Locative Media & The City

Something I am noticing in this airport In Boston on my way back to Buffalo is that I can not connect to the wifi connection in order to post my thoughts on this wonderful blog. There is a service with excellent reception, but it wants me to pay $7 for an hour of internet time. This led me to some interesting thoughts that we might have grazed over in class. Perhaps we are beating a dead horse when discussing things like the digital divide, but I feel it is important to think about when discussing things like calm technology, ubiquitous computing, and storing/encoding meta information into a physical space.

While walking through the streets of Philly, I was thinking of some of the technologies and projects that were highlighted this semester. Namely, (yellow tag http://www.yellowtag.org/) and also the project that has the bar codes placed in various spots throughout the city that can be scanned with a cell phone in order to obtain information about landmarks (similar to yellow tag).

While passing some historical buildings, I wondered about a few things. I would potentially be interested in who built them, when they were built, for what purpose, and also what it is currently being used for. While I was thinking this and passing by the building, I also passed by a homeless person rummaging around the garbage. My immediate response to this was to question the necessity of some of these projects mentioned above. I started to weigh some things in my mind. Does the information obtained from my device about this place count any more or any less over the potential information that the homeless person might have about it? This leads me to one of the proposed problems with something like Wikipedia. Some claim that some information contained within the site is potentially biased and therefore not very useful or even credible.

When it comes down to it, I value biased information. There is something rich found in a personal story about something rather than taking an objective standpoint as “correct” or “valuable.” The point I’m trying to make is that, it might be more beneficial to ask a real person where the best cheese steak is rather than scanning a sticker on the outside of buildings to find out. I would say that its possibly more enriching to engage in a chance conversation rather than roaming around scanning tags to find out more about the surrounding.

Another problem is the digital divide. As I alluded to in the first paragraph, I currently do not have access to information. It is available at a price that I am not willing to pay. So for someone who is “underprivileged” and does not have the luxuries of GPS devices and cell phones, the question of WHO benefits from these projects becomes relevant. Im not the expert on social justices, but it seems as though we should strive to make these technologies accessible to everyone. Wi-fi should be FREE across a city and not to those who are willing to buy into it. To my knowledge, google may be investing into a project that would cover all of san fransisco with a wireless signal free of charge. Perhaps, Google should be a model for future projects that will be valuable to everyone, not just those who have access to the technology.