InfoTechSpace

It may not seem evident from how this anecdote starts out, but I swear it's relevant.

My fiancé's brother was telling me recently about some medical research he's been doing. He works with lung transplant patients. His research from the last couple of years has been correlating transplant survival rates with race and socioeconomic status. The bottom line is, if he can show that some people are at a significant survival disadvantage because of their demographic, only then can steps be taken to remedy that.

The sort of information he can get from hospital records is along the lines of age, race, health background, address. They apparently do *not* keep precise records of income levels. So when he was researching emphysema survival rates, he was missing an important factor -- socioeconomic status. He was (I think) getting *some* correlation between race and transplant survival rates, but not that much, not enough to make a very good case.

So what he ended up doing was combining his data with publicly available geodemographic census data. Once he did that and started looking at who got put on the transplant lists in the first place he found some interesting things. Some good significant data that showed a trend that was not quite expected:

• white people who got transplants came from affluent neighborhoods that were on average 96% white.
• black people who got transplants came from affluent neighborhoods that were on average 96% white.
• people of all ethnicities from poorer and blacker neighborhoods were a lot more likely to die.

His use of geodemographic data was actually something of a methodological innovation in the field of medical research. I think it does a great job of exposing latent discrimination based on geodemographics, even if it's unarticulated. In this case, articulating his data in the way he did exposed unfairness and provided an opportunity to remedy it.

(I am reminded of a passage in Theresa Caldeira's book about Sao Paolo, City of Walls, in which she talks about how Sao Paolo jails, in the guise of being "colorblind", don't keep records of inmates' race -- and as a result the glaring racism present in criminal arrest and prosecution there never gets addressed.)

So, I see this as using the tools of the hegemony to stick it to them, quite successfully at that.

This is not to *disagree* with this week's readings on geodemographics, per se, just to point out another more hopeful scenario.

Posted by Amanda Williams at 08:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Just a thought about Scott's discussion of surnames. He descriibes how "among some peoples," a person can have many names that relate to different contexts such as relationships or social settings. I recall something that I read that related this practice of names to a sense of place, which he does not bring into the discussion. The idea was that with aural-oral culture names were contextual and that with written language names were not. I don't know how far this generalization holds, but it is an interesting idea. It is hard for us to imagine never having seen a phone directory with a list of names, and our own name on that list, or never to have seen our name written at all. A name that is only a sound that is heard or called out (and one does not call out one's own name at all), always exists only when you are present. When you go to a different place your name can change because that is where you are and so where your name is. There is no other abstracted place, like the god's eye view that Scott describes of a city, where your name can also be abstracted.
I also wanted to remark that perhaps the impulse to invent the airplane was itself the same impulse to see the city from the God's-eye-view, so fulfilling the latter not by coincidence but from the same trajectory of that desire to remove oneself to the higher plane. It is interesting to me that there is this trajectory among some people, who have often weilded power, to oversee and yet be hidden at the same time. A true god-like view. Increasing control by making others more legible and visible, and creating new ways to obscure the self.
This is the "seeing like the state," then, and I find it interesting that Scott does give this kind of autonomy to the state itself. (Not unlike the autonomy given to software in last week's readings). It is as if the state acheives the god-like view while the individual at its head never does. Maybe that is true. For all of one person's power to re-construct a city, that one person never really acheives the all-seeing view. The visibility we talk about today with the potential linking of databases is perhaps similar in that it is how the database "sees" even if it is never really acheived, no one ever links them all together. What the articles we read last week described is perhaps how the "database sees" in the same way that the conceptual "state" sees. It is a metaphor, but one that does tell us something. If we are organized in databases instead of the maps, lists, and urban plans of the modern state, is that a fundamental shift?
(I'd like to talk more about language since it keeps coming up. It does seem like we have to understand language in order to understand the place and time ideas we are tackling. The fact that we do not believe in the power of a magical curse, in the power of words to saturate and actually enter us and act upon us, might tell us about our sense of place now. Language has come up in our readings but we haven't discussed it at length.)
One thing that we keep critiquing is whether the authors of these articles "get it right" but it seems like place is such a mutable thing that can always be imagined in new ways. Thus, what changes is our ability to imagine it one way or another. Some of these authors seem to ask us to meditate on a way of seeing place that we don't often think about. If that is the case then this sense of place is not "real" because it is not in the general everyday imagination of place, but is a stretch. Another way to go about a study of place would be more like Basso's approach where he accesses the images of place of a group of people, but again it is different perhaps from how the reader has imagined place on his own. What Scott contributes to this is the idea which he makes quite clear in his title "seeing like a state." That is somewhere in between. He seems to say that the state sees place like this, while we may not in our everyday lives.
So, 1) why are we trying to stretch our imagination of place? and 2) if we're not trying to stretch it, just let it be, then why is it so hard to think about what place means now? What if we succeed in imagining place in these many different ways, will we really end up with a new idea of place, or just none? Just no senses at all?! That might just be where I am at right now in the arc of this class, my head too cluttered...
g'night all-

Posted by Marisa Cohn at 11:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The readings for this week all dealt in one way or the other with a notion of identity construction through spatial representation, spatial interpretation or spatially target consumerism, but also with the creation of spatiality through symbolic stories, activities, practices, and ideas created by the people. De Certeau was mentioned again (I think in Goss’s paper) in relation to surveillance and strategic use of geographic information systems, and could also be related to Curry’s theorizing on topography and the art of memory: “One creates a new place by acting, routinizing, narrating, and in the process, creating an account of what constitutes a place, of what in a place is possible and what is not possible. Places are performed”. A different dimension of construction of spatiality is reached (even though based on the same principles) when one talks about “nation development”, “modern colonization”, or “homogenizing on a global level”. Reading the geographers with Ferguson in mind raises questions such as “To which degree are tools for spatial practice and functional represented established within in everyday life by average people to produce feelings of security in public, to represent a “proper” self-image and to efficiently produce certain outcomes?”, “Are these tools still enactments of power-knowledge over social space when users apply them to move more freely within a strange and unfamiliar space?”, “Does practiced technology for spatiality re-configure subjects through disciplining surveillance or is the notion of the panopticon rather turned up side down empowering the public with a tool that informs, criticizes, and raises awareness?”. Latter one seems simply impossible if one is located outside of a certain Western standard or outside a social group that knows how to adopt these tools in an idiosyncratic manner. Moving through different places always implies adopting different lifestyles that are not only related to the specific spatial configuration, but also to social network and professional status. This also requires individuals adaptation to different situations and new forms of spatial representations. No matter if such environments impose new discoveries or day-to-day habits, people will make strictly designed streets messy, make fun of imposed information systems or use them within their own local system of power struggles. However, there remains a certain level of state or public control, of influence on individual habits that only transforms individual perception but also the collective. Individual identities are suddenly more transparent to an outside world than to the individual and it remains to ask if current technologies such as GIS motivate re-appropriation of the pre-imposed by local tactics or rather resignation of the consumer.

Posted by Silvia Lindtner at 11:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

a recurrent duality fuels the concepts formulated in a lot of the papers. from de certeau's strategic elite and tactical weak applied to the controller/controllees of the 'code' to scott's state leader homogenizing the space or their inhabitants, an exchange or services takes places connecting those apparently opposite bodies often through the help of middle men (airport workers, oil company employees, civil servant). one problem i have with ferguson's paper (seeing like an oil company) is where he applies the process of homogenization. scott's homogenized grid is the frame directing the 'services' of the state, linking its leaders to the people. it feels to me that if you want to apply the same idea to global corporations, you must analyze the homogenization process that occurs where the 'service' returns, the gas station. for sake of comparing, (and i might get ahead of myself as scott might have mentionned something in relation to this somewhere else in the book) take Hydro-Quebec that serves electricity to a majority of the province of Quebec, the grid form of the cities facilitates how the electricity gets to each and everyone's residence, but you couldn't say that the small recluse town that forms by the electric dam is homogenized in the same way.

flip flopping in this puddle of ideas, the decortication of the postal service in Curry's paper could be applied to the zoning of cellular phones and their evolution. each new tower expends my/their coverage and, at the same time, increases the precision of the tracking capacities of the company, gain some, lose some. and we get back to this access of information, and i can't relate to paul's uncredited flight as i almost fly cargo style, but the last time i got my phone stolen and called the phone company so they could tell me what phone number the person called with my phone and they said they didn't have the information, i almost went to buy a sheriff party pack at the dollar store just so i could ask them again with a badge.

