Background
The 'osmotic' relationship between physical and virtual spaces is transforming the ways in which people form publics. In the 21st Century interaction order (Jenkins, 2010) many of the everyday practices that Goffman observed - especially the delicate negotiation of availability and obligation through civil inattention or the use of involvement shields - still operate and William Holly Whyte's urban planning principles for The social life of small urban places (1980), too, still prove remarkably potent. But a groundswell of social innovation and experimentation around connectivity in public has far reaching implications for the design and use of public space, the nature of publics and public engagement. Qualitative studies of these natural experiments are an important source of insight and inspiration not only for academics, but also for communities, artists, designers, policy-makers, and politicians.
Such studies show, for example, how orientations and obligations towards others in public spaces change as people 'micro-coordinate' their everyday lives (Rich Ling & Haddon, 2003) and maintain close 'phatic' contact to members of their 'full time intimate community' (C. Licoppe & Smoreda, 2005; Matsuda, 2005; Rettie, 2008). The collective, civil diversity of physical 'mobile withs' (Jacobs, 1961; O. Jensen, 2010) is remixed as individuals on the move become locatable and 'addressable' on the move (R. Ling, 2010; Thrift, 2004a), with complex implications for the negotiation of (location) privacy (De Souza E Silva & Frith, 2010; Christian Licoppe & Inada, 2010). Connectivity now shapes the social life of wireless urban spaces (Hampton, Livio, & Sessions, 2007). People seek out connectivity, stake out niches for focused encounters with far away friends or colleagues, transforming or, at times, evading emergent, serendipitous encounters with co-present strangers. The result is a palimpsest of complex 'intersituativities' (Hirschauer, 2011), where different temporal rhythms of communication can be (and have to be) negotiated, creating new opportunities, but also new strains for intimacy and community (Crang, Crosbie, & Graham, 2007). Intimately mobile people (Bialski, 2011), affectively connected (Chayko, 2002; Turkle, 2011) negotiate technologically augmented comobility (Southern, n.d.) and, in the process, perform new kinds of public spaces and public spheres (O. B. Jensen, 2008).
Ephemeral 'improvised communities' (Clark, 2010) and networked, 'mobile publics' may form (Rheingold, 2002; M Sheller & Urry, 2003; Mimi Sheller, 2004; Varnelis, 2008). They mobilise 'collective intelligence' for play (Levy, 1997; McGonigal, 2006), but also for unrest and disruption (Morrell, Scott, McNeish, & Webster, 2011) as well as the serious business of dealing with emergencies and crises (Perng, n.d.; Vieweg, Palen, Liu, Hughes, & Sutton, 2008). In these contexts it is difficult to coordinate the 'fragmented geographies' of distributed participants (Mondada, 2011), but the efforts involved can also generate an 'extroverted' sense of global connectedness (Massey, 1991) or 'banal globalism' (Szerszynski & Urry, 2006).
Moreover, equipped with 'the capacity to remember, correlate and anticipate, [the] near-future “sentient” city' is envisioned as an actor in the performance of public space, 'capable of reflexively monitoring its environment and our behaviour within it, and of becoming an active agent in the organization of everyday life in urban public space' (Shepard, 2011). At the same time, the phenomenology of human embodied experience and sensory perception is changing (Thrift, 2004b).
However, while the opportunities and efficiencies of informationalized everyday mobilities may enhance many aspects of modern living, a Faustian bargain may be in progress (Elliot & Urry, 2010), where more efficient, personalised services and multiple mobilities are exchanged for an erosion of privacy, civility, community and civil liberties (Bauman, 2000), creeping securitization, even militarization of everyday life (S. Graham, 2008), 'splintered urbanism' (S. Graham & Marvin, 2001) and a highly divisive philosophy of code/space (Kitchin and Dodge 2011) and social sorting of 'access' (Lyon, 2001; Norris, 2002; Zureik, Stalker, Lyon, & Chan, 2010). A high price to pay.
But the bargain is not inevitable. Indeed the idea that efficiency, security, mobility can only be had in exchange for privacy, civility, community is false.(1) We could (and should) strive to do both. This requires radically careful and carefully radical design (Latour, 2008), and new forms of 'collective experimentation' (Felt, U. and Wynne, 2008) with possible and preferable 21st Century interaction orders. Goffman's exploration of the interaction order provides radical theoretical understanding of social organization and powerful analytical purchase by dissolving the dichotomy between agency and structure, micro and macro, practice and discipline (Rawls, 1987), while Whyte's visual and material analysis of spatial affordances provides inspiration for ways of extending this analysis to material and 'immaterial' computational and network affordances and agencies. This workshop seeks to bring together qualitative studies that can inform radical design and collective innovation experiments.
Note 1: Lucas Introna, personal communication, Bridge Project.