Kazys Varnelis and Anne Friedberg

Introduction

Contemporary life is dominated by the pervasiveness of the network. With the spread of the mobile phone worldwide (arguably history’s most successful gadget) and the growth of broadband in the developed world, technological networks are becoming easier to access and more ubiquitous. The “always-on,” “always-accessible,” network|or at least the promise of that condition|produces a broad set of changes to our concept of place, linking space to network to create networked place.

The following essay addresses both the networking of space and the spatiality of the network. We identify a series of conditions symptomatic of the culture of network “space”: the everyday superimposition of simultaneous real and virtual spaces, the development of a mobile sense of place or “telecocoon,” the emergence of real virtual worlds, the rise of the network as a socio-spatial model, and the use of mapping technology as a means of understanding the world. At the same time, we recognize that these changes are not simply produced by technology. On the contrary, the development and practices of technology (and the conceptual shifts that these new technological practices produce) are thoroughly imbricated in culture, society, and politics.

Taken together, these changes are already radical, but they may only be the first steps in restructuring our concept of spatiality, mere evidence of the early days of sociocultural shifts of which we can only be partially aware, just as the first theorists of modernism and postmodernism could only incompletely understand the emerging condition of their day.

I. Place: Simultaneous Spaces

“100 dollars for 3,000 minutes,” a twenty-five year old man with a Farsi accent repeats into his cell phone. The scene is the local Starbucks where you've gone to get away from the all- consuming distraction that the Internet plays in your life. You've left your Tr€o smart phone in the car in order to be blissfully unaware of any professional or personal obligations that would distract you from your task. You’ve even left your laptop behind so that you wouldn’t be tempted by the queue of emails to catch up to. You're in the café with your Moleskine notebook|this non-networked object so ubiquitous among the digerati|trying to start an essay on the role of place in network culture and finding that the only way to do it is to detach yourself from the network as much as possible. But the people surrounding you have other ideas. The fellow behind you is trying to commit himself more deeply to the network, purchasing a plan that will allow him to talk on his mobile phone for one tenth of his waking hours every month. A woman next to you is browsing the Internet with her laptop while a late-career executive is thumbing his Blackberry, two students are studying together, some teenagers are hanging out listening to their iPods and periodically breaking out in giggles and loud exclamations as they get receive messages from their friends on their mobile phones. A thirty-something man is on his laptop working on a screenplay, while a few people are just reading books or the paper. You are all somehow drawn together by the lure of the generically acceptable coffee and the desire to share a similarly generic, but nonetheless communal space with other humans with whom you are likely not to have any interaction.

That this essay opens at a coffeehouse is not incidental. For theorist Jürgen Habermas, when the “public sphere” emerged in the early eighteenth century, it did so in the context of the café, the learned society, and the salon.[1] The café, and the rituals of coffee and caffeine that grew along with it, provided both forum and fuel for critical debate about the latest pamphlets, newsletters and broadsides. But the public sphere was not primarily a physical place, rather it was a discursive site where a literate public could conduct rational and critical debate. The assembly and dialogue that constituted this emerging public sphere occurred as much within the pages of newly circulated printed materials as it did within the walls of the coffeehouse. And yet, while Habermas’ ideas of the emancipatory potential of the public sphere were dependent on open models of communication and participation, the café was a space with its own invisible divides of power and access. The spaces that Habermas championed as the original outposts of this deliberative democracy were not open to women or to men without the appropriate race, class or ethnicity. As feminist historians point out, women conducted different modes of deliberative discourse in separate spaces such as the tea table and the public laundry.

What kind of public do we have in the Magic Johnson-owned Starbucks scene in our quotidian present? Women sit alongside men, the patrons vary widely in age and ethnicity. But they are not engaged in debate or dialogue with each other. If they come together, it is simply to establish an ambient visual experience of bodies in near proximity, as psychically necessary in this wired day and age as in the days of the Neanderthals. The material space of Starbucks is designed to facilitate this through its neighborhood location, its anonymous yet familiar design choices, its comfortable furniture, and the carefully calibrated background music (which one can also listen to via the Starbucks Hear Music® XM satellite radio channel). But if, in general, these individuals aren’t interacting with the other café-goers verbally, they not only choose to share the space with them, they are engaged in a calculated co-presence: while comfortably sipping caffeine or its commodified equivalent in the franchised design of the local Starbucks, they are|via a network connection, mobile phone, or wireless laptop|in another “place.”

Of course, much has happened since the eighteenth century café inaugurated public life in Europe's great cities. Not only did the public newspaper, penny novel, and other printed matter offer new forums for the literate public, but arcades, boulevards and other public spaces began to develop in the bourgeois city of the nineteenth century, changing the relationship of the individual to the city. Poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire championed the man on the street|the flâneur|who moved through these newly forged urban spaces with the privilege and proxy that bourgeois gentlemen were awarded in public space: "To be away from home, and yet to feel at home; to behold the world, to be in the midst of the world yet to remain hidden from the world...."[2] In reflecting on these changing configurations of public and private on the streets of modernity, German cultural critic Walter Benjamin wrote: "The street becomes a dwelling for the flâneur; he is as much at home among the facades of houses as a citizen is in his four walls.... The walls are the desk against which he presses his notebooks; news-stands are his libraries and the terraces of cafés are the balconies from which he looks down on his household after his work is done."[3]

As the nineteenth century drew to its end, the pedestrian mobility of the flâneur was matched by the many machines of transport|trains, streetcars, buses, moving walkways, escalators, elevators| that not only accelerated movement but produced new social behaviors. Sociologist Georg Simmel describes this characteristic sociology of the metropolis: “Before the development of buses, railroads, and trams in the nineteenth century, people had never been in a position of having to look at one another for long minutes or even hours without speaking to one another.”[4] From the dawn of the metropolis however, as Simmel and Baudelaire observed, the only way that humans could navigate this overwhelming condition was by disconnecting, by shutting off their connections to this multitude of others. The flâneur was at home in the crowd, but he was also anonymous and occupied the position of the detached observer, even as he navigated the flow of the streets. To be clear, however, not everyone had the experience of the bourgeois male. The flâneuse, if she was to navigate public space on her own, without being thought of as a product for sale, was safest in the cathedrals of consumption, department stores that encouraged other new behaviors. Consumerism was born out the need to create desire for the products of the industrialized machines of capital and to award women new agencies a new “purchase” on public space.

Cultural critics observed that such detachment increased during the twentieth century as people fled decaying cities to suburbs, and as public space became increasingly privatized and virtualized, with networks of individuals being replaced by television broadcast networks, individuals becoming less and less citizens and more and more consumers.[5] For these critics, it wasn’t just television that produced these changes. The public sphere was being evacuated and along with it “place”|and its deeply-etched social and historical meanings|was quickly disappearing. In her book the Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs linked the city and the public sphere, arguing that a vital sense of civitas depends on an architectural infrastructure that encourages frequent random face-to-face interactions within an urban community. For Jacobs, both modern urban planning and the detached single-family house in the suburb inhibited those vibrant interactions.[6]

Perhaps the crescendo of this gloom came only a decade and a half ago when anthropologist Marc Augé made his dismal conclusion about the nature of human interaction in physical space in his Non-Places. Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Augé suggests that our sense of place, as old as humanity, is coming to an end. Building on Marcel Mauss's idea of place as a "culture localized in time and space," Augé distinguishes “places”|locations in which individuals with distinct identities form human relationships that in turn accrete, creating the sediments of history|from “non-places”|spaces of transition absent of identity, human relationships, or the traces of history. Augé’s non-places are in-between spaces, sites of transit for humans (airports, airplanes, freeways, parking garages but also refugee camps and shantytowns), data (the space in front of the computer screen), and goods and capital (the space in front of the ATM, the shopping mall, the supermarket). This new world, Augé writes, privileges the fleeting, ephemeral, and contingent.

