On his Neighbourhoods blog Kevin Harris wonders in The original space of flows whether we may be living in a 'dark age' of community communications...
.... where at the moment we have neither the benefit of dense overlapping networks in our neighbourhoods, nor the potential of an online resource for the accretion of community memory. There's stacks more to go into this, such as the 'isolating impulse' expressed in the use of personal stereos, shaded car windows, a non-conversational cash machine, how we feel about gated communities, and so on.
Kevin reports a presentation he gave at a seminar on social quality and the information society, where an historical review of neighbourhood communication...
... lead me on to suggesting that what we may lack today is the sense of readily available common repositories for local community memory. It's as if what we're left with is no longer fulfilling the role of shoring-up everyday lives, of giving form to neighbourhood life. Hence the importance of resources for community narratives – including informal gathering places like the school gates or the corner shop. I then referred to the e-neigbours and i-neighbours initiatives that Keith Hampton has kicked off at MIT, and the rest will become history.
Could there be scope for some collaboration between these US e-neighbourhoods initiatives, and work in the UK? For example, the Urban Tapestries project, piloted in Bloomsbury, enables people to use mobile technology in "a framework for exploring and sharing experience and knowledge, for leaving and annotating ephemeral traces of peoples’ presence in the geography of the city". There are now some scenarios on their site to explain what this means in practice for people using mobile phones and other devices to map and mark their presence in places. I would love to see some further experiments in London, but maybe the wireless Bristol project offers more scope.
On the one hand we shouldn't expect technology on its own to build relationships, but as Kevin argues cogently, it has always made a big difference in determining where the focus and scope may lie.
http://www.centrifugalforces.co.uk/citypoems/pages/01_03.html
http://www.stadschromosomen.be/
http://murmurtoronto.ca/
http://www.areacode.org.uk/
http://www.centrifugalforces.co.uk/surfacepatterns/pages/home3.html
It's better to think about conversations than memorialising.
GeoNotes is good in this respect:
http://www.i-cherubini.it/mauro/blog/2004/12/16/geonotes-features/
Posted by: andrew wilson | December 18, 2004 at 01:33 PM