Writing & Research

Basak Haznedaroglu

12.19.2010

Keywords: Concept description, Design Questions, Domain-specific Research

From a cross-disciplinary point of view, my thesis explores the mobile wireless

technologies people use and its sociological impact on daily interactions and how these
new technologies could cultivate the way people perceive the public space with the
habitants they share the space with. This paper covers the key methodological features
of each discipline; one is the wireless tools and communication techniques in public
space, the other is the new media usage for participation.

To be able to identify the requirements of new media usage for participation, I have
researched how the social media has become this immersive to sustain the most of the
social relationships throughout the day.

How does technology and social mediate your social relations with other people? Why
these mediations feel so comforting and intuitive? The more technology is getting
involved in the maintenance of our individual social networks, the more potential it
creates to take these internal individual daily organizations, activities and practices that
take place in digital media and to represent them more explicitly physically.
Representations of actions and ideologies in digital space have huge impact on the
pursuit of daily life in physical space therefore why not projecting these forms more
directly, explicitly and physically so that our digital traces are reformed in physical space
leaving us room to discuss, share and exchange in a more open dialogue occurring
physically in a physical public space.
Key features of the Technological Framework

Figure: Offloading information onto context. The mobile device meets the fixed and
embedded device (Courtesy of Malcolm McCullough, Digital Ground, Chapter One:
Interactive Futures)

According to Malcolm McCullough, in the near future computation will be “human-

centered” where technology will be available freely everywhere (McCullough, 2004). This
available technology will be in the wireless forms in public spaces helping us to handle
our goals and needs therefore human-computer relationship will be strengthen way
more. So as a designer after the realization of the complexity of changing the social
behaviors of habitants to alter their proximity in their physical interactions during the day,
these available technologies will enable different forms of communication without the
necessity of physical face-to-face communication.

Therefore wearable, mobile and wireless forms of technologies are being developed to
create communication and ad-hoc collaborations in physical spaces without “physical”
interaction. The chance encounters of actual face-to-face conversations are in decrease
and this leads to alternative ways to augment social interaction with people and space,
researchers have been working on wearable applications for collaborative practices
during the day as in Eric Paulos’ citizen science work- Urban Atmospheres where
citizens collect data and share collaboratively through wearable devices leading to social
community building without face-to-face encounters.

Many studies have been conducted to expand this personal networking and private
technology embodiment to another level to support local interactions and community
building. Marcus Foth, a researcher in Participatory Design and Urbanism states that
new forms of interaction are being redefined for community building by organizing
individual networking.

Networked objects and sensor devices are another form of promoting a participatory
culture that collects, shares and exchanges data within itself. Even the title “Networked
objects” itself promotes the notion of networking and connection between group of
people. So how can wireless technologies facilitate engagement with collocated ones or
just reinforce the idea of privatization in public space? Or to put it in a simpler way-
instead of connecting to our personal private accounts in public wifi spots; how would
that technology empower us to engage with people around us.

Where am I?

Well ubiquitous computing initiates an exploration of what opportunities lie beneath the
wireless technologies to use them not only accessing information when we are mobile
but also employ them to create a new layer of interacting with people that shares the
same space. I aim to reveal the potential of digital mediums to be utilized in physical
space.

Just as the pervasive technologies being used for community culture as I explained
above, my thesis is a series of persuasive and subversive technologies that disrupt the
daily routine with such technologies for people with “a shared experience of a defined
space, interest or moment in time” in a public spot (Bucolo, et al, 2005).
It is a fact that should be highlighted that the passive relationship of people living next
door is unable to create a dialogue physically, whereas a wireless internet that has been
shared in the same apartment is perceived as a safer and more open way to
communicate. And this belief encouraged me to think that even when we are other
people’s immediate proximity, we are still distant and passive however the digital
activities, networks and technologies that are shared in common have a potential to
bridge the gap between these people by bringing a dialogue via the shared
technologies- in this case wifi networking.

The place where I stand is the intersection of the new and traditional media, trying to
bring the potential in both, the old school activism that lives in streets and the new age
hacktivist yet still sensible and sensitive activism.

And the reason why I do this is simply my belief in the idea of socialization in physical
space through the diverse media embedded in space. Aware or not, we are exposed to
high intense activism and ideas through this diverse media, we hear our friends doing
this, joining this group, that group, starting petitions and they all reflect on us during the
day when we see the bits and pieces of our friends “digital footprints”.

The stimulation of ideologies and manifests getting outside of digital platforms and
finding a physical body on a physical space is another dimension in my thesis. Within the
evolution of ubiquitous computing, when all the technology just vanished in the
background and started to survive “invisibly” in our everyday life, streams of all this data,
all these digital footprints can be a tool for conversation and these digital traces during
the day can be a meaningful content to be embedded in physical space.

