canarytrap.net

So this weekly round-up is a bit different from my usual semi-regular link dump of stuff I’ve been reading. The past couple of weeks, I’ve been lax on blogging the past couple of weeks because I’ve been busy firing my little synapses at issues surrounding the how branding + geotagging/location check-in (e.g. foursquare, gowalla) affect how we encounter urban and public space (and each other within it. It’s quickly turning into a full blown captical-P Project. I’ll start posting some prelimenary thoughts/questions next week, but for now, some of posts, articles, and books that I’ve been drawing on in the initial concept mapping phase.

So, in a way, this is part link-dump, part project-emergence-documentation.

I started thinking about these issues with the recent surge in discussions of brand collaborations with popular geolocation social games, especial with all the chatter in SXSW reports about the rise of location-specific (I know people are using the term geolocation, but I’ve yet to really embrace that tautology) games and social networking tools.

• Daniel Terdiman reported that Foursquare and Gowalla trumped twitter this year in terms of cutting through the noise of the conference backchannels.
• And the prevalence of location check-ins was one of the biggest take-aways from Jay Baer’s SXSW observations.
• Clement Yueng at Social Media Examiner writes about how businesses can leverage geotagging to build their brands.
• Last month a number of Entertainment and Media brands linked up with Foursquare
• And universities are jumping on the wagon, with Marc Parry at the Chronicle of Higher Education discussing the rise of “virtual graffiti” initiatives.

Location check-in networks therefore have two obvious precedents: display advertising and graffiti culture.

• For display advertising and public space, I’ve been digging into City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York by David M. Henkin, which discusses the way branded communications and marketing transformed public space and how we perceive information as a culture.

• One of the (geographic) sites of interest is Sao Paulo, a city famous for its unique graffiti culture and for banning outdoor advertising. Hector Fernando Burga’s briefly outlines [pdf] a number of papers given at the Decentering Urban Theory conference at UC Berkeley focusing on new productions of urban space, including one by Prof. Teresa Caldeira on the “auto-construction” of Sao Paulo, where citizens engage in slow, collaborative, ad-hoc rebuilding of the city. These and other sites like it reveal “another dimension of place-making” that geotagging and location check-ins also seem to fit into.
• Also on the urban theory front, I’m looking into a classic in the field, Kevin Lynch’s Image of the City.
• And going in the other direction, I’m trying to think of how to situate the geolocation social activities between public and private, and starting with The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard, which explores how we encounter the most intimate and domestic spaces.

I recently stumbled across a post on tomatonation.com regarding the controversy surrounding prominent mommy-blogger Shellie Ross’ decision to tweet about her son drowning. I had heard vaguely about it previously and dismissed it with a long-suffering “oh lord, the internets” eyeroll, but the tomatonation piece make me think about it a little more closely.

Putting aside the impossibility (yet sad inevitability) of judging someone else’s grief, it doesn’t make sense to demonize any one channel of communication as wholly unfit for one type of information and not others. Technologies are anything but innocent of social power, but they also don’t come with predetermined regulations of use. But if we look at Madison McGraw’s now infamous backlash against Shellie Ross, it becomes clear that much of vitriol comes out of a sudden conviction that tweeting — that online activities — encroaches on the real life duties of motherhood.

In other words, the backlash is symptomatic of our contemporary crisis between public and private life, yet another flare-up of a long-brewing technology-triggered moral panic like the ones that have accompanied the development of everything from motion pictures to railroads. Once private acts can now bind us with networked publics, and public events come ready-made with backchannels of private communication. Twitter, and other social media technologies, are generating increasingly contested contact zones between the ideological bravado of the public sphere and the deep intimacies of the domestic one, a digital borderlands where it is becoming harder and harder to differentiate one from the other. And it is becoming harder and harder to accurately anticipate what things are best kept to ourselves.

Moreover, Shellie Ross’ tweets became the focus of such vicious backlash not only because it transformed one of the most deeply domestic acts — child rearing — with a very public one, but also because we are culture for whom public displays of mourning, however abbreviated, remain significantly taboo. Even now. Or perhaps especially now, as technological advancements and wonderous gadgets reassure us of our progress, our ever-increasing forward momentum. And it is disconcerting to see these things as an outlet for something as gear-halting as simple grief. Mourning seems the ultimate recursive loop.

But consider: we humans make sense of our traumas and delights by calling them out, giving them the names and reasons needed in order to share their burdens with one another. In that light, perhaps twitter is an appropriate vehicle for grieving after all. Its limited space gives us the freedom to articulate our distress with whatever utterances we can salvage from the wreckage, however mundane or superficial, and verify that we continue to exist even as someone else does not. And its publicness may remind us, crucially, that though our lives have suddenly grown unimaginably smaller, we are still not yet entirely alone.