Space, Place, and Identity in the Digital Age

Colonialism, Empire, and Networks

1. I am interested in interrogating the reason behind Dourish’s characterization of specfically post-colonial computing. While I do not wish to suggest that each and every nation-state that has been colonized must remain so to some extent, I do wonder about the ways in which post-colonial computing may additionally function as a neo-colonial pursuit. Borrowing from Fanon, I’d like to consider how even a program that gives laptops to children simultaneously functions to instill particular dependencies and create a potential labor pool. While it does seem that the practice of jugaad functions to shift the power dynamics Fanon cites, I am still not entirely comfortable with the idea of a post- moment.

2.As I’ve just finished reading Wellman and Rainie’s Networked, I’m wondering about the ways in which sovereignty, empire, and networked individualism connect. What is the relationship between networks and empire? Do networks rather than group dynamics allow for the growth of empire or is it perhaps the other way around?

3. Finally, how do mobile media, ubiquitous computing, and asynchronicity change how we read the shift from nations/imperialism to empire? While it seems to make perfect sense that international connectivity and transnational flows (or carvings out) of capital, information, and bodies would necessitate empire (think Google as empire), but is this shift too easy and too clear? That is, is it possible that nationalism and imperialism are not nearly as dead as we think but we simply can’t see it?

Definitions
Body: A node in the network
Place: The specification of space, achieved via one’s place in a networked community

Linguistics and Borders

Throughout the readings there were two points that I want to discuss; this idea of language as one, and dichotomies of us vs. them mentality. In Post Colonial Computing I liked this idea of breaking the dichotomy of us vs. them. The idea that not only a select few should be allowed access to technology or technological innovations is not something that most people think about. It’s also this idea of perspective – people given access to technology by companies, but then also being the labor to create it. I wonder about the investment in technology in so-called under developed countries. Is it this idea of nation building and Empire? If we think about what Anderson is saying in “Imagined Communities” a lot of established nations take influence from the West and develop from there. But, what about pushing influence on these countries via technology? I’m trying to think of more connections between the readings other than this idea of Empire and nations, nationality, or “imagined communities.” I feel as though this is something that is going to take some discussing for me to break down some concepts and ideas.

Postcolonial and empire

2. From my own perspective, it was really comforting reading Phillips et al.’s article on postcolonial computing. For me, as an international student in the U.S., it is very important to see that there is an academic interest in disrupting the notion of ‘othering’ (us / them – western world / the rest – civilization / savagery) etc. For example, when we get discuss in our class about mobile technologies, computer access, embodiment, etc. I always try to make sense of that using the “translation” that Phillips et al. mention in the article. Nonetheless, there is something that still bothers me about the authors’ perspective (and it is connected to my first question): what is the way in which postcolonial computing represents a real challenge to the processes of globalization?

Weekly Post 12

1: This might be a bit tangential, but in the preface Hardt and Negri mention the Soviet “barriers” to the flow of capital. While that may have been true in Russia for a time, I have to dispute the degree to which the Soviet Union really kept the capitalist system “out” of its sphere of influence. The capitalist system permeated the Soviet system in various ways, which somewhat lends itself to the assertion made by Empire that I question in my second question.

2: On Hardt and Negri, I think the notion that the current system is a better platform to challenge repressive systems is a questionable one. While Hardt and Negri do use global flows of capital as the backdrop for the current system, nationalism has not been exclusive to the left as a means of political expression. Increasingly, right-wing and other forms of nationalism – especially as it relates to military power projection and civil rights – has utilized the defense of the nation-state as a means by which to repress more people further away from the nation. Despite their claims otherwise, localism has been effective, if not for the left, than for the right.

3: While the Dourish article is intentionally very specific, I wonder if it might provide a broader framework for changing the way people view Africa. I’ve read that African countries have to release brochures to dispel popular conceptions in America, namely that Africa is a continent of nothing but violent warlords and civil wars, by showing off that these nations have middle and working class families just like the United States does. Could that be a viable way, in addition to the post-colonial efforts being currently espoused by the program, to encourage a different outlook on Africa?

Definitions:

Empire: By Hardt and Negri, Empire seems to be a term for the prevailing capitalist economic system which governs national and transitional affairs, perhaps comparably to the classical “neoliberalism” moniker.

Post-colonial: An understanding of the world outside of the auspices of the traditional imperial/colonial system that dominated the world between the Middle Ages and the end of World War II.