Posted by Bruno Nadeau at 10:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I think Scott does a superb job of presenting the progressive development of geographic and demographic cataloging in a state and Goss carries the analysis into our modern environment. As I read these articles the thought I keep coming back to is the tension that occurs between the promise of efficiency/greater convenience/ease of use/better service for the average person and the exercise of power over that person. Wherin a democracy the citizenry can vote on many matters of public policy, the policies regarding information seem to fall outside that realm. How silly would it be to vote on something like the implementation of a Zone Improvement Plan? I'm not sure anymore.

I think the alarmist view that was touched on during discussion last week comes from the fear of the background software/code developing into Baudrillard's hyperreality. Scott reinforces this idea when he says that the goal of the state is to reduce society to the "administrative grid of its observations" [p82]. We're already firmly planted in this grid by default, without much hope of escaping it. We could try and tactically evade it, but as Goss notes in his conclusion, the employment of tactics "are constrained by the deadly serious intent of strategy". I don't think there is any instrinsic harm (besides me not liking it) in someone knowing every piece of quantitative information about me. I think the concern is that the aggregate numbers that describe us will speak louder than our voices.

Posted by Mark Roland at 09:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Valverde's paper was a fun read, as were the others; the intention behind a group of people in commmittee who purpose together to form a certain type of community via ordinances and covenants (software, if you will) has been mine to share with other reasonably sane adult individuals (no criminal charges were ever actually filed, althought there were several threats, as well as the usual nasty Civil lawsuits) in the past. I was the leader of a gang of thugs and oppressor of hundreds, via laws and ordinances, all codified in a thick publication, now available online!

The Home Owner's Association (HOA) appears as a sub-species of the municipalities that Valverde describes, though even more powerless than the local city, it is even more universally feared and despised. I bring this political mongrel into the discussion because I think it shows most clearly to the electorate the naked intention of the creators of its software, the intended space/place relationship, and more clearly shows the attendant occasional near-violent reactions it elicits by select members of the local electorate.

In particular, no one thinks there is anything brave and true about restrictions on the type of plant material to be 'installed' in one's lawn but there are certainly emotional connections to both say, the very thought of restricting the freedom one has to plant a Sequoia Redwood tree in the front yard to the need to restrict all plants in Our Community to native varieties that are drought-tolerant and inoffensive to the other flora and fauna, provided they are all less than six (6) feet tall at the time of physical maturity as defined in Arborists-R-Us publication 123.

So, the Sociological and the Technical meet; the battle is joined and there is nothing like it. Oleanders are out because of the Oleander blight that is sweeping the country, and no, there can't be any thought of non-native species or we'll sue! The take-away (I think) is that the technical aspects of place/space engage over a rough and ill-defined skirmish line. There are laws of interaction to be discovered here that may inform us to the good of all, and the reduction of lawyer's bloated incomes.

There are lessons to be learned in how to approach technological aspects of these sociological formations (space/place). Proper framing of the technological issues can, at least, facilitate reasonably bloodless sociological change. At least, that is where I shall take my stand....

Best/Tom H.

Posted by Tom Herring at 08:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Scott’s “Seeing like a State” is just brilliant. There is no better word to describe it. The connections between design principles (e.g. legibility of city) and motives of governance are remarkable and they have been outstandingly analyzed by Scott. In fact, I feel inspired by all the readings I have read so far this week. When I started my graduate studies at the Department of Planning Policy and Design, I remember I kept looking for the “theory” in planning, urban design, and public health in all my courses. I realized that there was hardly any. This field seemed to draw from architecture, sociology, and political science (which is wonderful!) but very much seemed to be guided by, as Valverde captures this excellently in her thesis, by “…ad hoc mix of administrative habits, responsiveness to middle class citizens’ complaints, even when driven by purely aesthetic or idiosyncratic motives, and common sense ideas of what is or is not a serious breach of urban order.” I might add here that the market rationality also plays an important part in shaping urban planning and so called urban order (e.g. demand New Urbanist neighborhoods)

Ferguson’s work shows us another face of global capitalism (global oil companies in Angola) which does not adhere to Scott’s standardization-homogenization argument. But parts of Ferguson’s argument are somewhat flawed. He claims that late-colonial and early independence periods of Africa brought “far reaching social investment”; a “broader social project”(e.g. company towns, housing, schools, sports clubs etc.). But wasn’t this what ‘colonizing’ and ‘civilizing’ involved? I don’t think the purpose was a “social project” or “social investment”; it was an intention to obliterate the ‘natives’ cultures. So it was exploitative in terms of both material and human resources. But as far as the standardization and homogenization argument goes, I agree with Ferguson that with the globalization of the oil company sorts, there need not be standardization, simplification, and homogenization. Exploitation is even easier now in some places…

Posted by Shalini Misra at 06:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My goal for this class is not simply to communicate well-understood material, but to try to develop new understandings. In that light, I wanted to think through some aspects of Thursday's discussion and see if we can't come up with more of a conceptual framework for understanding what's going on.

I was a little surprised by the discussion, but that's good; that's why we have the seminar! My own going-in position is that the three geographical papers have different sorts of useful contributions to make, but generally focus on what de Certeau would describe as the strategic mode to the exclusion of a question of tactical forms of engagement with informated spaces. I certainly think that's a problem in what they present, and one that I think requires some attention, but that doesn't mean that they don't have useful messages.

What I heard in yesterday's discussion was a series of concerns with: first, a lack of nuance in the ways in which "code" or "software" figured in the geographical papers; second, an alarmist reading of the incorporation of technology into spatial systems; third, an inappropriate hierarchical relationship between technology and space; fourth, a failure to adequately set out an agenda ; and, fifth, a denial of the individual or collective agency that might be ranged against encroaching "surveillant assemblages."

These all seem to me to be valid points, although some are more significant than others.

As I suggesed in class, the issue of "code" doesn't seem especially serious to me because I think that, in the context of the broad argument, distinctions between software, hardware, and data don't have a big impact. One system's hardware is another's software; one person's code is another's data. I may just be failing to think of examples where this distinction really has bite, /for their audience/.

Further, I do think that issues of scale and discretion are very important when we think about the automated production of space. As Luv and others quite rightly pointed out, surveillance is nothing new. On the other hand, the ability to deploy surveillance technologies on a massive scale, and to process the results automatically, arguably result in a genuinely different form of control.

(It's worth noting the ways in which technologies of surveillance and information processing have themselves had considerable influence on conceptions of self-hood and the relationship between people and between the individual and the state. In "Suspect Identities," Simon Cole notes that only with the ability to name and record details of individuals can we even create the notion of "criminality" as a property of people. Identifying criminality as a tendency -- rather than the fact of a crime -- depends upon an infrastructure of identity and record-keeping. Similarly, as technologies become available, so do new ways of understanding and categorizing the self. One example is the way in which genetic profiling allows the emergence of a new category, the pre-symptomatically ill.)

However, the other thing that I wanted to bring into the conversation is the notion of the forms of governmentality with which some of these technological changes are associated. In passing, a couple of the papers we discussed last week did link the idea of software sorting to neoliberal and post-Keynesian statehood. I actually think that this is nicely captured by a quote from one of the papers for this week:

Under the contemporary "mode of information" (Poster 1990) or alternatively "cybernetic capitalism" (Robins and Webster 1988), administrative control of social life by the state is facilitiated by the systematic surveillance of consumption by private capital, while the administrative control of consumption by corporations is facilitated by the systematic surveillance of social life by government.

The kinds of effects noted by authors such as Graham or Thrift and French are important not least because they are associated with a series of transformations of the apparatus of state-hood, and in particular a transformation of social accountabilities that happens when state functions are outsourced to private corporations, or spun out into non-governmental agencies set up to compete in market economies. So one reading of those papers is not as hand-wringing over what is happening, or might be happening, but rather an argument that information technology has an important role to play in the conditions of possibility of neoliberal governmentality.

This takes us back to the other concern that came up in discussion on Thursday, which is to distinguish between the geographers' motivations as primarily political ("something must be done") or primarily analytic ("you can't think about space today without thinking about information technology"). There are aspects of both, I suspect, but one needs to distinguish between them.

This is already too long.