Where places are filled with individual identities, language, references, unformulated rules, non- places are spaces of solitary individuality. Much as at our Starbucks, that anonymity is shared by many. According to Augé, instead of being distinct individuals, we are all passengers on an airplane or drivers on a highway, our identities lost. Information in Augé’s world of non-place is conveyed through disembodied texts and voices offering prescriptive information: “No smoking in the airport,” “Flight 140 to Madrid departs at gate 25,” “Have your passports ready and customs forms filled out,” and of course, “Please take the ticket.” Modernity, Augé concludes, was still deeply tied to place and history|indeed, we can observe that historical narratives were key to that moment. Augé's supermodernity, however, abandons all that, leaving us in a realm finally devoid of history. To be fair, Augé issues a disclaimer, noting that non-place and place are only conceptual poles. He admits that there is no such thing as pure non-place|after all, for an aviation buff, airport worker, or true road warrior, the airport has history while highway engineer’s trained eye can identify just when an overpass was built|and there is no such thing as pure place. Nevertheless, Augé concludes, our era is increasingly dominated by non-place, our existence doomed to solitude.[7]

But what of place today? To be sure, the old world of public space has not magically returned. Our Starbucks is a generic space in which many alight temporarily, not a place defined by the kind of encounters that might have occurred in Café Central in Vienna where Trotsky, Freud, and Lenin came every day. Our Starbucks is not a place where random individuals chat with one another about the issues of the day, at least not usually.

[Figure 1 here]

But face-to-face encounters are only one level of human interaction: the Starbucks anecdote suggests that for some reason we still have an urge to gather together, even if in our solitude. And this idea of solitude is deceiving: since Augé’s day, a great deal has changed. The proliferation of mobile phones and the widespread adoption of “always on” broadband Internet connections in homes and offices in the developed world mean that we are not necessarily alone even if we are not interacting with those in close physical proximity to us.

We invoke the situation at Starbucks to demonstrate the proliferation of simultaneous environments in our culture, the series of overlapping spatialities in which individuals dwell. What we observed in Starbucks was on one level a generic space of anonymity, but on another a place in which a number of individuals inhabited distinct spaces, many of them networked spaces: simultaneous environments.

II. Mobile Place: The Rise of the Telecocoon

In the Social Impact of the Telephone, Ithiel de Sola Pool explains how the modern city, with its concentrated downtown core and increasingly dispersed suburban sprawl was made possible by the telephone. In de Sola Pool’s analysis, the telephone enabled remote surveillance of the factory by managers who could then work in city cores, inhabiting skyscrapers|a building type viable only once the telephone had made messenger boys obsolete|in highly packed environments where they could meet other managers for face to face meetings. But as de Sola Pool observes, these were also changes produced by economic growth: capital had undergone such a process of accumulation and specialization that highly specialized white collar workers needed to be deployed. The telephone was a technology that both encouraged sociability and maintained intimacy at a distance. Unlike radio's monologic address to many, the telephone distributed its dialogic potential through it growing circuits and exchanges.[8]

And as cultural theorists like Marshall McLuhan and Joshua Meyrowitz will remind us, television not only knit a global village of telepresent images, but by broadcasting live across its early networks, the medium produced a simultaneous doubling of place. As broadcast historian Paddy Scannell writes: “Public events now occur, simultaneously, in two different places: the place of the event itself and that in which it is watched and heard.”[9]

But these changes did not happen in a spatial vacuum. As Sola Pool points out, telephones reshaped the city by symbiotically exacerbating certain trends|the concentration of managerial, service, and information industries in the city core and manufacturing on the periphery. Televisions, on the other hand, were so successful in the 1950s and 1960s in part because they offered a sense of belonging in rapidly expanding suburban environments (and rapidly shrinking urban environments) within which individuals already felt isolated. In this regard, it is crucial to understand that humans organize space in such a way that it is a medium of its own. The city, as communications theorist Ronald Abler observed, is itself a communication device.[10]

If the city is a communication device, until recently the two primary means of browsing it have been on foot|the method of the flâneur or flâneuse|and with the automobile. The latter anticipates the condition of a mobile, networked world in that the automobile|which transports its driver and passengers in the comfort of a private interior|has always been a mobile communication device, a viewing machine; its wind-screen a membrane that both protects the driver and frames the view. As automobile speeds and design efficiency improved, the automobile negotiated a network of expanding roadways and highways. The Interstate itself was a prototype for the Internet, a network of networks. As Jean Baudrillard asserted in his 1983 quip about the “private telematics” of driving: “The vehicle becomes a kind of capsule, its dashboard the brain, the surrounding landscape unfolding like a televised screen.” No surprise the emerging metaphor for screenic access to Internet in the early 1990s was the “information superhighway.”[11]

Automobiles are, in a sense, transitional mobile devices, accustoming users, drivers, browsers to mobility with access. Car radios and, in the late 1970s, citizen-band radios or “CBs” connect the driver to information and communication beyond the vehicle. As mobile phones and GPS devices add access to an ever-more pervasive network, we can access networked “place” with a wind-in-the-hair mobility, riding the train, walking down the street, sitting on the bus, driving in car.

As we’ve learned from Mizuko Ito’s study of mobile phones in Japan, keitai (roughly "something you carry with you") are "personal, portable, pedestrian." By contrast, the network of mobile telephony has subtly different implications for automobile users. In Ito's study of keitai use on public transportation, she points out that mobile phones were swiftly regarded as noise pollution, whereas text/email are silent practices and therefore not offensive in public. [12]

But unlike the passengers on public transport or pedestrians, in the private space of the automobile, undistracted vision is necessary but silence is not. Hence there has been an inverse interdiction about mobile phone and mobile screen use while driving (and there might be natural selection afoot|carphone users may be the unfit portion of the human gene pool). In the lingo of the automobile industry, "automotive telematics" involves more than radio (one-way) and CB (twoway) audio communication but also adds screens to the driver's interface with the windshield. In the 2004 and 2005 model year, rear-seat entertainment, GPS navigation systems, and Bluetooth connectivity became increasingly common options. For example, in 2005, 28 of the 37 automakers offer rear-seat entertainment systems as standard or optional equipment. Only 19 brands sold vehicles with that feature in 2004; 27 automakers offer navigation systems, up from 23 in 2004; 17 have Bluetooth-enabled vehicles, up from seven in 2004.[13] Other systems such as General Motors’ OnStar offer automatic monitoring of automobiles via special cellular transmitters and GPS units. After automatically conducting a monthly check-up on the car’s health, OnStar emails both the automobile owner and vehicle dealer with the results of and, if an airbag is deployed, telephones the OnStar call center immediately with the vehicle’s coordinates.