Spatial Stories and Simulacra

Definitions:

Space: that which we create in and around us by virtue of our embodied social practices or relationships with other bodies (including objects).

Place: those specific spaces or locations to which we are affectively attached, bound, or oriented by virtue of meaningful relationships with other bodies (including objects), through embodied practices of power (biopolitics), and through practices of representation, visualization, and mapping; those spaces or locations that gain meaning through technologies of surveillance.

Identity: the enduring bodily and psychic perception and conception of self across spacetime(s), including the extension of self through cultural tools, technologies, and virtualities; the disciplining of self through technologies of surveillance; and the imagination or narrativization of self in relation to virtual and actual others or communities.

Questions:

1. This may seem tangential, but this week (like most weeks) I’m particularly drawn to the imaginary or imaginings of spaces and places. Perhaps this is because two of my favorite storytellers, Borges and Calvino, figure as a point of departure in many of our recent readings on virtuality, actuality, and reality. I’m fascinated by de Certeau’s argument that stories are spatial practices that perform the labor of transforming space and place (118), allowing us to conceptually “travel” between them. De Certeau leaves room for the work that desire does in constructing space and place; thus the virtual or potential can never be separate from the ways we live space because our desires, fulfilled or even barely imagined, will always form an integral part of our experience. I want to know how forms of critical desire (and maybe its inverse, refusal) might be mobilized in articulating spatial politics? This seems intimately bound to the utopian and dystopian concerns that weave throughout our course and, I would argue, all of our research projects.

2. Memory and metaphor are also key here as they shape the futures and the pasts we can imagine, as well as how we communicate or share our lived experiences of space, place, and identity. As de Certeau points out, metaphor or “metaphorai” is bound up with travel, one of the main ways we are able to think about our bodily experiences and practices of shifting spacetimes. I am especially attuned to this because my book review for today, Rowan Wilken’s Teletechnologies, Place, and Community, dealt explicitly with the use of images like “cyberspace” and “virtual community” to describe online presence and social interaction. What is at stake when the metaphors we use to describe things we otherwise might not have names for, like the slippery concept of “community”, rely on a subsumed or suppressed notion of space and place? What do we risk when we do not adequately attend to space and place but instead rely on it in primarily abstract or linguistic terms (thinking Lefebvre’s critique here)? To quote Martha Nell Smith, “mind your metaphors,” or to paraphrase Donna Haraway, it matters what stories we use to tell other stories with.

3. Imaginaries and socio-spatial fantasies also form part of the basis of Baudrillard’s argument. He argues that Disneyland “is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate the fiction of the real in the opposite camp. Whence the debility of this imaginary, its infantile degeneration. This world wants to be childish in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the ‘real’ world, and to conceal the fact that true childishness is everywhere–that it is that of the adults themselves who come here to act the child in order to foster illusions as to their real childishness.” How might we revitalize a political imagination that does not just create a negative illusion of ourselves, or that is not merely a lie we tell ourselves? Can that which is imaginary be dissociated from the childish or fantastical? The world of the child or of fantasy is not “real,” yet it is clear that the imagined makes reality.

Week 11

Unfortunately, I’m operating through a haze of nausea, but I’m going to take a whack at some of what I thought were connections between the readings and my own work. Apologies for lateness and/or a lack of clarity.

1. How do bodies function as or in representational spaces? It’s more clear to me they function in representational spaces, but I’m really intrigued as to whether or not bodies can be representational spaces. Specifically in terms of my work with weight-loss participants, it would appear that their bodies function as stand-ins for something.
2. Alternately, how do weight-loss bodies engage in what Baudrillard terms “dissimulation,” or the “feign[ing] not to have what one has,” in this case, a fat body?
3. Finally, I’d like to connect Arlene Davila’s recent book and talk to Sassen’s “Why Cities Matter.” Davila argues that the global flows of capital can be seen to center specifically in malls in Latin America, Puerto Rico in particular. As these malls develop, they essentially become global mini-cities in which capital and ideas about cultural authenticity become realized. So then, what is role of authenticity in the creation of global cities and how does its construction reflect flows of capital, ideas, and bodies?

Space and the City

How did the globalization process differ prior to the digital age? How might it change in the future? Will cities play the same role as proximity becomes less essential to doing the actual work of commerce?

De Certeau’s definitions of place and space differ somewhat from what we’ve seen thus far. How do these definitions relate to LeFebvre’s understanding of space and place? Is de Certeau’s definition (of space in particular) as useful when thinking of non-physical spaces, particularly since he uses physical words like direction and velocity to describe it?