I'd have liked to be able to meet on Tuesday to continue this discussion before we move into new readings on Thursday. However, I need to be in LA on Tuesday afternoon because I'm giving a talk that evening at UCLA (one that's strongly related to the topic of this class, actually: http://remap.ucla.edu/exp/). So perhaps we'll start off with any further discussion of this on Thursday and see where we get to.

--p.

Posted by jpd at 05:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Anthropologists are accustomed to having all information and knowledge pass through the human mind in terms of processing and they appear to be sounding the alarm to each other in the papers that we read for Week 3; the alarm is that there is a possibility that this processing, up to and including transfer of significant parts of this function, is shifting into Code. If true, this augurs for an added degree of complexity to their discipline, which is already complex, IMHO.

This effect is center stage in the interplay between the controlling Few and the teeming Many, one of the foci of interest to Anthropologists. Code seems to be evident in the interface between the Few and the Many and therefore of interest in the anlaysis that they perform.

For example, in the business environment, Code is expected to facilitate and improve the control of the Few; for example, security in Hospitals, Nuclear Power Plants, Airports, etc. The spectre raised is that this control, useful and desired by both the Few and the Many in the applications mentioned, may easily be extended to inappropriate areas of the lives of the Many. Britney Spears, for example, would be cast amongst the Few in this example.

Posted by Tom Herring at 08:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Unknown Citizen

(To JS/07/M/378 This Marble Monument Is Erected by the State)

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Installment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for he time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace; when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

-- W. H. Auden

:-)

Posted by Luv Sharma at 05:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

[this is a repost, not sure what happened to my original]

In reference to the hegemony of "code/space", Dodge and Kitchen say...
".... in code/space, code dominates the production of space, explicitly mediating sociospatial processes and experience –'Software quite literally conditions...existence..."

They maintain that code/space creates "docile bodies: bodies that pass through the system in an orderly, non-complaining, compliant manner."``

"...code/spaces are regulatory spaces where 'code is law'. Unlike ordinary law, however, code law is often more ambiguous, inflexible, and nontransparent for reason of security or commercial confidentiality, and is more difficult to appeal.

They do admit however that "code/spaces are open to subversion, "but they see this as being caused by "cracks" in the system rather than actions by people in that space.

de Certeau of course sees this situation differently. I picked out these phrases in his piece relevant to Dodge and Kitchen's analysis of the code/space of the airport.

"They were other within the very colonization that outwardly assimilate them; their use of the dominant social order deflected its power... they escaped it without leaving it."

"... this inferior access to information... elicits an increased deviousness, fantasy, or laughter."

"...develops in an atmosphere of tensions...for which it provides symbolic balances, contracts of compatibility and compromises, all more or less temorary. The tactics of consuption, the ingeniuos ways i which the weak make use of the strong, thus lend a politcal dimension to everyday practices."

Airlines use the systems described in the articles to (as it's pointed out) fill every possible seat. This strategy is met with the tactic of buying the ticket through an online auctioning system.

'... although they remain subordinated to the prescribed syntactical forms (temporal modes of schedules, paradigmatic orders of spaces, etc. ), the trajectories trace out the ruses of other interests and desires that are neither determined nor captured by the systems in which they develop."

"A tactic insinuates itself into the other's place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety, without being able to keep it at a distance."

"...a tactic depends on time – it is always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized 'on the wing.' Whatever it wins, it does not keep. It must constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into "opportunities.' The weak must continually turn to their own ends forces alien to them.

The "tactic" of deliberately being "bumped" off a flight so one can gain whatever reward the airline is going to provide – vouchers, money, etc.

This smacks of the behavior that de Certeau describes as "clever tricks, knowing how to get away with things..."

"The ruling order serves as a support for innumerable productive activities, while at the same time blinding its proprietors to this creativity."

Don't we have the sense that we're getting away with something when we do this kind of thing?

"...a set of rules with which improvisation plays...".

For instance, one knows they'll have to remove their shoes; what do they choose for footwear? For socks? For cleanliness? Creativity?

"... manipulating 'commonplaces' and the inevitability of events in such a way as to make them 'habitable.'"

This reminds me of the practice of forming a complete narrative for one's random experience in heavily-mediated spaces. A friend who was stuck in the Salt Lake City airport for most of a day constructed an entertaining narrative where her surrounding "actors" tactics were in high relief to anyone who chose to be an audience for it, as she did. She collaborated in the creation of these particular tactics.

".... the practitioners of urban space [read here as code/space]... what do they make of what they 'absorb,' receive, and pay for? What do they do with it?"

"His products are scattered in.... They are all the less visible because the networks framing them are becoming more and more tightly woven, flexible, and totalitarian."

This is just as Dodge and Kitchin describe.

But de Certeau continues to explain that these practitioners and tacticians soon are "blending in with their surroundings, and liable to disappear into the colonizing organization...."

The airline and governmental structure allows for this in various ways.

"They diverted it without leaving it."

"... it is an effort to delimit one's own place in a world bewitched by the invisible power of the Other."

"...a place appropriated as one's own..."

"... to give oneself a certain independence with respect to the variability of circumstances. It is a mastery of time through the foundation of an autonomous place."

"To be able to see (far into the distance) is also to be able to predict, to run ahead of time by reading a space."

"The space of a tactic is the space of the other." Thus it must play on and with ta terrain imposed on it and organized by the law of a foreign power. It does not have the means to keep to itself..." It operates in isolated actions, blow by blow.... What it wins it cannot keep."

"...a tactic is an art of the weak." The would-be passenger

However, "[p]ower is bound by its very visibility." The power system the passenger can subvert.

"The system in which they move about is too vast to be able to fix them in one place, but too constraining for them ever to be able to escape from it and go into exile elsewhere."

Finally, I wonder if it's true in the airport code/space that "[t]he 'proper' is a victory of space over time."

Posted by Amy Lewis at 03:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

SAP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software structure separates assets (Things) from resources (People). Thus, one plans work, in part, by associating Things and (qualified) People at a place and time in order to perform work in a timely and efficient manner.

Due to security issues, the current practice is to issue each person a unique, SAP generated Position ID (the person's Social Security Number is not in the table in order to reduce ID theft risk), which is quite similar to the equipment master data approach. Both cases involve a unique identifier within the Enterprise context,detailing the salient attributes of each object.

From a programmer perspective, especially in the Database/Table world, one sees the 'software similarity' between these two categories; software economy of design becomes now a universal,compelling force in software design. This specific instance of popular Enterprise software supports the thought thread I'm seeing here concerning code and place/space coupling and interaction. People are reduced, ineluctably, to objects by these logical forces.

Looking forward to class today...

Posted by Tom Herring at 08:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

wow. from the looks of the blog entries, our class session will run for approximately 17 hours today.

i'm going to (try to) succinctly state some topics i'd like to discuss and leave it at that:

1a. yes, converting people into barcodes is bad; however, can we use software to fight software oppression? microsoft's new operating system, vista, was cracked before it was released. might we be able to hack identities (think beyond identity theft...)? operating systems are desirable and obvious blockades, and hackers target them. what happens if national id cards and cctv systems become tangible obstacles? rfid chips can be cracked/hacked, too.

1b. if our identities are software-based, our identities can be hacked. identity theft is often seen negatively, but how could it be positive? could we "hack" the identities of illegal immigrants and update their status so that they are now legal, wealthy americans? can we then hack the identities of the elite and make their digital identity average?

2. if software is being used to oppress, then clearly the hacker counter-cultures may have the ability to resist. have we seen a global, mass hacktivist resistance yet? that is, hacktivists working together to attack large corporations for the purpose of revolution?

3. how do we re-value the real-world as digital datascapes become prioritized?

Posted by Teh Greg at 01:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I often find discussions of "code" by non-programmers vexing.

What I'm missing here is when did code take us so-called "unawares".

Watch out for code, it will creep up on you and strangle you in your sleep. It will murder your children and then eat your steak. "CODE coming to a theater, a car, an airport, a playground, a mall, a doctor's office, a restaurant..."
"Near you", but we never get to say "near you" because code is so many places. I was aggravated to read so many articles with the same perspective on code, outsiders, and alarmist. To read all of these articles about code and its creeping into every aspect of everyday life is astonishing or new... how? Why don't we talk about resistors or silicon chips or the wheel? None of these articles are from the perspective of the programmer, a programmer... any programmer. So they apply Foucault's bio power to code, talk about disciplining bodies, about power and it's mechanisms. This much we should know about Foucault's writings, "Where there is power, there is always resistance, and the two things are coextensive: "As soon as there is a power relation, there is a possibility of resistance. We can never be ensnared by power: we can always modify its grip in determinate conditions and according to a precise strategy." (Abnormal, "Course Context" by Marchetti and Salomoni). Some of these resistances are already familiar to us, like cheat codes in games or maybe that person that doesn't turn off his or her phone when the airplane takes off.