With the proliferation of screens in cars, as well as cellular, satellite and Bluetooth connectivity, the driver's interface is hyper-mobile. Whether her car is hurtling or crawling through space, the driver’s telematic connection to GPS information continually updates the relation between the car and its location. The automobile becomes a machine for hyper-mobile vision; the windshield competes with a multitude of screens, from dash-mounted LCDs to units in the rear-view mirror to heads-up display units projected on the windshield.

Today, whether on foot, in the car, in public transportation, or seated in a café, we can bring a networked world with us. From handhelds and laptops we can access other places: malls, mailboxes, messaging centers, picture archives, music libraries, and an extensive library of information and resources.

As we think about comforts of being inside the networked car (called variously a Swedish, German or Japanese phone booth), the automobile easily accommodates the spatial function that Ichiyo Habuchi has deemed the "telecocoon." Drawing upon Japanese mobile phone use, Habuchi describes the "telecocoon" as a virtual networked space created by young friends and lovers out of a constant, steady stream of conversation that keeps them in touch even when they are apart. The "telecocoon" maintains intimacy at a distance, facilitating private encounters in public spaces. Instead of an architectural plan or spatial design, the Telecocoon relies on networking technology to deal with the problems caused by distance in our lives. In Japan, as Ito observes, since the home is too family-oriented and too crowded to accommodate friends, teens resort to their mobile phones or keitai to text their close friends, often maintaining silent conversations throughout the entire time they are away from their friends. Keitai, Kenichi Fujimoto writes, are “territory machines” capable of redefining the notion of public space, transforming a subway train seat, a sidewalk, a street corner into “(one's) own room and personal paradise.”[14]

During the intervening years since Ito noted this phenomenon in Japan, the telecocoon has spread in the United States as well. Mobile companies finally provided for inter-carrier SMS transmission and began to promote the services, most notably by enabling SMS voting through the “American Idol” television program.[15] In the near future, mobile companies seem likely to seek to extend the telecocoon to a tele-umbilical for a younger set. When the Firefly, the “mobile phone for mobile kids,” the first such device designed and marketed for elementary school children (with just five keys, small enough for a child's palm, easily preprogrammable with parental and emergency phone numbers, with flashing lights and glowing body) was introduced last year, it was marketed as a safety device|like placing a tracking sensor in a kid's hand or pocket, tethering them always to the reach of the parental voice.

Mobile phone use has skyrocketed, from 5 million subscribers in the U.S. (11 million worldwide) in 1990 to 182 million (1.6 billion worldwide, more than twice as many as the number of automobiles) in 2005. Forbes rightly calls it “the most personal and ubiquitous gadget ever devised.” Mobile phones are increasingly capable devices, with digital cameras, game-playing, email retrieval, web browsing, and video playback capability already in many models. Nor are computers and mobile phones as distinct in our minds as they once were. “Text me” may refer interchangeably to a message sent over an instant messaging network such as AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), to a message sent from cell phone to cell phone, or even to a message sent from computer to mobile phone or vice versa. Moreover, third generation or 3G cellular networks such as EV-DO make it possible to connect to the Internet from mobile devices. Early adopters and residents of technologically advanced countries such as Korea can use the "all-you-can-eat" unlimited data models to listen to streaming Internet radio, watch broadcasts on their mobile units and videoconference. Technology enthusiasts can use VoIP (Voice Over IP) services such as Skype over their computers or their mobile phones to call more pricey long distance and international locations, thereby bypassing their telephone carrier. Of course these sorts of applications beg the question of whether the current battle over network neutrality will spill over into the cellular arena as well.

But thus far these applications have been limited by small screens and slow data connections. More recent research by Ito suggests that the widespread introduction of cameras into phones is more likely to have an impact in the way the telecocoon develops as individuals share "an ongoing stream of viewpoint-specific photos with a handful of close friends or an intimate other."[16] It may be that the future is not so much the Treo, which Bruce Sterling derides as an overly complex gadget trying to be all things to all people but rather the Sony PSP portable gaming platform, a dedicated gaming device capable of connecting to the wireless Internet to network players together or to download updates.[17] Browsers are built into the PSP to enable connections by games but, barring hacking by users, remain hidden. Instead of one converged device offering one form of access to the network, we have seen and are likely to continue to see devices and objects (cars, toys, cameras) acquiring network access. Some of these, such as newer Tamagotchi or the Nintendo DS have their network access limited to ad hoc, local networks, encouraging group use.[18] Similarly, in the new iPhone from Apple computer, even though the unit runs a version of the Mac OS X operating system, only programs the company authorizes will be permitted.[19]

Shaping their identities through networking technology, living in keitai-created telecocoons with their intimate friends, Japanese teenagers are today’s flâneurs. But just as the flâneur served as a stand-in for a broader cultural shift, so, too our invocation of the Japanese teenager points to a change in our relationship with culture. The way that Japanese teenagers use their keitai is, as Ito points out, contingent on their particular cultural context, but that’s precisely the point. We argue that culture is no longer localized in time and space, but neither is it non-place. Instead, individuals inhabit a physical world of simultaneous environments, of localized time and space as well as of multiple telematic worlds in which they can be co-present with others at a distance.

Nor are these virtual and physical aspects of our lives distinct. We inhabit physical and virtual space in specific ways, to specific ends, employing different forms of audio, textual, and visual virtual co-presence based on the situation we find ourselves in: if I am sitting on the bus, please text me on my phone, if I am in a boring meeting at work, send me an instant message through AIM, if I am in the car, try calling me on wireless. We turn to the Internet for information when necessary or turning it off as need be. Moreover, if eavesdropping on a neighbor’s mobile phone conversation can be intriguing, being seated next to such a person can be a nuisance. In Japan, social norms consider the ringing of the phone in public space to be intrusive and on trains, phone conversations are banned outright so individuals text message each other. In the United States, the appropriateness of mobile phone use in different spaces has been a matter of wide debate due to a perception that mobile phones in automobiles cause distraction that leads to traffic accidents. Some states and localities have restricted their use. Nor is threat to person and property the only reason that Americans are concerned about mobile phone use: when airlines and cellular phone companies recently proposed service aboard airplanes, there was widespread resistance to introducing this technology among passengers.[20]

III. Real Virtual Worlds

In his 1831 novel about 15th century France, Notre Dame de Paris, Victor Hugo crafted a now famous statement for the lips of the Abbot of that church: “This will kill that. The book will kill the building,” For Hugo, Gutenberg’s marvelous invention put an end to architecture’s role as a communication medium. From “the origin of things to the fifteenth century,” Hugo wrote, architecture “was the great book of mankind...” “the principal register of mankind.”[21] The printed book, however, was a far more efficient medium arose for communicating with individuals. Nor was Hugo’s decision to stage his novel in the fifteenth century an accident: the print literacy that Hugo described beginning its radical spread with Gutenberg only truly became a mass phenomenon in his own day.

If Hugo was largely correct about the capacity of the book to replace the building as text, what about the possibility that the network might replace the building as dwelling place, that virtual space will replace real space?

