The Boggling of My Mind
First, I want to do a more traditional blog post about Silva, Farley, and Dourish. The post ends with my technological plea. I think you’ll agree it reflects the view of technology I’ve shared with you all throughout the semester. Then I would like to end my 701 blogging with a rant about sousveillance. It will be my only rant of the semester, and I’m not sure how that happened.
Silva, Farley and Dourish
According to Farley, on August 15, 1996, the first Internet capable phone was manufactured by Nokia. Then, in October of 2000 the first camera phone entered the market in Japan and was capable of sending and receiving images via email. In the years since these developments, the amount of data sent and received via mobile devices has grown exponentially. At the present time nearly the entire Internet is available on a few higher end mobile phones. We can access and download music and video and use GPS-based applications. It’s almost difficult to imagine what might be next. As Farley says, “the desire for people to communicate, and for business to cater to that need, insures an imaginative and successful future for the mobile” (p. 34). He doesn’t posit any guesses about the future and neither will I. Instead, I plan to focus on the transformation of our physical spaces by the influence of the mobile device.
Dourish and Bell state that ubiquitous computing involves individual users being served by “tens or hundreds of computational devices … spread throughout the environment.” This is not likely to occur with desktop computing, leaving us with mobile devices as the deliverers of ubiquity in computing. The use of mobile devices, according to Silva, creates a hybrid space. She says that “hybrid spaces merge the physical and the digital in a social environment created by the mobility of users connected via mobile technology devices” (p. 263). The hybrid space transforms our physical landscape. Dourish and Bell argue that our cultural actions help to form our landscapes. “The very organization of space … is experienced through a range of cultural lenses” (p. 10) and ubiquitous computing works to create and sustain our infrastructure.
This is all very well and good. However, I wonder what the effects of these changes in our physical spaces are. If, as Dourish and Bell indicate, we are becoming increasingly dependent upon our infrastructures, what does that mean for us as a society? Dourish and Bell claim that infrastructures are a “manifestation of cultural practice and can be scrutinized as such” (p. 3). If our infrastructures/physical spaces are being created/re-created by our use of mobile technologies, what does it mean to scrutinize them? If we critically examine the structure of space, we are in turn critically examining our use of technology. This is a bit of self-reflection that we may want to engage in, and did to a certain extent during our discussion of space.
We are becoming increasingly dependent upon our infrastructure and therefore upon the technology that creates it, in this case mobile devices. So, our physical spaces are hybrid spaces. In such spaces, Silva argues that we do not perceive differences between the physical and the digital. They are not created by the technology themselves, but by the social use of the technology. Mobile devices are in constant use in public spaces, therefore creating hybrid spaces. My question is, does each user inhabit his or her own individual hybrid space? Silva states that hybrid spaces are mobile spaces, which are “networked social spaces defined by the use of portable interfaces as the nodes of the network” (p. 266). Nodes are still a part of the network, and the entire network defines the space. Therefore, if I am in a train station with 100 other people and we are all using a mobile device, then are we all existing in the same hybrid space? I don’t believe that we are. I think we develop our own individual spaces. Once again, the difference between space and place becomes an issue: we each have our own hybrid space within the larger place. Is the entire network of nodes, then, a hybrid place instead?
Another question that I have involves a passive node. What if I have a mobile device, but I’m not using it? Am I a part of the hybrid space? Silva describes the game Botfighters. If am not involved or even aware of the game, yet I am standing next to people involved in zapping one another with their text message rays, am I in their space? This question of presence is intriguing to me. Silva mentions Hayles’s notion of enfolded space: “there is a context that is created by the spatial proximity of people and inside it another context that is created by the cell phone” (p. 269). Silva also points out that users of mobile devices will consider others who are engaging in conversation with them via a mobile device are “considered by others to be present” (p. 269). So, it seems that, using the idea of the hybrid space, it is possible to be present in one location and not present in the same location but at the same time present in a different location. My mind boggles.
In the end, though, I’m pretty sure that I don’t really want my physical landscape to be determined by my use of technology. Dourish and Bell state that “the spaces through which we move become visible in terms of their network accessibility” (p. 3). I simply don’t think this is true. I do not view a place in terms of whether or not it has wireless access or cellular signal. If I need or want to be in a location, I’m going to go there regardless. I do not choose or view my surroundings based on connectivity. I do not need to be constantly connected. Is it nice to have the Internet everywhere? Sometimes, sure. But sometimes I want to exist in a single place; I don’t want to be fragmented. I don’t want to be part of some text message ray gun wielding crazy world. Please, just let me leave the Internet at home and leave me out of your befuddling enfolded spaces.
Mann, Nolan, and Wellman
Maybe it’s because I’m not Canadian so I couldn’t relate to what these authors were talking about, but I’m not sure I understand the point of their article. They begin by providing a number of quotes discussing the ubiquity of surveillance. I have to agree with the idea that surveillance is needlessly abundant. I was even kind of intrigued by their description of sousveillance: the “offering [of] panoptic technologies to help [us] observe those in authority” (p. 332). This is an interesting idea, although it’s not very new. 20/20 has been doing hidden camera exposes for years. They go on to say that sousveillance can help to “mirror and confront bureaucratic organizations” (p. 333) and provide people with the ability to use the organization’s own tools against them. “Sousveillance focuses on enhancing the ability of people to access and collect data about their surveillance and to neutralize surveillance” (p. 333). The authors point out the Rodney King video as an example of sousveillance. But, then, the wheels come off of their paper.
The authors claim that sousveillance brings “into question the very act of surveillance itself” (p. 337). Oh, really? How exactly does it do that? Because I take a picture of a shop owner, he’s going to think twice about installing a security camera? Seriously. Even if I watch the watchers, they’re still watching me. Other than a great 20/20 episode, what exactly have I accomplished? Not very much. And the authors accomplish even less with their sousveillance.
How exactly is walking around with a camera and a projector sousveillance? I’m not watching any watchers. And how did they expect people to react? People were confused by the fool walking around with a projector strapped to his chest. The hidden camera made the “performance” disconcerting? Who called it disconcerting? The people you mentioned seemed amused and (once again) confused, not uncomfortable. The point is we’re used to getting our picture taken. Did the “researchers” in this article stop to think about why security personnel approached them? Maybe it was the giant Flavor Flav-esque camera dome on a chain or the LCD display on your back that drew attention, not the possibility of picture taking. Stores don’t want you doing things to distract customers from the merchandise, they’re going to ask you to leave and take your projector with you.
Then the sousveiller herself thought that people were thinking “if I wanted to take a camera into a store, they would hassle me like that too?” People probably weren’t thinking that – they were probably thinking of how foolish you looked. And they wouldn’t hassle them with a camera unless it was gigantic and strapped to their head and they made lame excuses about not controlling it or that it was somehow implanted into their skull. Sousveillers that gave those excuses were understandably left alone: people usually try to avoid those who are insane.
I didn’t realize how angry this article made me until I just realized how much I have written/ranted about it. But what this article illustrates is not that sousveillance is any sort of effective empowerment tool, but that people with ridiculously large cameras and computers strapped to their bodies draw attention to themselves.