thinking

Moving, always moving

In the United States a man builds a house in which to spend his old age, and he sells it before the roof is on; he plants a garden and lets it just as the trees are coming into bearing; he brings a field into tillage and leaves other men to gather the crops; he embraces a profession and gives it up; he settles in a place, which he soon afterwards leaves to carry his changeable longings elsewhere.

- Alexis de Toqueville, quoted in Bourgeois Nightmares: Suburbia, 1870-1930 by Robert Fogelson. The chapter, by the by, is called “Fears of Almost Everyone and Everything.”

United Arab Emirates and Mobile Persuasion

Thanks to Ame for finally prodding me to upload the slides for this talk. I gave it at the Mobile Persuasion conference at Stanford a few months ago, but school and wedding preparations got in the way of blogging or uploading it. The gist: self-presentation and social communication practices have changed around the world after the influx of digital photography devices – especially camera phones. Mixed with photosharing communities like Flickr, this makes photography ever more mobile, crossing social groups, national borders, and linguistic boundaries. But this new mobility of images has multiple meanings, especially for countries like the United Arab Emirates that are debating how far the globalization of culture should go.

Tourism services

Ooops. Forgot to publish this when it happened…better late than never, I suppose. Forgive the slideshow errors — the conversion from my non-standard fonts did not go smoothly.

I’m at the iSchool Information Services and Design Symposium, where I just spoke on “designing for destinations.”

The argument, in a nutshell (or an abstract):

Tourism exists in the interplay between places and stories. In making sense of travel, we’re also making sense of ourselves and the world around us. Indeed, the global tourist industry produces places as “destinations” through stories and souvenirs. The audience for tourism stories has changed greatly with changes in technologies of communication and representation, with one of the most radical changes the introduction of networked media. With the rise of web-based services, tourist experiences have acquired a digital penumbra of content available in ever more formats and locations. This paper examines these technological changes, and the potential consequences for digital storytelling, travel, and the production of destinations.

This is an attempt to look closely at dimensions of what John Urry has called http://www.intute.ac.uk/socialsciences/cgi-bin/fullrecord.pl?handle=30130489“>”the tourist gaze”

Slideshow:

At Where 2.0

Some very sketchy notes follow in the extended entry. My more coherent take on Where 2.0 will come later, probably after I recover from the 4th of July.

Continue reading…

Vanessa without borders

Vanessa Without Borders is the blog of Vanessa, a self-described hipster who has just moved to Sierra Leone to work with an NGO

After 8 years of living the hipster lifestyle in what I’ve come to think of as the center of the universe, New York City, and working in various media and for various social causes, I have decided to leave the slickness, irony, and most of my accessories behind.

Her website is both a blog of her time there and a clearinghouse for communication between Sierra Leonians and Americans. My favorite section is the Personals, where Vanessa uses the Nerve dating format to quiz both her fellow American and British aid workers and the Sierra Leonians about their lives.

Long distance, pt II

FYI: That last entry was partially brought to you by the work of Saskia Sassen:

Hypermobility and space/time compression need to be produced, and this requires vast concentrations of very material and not so mobile facilities and infrastructures. And they need to be managed and serviced, and this requires mostly place-bound labor markets for talent and for low-wage workers. The global city is emblematic here, with its vast concentrations of hypermobile dematerialized financial instruments and the enormous concentrations of material and place-bound resources that it takes to have the former circulating around the globe in a second.

What’s with the 511?

I just had (okay — it was two weeks ago, but it took me a while to recover) an unusually bad encounter with, sadly, the very well-intentioned and usually helpful Bay Area public transit trip planner. Getting from my house in the Mission District to the lab in Palo Alto (26 miles or so away) requires three forms of public transportation: subway to light rail to bus. The online trip planner, as you can imagine, is absolutely essential in coordinating all these transfers. On a good day, the trip takes 1.5 hours. On a bad day, as happened last week, I miss my usual train, take the next one, and then spend 45 minutes waiting at the Palo Alto bus stop to take a ten minute ride from the station to the lab.

Just to clear this up – I spent just as much time getting from Millbrae (in the south of San Francisco) to California Avenue (in south Palo Alto) as I did waiting at that goddamn bus stop. And as I sat there, waiting for the bus, I thought about that web page, and thought about how the little schedule spat out by the trip planner hadn’t differentiated between “waiting time” and “travelling time.” Nor had it offered any easy way to minimize waiting by adjusting the time or origin of my trip. Oh, I fumed and I fumed. Would it have been so hard to put the “waiting time” in a different color, even?

Then there’s the lack of transparency. Over the past few months in SF, the trip planner has given three different sets of directions from the same origin to three nearby destinations. I like to believe that the system is adapting to changing traffic conditions. Or bus delays that I don’t know about. However, without any insight into the algorithms behind the schedule I’m given, I’m forced to assume that the system is just trying to be funny.