These surveys of the "landscape" are hegemonic at best, towing the line of government, consider Graham's mention of biometrics from the elite to "mass usage" making tracking "much easier simply because they are subjects attempting to travel ... without their associated data..."(567) This is a massive undertaking as soon as he touches on illegal migrants, the can of worms tipped over here is illegal flows of people - sovereignty. This is an up and coming issue in political science the question is "how large is the illegal economy?" for people trying to come into the country illegally, most of them are not taking planes, for those that are taking planes they can likely afford to have the biometric data can be created for them, states are implicit in the underground economy. So where does that leave us? Where are the legal challenges introduced in this article, citing 9/11 doesn't mean we burn the constitution, that grants a right to privacy. Business travelers choose to give that up, but this article implicitly contends it can be imposed. Flying certainly posts a number of logistic issues; space travel is completely overlooked in Dodge and Kitchin's article. And we think so little of hardware in all of the articles unless they are CCTV cameras or cell phones. What is device less code? Speech? There is clearly a fascination with the thing that can't be seen, the exotic.

Software programming is not "little understood" as Thrift and French say in their article, it's simply understood by those who need to understand it, clearly they lack the need. (324) The Automatic Production of Space was a long article and wasted a significant portion of my time. Why are we hatin' on code?

Posted by Beverly at 12:24 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Graham's software-sorted mobilities and cities reinforces the notion place as a safe and immutable conception delimited by a set of mental boundaries by increasing the speed and minimizing the effort of transgressing the limits of one place to the next. The software-sorted mobilities like the airpot system of Graham and the code/space of Dodge and Kitchin cleanse the flow of travel of both the software-defined elite and the rest, and ease the way for entering the bubble of the destined place. In contrast, but with a similar effect, software-sorted cities classify characteristics of place in view of elevating the experience of such place, and in the process, "ossify spacial and social classifications". The value of place is driven by these forms of mobility and, as Dodge and Kitchin puts it, "these newly emergent spaces contrast with the more rooted and less fluid nature of the space of places". This strikes me when compared with the tales of the Australian Aborigines defining and valuing their land as an integral part of their movements between places, meaningful connections of mobility. At first, and by at first I mean till I started writing this paragraph, it struck me as depreciating the spacial interconnections between places, but then I remember how much airports are such important places to me.

Another aspect of code/software that seems relevant and is often overlooked, partly due to its ubiquitous and invisible nature, is our access to it and to the information it processes. Code brings a feeling of certitude enough that we forget its there. We trust it. Although, software is not untouchable and it is well defined and this might be from my compsci point of view. The aspect of software that removes human error form the processes and creates its homogeneous responses is undermined by the secrecy of code. Also, to follow Eric's words on software seen as language rather than a remnant of the body/mind dichotomy. Are computer scientists far from being modern scribes as they understand the glue, the language of the hardware? Reading and writing expanded to be at the grasp of the public to permit a leap in knowledge abilities. How would a public understanding of software, while taking the magic away, trigger such drastic change? We seem to trust software the same way we trust the human mind it often replaces (by the mind you produced it), till we understand the mechanics behind it.

Unlike software, my responses becomes erratic, i stop here.

Posted by Bruno Nadeau at 05:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I am struck in these writings, as often in work of this nature, of the duality that is placed upon notions of "software" and its often unnamed opposite, "hardware". This duality has also been named as "physical/virtual". It has been referred to by Ishii as "atoms/bits". There is an abundance of literature which questions this duality and notions of "virtuality". We can also draw comparisons to (and suspicions from) the historic battle and leftover debris of the mind/body duality.

In the Thrift and French paper, software is described in very loose terms and often conflated with hardware instantiations. There is a brief concession to the fact that hardware and software are difficult to untangle (page 310, second column) but the further examples of impacts are really more based upon hardware than software. Ideas about how ubiquitous computing is changing the world are used. However I would observe that most of the changes which have propelled (and slowed) ubicomp are hardware-based, not software. I.E. miniaturizaion, batteries, communications networks, etc. What is interesting here is how "software" comes to regulate the world of hardware, as is more eloquently explored by Graham's "software sorting" or the nature of the dyadic relationship as highlighted in Dodge's code/space. Nonetheless, most of the scenarios pointed to are not a direct negotiation between people and code, but the interaction of the two *through hardware*. It is not software systems which directly regulate people's actions in airline travel, it is metal detectors, barcode readers, people.

It is in passing that Thrift points to what I think might be his real distinction between hardware/software. On 312 he speaks of software as existing "below the threshold of representation itself." And so here we might see that Thrifts demarcation point between hardware and software is one of representation. Hardware operates at a level of representation discernible to humans and anything which operates at a lower level becomes "heuretic" rather than "analytical." Code simply "does" it does not "represent." It is here that the textual or linguistic model for code becomes useful, though in a different way than most of the models he puts forth in the paper. As opposed to thinking of code as an extension of textuality, we might look at it as a new lexicon. Code might exist below the level of representation for humans, but what about machines? Just as human language exists representationally (a semiotics to abstract objects from the world) it also can be conceived as holding inscriptions for action. Not only in the form of direct instructions, but also at a less literal semantic level, language is used to invoke certain actions through rhetoric and subtext. In the same way, computer code cannot be seen as holding only heuretic power (doing things, actions) but also representational power.

Oh no, I wanted to say this shortly and it's obviously an evolving thought (and one which has already been written about by others). I guess I'm merely suggesting that a linguistic approach here might be useful, and not one rooted in seeing code as an "extension" per se of our existing language, but the development of another linguistic model all together. Perhaps making the mechanics of this new language less opaque is one way to reveal the complex ways in which code regulates space.

Posted by Eric Kabisch at 04:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

the reference to panopticon... as an airport passenger, i feel as i have been coded. my identity in the airport system is created by the "assemblages" of technology. especially with etickets, i don't even need to bring anything but proof of my identity to the airport to get my boarding pass, but it's existence as a "ticket" doesn't even make sense. like i get the feeling that if i lose the boarding pass, i can get on the plane by showing my id and anyone with access to the airline system (a system within the airport system) can see every flight that i've taken, and probably gain access to "security information" about me. so an extremely creepy feeling of surveillance occurs in airports. they create my identity and have complete access to it while i'm there, and that identity is carried with me out of the airport as a regulatory system of discipline (discipline being an example of how code/space is embodied through performance) that is tied to my coded identity.

Posted by Pearl Ho at 09:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

thrift and french examine the pervasiveness of software, which, up until the y2k scare, had not received much attention in the media. the first time i thought about how entrenched technology was in my life was when i had a homework assignment where i had to enumerate all of the embedded systems i encountered in a single day. i ended up with just over a hundred devices but i’m sure, as thrift and french point out, that i overlooked dozens more. part of the reason people take software for granted is its ubiquity and transparency. software code doesn’t exist in the tangible world but rather, it manifests itself in mundane objects like electric toothbrushes, espresso machines, and kitchen appliances. sometimes designers do too good of a job at making something user-friendly and we forget that hidden underneath the pretty interface, it’s still a machine operating on millions of lines of code.

graham also explores some of the software people encounter in everyday life, but he does so to reveal its role in engendering the politics of inequality. the idea of “software sorting” is an interesting complement to the notion that computers aren’t supposed to be biased. If a security guard watching a cctv system flags someone as looking suspicious, he can be accused of being racist. on the other hand, if a facial recognition cctv system flags someone, can we really accuse it and its underlying algorithm of being biased? it seems strange but after all, the algorithmic code was authored by a person(s) and represents his perspective on what criteria constitute suspicious behavior. graham presents evidence that supports the idea of prejudiced code and warns against the implications it has for establishing ecologies of normalization within capitalist societies.