A decade ago, visionaries such as William Mitchell suggested that with the development of the Internet, the downfall of the modern city was upon us. In their view, the new problem was how to create the “City of Bits,” the electronically mediated spaces for the lives that we would be leading online as sure to replace the modern city as it, in turn, replaced the village.[22]

To be sure, the provocative visions of a three dimensional cyberspace such as those shown in Michael Benedikt’s seminal Cyberspace: First Steps have not come to pass.[23] At the time, colored by Cyberpunk novels such as William Gibson’s Neuromancer, it seemed plausible that we would inhabit virtual cities, our bodies becoming “wetware” and the spaces and social formations surrounding them increasingly neglected.[24] But VRML, the much-touted three-dimensional counterpart to HTML hasn’t result in one commonly used site. Although the web has become graphically more sophisticated, when we visit it, we navigate a two-dimensional interface. Corporate presences on the Internet appear to us as “brochureware,” not as virtual structures that we can enter into and inhabit. Indeed, the web is curiously aspatial, a step back from the use of the desktop and file folders to represent relationships between data.

In retrospect, then, the all-digital city of bits seems to be a historical artifact, the product of a digital culture in which the user was tied to a CRT screen. The key technological devices that shape our lives|telephones and computers as well as the telematic networks that connect them|are now mobile, setting them free of specific contexts but also implicating them in situational contexts, coloring those situations just as those situations color their contexts in turn.

Today, however, as the sections on place and mobility above suggest, rather than having one body withering away in front of the screen, it is increasingly common to navigate two spaces simultaneously, to see digital devices and telephones as extensions of our mobile selves.

But was the prophecy so wrong? To some degree, this world predicted by the Techno-Futurists has come to pass.

First of all, the web is a growing presence in our lives. Cell phones, email, and just browsing for information are increasingly part of the everyday experience of many people. Shopping in particular is more and more virtual for many consumers. If the dot.com crash demonstrated that some business models such as webvan.com or pets.com were not immediately viable, the years since have proven that other models are viable. Bricks and mortar stores have been seriously challenged by mail order megastores such as Amazon.com and iTunes which offer lower prices while also making a much wider variety of “Long Tail” products available, commodities that are purchased too infrequently to be stocked in normal stores but that collectively make up a massive market share possibly even exceeding that of blockbuster and bestseller items. When we window shop, it is more and more frequently in the window of our web browser.

Moreover, for millions of people, the Internet offers an alternate reality in the form of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games. Blizzard Entertainment, owners of the most popular MMORPG, World of Warcraft (WoW) boast some six million players. Even taking into account corporate hyperbole, the fact remains that the population of one game alone rivals that of Los Angeles. Edward Castronova calls MMORPGs such as WoW or Everquest “the first settlements in the vast, uncharted territory that lies between humans and their machines.”[25]

Immersed in these spaces, players occupy avatars, virtual stand-ins for their earthly selves that they can craft to their liking, choosing an appropriate name, hair color and style, clothing, color, gender, race (by this we mean not only in the everyday sense, but elven, dwarven, or orc as well), and pet.

But does the body wither away? As the Matrix, aspiring to be our prime allegory for contemporary life, suggests, the flesh and its avatar are still linked and everyday reality and the virtual worlds of the games collide. After a player in WoW died of a stroke, her friends organized a virtual funeral for her. But they did so in a contested zone on a WoW server in which players routinely fight other players. A hostile party mounted a raid against the grieving teammates and posted the video on the Net, causing a controversy among gamers. Of course if monsters generated by the game’s algorithms had perpetrated the ambush, the players would not have complained, but since these were real people attacking real people who were grieving, albeit virtually and in a place in which they should have expected the possibility of being attacked, the incident raised questions about moral behavior in MMORPGs.[26] Moreover most MMORPGs offer no ability for the user to impact the game. When you log off, the traces of your actions disappear.

Conversely, since MMORPGs are typically based on economic models in which characters generate virtual currency by killing monsters or completing other tasks and spend that currency on virtual items, many millions of dollars a year are generated in the buying and selling of these virtual goods. Even if the legality of the activity has been called into question by MMORPG companies, this has led to the development of “gold farming,” in which individuals, working for low wages in China (this isn’t merely a question of outsourcing|estimates suggest that there are more players of MMORPGs in China than anywhere else) and Indonesia, generate gold that they then sell for real money.[27]

Nor is this attention to virtual worlds mere escapism. John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas suggest that World of Warcraft effectively teaches players how to manage teams in the successful accomplishment of complex tasks. MMORPGs are still rather early in their development, but they seem to have the capacity to significantly feed back into “real culture.”[28] Suggestions have been made that the MMORPG could be used as a model for facilitating online meetings of individuals dispersed in space and time. Such meetings would be more effective than video conferencing, it is argued, since even if a participant is replaced by an avatar, the full range of three dimensional motion in an MMORPG affords a more intimate experience than the flattened world of videoconferencing.

MMORPGs would not immediately appear to inhabit a mobile landscape. Attempts at Alternate Reality Games (or ARGs) such as the viral marketing stunt “I Love Bees” have been made, but these have as yet failed to capture the following of MMORPGs.[29] Still, if MMORPGs continue to rise in popularity, they suggest another aspect of the quality of simultaneous environments: that increasing numbers of us have, or will have, alter egos that dwell as much in virtual, networked worlds, as in this one.

IV. The Network and Its Socio-Spatial Consequences

Throughout both this essay and the book as a whole, we observe how network culture has significantly altered digital culture. Digital culture's drive to abstract the world into discrete, computable elements is increasingly replaced by a focus on the node's position in a broader technological and social network.

But the transition toward network culture is not merely technological, it has deep roots in other societal changes. In The Rise of the Network Society, Manuel Castells analyzes how society is moving toward more networked forms of organization in production, power, and experience. Corporations, financial markets, criminal activities, and political groups, structured as vertically integrated hierarchies in modernity are, in our own time, structured as networks.[30]

Saskia Sassen identifies the “global city,” as “a function of a network of cities. In that sense it is different from the capitals of old empires where you have one city at the top. The kind of urban space that the contemporary period makes possible is different|because of the simultaneity, the instantaneousness of the communication|from any older period where you always had cities connected to each other. This is different because this is something that is happening simultaneously in long-distance digital networks and in a very, very concentrated space.”[31]

Global cities, in Sassen’s analysis, do not function independently, but rather act as nodes in a planetary economic system. Thus, New York is a key node as a financial market and publishing center as well as a location for design-based manufacturing (woodwork, metal work, garments, and furniture). Los Angeles is a global city, albeit of the second tier due to its lack of a major financial market, because of Hollywood’s presence and the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, which act as interfaces between the North America and the production of the Pacific Rim.

Both Castells and Sassen raise concerns about areas that are left out of the global network on a planetary, national, and urban scale. What Castells calls “Functionally unnecessary or socially disruptive” local populations are bypassed by the network. Much as the telecocoon functions on an individual level, the global city’s connections are often at the expense of local disconnections. The new space of flows is constituted as a set of hubs and nodes. Areas outside of this logic are subject to the “tunnel effect,” which means that they virtually don’t exist as far as the network, and hence, the dominant world economy, is concerned.

Nevertheless, during the last decade, networking technology has had an impact on areas that had previously been outside the global economy. Developing countries with well-educated, technically adept, and often English speaking workers such as India, China, and Estonia have become homes for outsourced information work. This provides much needed capital and employment, as well as the infrastructural (physical, human, and organizational) basis for information economies in these countries, which have gone on to develop their own indigenous information economies. Nevertheless, this has led to tensions in the developed world due to jobs in originating countries being lost or “outsourced.” But networking technology has also allowed resistance movements, NGOs, and other bottom-up entities to band together worldwide, creating a powerful anti-globalization movement that seeks to redress the inequalities of network society.

