(This morning in the airport I cleaned up my desktop and bumped into a file titled "Untitled 5," which turned out to be my notes from the symposium Architecture and Situated Technologies. What follows is hardly an executive summary by any means but rather a brief personal echo of what turned out to be a really consequential event that I cooked up with Omar Khan and Mark Shepard. To understand the context for these fragmentary comments please catch up with IDC discussion July-October.)

Today, we take our online friends with us into the city and do things with them. We call them. We play games with them. We text with them or we email. We facebook or myspace on the plaza. Increasingly, the urban context is embedded with miniaturized technology, with sensors that sense our passing through.  

The public sphere is a place of tension and ritualistic encounter. How do wirelined and wireless technologies designed for responsive spaces shape behavior in public spaces? How do they change the way we move and socialize in the face of situated networks, personal, locational, ad hoc and multi-hop networks? How are these socialities negotiated? Can technological behavior be predicted at all? Which desires drive people who are using technologies? Today idiosyncratic, personal, *malleable* tools or instruments (Flickr on speed= Jimmy Henriks?) that are adapted to socially-situated conditions dominate over those technologies that are designed for universal settings.

Teens are lacking the public sphere that was there for them in the 1950s and search for new spaces to mingle. MySpace is one of those places where kids try to recreate a public sphere. You could also liken it to the 1990s attempts of Digitale Stadt in Amsterdam that took the city metaphor to create web-based architectures. But today, teens can take MySpace to the street; they can check their MySpace account while walking down the street and can even post to it. This creates an odd blur of physical and disembodied. Our online relationships are still with us out in the urban context. Attention is divided between the virtual and the actual. New social spaces are created and in the theatre of networked sociality the physical and the net are increasingly entwined.


This video clip "Da Kings of Myspace" became popular on Myspace and Youtube. Interestingly it is filmed at the Time Warner Studios (see the credits). What looks like an amateur teen production is in fact supported by the corporate Murdoch/TimeWarner PR machine. The free floating public realm of participation (of content submission) is infiltrated with amateur-lookalike contributions that are in fact PR productions. LonelyGirl15 was another example of this phenomenon.

Apart from the shrill tension between embodied and virtual encounter there is also the looming surveillance objection. What happens when our data leak out of our devices? Who controls these "panoptical" techno-social devices? The Coors slogan "here everybody knows your name" takes on a whole different meaning when the network already knows you wherever you go and this omnipresent data body is responsible for many choices that are made on our behalf (i.e. health insurance).

How to approach the discussion about situated technologies? Anne Galloway located her own approach in the "vibrating inbetween space" between the equally totalizing visions of dystopia or utopia. Here, technology has a due role to play in the imagination of the future but also accounts for its many shortcomings and dangers.

Today, we carry "personal territory devices" with us that make social space mobile, facilitating arguably isolationist "conversations," human interaction turns the confectionary spectacle of participation.

Near future scenarios will incorporate heightened relational experiences between technologies, environments and humans. Already today we are swamped with trivial choices, which plague us with anxiety and depression. Noise is shot at us with increasing speed. The Internet of Things will not slow this process down. Every step you make, every breath you take-- you'll have to respond to one influx or the other. This leads to what Neal Stephenson,  author of Snow Crash, calls "continuous partial attention." His response, offered on his often quoted website includes

1) Explicit Discouragement. Persons who wish to interfere with Neal's concentration are politely requested not to do so, and warned that he does not answer e-mail. 2) FAQs. Persons who wish to ask Neal questions are encouraged to look for the answers here on his web page). 3) Redirection. Talk to his agents.

At the symposium Mark Shepard marked the special issue (September 1991) of Scientific American on Communications, Computers and Networks as a historical event in the history of the discourse about networked objects and situated technologies.

Shepard's political claim was that today we need negotiation rather than resistance in the name of what he called "grandiose agendas with assumed alliances." For Shepard, alternative scenarios of use and operation are the realistic goal that can be negotiated. Negotiation, within this scenario becomes about micro-political interventions partially changing sociality. We could add attention diversion, disruptive interventions, re-use, and re-appropriation tactics to this trajectory. Another speaker commented that we are active agents who are accountable to social change and that if we see technology as vehicle for social change (at least as one player in this realm) we need to ask what kind of change exactly we are opting for.
 
Peter Hasdell, proposed a rather different notion: the concept of uselessness of technology. Must technology always have a useful function? Does it have to solve problems? What about things that are going wild? Hasdell talked about the autonomy of things as the digital wild. Eric Paulos opted for technology's ability to create moments of wonderment. Charlie Gere suggested that artist interventions up until the 1970s functioned as sometimes breathlessly naive projections of what technology can do. Since then, artists, according to Gere, rather strive to put a break on technological development.  

A few references from the symposium:

Gordon Pask (1928-1996) was an English cybernetician and psychologist who made significant contributions to instructional psychology and educational technology.

Gordon Pask "Architecture of Conversations"
http://www.cyberneticians.com/video/pask-from-bbc-1974.mov

Paul Pangaro describes the difference between reactive, responsive, or interactive and participatory systems. 
http://www.cyberneticians.com/video/gms-users-to-designers30fps480x360.mov

Cedric Price's "Technology is the answer but what is the question?"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cedric_Price

Uzman Haque's: "What is the question if technology is the answer?"
http://www.haque.co.uk/