about the Third-World city stems from the sense that they may provide effective preparation for our future survival in London, New York or Paris? Our fast-moving media culture, groping always for any image of the ‘new’ that can be used to produce more astonishment, operates in a zone slightly ahead of knowledge.†In other words, westerners are increasingly looking to the Third-World to catch a glimpse of our own future.
Something’s bothering me about my mobile technology and public space post (besides sounding like an anarcho-hippie by talking about “reclaiming” something), and no one’s called me on it. I utterly failed to make a case for why these changes to public space might be bad.
My attitude towards social change is usually brutal: evolve or die (or, in less harsh terms, “go with the flow”). So am I being hypocritical here? Should I just accept the evaporation of third places and individualization/interiority of public space? Is my resistance to living a life with sound hampered by iPods, viewed through LCD screen of a digital camera mere neophobia?
I think for the most part the desire for public space to be shared is a matter of preference. It’s fine for some people to want to “opt out” by disappearing into the comforting nullification of headphones and laptops.And if we want to make a comparison – is “then” (the pre near-ubiquitous wifi and iPods time) better than “now”? I’d say no – high storage capacity mp3 players and free high speed internet in public places are great tools that have made many new experiences and activities possible.
Besides “just getting used to it,” I can think of two main avenues for the furthering of the public experience:
1. “Tech free zones.” – Adam Greenfield predicted long ago that one of the first business models in the “ubicomp” world would be “dead zones” where there was no ubicomp. (See his book Everware).
2. Technological solutions. More mobile social technology. There’s more and more of this sort of stuff coming out, we’re getting closer to the world envisioned in The Headmap Manifesto. Twitter seems to have taken off, but it doesn’t have any location awareness or “discovery” features (Dodgeball was close to this, but looks to be dead). Plazes seems interesting as well, but it’s never really taken off (I’ve never really used it… and it’s still in beta?).
This post Is The Bedouin Worker Killing The Third Place? got me thinking again about the subject of mobile technology and public space. Years ago, there was thread on Margin Walker about “third places” and the concept of “fourth places.”
To sum up, the “first place” is home, the “second place” is work and the “third place” is, as Adam summed up nicely, “those locales neither home nor work that are critical platforms for socialization.” Places like coffee shops and bars. Adam went on to speculate about the possibility of the emergence of “fourth places” – public, social work places (some more notes on this here).
This sounded great, but what actually seems to have happened is that 3rd places have been hijacked and turned into 4th places. I’ve seen more and more posts about this on various blogs over the past couple years, and have observed it myself here in Portland. It seems like coffee shops are becoming more like libraries – everyone’s got their heads down workin’ on something, everyone’s being very quiet.
The iPod exacerbates the problem. I’ve always been sorta bugged by people with their ears stuck in their disc/walkmans, but portable mp3 players have brought this to a more critical level. What headphones essentially do is turn public space into private space by cutting off or dampening public/shared sound and replacing it with a private soundtrack. Sound is a crucial aspect of a shared space, but what happens when it is no longer shared? It seems to be increasingly unlikely for spontaneous conversations to occur in public when individuals are clearly showing that they are not listening to each other, and are inhabiting a whole separate (private) world.
Cell phones are actually not as bad as either laptops or headphones. The cell phone connects to spaces, and essentially disrupts both – both ends of the call are effected by the location of each end, and any bystanders are effected as well. In other words, the cell phone user is not removed from their surroundings, but changes it and is changed by it. The users of laptops and headphones withdraw.
Bars are relatively unaffected by all of this – they remain predominantly social spaces and I don’t see too many people zoning out to iPods at them. But practically all other public space, from buses to stores to the sidewalk to parks, seem to be consumed.
What efforts are being made to counteract this? In the above link, Piers Fawkes notes a coffee shop that restricts laptop use to certain tables. Victrola in Seattle turns wifi off entirely on weekends. This doesn’t stop the podpeople from zoning out to their headphones, but I suppose it’s an effort. Fawkes also notes a meet-up called Likemind that tends to claim a lot of space from the laptoppers. PDX Occulture tends to do the same thing at our meet-ups.
Are there any other interesting attempts to reclaim public space?
Part 1 of a new series I’m doing at WorldChanging’s Portland blog is up.
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