In both the de Certeau’s “Walking in the City,” and Sassen’s “Why Cities Matter,” I was struck by the lack of attention to the fact that makes cities what they are: density and diversity of people. Do people, not just financial professionals but the proximity of people in general, factor in to the markets described in Why Cites Matter?  What is the connection between cities as places where large numbers of people actually live and work and cities as architectural spaces and commercial centers?

Space: a location that is used and moved through, and thus transformed. “Space is a practiced place” (de Certeau, 117)

Place: a distinct location, separated by relations to other places and configured by rules.

making the city

1) According to Sassen, the inhabitants of a city can be equated with the space of a city, as business and global connectivity increasingly glocalizes these areas (50).  She also discusses the looming possibility of “public” space being taken over by commercial and global economic privatization.  What she doesn’t discuss are the implications this privatization of public space has on specific bodies.  She actually seems to gesture that the city is the place for disadvantaged people to gain access and power, but I don’t think that addresses the many forgotten and erased people that physically occupy these cities.

2) To put Baudrillard and Sassen in conversation, I’m interested in the ways that signs and symbols mark the city and enable them to be hubs of globalization while remaining specific physical places.  Culture acts as a way to localize and differentiate the global nature of the city.  In Korea, Songdo city is actually being created to be a global economic city.  It is literally being built in a flat place that has no inhabitants.  I wonder what this says about the impact that cultural symbols inherently mark the city?  How will people conceptualize this city that has no history and will it be a “successful” endeavor in the economic sense?

3) To continue with the example of Songdo, I wonder how de Certeau’s concept of the city walker will be reimagined when this city opens up like a Disneyland’s opening day?  There is essentially a ribbon cutting followed by business and living in this city.  If there is no evolution in the city, where pedestrian encounters with space are reactive and adjusting to larger state structures, how will the individual use of that city space be affected?

Baudrillard

Space: is imaginary. What we have come to understand as space is based on the stories we create around space. This adds tom understandings of space as contested. In order to lay claim to a space we must first create our story or use of that space.

I had a lot of questions regarding the Baudrillard text because I don’t think I have a good understanding of what he is saying. Is he arguing that everything that we have come to understand as “real” is only a part of our imaginary? It seems as if nothing can be considered “real” because all we have ever known is the representation of a particular object?

In terms of Baudrillard, how are we to understand myth making and the simulacra? What lines can we draw between myth and reality? Here I was thinking about ideas of nation and boundary. If what we know about a space is based on myth then how does this change our perception of nation crossing?

Other questions I had regarding the Baudrillard text are, Does simulacra have a referential? Does it represent itself and not anything that we have ever seen before?

City and Citizenship (?)

Something that concerns me about Sassen’s article is the observation she makes regarding the political character of the city. I completely agree that different political activities “become visible on the street” (p. 49). However, it is a fact that such the way politics is enacted in the city seems to be more difficult in the context of highly specialized (and corporate) cities. In other words, it seems that the space of the city (which is supposed to be public) is being challenged from “commercialization, theme-parking, and privatization” (p. 49). Therefore, political acts that are not sponsored by mainstream political and economical spheres could be excluded from the notions of political activism and social-spatial justice. If the resonance of the activities of political groups is stronger in the city, what happened with movements such as Occupy Wall Street? Although the movement was pretty strong last Fall and part of Winter, it seems that its power diminished because there was a broken link between the use of urban space and the politics of the new city. Is it possible, therefore, to recover the political character of the cities in the near future? and, for whom cities really matter?

It is impossible to read De Certeau’s “Walking in the City” with certain predisposition after reading Nigel Drift’s “Driving in the city.” I imagine that De Certeau writes in a time when augmented space was not as important as it is nowadays, and that is why Drift criticizes some of De Certeau’s reflections on the creation of urban space. However, reading this article and comparing it to Sassen’s makes me think about the concept of “citizenship.” I am not referring here to nation-state affiliation, but at the relationship between the individual and the space s/he creates when interacting with the city. If the current life of the city offers us highly specialized, and technologically complex spaces that emulate the global standardization of cities, then what is the meaning of this new type of citizenship? Is this concept related to consumerism? is it a way of interacting with others’ vision of space by means of mobile technologies? what is it?

Representations of Space and Place.

