Communications and the City - Essay Example

Communications and the It is interesting how dystopian our views of the of tomorrow invariably are. In film, in novels, in imagination, our cities just get taller, darker, faster, and dirtier. The common niceties that typified human society up until now seem to have been obliterated by the growth of the impersonal city. Whether it's the eponymous San Angeles that grew up while Sylvester Stallone's character slumbered in Demolition Man or the dark collection of girders that makes up the setting for Blade Runner, we tend to view the future as dark, as scary, as amoral. Our imaginations also include methods of communication that are faster and closer at hand than those we have when we make our stories. Consider the tricorders in use in the original Star Trek television series and early films; the video wristwatches that were available to James Bond back in the 1970's, and the eerie way in which Sandra Bullock's droid character was able to see into Sylvester Stallone's memories in Demolition Man. Now that the 21st century has arrived, we are completely surrounded by communication. We carry access to the World Wide Web in our pockets; the ability to communicate digitally has actually slowed our interpersonal communication, as we spend our time with other people texting people who are not with us, or posting information about what we are doing on Facebook or other social media sites. However, communication from the media to us does not just travel through smartphones, and the newest forms of urban planning are taking this change into account. One of the challenges facing urban planners is the inclusion of robust methods of communication and media technology without ending up living in the dank, black sort of city that served as The Running Man's labyrinth. However, incorporating media into city planning does not mean that citizens have to have walls built up between themselves and others, either in the form of dark skyscrapers or suburban sprawl. The very word “media” has taken on the connotation of passive reception of entertainment, networking with people close at hand as well as on the other side of the globe (McCullough 2006, 16). McCullough (2006) applies the term “locative” to media technology that leaves the desktop and the laptop behind and works its way into the other parts of our mundane lives. The good news is that the media technology that is used in urban planning does not have to take the form of a separate world that sits behind a large desktop monitor, as Walker (1989) envisioned. This vision of larger access to media did populate the cultural imagination, as such films as I, Robot and such novels as Ready Player One saw a future in which the true controllers of the world would sit behind glass walls in offices, manipulating events through touch screens and avatars. However, the world has proven not to be so difficult to infiltrate with media. The advent of the smartphone, as well as larger-scale technologies, enable people to indulge their taste for media while out on the streets. This has taken some time to take place, though. In 2005, the Where 2.0 conference was all about the transition of online information from the computer to geospace (McCullough 2006, 16). The advent of all of the Web 2.0 tools has made the notion of “cyberspace” almost an antiquated one. While one still sees ruddy invitations to come to websites, more often than not one can find the necessary web content all about one, no matter where one is. You no longer have to unplug from your social surroundings, go upstairs, power on the computer, plug in the modem, and wait for your information. You don't even have to sit down; you can access it while on the move. In fictive environments, of course, this was predicted long ago, most frightfully by the visions of George Orwell in 1984. The purpose of the information technology in Smith's world, of course, was surveillance, as Big Brother and the Party were all about keeping tabs on the deeds, words, and even thoughts of the people. Now, of course, the purpose is more commercial. As Arthur Jensen, a corporate executive in the 1976 film Network put it, “We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies...the world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of businesses...[in which] all necessities [are] provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.” However, we still do live in a world in which geography remains important – perhaps the most visible sign that the world has, emphatically, not gone virtual. Consider that, in just about every urban center, the real estate prices are the highest in areas that are the most dense – and the most well connected to media technology. Some of the largest building projects have been done by universities, as the college experience has proven very hard to reproduce online (McCullough 2006, 17). One of the most popular economic pastimes, even in a time period with the highest fuel prices in the history of mankind, remains tourism – a pastime focused on place. Urban design still centers around shopping, in many cases, even though all of the tony stores that one walks by have websites where you can make purchases from home. The ideal corner locations are still home to cafes; even though many people will bring their laptops there and set up shop for a while, these people are still getting out of the house and spending money in the traditional way. A fascinating example of a change in cultural patterns, thanks to the advent of such robust media and communication technology, has taken place in Tokyo. The “keitai” text messaging has made people more civil to each other on the train system, and social groups that meet both online and in person have made living in a very dense residential and pedestrian setting much richer. The city is seen by members of these groups as a game to play, both online and in real life. Instead of leaving the real Tokyo behind and entering cyberspace, they are pulling Tokyo into the Web as well (Ito 2005). Much of the study of urban design in the wake of the revolutions in communication technology have focused on the large scale conception of the city (Graham and Martin, 2001). In economic terms, in which these macro concepts have taken root, the notion of cyberspace is still alive and well. After all, if you look at the money put through the capital markets in the world, that sum is much greater than the total of the gross domestic products of all the nations of the world. Clearly, there is money moving around that is not ending up (at least being reported) in the coffers of nations. Instead of discrete locales, cities have just become way stations for the abstraction that money has become. This