[IP] Salon on wifi and cities
Begin forwarded message:
From: Robert Bryce <robert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: November 30, 2004 11:13:54 AM EST
To: Dave Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Salon on wifi and cities
Hi Dave,
For IP, if you like.
best
rb
Urban renewal, the wireless way
Thanks to Wi-Fi networks, cellphones and global positioning locators,
there's a new sense of place in the city.
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By Linda Baker
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Nov. 29, 2004 | In November 2003, New Yorker architecture critic
Paul Goldberger penned a diatribe in Metropolis magazine against the
isolation and dissolution of place wrought by the pervasive use of
cellphones on city streets. "The mobile phone renders a public place
less public," he wrote. "It turns the boulevardier into a sequestered
individual, the flâneur into a figure of privacy. And suddenly the
meaning of the street as a public place has been hugely diminished."
Goldberger's critique of mobile communications technology capped over
a decade of analysis revolving around the ability of global
communications networks -- for better and for worse -- to release
people from the constraints of time and place. "The post-information
age will remove the limitations of geography," wrote Nicholas
Negroponte in "Being Digital." "Digital living will depend less and
less on being in a specific place at a specific time." In
"Pandemonium," Lars Lerup, dean of the architecture school at Rice
University, proclaimed: "The bandwidth has replaced the boulevard."
Actually, it didn't. Virtual reality as a substitute for reality? That
kind of thinking is, well, so very yesterday. With a new generation of
wireless devices, GPS (global positioning system) locators and
ubiquitous networking, future gazers claim, digital space will simply
add another dimension to physical space, especially as technology
continues to penetrate what sociologist Ray Oldenberg has famously
described as "third places": the communal public spaces where people
interact with friends or strangers.
So-called "urban computing" means much more than bringing your
Centrino laptop to Starbucks and logging on to Amazon.com. Instead,
cutting-edge mobile and wireless services emphasize proximity over
connectivity, the local over the global and the here and now rather
than anytime, anywhere. Computer geeks suddenly turned urban theorists,
many of today's technologists harbor even loftier goals for mobile
research agendas: to enhance the image of the city itself -- the
patterns, the complexities and, above all, the sheer serendipity of the
urban landscape.
"People talk about mobile computing as now you'll be able to leave
your home and go to a cafe or park and maybe go online and check
e-mail," says Eric Paulos, lead researcher at Intel's Urban Atmospheres
project in Berkeley, Calif., a program designed to explore technology's
potential to augment and enhance the urban experience. "But we're
interested in something much bigger than that. We're interested in the
social cues that people already perform in urban spaces, in the
artifacts that already exist, like trash cans, park benches, and how
they will be mapped or reappropriated into a playful network of digital
life on the streets."
<snip>
http://salon.com/tech/feature/2004/11/29/digital_metropolis/
index_np.html
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About the writer
Linda Baker is a journalist in Portland, Ore.
Robert Bryce
2006 Homedale Dr.
Austin, TX 78704
p: 512-445-5097
cell: 512-589-8235
www.robertbryce.com
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