This type of transportation problem – travel at a fixed time between a fairly specific origin and destination – gets solved neatly and efficiently when I buy plane tickets (including up to 4 separate hops on multiple carriers!), yet stubbornly resists solution at the municipal scale. Yes, of course: there’s a lack of money, time, and interest. But I also want to point to another difficulty: the sheer complexity of the metropolitan environment. The global network of airports is a self-contained system, built to process people quickly and/or amuse them while they wait. They minimize the unpredictable. Cities (even ones with shiny new railway terminals) are exactly the opposite and do nothing of the sort. When I think about the giant mixup that is the Bay Area’s buses, subways, trolleys, light rail, bicycles, and automobile traffice, I’m almost amazed that trip planners work at all.

Nevertheless, the website (which is not potentially stuck in a traffic jam and thus about to miss its transfer) could use some more color-coding.

My life as a “nomad”

Almost exactly one year ago, I gave up my no-longer-quite-so-beloved apartment in the Lower East Side to move (temporarily, I thought) to San Francisco. Five months later I still hadn’t returned to take up my life in New York; twelve months later, I’m pretty sure I’m not going back. The intervening months have been a bit of a blur: Seattle, then Portland, then Oklahoma, then Los Angeles, then New York, then San Francisco. Again. For a summer, at least. FYI: I will be working here. Very exciting.

I think I might qualify as a nomad; it’s an overused term. I met this guy in Portland who “doesn’t do winter”; he spends half the year in Australia and half the year in Europe/America. He never keeps a permanent address either; he’s always in sublets and having his mail sent on to the next stop. Now, that’s a nomad; I’d rather just call myself “temporarily dislocated.”

Things I discovered about me and my relationship to the technologies that support my life:

I. As homes go, a laptop isn’t a bad one.

Using Craigslist, I rented sight unseen a studio in New York from February to May. It was on the first floor of a relatively nice street in the West Village, so I thought: “Hey, I’m living the lush life now.” I arrived to find a non-functional lock on the front door, a front window without any lock or bars at all, a large front window with a curtainrod that mysteriously refused to stay up, and a steam heater that was…inconsistent. So for the first few days and nights, I was cold, constantly calculating the likelihood of robbery, and totally visible to any enquiring minds walking past. My only consolation was my laptop, which provided warmth (courtesy of the PowerBook battery, which runs hot), light (courtesy of the little glowing screen) and companionship (courtesy of email and IM). And the cell phone was good too. I huddled under the blankets, curled myself around its warm silver skin, and tried to remember why I’d wanted to leave Los Angeles.

II. Put not your faith in laptops

The computer-as-home model, I think, works best when you have other support systems already in place. When my computer started stumbling a month later, I tried to pretend the constant freezes weren’t happening. I was in the middle of a major project, and could not imagine coping without her (yes, she’s a she) for two whole weeks while the Apple techs ripped her guts out. So I soldiered on for another month. Things got worse. First she froze every hour, then she froze every 15 minutes, then she froze every 15 minutes and refused to start up again without a two-hour long break. Which, yes: was not so good for that major project. I had her all backed up to disk, but I couldn’t face renting another machine for two…whole…weeks. The expense! The inconvenience! In retrospect, I think I just couldn’t deal with the consequences of even temporarily losing the only continuity I had… (I don’t want to push this analogy too far, but when I signed the release authorizing Apple to wipe the hard drive if necessary, I felt like I was signing a do-not-resuscitate agreement. Very painful.)

III. Put not your faith in WiFi, unless you have an indepth knowledge of the neighborhood

In London: no open access points to be found. In New York: at least three A.P.s within range of my apartment, with one offering consistently fantastic bandwidth. But no open points near my favorite cafe, oh no. I assume that’s because everyone who lives around there knows full well the slackers in the cafe are using their broadband to download music. I send my thanks to the unknown person who provided my connectivity for 2.5 months. I’d have PayPalled some money each month to help out with the broadband bill, but hey…there was no way to work out who it was. Sorry about that.

IV. Your friends and family actually do need to know where you are

If not for their own peace of mind, then just for their own ability to forward your phone bills to the correct address (Yes, this actually happened. Very embarrassing, especially as I mostly deal with all this stuff online.) Also, your friends will not be able to invite you out for a drink if they don’t know what city you’re in. Remember that. Having to explicitly tell people where I was at all times came as a mild shock. I had figured that being constantly reachable through mobile phone/email would be enough. It’s not. Even though I find it a little egotistical to send out a mass emailing every six weeks updating my location information, at least people in my vicinity know to ask me out for lunch. I’m going to be in SF for long enough that I can’t really be bothered, but I think an RSS feed for my location would have solved the problem nicely. That way, I wouldn’t have had to bother anyone and people wouldn’t have to keep checking the blog. (If you’re actually the sort of person who asks me out for drinks, and you do check confectious to see whether I’m in town…Thanks. I’ll get the next round.)

V. It’s amazing how few clothes you need…and how many gadgets

Admittedly, I borrowed a winter coat the night before I left Los Angeles for New York. But there’s no option but to haul around the hard drive, and camera, and the attendant power supplies and data cords, and maybe a mouse. Shocking how bulky that stuff is when you actually start hauling it through airports in a suitcase. The hard drive especially. What I missed most, actually, was a printer. Driving directions. Flight information. Presentation revisions. Budgets. Schedules. Work contracts and health insurance applications and reimbursement slips that require paper copies and signatures. Faxing, for crying out loud. Faxing!