Posted by judy at 02:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Through everyday practice, enunciative acts such as telling stories or playing (tactics) people appropriate places and create imaginery but actual spaces. This view that de Certeau elaborates in the practice of everyday life relates to power relations and resistance from the bottom up. It is about historical investigation of aspects of everyday life, about power and identity struggles. De Certeau argues that in re-appropriating technologies of power through individual and collective stories of everyday life, the “weak” while wondering through the places created by the “strong” construct their own space, create their own meaning for spaces, however not on top of the a priori given rather intermingling with a self-expressive and humorous form of adaptation – the stories of miracles, the utopian space, the play.

While these spatial stories describe the space people transcend and the movements they make, it seems particularly fascinating to me how different cultures, different ages, or different time zones make use of these stories in their idiosyncratic ways. These various languages adopted and re-invented through the course of time, through cultural understanding. Thrift and French provide an interesting perspective on how software, or “programming languages” create new stories of government and invent new forms of play. Could software hidden “behind” the gadgets of everyday life, no matter if mobile phone or Wii, be the language of current Western ages, the language that transforms and constitutes space and public appropriation? In terms with de Certeau the programming language would then be another ruse, another trick and camouflage to tell stories that aim at withstanding power. This seems confusing though. Technology was supposed to be a strategy, an invention and further re-establishment of power of a “technological elite”! How can we suddenly speak of software as everyday practice, as language that relates between the virtual and the actual used by the people? Of course! There is OpenSource. And Web2.0! We could be satisfied by now and assume together with Thrift and French that software is indeed a mediary, a displacing, a space in-between, a powerful tool for extending textuality.

However, software seems to be rather tool than practice, a tool that can be used to build artifacts and interactions that eventually become interwoven into everyday stories or tell them. A language that for its own sake would be a numerical abstraction of an everyday practice, not the practice itself. However these boundaries clearly intermingle and while writing software becomes the everyday practice for some, it contributes to the creation of a spatial understanding that sits in-between the virtual and the actual (I actually don’t like this terminology used by Thrift and French at all, why consider the virtual less actual as the physical, why would we care about a differentiation like this if we consider the language of the virtual as an everyday practice – is it not built on the same principles as language of everyday life?).

In Dodge and Kitchin software and coded objects speak through barcodes and tags, surveillance cameras and gigantic displays. Here, code produces and “functions” the spatial scenario of an airport assuming passengers as merely passive entities moving through the “real virtual” their actions programmed by the coded and spatial dyad, embodiments of the code/space. Even though I am intrigued by the analogy to Foucault’s panopticon, I don’t think it holds in times of forbidden liquids and fear of terror – it rather seems the (security) system itself is under current observation from the masses it believes to control, appropriated through the tricks of the “users”.

Posted by Silvia Lindtner at 12:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The interesting thing about some of the arguments in the papers is the way 'code' or 'software' has been portrayed as some sort of an (almost) omnipresent and omnipotent phantom that is taking over our lives. Maybe it's the way I read it, but there seems to be a certain fear of the unknown in the way these geographers have seen software. Again, maybe this is because I am a computer science major, I seem to think that code or software is essentially doing what it's being asked to do and nothing more. I have been trying not to take the arguments too literally but at some points, I just felt I had no choice and for the purpose of justifying what the author says I couldn't not read what I thought I did (?).
I kept trying to convince myself that when the author says 'computerized code continually orchestrates inequalities through technological systems embedded within urban environments', there will be some indication of the presence of a certain group of people or organizations that are actually 'orchestrating' whatever it is they are; there seemed little or no indication in this direction. I really wonder how much power code has in itself, for example the following phrases on the very first page of the paper:
- "code based technological environments continuously..."
- "Sunk in the taken for granted background of everyday life, these worlds of code exert their power over..."
While I do understand that the authors are aware of the fact that these lines of code are ultimately controlled by some entity that has a certain political, economic and/or evolutionary agenda, it kept striking me that they are possibly assuming they now have less power than the code. I don't think I sound convincing enough; hell, I haven't absolutely convinced myself but to sum it up, I think they invest the 'code' with a little more power than is actually due. I wonder what the others think about this.
Also, another particular point that struck me was one towards the end of the Graham paper where he offers examples of the 'progressive potential of software-sorting'. The last example in which he calls for a transport-system in the name of environmentalism (I think) that charges heavy polluters more money: Wouldn't this evolve into a system where ultimately the rich buy better (read non-polluting cars) and those who can't, are immobilized?

Posted by Luv Sharma at 11:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Thrift and French audit the embededness of software in urban spaces of everyday life in the Euro-American world. They review the attempts being made to “humanize” software. Techniques such as “evolutionary computing” and “soft computing” accounting for what is called “approximate reasoning” are described. This is very interesting. Psychological research has been finding that the human information processing mechanism (goal processing, judgments, decision making, action tendencies) relies increasingly on heuristic processing and systematic biases. While these mechanisms get us by in many if not most situations, they are prone to error (e.g. faulty probabilistic reasoning, stereotypes, biased memory, reliance on accessible cognitions, explanation based judgments, etc.). Also, we are always in a certain affective state. That is to say that there is a difference between ‘affect’ and ‘emotion’. Moreover, emotion plays the pivotal role in judgment and decision making. So does motivation (no mention is made of this construct, but it is another aspect of humanity). How will emotion and motivation ever be computed? And if the aim is for software to mimic human information processing, then it should end up being inaccurate and error prone. Why do we want that? Why so much effort into “breathing new life into software”? Given the fact that we have a Paleolithic brain inside or skulls, there is only so much information and stimulation we can process. We are yet to adapt to the dramatic changes we have made to our environment….

And how can self construal be computed? Human children have some sense of self between the age of 2 and 2 and ½. Until the age of four, children don’t even have a sense of the realities of others. And this is what makes us unique…we not only understand our realities but the realities of others. Can such development/learning ever be simulated? There is brief mention of the ‘genetic algorithm’ and the evolution of software. Given the randomness of mutations, and the fact that most mutations are DNA copying errors and do not have any fitness function, how is this being simulated. I’m very curious and confused. Computer science people, enlighten me please!

Posted by Shalini Misra at 10:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is the point where it becomes very clear that I am not from a computer related field. And I am at an extremely beginner level in terms of understanding things like software. For example I was impressed that Thrift et. al. who appear to be geographers were so well versed in areas of computer software. To those of you in computer related fields their ideas may have seemed very basic.

I also want to say that I have recently left the workforce where I was conducting empirical research and reading empirical articles. I am trying to get back into the mode where I read, contemplate and synthesize conceptual and philosophical pieces, but I am still a little rusty. I have read de Certeau’s work before on my own, but think I missed a whole lot with the absence of discussion and lecture. If others feel the same way I would love if we could dedicate some time (either in the course or on the blog) to some of his ideas. I am particularly interested in his distinctions between tactics, and strategy. This may be perfectly clear to some, but I would like to hear interpretations of his ideas. (On the other hand, I don’t want to hold others behind so I can also meet with Paul).

What does resonate with me about de Certeau’s work are his ideas related to the user. The notion that the way in which we use and consume things may be very different from their intended purpose is critically important in terms of both planning and design. The way people use spaces is to some extent unpredictable. There is a “push pull effect” in which we adapt and adjust things to work in the way we want and need it to. It reminds me of this photography project by Richard Wentworth called “Making Do and Getting By” where he documents the way in which people adapt to their environments. A fence may become a way to hand a lost glove or a Kleenex box may become a door- stopper. These images are interesting because they provide visual evidence for some of these ideas.

The article “The automatic production of space” is something that I should have read a long time ago. Like I said before I am not on the cutting edge of technological advancement (this is probably why I enjoyed this article – I am probably their intended audience). If possible I would like to know, from the point of view of those of you who are in the computer field, to what extent the ideas from this article have changed or evolved. I have little idea about the current state of “space changing” technology and the direction in which your field is moving. I think these conversations will be important because people in planning and fields need to make predictions about the future of urban spaces. Decisions and plans are made based on changes in the next 20 years. So I think it is increasingly important that we understand (the way these geographers understand) the directions of your field and for your field to be at the forefront in decisions made about the uses of space.

