Locative Media & The City

I believe in our class discussion of Benjamin and “The Flaneur” the idea that it may be compared to the Internet was brought up. I think this in an interesting thought and want to explore it a little bit.

There are certain qualities in the Flaneur walking the city that are similar to someone experiencing the Internet in the Flaneur style. This involves viewing the Internet as a kind of city, and thinking more about the social spaces that exist there. One of the similarities between Benjamin’s Flaneur and an Internet Flaneur (I’ll call him/her the “user”) is that it could be assumed that the user would be of the bourgeois class. While there are public computers in libraries that are available for free use, the user who can navigates like a Flaneur would presumably have a higher education and therefore be part of a higher social class. Likewise, the user has time to spare, time that is not occupied by labor. This would be true of someone who inhabits chat rooms and other social spaces on the Internet, observing interactions, identities, and conversations. Of course, there are no physical spaces that the user can inhabit, which makes it a strikingly different experience from Benjamin’s Flaneur. But what really strikes me as a similar experience is the ability to observe with distance while being hidden in the crowd, and to taken on momentarily the identities that the user observes. One might even place a computer hacker in this position, however, the hacker is invisible and completely segregated from the crowd so I would argue against that.

Reading Lynch's "The City Image and Its Elements" prompted me to think about Buffalo in that context, and how Buffalo's paths, edges, districts, etc. are represented to me.

The paths of Buffalo in my mind are highways and main roads that I trace back and forth every day. The 33, 90, and 290 highways, Millersport, Delaware Ave., and Main Street are inscribed in my mental picture as pathways that cross through Buffalo. Delaware exists as a gradient for me; I forget that it is a street much past Hertel Ave, and still tend to be a little surprised when I see the sign for Delaware Ave. on the 290, on the rare occasions I travel that part. The gradient is thickest near the Allentown area since that is where I live, and slowly pulses off to nonexistence in my mental map as it travels north.

Like some others have commented already, I found last weeks texts were complex and a little hard to digest and speak about. I thought I’d pick one point of the Lefebvre article that I thought was interesting. Lefebvre says “repetition has everywhere defeated uniqueness, that the artificial and contrived have driven all spontaneity and naturalness from the field, and, in short, that products have vanquished work.” He describes these repetitious spaces as the products of workers’ repetitious movements. This reminds me of everything from restaurant chains, to urban condos that all look the same (I see these in downtown Cleveland, Ohio), to suburban neighborhoods with houses that are all copies of each other, one after another.

I have been exploring the projects discussed in “Beyond Locative Media:” .walk, urban tapestries, and 34N 118W. This is the first time I have read or thought deeply about locative media in the city, and seeing the projects helped me to go back and understand the readings a little more clearly.

Checking out urban tapestries really got me starting to grasp the concept of locative media’s possibilities. More so than .walk, here it seemed that the city is existing as a living, breathing, code producing computer. The threads of social interaction and information exchange seem endless. In the first animation example, the man on crutches receives a helpful hand, a new reading list, and pleasant destination in just a few clicks from his handheld. I imagined the park not as a simply a scattered tree field with benches, but a networked link between strangers, conversations, and a book club of sorts.