VI. Without ready access to paper, putting your trust in bits takes a lot of trust

So I had to get health insurance, as my university finally bumped me off its rolls. And since I didn’t have a printer/scanner/fax machine handy, I wanted to do it all online. But here’s the catch: buying health insurance in the US involves giving away lots of sensitive, sensitive personal data. How am I supposed to know whether the “registered California health care broker” I went with wasn’t some shady front? How much do I really trust the authorities who granted those authentication certifications, and how bad would it be if I got burned? And do I really feel okay about sending all this stuff out over an unencrypted WiFi connection? (FYI: It was fine. But I spent a week wondering whether I’d just made a colossal mistake out of a desire to avoid spending two hours and $30 on the local Internet café’s fax machine and printer.) I started thinking a lot then about the potential business for privacy brokers — people/systems who would just manage the access to my personal data for me, because I honestly don’t have the expertise (or the time) to do it myself. That’s why stock brokers exist, right?

VII. I am now a helpless cellphone zombie

Since all my collaborators are in different cities/neighborhoods/timezones and they don’t always know where I am, I’ve become one of those jerks who walk around, dead to the world around them, talking loudly and insistently on the phone at all hours of the day or night. I once got caught by someone from ITP yelling about server problems in front of the Barnes and Noble at Astor Place. Which sort of reminded me that the world may be my cubicle…but it’s not everyone else’s. Once I got used to being always reachable and always…reaching, I found it very difficult to walk around the city without an invisible companion. I’m trying to ramp down my cellphone consumption a bit (the bills are exorbitant), but now I almost feel…lonely if I’m on the street without a voice in my ear. Can you hear me? I’m driving home now…where are you? Oh, I know that place. I’ve been there before How much time did I spend during all this wandering talking about the places where I had once been and where my friends now were?

’I know this may sound far-fetched,’ I said to Elizabeth Vrba, ‘but what if I were asked, “What is the big brain for”?, I would be tempted to say, “For singing our way through the wilderness.”’ – Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines

Cellspotting

spacenamespace made an implicit challenge to developers:

phone with WAP browser would count as a ‘location-aware device’; standard services allow you to locate nearby pubs; in urban areas, the few hundred metres accuracy available per cell ID suffices for this, in a blunt-instrument way. but the device-location mapping isn’t open or free; available for re-sale, for bootstrapping commercial services.

…and Cellspotting.com answers it:

“CellSpotting.com” is a global location based service for mobile (GSM and soon UMTS) users.

- Find the name and location information about a place you are at.
- Track your Cellspotting friends, You can find the whereabout of your friends.
- Find the distance and direction to spotted cells!

The applications Cellspotting proposes are pretty mundane: tourist information, local interest groups, maybe a “jazz clubs near me” and other types of categorized services. And there’s no discussion of ownership of content and/or the social ramifications of using collaboratively generated, potentially inaccurate, kind-of-spotty location data to lookup your friends and loved ones. But it’s interesting how accepting uncertain, incomplete, and potentially flawed data from a whole lot of people might enable “good enough” location-finding in the public domain. The problem is recruiting enough sources — and how open Cellspotting is to letting outside developers use their database.

Coverage of the US is unsuprisingly poor, but the scope of the project — spanning carriers and continents — is impressive, especially given that the client only runs on Nokia Series 60 phones.

via Veen

Thar’s booty in them there streets

Like Minnesotans, people in Japan do appear to have more mobile fun, as evidenced by Mogi, a game where:

Players move outside, pick up virtual items through their mobile phone interface then trade with other players to complete collections. The goal is to get the maximum points completing collections.

Paul Baron has a good explanation of what makes this game so interesting:

- It uses the GPS in my phone, and that’s so cool.
- It maps a virtual data layer onto Japan and brings a fresh new way to look at my map of Tokyo.
- All the trips I make in the city are now randomized, as I will often divert a few hundred meters to go and collect an object around me. I get a chance to discover parts of the city that I ignored, a motivation to check out that parallel street I never took.
- It has a community dimension to it, I chat with other players, I also know how far I am from them and finding out some are less than a few hundred meters to me is really exciting. Over the past month, I bumped into a player who turned out to be the creator of the game, I had to race to pick up a flag that had been put on the map at equal distance between me and another player to encourage us to meet.
- The web interface of the game is pretty impressive, with nationwide 3D map with cool visual effects, detailing where all the objects are, along with special items and shops.
- The game offers a few different scenarii to accumulate points, for instance you can pick up scrolls along the way, which when activated in those shops can produce new objects.

Paul Baron is an expat Brit in Tokyo. Mike Liebhold posted a link to his blog on geowanking….and here we are.

Mogi is moving towards Matt Walsh’s plan for a MM(offline)RPG played by people on city streets. I always had a soft spot for the idea of joining together with fellow guild members to slay a dragon underneath Times Square. Just imagine the kind of carnage we could create in the Meatpacking District.