Locative Media & The City

I found the Davis chapter interesting for a number reasons.
First, it contains a number of examples of both the discipline and the control society.
Numbering housetops to form a grid to allow police helicopters to quickly respond, police substations atop the public library, gated communities and ubiquitous security cameras are examples of the . The control society isn’t so obvious but can be found in databases like used by the police to match criminals. These devices aren’t always obvious because of the level of modulation.

Its worth mentioning that the control society doesn’t necessarily deny the discipline society. Deleuze credits Foucault seminal work on the panopticon for capturing the eighteenth and nineteenth century mechanisms of power. A variety of factors in more contemporary times (computers/internet, military technology, corporations, globalization, to name a few) have shifted the paradigm of the discipline to one of control.

Secondly, the Davis chapter is full examples of the impact of architecture/urban design on society. He demonstrates the effects of street barriers, fortress like public and private buildings, rounded benches that can’t be slept on or lack of public restrooms, to a name a few, can have on the public.

Is LA somehow exemplary of other urban centers in the 1st world? Examples of the discipline society and the control society abound. At this moment, I’m looking at a a surveillance camera across the street. I’m borrowing a wi-fi signal from spot coffee while ‘logging’ onto the UB network. Last weekend, my brother-in-law looked at one of a number of gated communities on Long Island for his mother to retire in. We google’d the directions and used our EZ pass on the toll roads/bridges.

Its one thing to be annoyed by spyware, victimized by id theft and computer ads that know my name; its another to have large scale collapse of world markets. One of my big concerns is shared by Paul Virilio (and countless sci-fi writers) – what if there is an accident? I think of the person that accidentally sold too many share’s on the NY Stock Exchange a few years ago that put the financial world in turmoil for a couple of days. Scary stuff!