Castells points out that the network has to be seen as part of a bipolar opposition between the Net and the self, in which individuals relentlessly try to affirm their identities in a rapidly changing world. This identify formation increasingly happens within networks which are simultaneously physical and virtual, filled with individuals who both produce and consume, taking advantage of the new kinds of cultural production outlined in the chapter of the this book on culture.

To address this condition, the new field of geodemographic market research combines research into networks, places, and cultural production and consumption. Top-down marketing in which big business aims at a mass audience has given way to marketing efforts targeted at mere fractions of the market, micro-populations identified as potential consumers through precise demographic data. The leader in gathering and providing geodemographic information to marketers is the Claritas corporation, which, over the last thirty years, has developed its “PRIZM” method to successfully break down populations into distinct demographic clusters based on age, ethnicity, wealth, urbanization, housing style, and family structure. During the 1970s and 1980s, Claritas identified forty clusters in American society. By the 1990s, increasing diversification from immigration, economic changes, and greater choice in lifestyle led the corporation's geodemographers to identify sixty-two distinct clusters and after the 2000 census Claritas identified four new clusters. Through the lens of PRIZM, the nation becomes a landscape composed of radically small minorities, the largest a mere 3% of the American population.

These new demographic clusters indicate the symptomatic changes in our concept of , and relation to, place. The era of mass society and the mass market are now history, replaced in turn by a series of networked lifestyle clusters. Claritas’s geodemographic research suggests that territories are no longer composed of solid blocks of ethnic and economic groups. Rising consumerism and demographic fragmentation have effaced many of those traditional differences while creating new differences. Thus, for example, while politicians were hoping to woo the “Hispanic Vote,” PRIZM identified some eighteen clusters that Hispanic Americans belonged to. Lifestyle differences between clusters can be extreme. An individual's values and interests depend on their cluster and this takes precedence over geographic proximity, ethnicity (at least to some degree), or economic class. So, for example, in the upper-middle class cluster of “the Young Digerati” who may inhabit the Fairfax area of Los Angeles, a tech-savvy couple with kids who works in digital production for Hollywood might be drawn to the area by the mix of coffee houses, lives in a trendy condo, drives a Toyota Hybrid and generally votes liberal but also has a libertarian bent while only 45 miles away in the postsuburban Orange county town of Newport Beach, another couple from the same socioeconomic background (both couples are likely to be Caucasian or Asian and have finished graduate school) and same salary might be members of “Blue Blood Estates,” business executives who value their newly built “McMansion” home, vote Republican, enjoy golf vacations, and eat fast food picked by their kids.

By no means is this condition limited to the United States. Cosmopolitanism has a new flavor now as well. Claritas identifies a similar set of clustered lifestyles on a global scale. Thus, a farmer in rural America, a farmer in rural France, and a farmer in rural Lithuania have a lot more to do with each other|culturally, politically, and in terms of what they want out of life|than they do with the urban dwellers in cities only 100 kilometers away or even with unemployed former mine workers 50 km away.

Clusters are virtually linked through both old and new media, traditional and participatory, from television shows to blogs and online forums. But clusters are part of our culture of simultaneous environments. They are not merely virtual. On the contrary, clusters rely on infrastructure. These new tribes are widely dispersed nationally and globally, connected not by place so much as by telecommunications and media. Still, on a local scale, people live next to people they like. Clusters exist as small geographic communities. Although clusters always overlap with one another|generally Claritas identifies five clusters per area|they do so in locations that suit them infrastructurally. The individualist, extremely liberal, often Gay, arty, singles of Bohemian Mix will not live in the new, manicured suburban homes of Blue Blood Estates. Instead, Bohemian mix seeks out dense|but generally low rise|urban communities with a vibrant street life, places like West Hollywood and Silver Lake in the Los Angeles area, Lakeview in Chicago, or Dupont Circle in Washington, DC.

The result is that the Earth is now blanketed in a posturban terrain of discontinuous microcosms, clusters of communities organized by similar taste, culture, and ideology. The kind of urban infrastructure (40 year old suburb, brand new 80 story condos on the beach, exurban loft, ultra- dangerous urban renaissance skid-row housing) we choose for ourselves, then, is a product of our position within a cluster.[32]

While exurbia and sprawl continue to grow worldwide, this atomization of the populace into clusters is far from the end of the city, so widely predicted in the 1980s|and even early 1990s|as a consequence of telecommuting. Certain lifestyle groups such as the Young Digerati or Bohemian Mix will insist on the diversity that urban life affords. Steven Johnson suggests that the renewed interest in cities during the 1980s and 1990s will only increase with the growth of what Chris Anderson calls the “Long Tail.” Anderson observes that the power law distribution of the demand curve for cultural products has traditionally been understood to validate the production of a small number of hits that would be bought up by a vast consumer market. In his theory of the Long Tail, the Internet is making the flat part of the Long Tail as profitable as the head. Moreover, Anderson argues that tools such as aggregators and search engines and a societal shift to the flat part of the Long Tail increasingly depart from a one-size-fits-all mentality toward an interest in more eccentric, niche tastes. Johnson argues that with culture moving to the right on the “Long Tail,” the diversity of taste cultures that we can find in dense cities will appeal to us more and more. This rising individualism in consumption|which often extends toward fan-based production practices, is the fulfillment of the second half of the bipolar nature of network society that Manuel Castells describes, the focus on the self.[33]

To serve this increasingly networked culture, online social network services such as Friendster and MySpace have developed. Particularly aimed at young people, social network services are generally not composed of static pages but rather are sites of social interaction that are constantly revisited by their active members. Typically, these sites consist of profile pages which contain photos, demographic information, an individual’s personal preferences, a blog or link to a blog, and|in sites operating according to “the circle of friends model”|links to profiles of an individual’s friends as well as comments from friends.

Writing about MySpace, danah boyd describes how these sites are very much places of identity production: “Because the digital world requires people to write themselves into being, profiles provide an opportunity to craft the intended expression through language, imagery and media. Explicit reactions to their online presence offers valuable feedback. The goal is to look cool and receive peer validation. Of course, because imagery can be staged, it is often difficult to tell if photos are a representation of behaviors or a re-presentation of them.” boyd suggests that these sites are indeed sites, not just web pages but rather places that take over the site of teenage hangout. “Hanging out has moved online,” she concludes, observing that, when combined with instant messaging, these sites provide intimate communities that fulfill a vital function for teens who have no real spaces in which to gather.[34]