This week I admittedly struggled with the Buadrillard reading this week regarding reproductions. From my understanding, we take for granted the “real” and live in a world filled with reproductions. At this point we start to see the reproductions as the actual and then when they start to dissipate we feel a sense of loss because of our living in the reproduction. Is this the idea of the hyperreal? I’d just like to discuss this more in class because I feel like no matter how many times I go over this I misunderstand something.

In response to Alex’s question that he posited, “Is it possible, though, that cities themselves are spaces in which “place” becomes mutable and separation from certain spaces becomes largely marginal and even irrelevant?” I would suggest that given specific definitions of the term place, that place is never mutable. If I use the definition that I am using throughout my work, which references de Certeau’s theories of space and place, the two are so closely linked with each other that one cannot exist without the other – “space is what place becomes when the unique gathering of things, meanings, and values are sucked out…Put positively, place is space filled up by people, practices, objects, and representations. In particular, place should not be confused with the use of geographic or cartographic metaphors (boundaries, territories) that define conceptual or analytical spaces…” (Gieryn, 465). In essence, place and space are in a relationship with one another. Here, to mute one is to mute the other or, to mark irrelevant one is to mark irrelevant the other. Granted, throughout the course we have stumbled upon different definitions of space and place, I believe that this is one context where this question can be answered – given the definition that I have posed from Gieryn’s work that was inspired by de Certeau.

Gieryn, Thomas F. “A Space for Place in Sociology.” Annual Review of Sociology 26.1 (2000): 463-96.

Weekly Post 11

1: The Sassen article raises a question for me regarding cities. While cities, without a doubt, exist in a certain space and time, as Sassen points out throughout the paper, cities also are a place where “space” is not always the most relevant of factors. Is it possible, though, that cities themselves are spaces in which “place” becomes mutable and separation from certain spaces becomes largely marginal and even irrelevant? Maybe the notion of cities as “centers” of regions and nations rings more true in the digital era than many people believe.

2: The way in which de Certeau describes the functions of the city seems rather similar to the panoptic principle that was established by Foucault. He doesn’t do so explicitly, but it makes me wonder what a look at “the city” through the lens of panopticism – taking into account not only its own regulation of its own people, but also the role of the city in trade and politics beyond its borders – would look like and what theoretical principles it would yield.

3: Honestly, I have a lot of questions about the Baudrillard reading, which I found to be rather overdramatic and sensationalistic. Maybe that was the intent, but I can’t say I enjoyed it. One part that did get me thinking, though, was the segment on holograms. The article claims, as an example (of something) that by passing your hand through the hologram, your hand becomes unreal. I dispute this, and the premise of one becoming unreal through the medium of television. I think things like holograms and the ongoing theme of television are important to establishing our own “reality” against what happens on the screen.

Definitions:

Gentrification: While this definition is not hit directly in the articles, I’ve brought it up once before and think it bares relevance to the current readings and specifically de Certeau’s. In a city defined by its functions, it would seem that gentrification is a manner in which “undesirable” elements are removed from the city in favor of those which meet its ideal “function” better.

Panopticism: As it relates to de Certeau, panoptic principles could be argued to be driving the manner in which cities are evolving both in their self-administration and in how they relate to the wider world in the digital era.

Connection

Overall these articles gave me a rather unpleasant feeling. In particular the Ito, et al article and its analysis of the “mobile kit.” I’m not sure how much of the tone of the article is related to the discipline it comes out of but the subjects seemed very dehumanized. To what extent is that view of people as objects an extension of objects as parts of people (cyborgs)? Are people becoming extensions of their online identities?

In all of these articles, I am struck by the seeming contradictions of the ways mobile technology affects our lives. It seems we are simultaneously more and less connected. In the chapter by Sherry Turkle, young people leave their parents behind technologically on one hand, but on the other they are competing for attention from their parents against phones, computers, and other devices. We are at once more efficient and more overwhelmed by all there is to do. How do we go about understanding these seeming contradictions, and where do they come from in terms of the possibilities of technology and our relationship to it?

We tend to talk about what technology does to us, our relationships, ways of communication, etc. However, as much as our phones become “smart” and able to do more and more things, they are still tools designed to achieve a goal. Is it possible to interpret the ways in which we have developed and used mobile technology as driven by the ways humans really want to connect and communicate? To what extent are the effects of new ways of doing things shaping the way we do them (and ultimately the ways we want to do them), and to what extent are they actually reflecting a cultural shift that happens independent of the means?

Cyborg – an entity consisting of a human augmented with machinery, in this case with mobile networking capability.

Life mix – the amalgam of places and spaces in which we exist and interact, both “in real life” and virtually.