Posted by Julka Almquist at 10:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Reading Graham and Thrift made me think back to Frankfurt School’s position toward mass media and mass culture in general. In the first half of the past century intellectuals were concerned with the rise of mass culture, and worried about the effect that it would have on people. People were then considered as the ‘victims’ of an imposed lifestyle that was lowering the scope of their individuality, and subjected to a vision that they were forced to share, often without being aware of it. Now it seems that the increasing diffusion of computation is having a similar (even though milder) effect on intellectuals, who fear for the omnipresence of an intelligence that most people are not aware of even if it’s conditioning every aspect of their lives. While the ‘mass media critique’ was concerned with the power of the ‘message’ being conveyed, the ‘software critique’ is focused on the power of the technology itself, with the end result that they (both sides of the mediatic coin) are supposed to become problematic forms of control.

While these accounts are insightful, I prefer a more ‘complex’ take on the human-technology relationship, such as the one presented by De Certeau, where people are acknowledged for their ‘creative’ use and misuse of products. This until computational intelligence overtakes us all and the most dystopian scenarios becomes real.

Posted by Arianna Bassoli at 09:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The transition from Keynesian or monopolistic service and infrastructure regimes in the bulk electrical power generation market in the State of California to a software-facilitated open market were a business failure, resulting in negative, broad based, first order effects (blackouts, bankruptcies, lawyers enriching themselves at public expense, etc.). In other States, however, the software sorting that Graham writes about in fact produced the effects he describes/predicts. These States, interestingly, did not follow the lead of California in this important aspect, materially contributing to the expected downward move in price while maintaining (relatively) electric service.

Retrospective analysis of this signal failure, in part, appears to identify the artificial (aka political) definition of the affected geographical boundaries of the software sorting employed; that is, rathen than allow market forces to establish the transmission lines and generators which software would facilitate in 'sorting' into geographical boundaries, the boundaries were set by 'fiat' and contributed to the various blackouts during high grid load condidtions.

This supports Graham's assertion (pg. 565) "...the inevitable flexibilty asociated with sofware-sorting techniques, it is there fore apparent that their widening application needs to be seen as a crucial, facilitating dimension in the broad shift from Keynesian welfare states and public domains to 'splintered', post-Keynesian regimes of infrastructure, service, and space production and consumption."

Finally, the interaction of place (here, geography as the physical location of generation and transmission assets and the relative capacities and demands as a function of the annual cycle of weather and population electrical power use clearly interact with the space of software and virtual control.

Questions and comments are, as always, welcomed and appreciated.

Tom H.

Posted by Tom Herring at 03:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

i had a couple points which i thought about for the discussion but it feels like they would have required rhetorical acrobatics to plug them in smoothly. anywho.

places are inevitably stored into abstract locations in memory, and it seems, at least based on the "placenames" of the Western Apache, that visual perceptions becomes primary cues from which to recreate a place mentally. when it comes to virtual communities, virtual spaces where, just as with material space, complex interactions are taking place, how do we memorize these virtual experiences i term of space and place?

what part of our discourse, like the "placenames", reveals our attachment to places and how as it evolved in response to our hybrid environments. as an exmple, such small expression as when you say "replacer qu'un" in french (not sure the equivalent english) meaning remember most often by resituating the person in time and space, in place. but as discussion takes place more and more on virtual grounds, are such expressions changing their meaning or use? are there new forms of speech that reveal our attachment to places?

how much does the nomadism of the Australian aborigenes and of Western Apaches defines their definition of knowledge? compared with the current neo-nomadism made possible by our increased mobility and the space-time compression, are there similitudes in the way it might be changing our perception of space and place?

how does the phenomenon of 'time-space compression' and virtual communites impact on concepts of identity such as gender, place of birth, place of residence, etc. that is found in cosmopolitan areas? cosmopolitan extension?

Posted by Bruno Nadeau at 01:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

First I want to apologize (especially to the presenters) that I did not post this week. I have been sick and I hope what I had is not going around because it really sucks. I am out of my haze and able to form cohesive thoughts and I want to make a few comments about the readings and our discussion today.

1. I am still uncertain about what kind of “space” we are talking about. Given the diverse nature of the articles at times it seemed that the type of space we were referencing was a more material space based on ideas of territory, land/land use, cities etc. But in other articles (like Massey) the type of space seemed to be what Lefebvre refers to as abstract space - space that exists as a result of global networks, businesses etc. I think this article predominated today’s discussion because abstract space makes a lot of sense in terms of information and technology. I tend (and maybe others from PPD) to think of space in a less abstract way so I am trying to adjust to this notion. I think architects, planners and urban designers increasingly must consider abstract space and how it is changing their work.

2. I also have the sense that we are talking about macro level space and really public space. There was nothing in the readings or discussion that addressed private or secret space. I am very interested in cultural beliefs about public, private and secret space and how ubiquitous computing is radically changing these notions. Maybe these distinctions will come up in future readings and discussions.

Thoughts?

Posted by Julka Almquist at 12:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A short piece by Jorge Luis Borges is apropos:
"On Exactitude in Science . . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography."

Of course artists of all genres and disciplines have had much to say about maps and what we think we know about the world through their creation and use. Here's one very compelling project to check out:
Worldprocessor

Part of his work is on exhibit at the San Jose Museum of Art right now.

And then there is this map by Charles Joseph Minard which shows the progress of Napoleon's Grande Armée into and back out of Russia.

It is map as political commentary, but it is also as good an example of the power of information design as has ever existed. For more on such things, Edward Tufte's books are without equal. (His thoughts on PowerPoint are priceless as well.)

Posted by Amy Lewis at 12:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So, a funny thing happened on the way to writing this blog entry. I totally knew what I was gonna say after I read four of the articles, and then it turns out that Turnbull said a lot of it already. I suppose it's just as well, because I was shaping up to write something longer than would have been polite on a group blog. So instead, I want to comment on how time is represented within representations of space.

First of all, I'm using "representation" broadly. So Turnbull at the end of his paper gives us these two poles of representation (like, map-making) and performance (more the realm of the trickster, I suppose), and really he's just naming the contrasting spatial representations? practices? that are presented in all of this week's reading. But performance, I'd argue, has an element of representation to it also, though looser and more open to individual interpretation. Maps abstract territory, representing spaces only selectively... but isn't that what the Irish Nationalists of Ballybogoin were doing as well, when they recounted the history of places, turning bombings and murders into an ongoing dialogue between colonized and colonizer while abstracting the pain and violence from it? The abstractions you choose feed into how you act in a space, I certainly got the feeling that British mapmakers were trying to abstract the Irish right out of Ireland.

But... maps abstract the territory in different ways from verbal/performative representations of it, and one of the really glaring differences to me is how they treat time. The whole territory is laid out for the reader on a piece of paper, turning them into an omniscient viewer, able to peruse at their leisure. Once the map is made, it's static. So while Turnbull points out all the time, mobility, organization and labor that went into compiling early modern maps, taking survey results from numerous people who visited the New World at different times over -- what was it? -- 110 years, the map itself hides that labor and moreover the time that it took. The world presented in the map seems frozen in an eternal imaginary moment.

By the way, it's a really fun exercise to look at Google maps using the satellite view, and try to find places where adjacent satellite photos have clearly been taken on different days. (This is a link to satellite images of Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, and for some reason it cracks me up that that map depicts ships sharing a harbor when they were never there at the same time.)

By contrast, look at how Apache, Yolngu and even Irish Nationalists talk about their spaces. The same actions recur in those spaces, tying the present to the past. In Apache practices of speaking with place names, the listener/interpreter is reminded of ways in which recent actions might echo things that one's ancestors did in the same space. In Ballybogoin, loyalists and nationalists answer atrocity with atrocity, each one in response to a past offense. In Yolngu belief (and this I'm most unclear about) the dreamtime is not so much a distant past as... a parallel universe? such that actions that are/have been taken in the space of the dreaming are reproduced over and over in the space of our mundane reality. In all these accounts, everything that happens happens many times. Time is cyclical. (Or layered, or spiraled.... I'm not 100% happy with any of these images.)

It reminds me of a passage from The Unbearable Lightness of Being, where Kundera talks about the idea of eternal return, where each decision you make in life is then repeated ad infinitum when you live it over and over again. It lends weight to one's actions, grounds them, makes them meaningful. By contrast, if everything only happens once, action is less meaningful, and becomes "unbearably light".

Massey points out that for many academics, the phenomenon of time-space compression seems unsettling. It's just a passing comment, not even entirely essential to the paper, but it seems to fit here.

Damn, this still turned out long.