V. Geospatial Web and Locative Media

The previous examples of recent changes in our relationship to the spaces that surrounds us are all dominated by the seemingly inescapable logic of the network: as Starbucks demonstrated, the price of new connections is local disconnection. Two emerging technologies|the geospatial web and ubiquitous computing|promise to reverse this trend, bringing the transformative potential of the network to bear on physical places by offering new interfaces to our local surroundings.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) offer a way to represent and analyze data spatially and have been commonly used by industry and government for some time now. Slowly, however, GIS tools are becoming available to ordinary people. Developed in 1967 by the Roger Tomlinson at the Canadian Department of Energy, Mines and Resources, the first such system, called CGIS (for Canadian GIS) collated and analyze information on land use.[35] Since then, government agencies such as the United States Geological Survey and US Census bureau as well as corporations specializing in geodemographic marketing (Claritas’s PRIZM system is inconceivable without such systems) have adopted GIS with enthusiasm. Much as the spreadsheet revolutionized businesses by making it possible to test scenarios on a personal computer, GIS make it possible to model and hypothesize geospatial scenarios such as changes in a watershed due to construction, the spread of a plume of fuels and solvents underneath an airport and the surrounding neighborhood, the rise or fall of a city’s tax base as a result of a new park, or shifts in Congressional seats caused by redistricting. For forecasting and analyzing this kind of information, GIS is now indispensible. For the most part, however, the specialized nature of GIS means that the administration, development, and use of such data is the province of government, corporations, NGOs and other research organizations,

But GIS is not just limited to shaping user’s lives behind the scenes. Commonly used Internet tools make GIS available to end users, offering what Institute of the Future researcher Mike Liebhold has called the “Geospatial Web.”[36] For the most part, Internet mapping sites such as Mapquest, Yahoo! Maps, and Google Maps, offering user definable maps and door-to-door turn-by-turn driving directions, are the most familiar applications of GIS technologies, in daily life. Turn-by-turn maps, such as the American Automobile Association’s Triptiks, have been available for almost a century. If MapQuest, Yahoo! Maps, and Google Maps make such information more convenient and more readily accessible, by dispensing the map in favor of a point-to-point travel, they also enhance the “tunnel effect” of networks. With a map, one might be tempted to go off route to see a nearby attraction but with turn-by-turn directions, one’s route is optimized as much as possible, with only the most prosaic sponsored businesses interrupting the smooth flow of one’s drive.[37]

The case of Google Maps is a bit more complex, however, as Google has made it possible for even the most amateur programmers to interface the site’s data and maps easily. As a result, programmers have created hundreds, if not thousands, of Google Maps “Mashups,” creating geospatial interfaces to all manner of information interesting to end users such as free WiFi nodes (http://www.gwifi.net/), real estate available on Craigslist (http://www.housingmaps.com/), locations of cell phone towers (http://www.cellreception.com/towers/index.html), or airports in which pets have been lost, injured, or killed (http://www.petflight.com/incidents/map).

Google is also responsible for the “Google Earth” application, dubbed “The People’s GIS” for its attractive, easy to use interface that can render three dimensional flyovers based on satellite photographs and contour data in real time, for its ability to display layers of GIS data|such as locations of shopping malls, monuments, places to eat or sleep, or city boundaries|and the ease by which users input their own information such as coordinates to Wikipedia articles, earthquakes, or annotations to historic or interesting sites (e.g. airplanes visible in the satellite photographs, crime scenes, or corporate signs),[38] To some degree, Google Earth gives a taste of a future “Digital Earth,” a term coined by Vice President Al Gore in 1998 to refer to a three dimensional virtual representation of the planet that would allow individuals to explore scientific and cultural information about the planet.[39] But Google Earth is both too sophisticated and contains too little information: a fascinating application, it does not have the depth|such as allowing individuals to find out about the natural or human history of a site|to work like Digital Earth. Lacking any real purpose, Google Earth has had little impact on everyday life in comparison to the more prosaic two dimensional mapping interfaces.

The Holy Grail for networked place, however, is to take GIS information mobile. With Global Positioning System (GPS) technology improving and Internet connectivity becoming available in both mobile phones and personal digital assistants, an emerging field called “Locative Media” is developing, populated by hackers, software developers, and artists. Based on the promise of handheld location-aware devices that can interface with the geospatial web to provided georeferenced information on the spot to end-users. Locative Media sets out to turn the model of Non-Place on its head by using networking technology to create social connections. For the most part, Locative Media experiments remain only experiments and few projects are in use by everyday people, but proponents hope that inclusion of geographic references on the web and the delivery of that date to the end user in the field will make it possible for digital media to be associated with a site and then “found” there. Similarly, comments, blog entries, user-provided restaurant reviews and such will be available at the sites they are associated with. This is already possible with the Vindigo service which provides locations, contact information, maps, and thumbnail reviews of restaurants, bars, bathrooms, services, museums, galleries, music venues and so on for major metropolitan areas in the United States as well as London to PDA owners and cell phone users.[40] Other Locative Media services propose location-awareness as a goal, generally as a social networking tool. At Dodgeball.com, users sign up their mobile phone numbers with the service and inform their friends that they are doing so. When they have some time to spare, they notify the service with an SMS text message. The service notifies friends, as well as friends of friends, within a ten-block radius.[41] Even after being acquired by Google, dodgeball seems too convoluted for the average person to use. On a recent visit, the site advertised that the top user in New York City had “checked in” merely seventeen times in the last ten days. Another example is Nokia's Sensor, an application for mobile phones that allows free file sharing and spontaneous social network creation among users who download it to their Bluetooth-capable, Nokia brand phones.

Melding the Geospatial Web with Locative Media promises that you can leave your mark on the world or read the marks others leave behind about, re-creating place in a Borgesian digital map. Artifacts and places will be imbued with memories in a far richer way than ever before. Given a geocoded wikipedia-like interface, it is possible to imagine the entire world annotated with histories, becoming as Freud once wrote of the mind in Civilization and Its Discontents, a place “in which nothing once constructed had perished, and all the earlier stages of development had survived alongside the latest.”[42]

But what of forgetting in this age of Locative Media? Will this lead to an accumulation of mindless geospatial data spam-junk that buries spaces? Some personal memories might be better left forgotten. If someone was beaten in the very apartment you live in thirty years ago, would you want to read the harrowing narrative? Would you really want to know about the effects of the earthquake on your neighborhood after you had bought your house? But such questions|along with the ongoing debates about coordinate standards, about the representational politics of mapping, about access (and its uneven distribution) to geodata|may serve to obscure the potential benefits of the geospatial web’s grassroots use|mapping sick buildings, tracing viral paths, creating spatial memories.

VI. RFIDs, Ubiquitous Computing and the Coming Sentience of the World

If Locative Media offers sentient users the ability to read place, other developments, some of which are more already in more widespread practice, suggest that the less-than-sentient world may gain a certain degree of awareness.

Already widely in use, Radio Frequency Identification Tags (or RFIDs) are a passive way of giving objects|but also people|the capacity to tell their stories, of mapping information onto things that may or may not move around. RFIDs are small tags, sometimes cunningly disguised, that require no internal power source but that signal their presence by responding to radio-frequency queries from transponders and are commonly used for inventory tracking in stores. As each RFID has a unique identifier, it can forever be associated with a distinct object. It's a small leap to imagine that RFIDs could also be tagged by their owners so that their stories can be added to. In his book Shaping Things, Bruce Sterling suggests that RFIDs could have a positive use in creating "Spimes," a neologism with which he refers to objects that can be tagged with "cradle-to-grave" information about where they have been, where they are, and where they are going. The origin, conditions of manufacture, and ultimate destination of an object can all be understood through its RFID.[43]

The result, in this utopian vision, is to make visible a genealogy of objects, for ecological and political purposes. As Walter Benjamin once wrote:

“The cultural heritage we survey has an origin that we cannot contemplate without horror: it owes its existence not merely to the effort of great geniuses who created it, but to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is not a single artifact of culture that is not simultaneously an artifact of barbarism. And just as no artifact is free of barbarism, so too the process of its reception, by means of which it has been passed on from one recipient to the next, is equally fettered.”

