InfoTechSpace

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”.