Posted by Amanda Williams at 10:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Notes On Verran (my favorite of the readings):
Place is the knowledge about land. Modern knowledge Latour's translation and puritfication as scientific ways of knowing, regulative power. natives, the land, science can be known about. "true knowledge" is sought after, mediated by numbers. numerical equivalence to space.
Versus Aboriginal groups who own land by being with it. time network of places, hubs, broadlands between. differentiated space.
"performative epistemic mode" to engage shared imaginary of ownership, located in practice.

I find that my interactions with a place are so far removed from the land, disconnected to earth. Perhaps it's because buildings and spaces are created with mathematical understandings of space. One of the few times that I feel like my idea of a man-made place is connected to the earth is when I'm in a building with a view of the ocean or mountains. This is why I like the Verran article. Place for the Aborigines reflects the land and has a grounding to it. Whereas moderns create places by leveling and creating the numerical equivalence to land.

Sidenote:
Turnbull's roll of trickster "adding disorder to order", "experience of what is not permitted", performer of knowledge making. This is a good mythological reference for thinking about interdisciplinary praxis.

Posted by Pearl Ho at 10:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'd like to introduce myself to this blog by explaining my academic background. I just graduated from a traditional electrical engineering program. When not studying the math or physics of electricity, I was focusing my extracurricular exploration on industrial design, thinking about form and function of objects. So, for me, the notion of space is strongly rooted in geometric relationships. I'm excited to explore the more dynamic notions of space in this course.

As I was thinking about the connections I could draw among these articles, I observed that a lot of my knowledge is stored using places and mental maps. Like the use of placenames, I use a mental picture of a space to recall knowledge. I've always found it curious that athletic friends of mine can remember certain situations from previous competitions. Having participated in athletic competitions as well, I can rarely recall the temporal situations from these events, however I can envision the geometry of where these events occurred with extreme clarity. As I think about those spaces, I can then start to build recollections of these events by using the space as a framework. In this way, I can very much understand how the Western Apache use placenames and the mental picturing of a place to recall the knowledge or wisdom that plays-out in that place.

I realize that to the social scientists in the audience, this may be a very basic analysis of cognition, but for me thinking about spaces in non-geometric terms is new and I'm looking forward to exploring it with you.

Posted by Mark Roland at 08:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

places tell stories. can something happen nowhere? the apaches assert no, "placeless events are an impossibility." it seems bold, and i'm still trying to think of a counter-example. maps are not defined by places but rather, places define maps and people put meanings to places. these papers explore the connections people make to places and identity. every place is associated with its own meaning. basso's notion of a "placename," then, is really an abbreviated narrative that evokes images and stories with which most people are already familiar. in the conversation between lola, louise, emily, and robert, the three places mentioned serve different purposes. one was intended to relieve the tension in the air, another was intended to comfort Louise and give her hope to believe things will turn out for the better, and the last was to introduce some levity.

on another note, the surveillance anecdote in the kelleher paper brings up the question of who/what is being protected against whom/what and by whom. the space was destroyed; the place was not.

the pepsi can [basso] was an interesting assimilation of american culture in an otherwise aboriginal setting.

Posted by judy at 01:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the phrases that made me reflect the most was Trager’s citation in Basso: ‘the way the man talks about the physical universe is his only way of knowing anything about it’. This (quite extreme, as Basso notices) statement points, in my mind, to the phenomenological need of experiencing a place in order to know about it, and to the importance of expressing this knowledge through language to consolidate it and create a shared meaning. It is always very interesting to read studies on other cultures and in this specific case how they relate to their ‘space’. However, whenever I read about a culture or a place that I’m rather familiar with, I cannot help by comparing my personal perception of that space to the accounts I’m exposed to and, at the end, my experience feels more ‘true’ than a scientific story. Although I have acquired a very limited perspective on those places, and most of the time it has not been ‘reflected upon’, this experience has shaped parts of my identity and how it relates to those particular places. As a ‘transnational’ person, as Ken was pointing out today, I’ve probably failed to engage with some places I’ve lived in as a native person would do, but I still contributed to create those multiple identities that Massey talks about, and to confirm that there is not just one way to engage with a place, but multiple ones.

Posted by Arianna Bassoli at 12:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

On Massey:
Firstly, I am not familiar with Heidegger's conception of place that Massey is critiquing, so I'd like to follow up on that.
Massey's meditative moments on the view of the earth from outer space are the most affective in achieving her argument, and I wonder now what that same meditation would have read like to someone writing when Heidegger was writing about place. The first picture of the earth from outer space was available during Heideger's lifetime. But we have a lot more images, not imaginary ones, at our disposal, of google maps, earth, pictures of satellite images, and of course of the planet as a whole from farther out. I can follow Massey's visualization in a literal way, piecing together these images. It just seems as if we are always conceptually catching up with the way things are changing. If we are now able to, as Massey shows, think about places in a new way, how long has it actually been this way? Or has it always been this way? How historically 'local' is Masseys view? Nation-states and boundaries have been obsolete for a while for some groups of people, and as long as some, (certain) people carry these boundaries around inside their heads then these boundaries will still exist through what they, the boundaries, acheive for some or how they act on others. And I am wondering if this is wy Massey refers to this persepective as "progressive."
I would also like to think more about the "why" of Massey's argument. She says this would be a more "progressive" view of place, one that is global etc, so that suggests that the argument is for the sake of being progressive, as opposed to what? Progressive suggests that this could serve to either keep apace with the way things are changing or else maybe even project our thinking out into the future, and that it might serve to think about the future in a particular way. She says "What we need, it seems to be, is a global sense of the local, a global sense of place" (p68) Is the 'we' researchers and the need because we have so far been inaccurate in our descriptions of place, or have failed to notice how place has shifted beneath our feet? Was Heidegger accurate as well, only for his time, or was he less 'progressive'? Or maybe the "we need" is more inclusive? We as humans need, but again why, toward what end?
Overall, though, I agree that 'we need' a global sense of place, because we need to act from this understanding. The problems we face (political or design, etc.) can't be solved with the old sense of place.
What strikes me, however, is that there is actually something still unprogressive about Massey's explosion of place. She says "and take the further element of specificity from the accumulated history of a place, with that history itself conceptualized as the product of layer upon layer of different sets of linkages both local and to the wider world" (p68, my emphasis). This idea of exploring the history of a place as well as the relations and boundlessness of it, is sort of tacked on at the end of the discussion. Furthermore, she does exactly to history what she has said we need to escape in our thinking about place, that is she has reified it as a "product" that can be "layered." So we have this image of interacting, intersecting, interrelating encounters of people, and then snapshot after snapshot, layered over each other. Thus the movement is still in a still frame. Is there a way for us to think of the history and time dimension in a less bounded way as well? I think that the other articles address this, such as Basso and Verran.
Lastly, this brings me to the question of how one conducts research. Because there must always be inclusion and exclusion, always some selection of what we are going to look at, we can't very well just contain some representation or idea of the whole of history and all its movements in our head. So are the 'mistakes' we make as researchers in mis-representing place because of our need to be selective or because of a theoretical flaw, can we differentiate these? And how can we both broaden our ideas and still select so we can speak about things?
These articles suggest that we can make selections, but that we ought not select by drawing boundaries around place or time, but rather to take some kind of snapshot and then "map" these snapshots through time... There's still a sense of mapping though, isn't there? something we can't escape....

I think that the imaginary that comes up in Verran and Basso speaks to this idea of exploding temporality in the way that Massey suggests we explode place because the imaginary is exactly that realm of the time continuum that is indescribably the future. With the aid of the internet and new models of conceptualizing relations it is easier to expand our sense of place beyond the idea of boundaries, but it is far more difficult to face the boundaries between the past and present and present and future for the exact reasons that Verran shows, that we are out of touch, or have excluded the imaginary from our lives.

Another note: I would like to understand the penetrability/vulnerability concept more.

Posted by Marisa Cohn at 10:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Taking from the readings in general and the topic heading (for week 2), the thought of whether technology can replace (or even how far it can represent) physical knowledge of an environment kept coming up for me. There is the idea, if not the reality, that urban planners and architects make decisions without visiting a site. Technology allows for this (it can describe and represent space), the planners/designers take advantage of it. What's the extent of environmental knowing without physical interaction with a space/place? My own feeling towards those who design without ever seeing the site is that it's an irresponsible practice, a sort of abuse of technology. Plus, not knowing much about the technological side of things, couldn't the technology misrepresent? Misrepresentation through bugs and glitches in the hard/soft ware, lack of source control, etc. Then this misrepresentation leading to faulty environmental knowing.