Sterling’s thought concept of Spimes, then, suggests that by becoming aware of a Benjamin genealogy of the object, we will radically rethink the social and ecological impact of our purchases.[44]

But RFIDs have a dark side, potentially outweighing their benefit as proto-Spimes. in Spychips, Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre suggest that RFIDs are the gravest of threats to privacy. Already in 2001, they observe, IBM had a patent for tracking individuals with RFIDs. RFID manufacturer Verichip has already developed and received approval from the FDA for a human-implantable RFID and in a recent interview, Scott Silverman, Verichip’s Chairman of the Board suggested that these could be used to track guest workers in the United States.[45] Here, unlike the traces we might consciously leave on the geospatial web|traces that we could leave behind simply by turning off our devices or donning the Harry Potter cloak of geospatial invisibilty|RFIDs allow others to monitor us surreptitiously. But Albrecht and McIntyre observe that RFIDs don’t need to be implanted to track us. Since RFIDs are used as theft-prevention devices, they are, like some virulent form of insectile parasite, hard to destroy and generally invisible. RFIDs are by no means deactivated when you leave the store, so if you bought a Calvin Klein shirt with an RFID sewn in the label, the RFID remains with you wherever you go, ready to give itself up to a radio-frequency query, only now, since you purchased the shirt with your credit card, it is forever identified with you. Assuming a will on the part of marketers or the government, it is trivial to construct a system that would use RFID-bearing clothing and personal items that would actively track you through your daily travels. You may be entering a bookstore, but if it has access to the database that associates the RFID in your shirt with you, the bookstore will know who you are. As yet, Albrecht and McIntyre observe, no foolproof way for deactivating or killing undetected RFIDs has been identified.[46]

Tracking individuals using RFIDs is already possible. At LEGOLAND® Billund, the "Kidspotter" service, introduced in 2004 by the amusement park and the Tryg insurance company, allows parents to use RFIDs to keep track of their children. Children enrolled in the system wear a special Kidspotter wristband with a tag the size of a matchbook attached. When parents send an SMS message to the system, they receive a return message containing their children's coordinates, which they can then check against a special map of the park.[47]

But RFIDs still suggest that objects will be passive. The RFID is a product-tracker; it is a passive tag, sitting deep in the warehouses of Wal-Mart, the Amazonian rain-forest, the bourgeois home, waiting to be activated. The world of things isn’t taking the imposition we are making with the geospatial web lying down. On the contrary, we are, for the first time, giving it the ability to talk back to us. Thus the Internet of Things, published by the ITU (International Telecommunications Union) in 2005, declares a “new era of ubiquity” beyond the “ubiquitous computing” of networks available anywhere anytime for human-to-human (H2H) connectivity to an Internet reliant on connections between humans and things (H2T) and between things themselves|Thing to thing (T2T) communication circumvents the communicative networks between humans. The Internet, in this vision, emerges as not only a network between anyone but between anything.

This formerly “inanimate” Other can now communicate back (about its location, condition, needs) either willfully or not. Things, in this vision, are no longer simply objects, mere commodities, fetishes valued by humans. They exceed anything that Marx could have ever imagined, becoming active, even sentient nodes of communication: dust is smart, glass is smart, phones are smart. Our age old animist dreams of a world imbued with spirits and personalities seem to be around the corner.

Blogjects|a neologism Julian Bleecker introduced to describe objects that blog|exemplifies the soon-to-come Internet of Things, a network of tangible, mobile, chatty objects enabled by the miniaturization, the ubiquity of consumer electronics and a pervasive Internet.[48] In its most basic form, a Blogject is not dissimilar to people that blog|it is an artifact that can disseminate a record of experiences to the web, reporting the history of its interactions with other objects and with people. Because it exists as a physical object, occupying physical space, proximity, mobile technology, and movement that space plays an integral role in what it will communicate.

But if we are asking objects to blog, are there objects that might refuse to blog or that should? And if the two dystopian scenarios of the geospatial web filled with geo-spam and our every move tracked with RFIDs are real possibilties, what might happen if every light bulb insisted on leaving behind its life story? Or if your printer told the police what you printed?[49]

Curiously, in an age so often described in terms of its frenzies of ever-more proliferating visuality, Locative Media, RFIDs, and the Internet of Things are premised on their invisibility, on a near future in which an invisible data overlay blankets the earth while not only devices (that cellphone, that PDA) but also furniture (that chair, that table), objects (that tree, that street sign), buildings (that monument, that apartment building), landscapes (that forest, that desert, that riverbed) become sentient information platforms, sensors to collect and send data to whoever is out there to collect it, analyze it, read it.

Conclusion

Today, Augé’s solitary non-places seem like an artifact of the past. Individuals, at least in the developed world, will never be alone again except by choice. Will being too connected become more of a problem for us than loneliness? And what of our relationship to the local? If RFIDs, new mapping technologies, and ubiquitous computing seem like promising future trends in the spread of technologies, linking us closer to the world around us, the emergence of real virtual worlds such as MMORPGs and the growth of the telecocoon suggest that the disconnection from the local may yet increase.

Throughout this essay we have talked about the network in the most abstract terms. But we must remember that the network has its own physicality, its own material presence. The network remains far from the mythical distributed ideal that ideologists of technology claim it to be. On the contrary, networks rely on relatively few high bandwidth transcontinental and transoceanic fiber optic lines, on even fewer Tier 1 carriers that sell space on these lines, and still fewer mobile phone operators and “last mile” connection (DSL or cable broadband service) providers that allow the end user to access bandwidth. Interchanges between such networks occur at only a few major peering points, usually one or two major carrier hotels per metropolitan area. This highly centralized system, produced by historical factors (most notably the monopoly stature of AT&T prior to divestiture) is both vulnerable to natural or man-made disasters but, as the scandal over NSA data mining during summer of 2006 demonstrated, all too easy to take advantage of by individuals or governments.[50] And, as we access this network we remain reliant on the visual prosthetics of screens and devices that we sit in front of or carry with us.[51]

Throughout this essay we have been concerned with a series of emerging issues: global connections versus local disconnections, the growth of environments that allow us to enact simultaneous ”˜real’ presence while engaging in networked forms of tele-presence, producing new forms of tele-cocooning, the emergence of on-line gaming in virtual worlds that have become, to its users, quite real, the network as a new form socio-spatial organization, global information (GIS) and global positioning (GPS) devices that provide mastery over the mappable globe, RFIDs that keep track of our position, and the position of our things in this new globally-networked map. Place, it seems, is far from a source of stability in our lives, but is rather, once again, in a process of a deep transformation.

[1]. The public sphere is "made up of private people gathered together as a public and articulating the needs of society with the state," Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 176.

[2]. Charles Baudelaire, "The Painter of Modern Life,' in My Heart laid Bare and Other Prose Writings, (London: Soho Book Company, 1896), 34.