A Social View of New Media

The practice of citizenship has been changed drastically after the introduction of social
media to our everyday social life and accordingly many researches have been in the
area of “e-democracy” where citizen engagement is being measured by the online
participation and deliberation of topics. Through social media, cultural citizenship is
being redefined as a more embedded in everyday life, leisure, consumption and
entertainment practices therefore with contemporary media and communication
channels, the way we engage in critical spheres is when we sit in our homes and send
petitions online through our Facebook or Twitter accounts. The theoretical framework of
citizenship isn’t highlighted any more by the street performances of “egg throwing or
chaining arms on doors”, it is carried to a greater level of visibility and accessibility over
oceans and cross platforms.

From a more traditional point of view, the Habermasian ideal of the public sphere
(Habermas, 1992) imagines universal space where rational citizens engage in the
political process through physical, critical and rational deliberation (Foth, 2006). However
post-Habermasian alternatives argue that popular culture and new media and everyday
life can be accounted as possible sites of democracy where the boundaries of online and
physical activities become blur. There are many case studies that exemplify the potential
of critical attempts through Facebook and Twitter such as the Iranian elections or
California Proposition Eight campaigns to support gay marriage or Burma’s Monks
Support Groups in Facebook and many others.

Through all these unconventional ways of approaching and engaging in collective

activities, in my thesis I decided to explore this huge potential of computer and wireless
technologies-mediated communication that occurs unexpectedly and spontaneously
during casual everyday practices. It’s simple, the content is created by individuals during
everyday life, then maintained through digital activities all days (posts, blogs, comments
in new media) then transcend from online to offline by being embedded in physical
space through the use of mobile and wireless technologies in a public space. Why I am
doing this can be explained in the lack of physicality and site-specificity in these social
medias. To regard a community as “collective” it cannot be expected to happen
physically through physical face-to-face conversations since the social urban
infrastructure is not encouraging this type of interaction. At this point, I do believe that
the dominant modes of communications –in this case social media- can be restructured
in physical spaces. As Marcus Foth explains that everyday creative practices like
chatting, blogging, photosharing, storytelling can have both intended and unintended
consequences for the practice of cultural citizenship and can constitute collective critism
and authoring for community building.

From a more Poetic and Conventional Perspective

What is happening to civil society, how is reaction following a revolution in this digital
world? What is a revolution in this digital era anyway? Hakim Bey, a political writer and
philosopher, explores the notion of freedom and political control over authority by
creating individual zones for ourselves and for our manifests. The way he unites the
human kind’s emotional and poetic approach to freedom and justice by following the
footsteps of invisible guerilla ontologists has been very inspirational. What is so beautiful
in his book, The Temporary Autonomous Zone is the realization that TAZ begins with a
simple act of defense, which is meaningful and “invisible”. The key to organize and
operate our social relationships in a non-hierarchical system is to “release the mind from
controlling mechanisms that have been imposed on the mind” (Bey, 1991). He explores
the power of individual mind against authorities is hidden in the real empowerment of
individual creativity and the real empowerment is being initiated in his theory of
“temporary zones” which I attempt to discover within the new social media. I do believe
that the release of the individual mind and the creativity is managed through anonymous
acts in digital world where the temporary autonomous zones are turned into safe
anonymous zones where ideologies and manifests are not tied to “physical faces or
identities” instead where ideologies and manifests are forms of anonymous bits and
bytes. Therefore people define their digital world as safe zones where they speak up
without the fear of public humiliation or outkasting. In my argument, I aimed at using the
power of anonymity in digital spaces for habitants to share and exchange ideas- ideas
that do not belong to individuals, ideas that belong to “everyone”. The collectiveness and
a public identity is what an urban space needs to form a social bond between its
habitants- an invisible bond made up of invisible and anonymous ideologies of
“everyone”.
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bey, H. (1991). “TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic
Terrorism”.

http://hermetic.com/bey/taz_cont.html (accessed on 11.23.2010)

Burgess, J., Foth, M. and Klaebe, H. (2006). “Everyday Creativity as

Civic Engagement: A Cultural Citizenship View of New Media”. In Proceedings
Communications Policy & Research Forum, Sydney.

Foth, M. and Axup, J., (2006). “Participatory Design and Action Research”. Proceedings
Participatory Design Conference 2006: Expanding Boundaries in Design 2, pages pp.
93-96, Trento, Italy.

Foth, M., Burgess, J., Klaebe, H., (2006). “Everyday Creativity as Civic Engagement: A
Cultural Citizenship View of New Media”.

Habermas, J., (1992). “The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry
into a Category of Bourgeois Society.” (Trans. Thomas Burger). Cambridge: Polity
Press.14

Kortuem G., Fickas S., Segall Z., (2002). “Architectural Issues in Supporting Ad-hoc
Collaboration with Wearable Computers”.

McCullough M., (2004). “Digital Ground: Architecture, Pervasive Computing, and

Environmental Knowing”, The MIT Press.

Neumayer, C., Raffl, C. (2008). “Facebook for Global Protest: The Potential and Limits of
Social Software for Grassroots Activism”.