On another note, and from left field, is there software that draws what is spoken? As in, spoken directions being drawn automatically into a map?

-A.

Posted by Amanda Merchant at 10:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here are some thought questions and ponderings we might discuss in the next class.

‘Space’ can be conceptualized to be an ‘imagined’, ‘knowing’, ‘living’, and ‘meaningful’ agent by some cultures (Verran). ‘Places’ could be thought to be made up of patterns of kin relations (Verran; Basso), history of social relations and networks with other places, and social actions (Massey; Kelleher; Verran; Basso). One could think of it as being differentiated and interconnected by time, shaped by individual and collective memories, values, and perceptions. Places also function to shape identity and its own development. Above all, spaces and places are material (although not just enclosures) and bound by time. So these readings posit…

--If all this is what space and place is, then are virtual communities (e.g. ebay), virtual social networking websites (e.g. Myspace and Facebook), and collaborative media spaces, spaces or places at all? (I am too indoctrinated by the ‘positivistic’ knowledge tradition, so I can’t help thinking of inclusions and exclusions!). Do the above conceptualizations capture the increasing diversity and complexity of human environments? As places and spaces become more and more hybridized (incorporating both virtual and physical components), how could these conceptualizations change? Since people are spending increasing amounts of time immersed in virtual spaces, how does this shape their identity?

--Critiques of the proliferation of the Internet and other information and communication technologies say that ubiquitous computing, increased mobility, and social networks based on communities of interest rather than propinquity result in weak ties to local (place-based) places (communities, neighborhoods, cities, and nations). What do you think?

--TIME magazine’s person of the year is ‘YOU’, celebrating people’s power to optimize their environments through the Internet. Massey talks of spectrum of time-compression power balance between those who control it at one of the spectrum (the high SES ‘echo boomers’) and those who are controlled by it at the other end (the elderly and poor). She focuses on globalization and capitalism and the uneven geographical development that occurs as a result of it. Time-space compression due to information and communication technologies is leading to a similar undemocratic environmental form. If each place is a combination of wider and more local social relations, then how are these ‘flows’ of information between the ‘have-its’ affecting urban form, and its use, and meaning?

Verran’s investigation on the epistemological and ontological meaning of space in a non-western society, though extremely thought-provoking and valuable, does not clearly explain as promised, how these two ‘ways of knowing’ can be reconciled. Can they ever be? (I haven't reviewed Turnbull yet. Maybe he has a breakthrough). If one knowledge system acknowledges there to be one and only one truth, external to oneself, and other thinks of the world as having multiple truths colored by emotion, perception, and experience, then how is possible? If there was one truth, then both knowledge systems should find the same truth. And they obviously do not…(e.g. space as being conceptualized as an empty tract of land with no value for emotion by one way, and a spiritual-emotional living entity by another).

But all is not lost. Verran does not consider recent research in the field of social cognition that has found that people are not entirely rational beings (see for e.g. Kahneman and Tversky). Our judgments and decisions are indeed guided mostly, if not entirely by emotion. Moreover, they are also likely to be automatic—that is very little if any ‘rational thought process’ involved (see for e.g. Bargh). So much for free will and the western science, technology, and philosophy. Thoughts?

Posted by Shalini Misra at 08:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

How Massey describes his experience of Kilburn High Road reminds me of a certain place in downtown (?) Bombay.
There's an intersection not far from the Mumbai Central Railway Station in the center of which is a park and from the circle emerge 6 roads. At least 5 of these roads are culturally distinct from each other: one of them is a jewish housing community, another one is a Parsi neighborhood, a third is predominantly Irani and one of them has the few Britishers that decided to stay back and make Bombay their home after independence. On one of the other two is a Hindu temple (if I remember correctly), and the last one I don't clearly remember.
A long time ago, when I first encountered this 'place' I was curious about the demography of the city and I found out that the majority of Indian jews live in Bombay. This was also true of Parsis and Iranians. I'm not sure, but if researched, it would also be true of the few English who still live in India. Now Bombay is considered the commercial capital of India but it isn't the biggest city, not the most organized, and certainly not the cleanest/livable. Other Indian cities boast of superior infrastructure: cities like Bangalore and Gurgaon are the ones where all the global players in information tachnology have set up their bases. Delhi is the political capital of the country and thats where all the different embassies are located. All political interaction with the world is carried out in New Delhi. Nearby Gujarat is the most prosperous state and cities like Ahmedabad and Baroda offer many many more oppurtunities for business. Still Bombay remains the most (or even the only) cosmopolitan Indian city.
I think it'd be interesting for me to juxtapose my experience of Bombay with the notions of space and place we are exposed to and the ones we individually and collectively develop.

Posted by Luv Sharma at 07:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

“How do we or rather how should we experience space versus place?” asks Massey. The notion of place appropriation or space creation has been related to other struggles before, to struggles of power and resistance, to finding or definition of the self, or deconstruction of the latter (see Foucault, or deCerteau). While Massey argues that a small Western elite, the world of academia, is “in charge” - moving and communicating across space and time, one could argue in de Certeau’s sense that this is merely sophisticated illusion. The use of a space, the name of a place (no matter if you call it placenames among Western Apache or imaginary knowledge making embedded in the local) remains up to the individual, social group or in-moment gathering.
I find it appealing to “make places” through metaphors, in telling stories or imagining past or future. And I agree with Massey that a place can exist for a moment, and that experiences and hybrid interactions ascribe meaning to a space. However, it might not be perceived as such ephemeral event. For example, while the home might still be perceived as static and local, it became through its connected and mobile inhabitants a place of mobility itself. Interacting with the outside world the home and its inhabitants simultaneously construct their environment (not just in a local sense) and are constructed from the outside (identity?). Then, there is no single character to one place, as Massey argues, but many which are defined by its in- and outgoing inhabitants or contributors.
Instead of trying to define places we should rather understand articulations and adaptations, as well as self-representations and perception of the self, which contribute to and create a space. As land becomes meaningful when interconnected for Aborigines in Australia (Verran), I argue that spaces, no matter if tangible or virtual, become meaningful through interaction - not only through interaction with people, but through interaction with the self, memories and a collective imaginery (Basso).

Posted by Silvia Lindtner at 07:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Basso's observation on pg. 101 seems primary: "...communicative acts of topographic representation -- will be most revealing of the conceptual instruments with which native people interpret their natural surroundings." Similar to the Greek Aorist tense and action words (verbs), place-speaking embodies a context almost immediately for those who are on the inside of the language barrier and conversely bewilder those on the outside of the language barrier.

Also, the utility of place names often persist through several cycles of conquer/dominate/decay by different language groups, for example the Dnieper and Don rivers in Eurasia.

Tom H.

Posted by Tom Herring at 03:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

this is just a quick post with some info about using the blog interface.

saving a post: by default, it seems the posts are unpublished. there's a small form box at the bottom left of the "new entry" page that allows you to set the post status as published / unpublished. be sure to change it to published when you hit "save."

comments: if someone comments on your post, you'll get an email (that will most likely go to junk mail). you have to follow that link and AGAIN you have to choose "published" from the drop-down on the right BEFORE you hit save. it's trivial but easy to miss.

sorry to be pedantic, but i didn't notice that published/unpublished crap at first so i'm guessing it has happened to someone else.

Posted by Teh Greg at 01:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

thought: in reading massey's entertainingly surly chapters, there's a nice quote on page 12 by ross talking about how spaces transform us. made me think about how in defining the identity of a place, its inhabitants define themselves. there's a sort of cyclical feedback loop, where the space is shaped by and helps shape its occupants. it's not a one-way street: people enter and a space becomes a place as the people become those inside the place. i guess this might seem trivial, as we all act differently in different contexts, but what i think ross was getting at is that the different ways we act in these places help define our overall identity. we don't move in and out of static personas or places - these personas and places themselves help shape us and our other personas. talk about a nightmare for ethnography.

Posted by Teh Greg at 02:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

slowly we stir

Posted by Luv Sharma at 11:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is going to be fun. Thanks.

Posted by Shalini Misra at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

and it is so awesome.

Posted by Teh Greg at 11:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)