[3]. The flâneur may have been at home in privatized public space of the street and the café, but his female equivalent|the flâneuse|was only allowed access to public space in the new cathedral of consumption, the department store. See Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” in Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. (London: New Left Books, 1977), 37.

[4]. Georg Simmel, Soziologie: Untersuchungen Ãœber Die Formen Der Vergesellschaftung (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1958), 486.

[5]. See for example Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974) and Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, (New York: Zone Books, 1994).

[6]. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, (New York: Vintage, 1961).

[7]. Marc Augé, Non-Places. An Introduction to the Anthropology of Supermodernity, (New York: Verso, 1995).

[8]. Ithiel de Sola Pool, The Social Impact of the Telephone, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977).

[9]. Paddy Scannell, Radio, Television and Modern Life: A Phenomenological Approach (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 1996), 76.

[10]. Ronald F. Abler, "What Makes Cities Important," Bell Telephone Magazine, 49, no 2 (1970), 10-15.

[11]. Jean Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Communication,” Hal Foster, ed. The Anti-Aesthetic (Seattle: The Bay Press, 1985), 127.

[12]. Mizuko Ito, "Introduction" in Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe, and Misa Matsuda, eds, Personal, Portable, Pedestrian (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 7.

[13]. Telematics Research Group, Inc., “Automotive Industry Jumps Into Electronics,” Corporate Report, http://www.telematicsresearch.com/PDFs/TMpress011205.pdf

[14]. Ichiyo Habuchi, "Accelerating Reflexivity," in Ito, Okabe, and Matsuda, Personal, Portable, Pedestrian, 179 and Kenichi Fujimoto, "The Third-Stage Paradigm: Territory Machines from the Girls' Pager Revolution to Mobile Aesthetics," ibid, 10.

[15]. Brad Smith, “Texting Knows No Bounds,” Wireless Week, October 15, 2005, http://wirelessweek.com/article/CA6273193.html?spacedesc=Features&

[16]. Mizuko Ito, "Intimate Visual Co-Presence," (paper presented at UbiComp 2005, International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, Tokyo Japan), http://www.itofisher.com/mito/archives/ito.ubicomp05.pdf

[17]. Bruce Sterling, discussion in Southern California Digital Culture Group meeting, November 18, 2005.

[18]. See Mizuko Ito, “My First DS Backchannel,” Mizuko Ito Weblog, http://www.itofisher.com/mito/weblog/2006/05/my_first_ds_backchannel.html and Mizuko Ito “Gotchi Networks,” Networked Publics Weblog, http://netpublics.annenberg.edu/portable_media/gotchi_networks

[19]. Stephen Lawson, “Analysis: Reality Might Tarnish iPhone's Shine,” Macworld.com, http://www.macworld.com/news/2007/01/12/iphoneanalysis/index.php

[20]. House Subcommittee on Aviation. "Cell Phone on Aircraft: Nuisance or Necessity," 109tht Cong., 1st sess., (July 14, 2005), http://www.house.gov/transportation/aviation/07-15-05/07-15-05memo.html

[21]. Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris (New York: Penguin Books, 1978), 188 and 195.

[22]. William Mitchell, City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).

[23]. See Michael Benedikt, Cyberspace: First Steps (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).

[24]. William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace, 1984).

[25]. Edward Castronova, Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

[26]. Joe Rybicki, “The Real and the Semi-Real,” Joe Rybicki’s 1UP Blog, http://www.1up.com/do/blogEntry?bId=6883235&publicUserId=4553267 and and “Rival Guild crashes WoW funeral (video!),” NeoGAF forums, http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=94595

[27]. See James Lee, “From Sweatshops to Stateside Corporations, Some People are Profiting off of MMO Gold,” 1UP.com, http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3141815 and “Paul,” “Secrets of Massively Successful Multiplayer Farming,” http://www.gameguidesonline.com/guides/articles/ggoarticleoctober05_01.a...

[28]. John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas, “You Play World of Warcraft? You’re Hired!” Wired 14.4 (April, 2006), http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.04/learn.html

[29]. On ARGs, see Alternate Reality Gaming Network, http://www.argn.com/.

[30]. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996).

[31]. Saskia Sassen, “On the 21st Century City,” interview by Blake Harris, Government Technology Interview, June 1997, http://www.govtech.net/magazine/story.php?id=95352&issue=6:1997.

[32]. On Claritas, see Michael J. Weiss, The Clustered World: How We Live, What We Buy, and What it All Means About Who We Are, (New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 1999).

[33]. See Chris Anderson, “The Long Tail,” Wired 12.10 (October, 2004), http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html and Steven Johnson, "Emerging Technology. Friends 2005: Hooking Up," Discover 26, no 9, http://www.discover.com/issues/sep-05/departments/emerging-technology/

[34]. danah boyd, “Identity Production in a Networked Culture: Why Youth Heart MySpace,” (paper delivered at American Association for the Advancement of Science, February 19, 2006), http://www.danah.org/papers/AAAS2006.html

[35]. Wikipedia contributors, "Geographic information system," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Geographic_information_system&... (accessed June 13, 2006).

[36]. Mike Liebhold, “The Geospatial Web: A Call to Action,” O’Reilly Network (June 2005) http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2005/05/10/geospatialweb.html

[37]. See Nick Paumgarten, “Getting There: The Science of Driving Directions,” The New Yorker, April 24, 2006, http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060424fa_fact

[38]. “Google Earth: The People GIS,” AECNews.com, http://aecnews.com/articles/1050.aspx

[39]. Al Gore, “The Digital Earth: Understanding our Planet in the 21st Century,” (speech given at the California Science Center, Los Angeles, January 31, 1998), http://www.digitalearth.gov/VP19980131.html

[40]. For a survey of locative media see Marc Tuters and Kazys Varnelis, “Beyond Locative Media,” Leonardo 39, no 4 (August 2006), 357-363.

[41]. See Steven Johnson, “Friends 2005”

[42]. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: J. Cape & H. Smith, 1930), 17.

[43]. Bruce Sterling, Shaping Things, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).

[44]. Although it is not linked to RFIDs, Natalie Jerimijenko’s How Stuff is Made (http://www.howstuffismade.org/) is a wiki-driven visual encyclopedia that aspires to produce similar genealogies and can serve as something of a model for the Spime.

[45]. Tiki Barber, Brian Kilmeade, Kiran Chetry, “Fox & Friends” interview with Scott Silverman, Fox News Channel (May 16, 2006), transcript at http://www.spychips.com/press-releases/silverman-foxnews.html

[46]. Katherine Albrecht, Liz McIntyre, Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move With RFID (Nashville: Nelson Current: 1998).

[47]. “LEGOLAND® opens its gates for the 2004 season,” LEGO.com, http://www.lego.com/legoland/billund/Press/pressrelease.asp?locale=2057&....

[48]. International Telecommunication Union, The Internet of Things, ITU Internet Reports (2005), http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/publications/internetofthings.

[49]. Printers already have forensic information built into them and printed, invisibly on every page. See “DocuColor Tracking Dot Decoding Guide,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, http://www.eff.org/Privacy/printers/docucolor/

[50]. See Kazys Varnelis, “The Centripetal City: Telecommunications, the Internet, and The Shaping of the Modern Urban Environment,” Cabinet Magazine 17, (Spring 2004/2005), 27-33.

[51]. Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).