means that Money trumps the value of the local on an almost universal basis. When city planning reflected this macro emphasis, this meant that development ideas that worked in one place where photocopied and ramrodded into other places, even though the setting was completely different, which led to some interesting juxtaposition. One such example is the Shops at Fairview, an outdoor mall that has been stapled onto a farflung suburb of Dallas, Texas. The sprawl matches some projects that have done well in the area, such as the Firewheel Shopping Center in the Dallas suburb of Garland. However, outdoor, pedestrian shopping, where the stores are separated by large parking lots, is not what people want to do in Texas, especially in the summer. As a result, the huge complex has had an extremely difficult time finding tenants (Wilonsky 2008). However, city planning that takes note of the fact that, even in a communication-heavy world, people remain focused on what is close to them, and what is tangible. The abilities of Bluetooth technologies to track times when people carrying activated Bluetooth technology pass within a space of a few meters from each other makes it possible for sociologists (and city planners) to make note of how people walk in a particular area, and what the habitual patterns are (Pesce and Tonkin, 2008). It is these habitual patterns that will be particularly important in the urban design of the future. Americans love to look at movies that are set in Los Angeles and New York City, but we generally do not trust cities. Look at the urban sprawl that surrounds just about every urban center; note the flight to the suburbs that has marked the last sixty years. However, in Europe and in east Asia, things are much different. People move around their cities, on foot, carrying their only computer in their hand. For them, it is about messaging, meeting up with people, and leaving tags (McCullough, 2006, 17). This means that the cookie-cutter version of city planning will no longer work. Media and communication are as small as an RFID tag that you can carry around with yourself – and as small as a smartphone Web server that could sit on a quarter. There is good news to go along with this, though – because the large scale is proving to be inadequate, the likelihood of a Big Brother actually arising to control all of the information is difficult to imagine. It is the smaller pests that are likely to provide annoyance, though, where it is the weirdo sending worms through spam emails, your having to leave encrypted information every time you swipe a debit card or run your identification badge through a slot at work. When technology is added to a situation without forethought, the result is annoyance rather than convenience. However, people will continue to add these devices to their lives, whether they actually end up being helpful or not. For an example of this, consider the Zipcar. This has a gadget that sits on thewindshield. Inside, it has a GPS and wireless attachment to a database. You can reserve one as little as an hour before you need it, and the RFID technology allows it to know who is supposed to pick it up. This means that you don't have to buy a car if you don't want to; you don't have to stand in line at the Hertz or the Avis counter waiting to be helped. You can use a car whenever you need to – without the burden of ownership. This is the upside of locative media application. Obviously, this paradigm does not work as well in other areas, especially those that require interpersonal relationships. The spinning carousel of available women that awaits Michael York's character in Logan's Run has proven much more complicated to reenact in the real world, as people have proven to be quite stuck to their emotions, even if the official trappings of relationships, such as a marriage license, has proven to be somewhat expendable. But if one can hire a Zipcar, and one lives in a city with reliable and useful public transportation, why would one need to sign a lease, or take out a loan? The great thing about dystopian visions of tomorrow is that most of what our prophets envision ends up not coming true. We cling to our need to touch, to relate, to feel, to get real feedback from others. Those things are not possible in a world run by avatars, or in a world in which we sit behind computer screens and find our reality through them. City planning, then, becomes a much trickier enterprise; because the ways to study human interaction have multiplied, and because the options that people have when it comes to their lifestyle choices have multiplied even more, the margin for error has shrunk considerably. In a way, this is a positive thing, because it means that there will never be an Orwellian Ministry of Truth that puts down all those who would reveal its handiwork. It also means, though, that civic leaders will have to work harder to keep their residents from burrowing their way towards like-minded people who live near them, instead of engaging in the community at large. Maintaining a cohesive spirit for a town or city will become an even greater challenge. However, for every robot invasion that we imagine, there is a human solution. It can be the same way for maintaining a unified society. Works Cited Bauman, Z., 2003. City of fears, city of hopes. http://www.gold.ac.uk/media/city.pdf Blade Runner, 1982. Film. Directed by Ridley SCOTT. USA: Warner Brothers Pictures. Cline, E., 2011. Ready player one. New York: Crown. Demolition Man, 1993. Film. Directed by Marco BRAMBILLA. USA: Warner Brothers Pictures. Graham, S. and Martin, S., 2001. Splintering urbanism: Networked infrastructures, technological mobilities, and the urban condition. London: Routledge. Ito, M., 2005. Personal, portable, pedestrian: Mobile phones in Japanese life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Logan's Run, 1976. Film. Directed by Michael ANDERSON. USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. McCullough, M, 2006. On the urbanism of locative media. Places 18(2): 16-19. Mitchell, W., 2003. Me++. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Network, 1976. Film. Directed by Paddy CHAYEFSKY. USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Orwell, G., 1950. 1984. New York: Signet Classic. Pesce, M., and Tonkin, J., 2006. San Jose's missing soul. Metropolis Magazine November 2006. http://www.metropolismag.com/story/20061108/san-joses-missing-soul Walker, J, 1989. Through the looking glass. In The Art of Human Computer Interaction. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley. Wilonsky, R., 2008. Mall? Rats. Dallas Observer 10 September 2008. http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2008/09/mall_rats.php Read More