Is Integrated Social Media Taking Serendipity Out of Urban Life? (a guest posting by Urbanist Carl Kerchmar)
Picnic just enjoyed its fourth edition of showcasing the worlds most innovative cross-media social mobile green technologies of wow on grass. Yes it’s a mouthful because so much is happening. The Picnic conference is the embodiment of the knowledge economy we are all waiting for. From keynote speakers to hands on tech labs Picnic navigates its participants in a seamless house style. The graphic design, location, installations and programming all coherently mingle with the Picnic brand image: Lo-Fi High Tech. Good enough technology, social agenda and green innovation.
Preference platform
During Picnic was a section entitled ‘The City as an Interaction Platform‘ which hosted a series of presenters showcasing how mobile and Internet networks are embedded in the city skyline. Equally important as buildings and monuments are the invisible geo-location points and preference flows the map out a city landscape 24-7 are characterize urban experience.
“Citysense” answers the question ‘where is everybody going tonight?’ by mapping out people’s movements in San Fransisco using GPS on your mobile. Without ever using personal data the service can generate quite specific life style groups which help you answer the question ‘where do people like me go out tonight?’
Preference filtering services are running rampant: music, film, food, and any niche worth an email address can be queried implemented an engaged to keep me going in my maximal blissful direction.
Neo Flaneurism
Could finding what you like when you want it be bad? Social media via Internet and mobile allow us to find like minded people and therefore letting us stay within our comfort zone of preferences. But what does that mean for the chance meeting and serendipity?
Much of urban life has been about the plethora of chance contacts that can send your life in a new direction or open up new opportunities. Remember the years it used to take for someone to become a local in a city? To know about the right restaurant for your immigrant tastes or the rockin’ club to fit your mood in an obscure club in some forgotten alley. Is that dying out and are we becoming risk averse?
The end of something means the beginning of something else. In our urban context with the integration social / mobile media could mark a fundamental shift in how and where the Flaneur makes his or her stroll without goal through the city. Enhanced by geo-loctation preference devices and augmented reality our Sunday stroller has more possible point of interaction then every before. An who is to say that maybe urbanites will annex multiple selves, ie. have access to multiple tribes and preference platforms simply be filling in another user preference.
The city just got 3x bigger.
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I’m not sure I agree entirely. The Flaneur or ‘drifter’ is more of a political choice, and that person will never choose to use social/mobile media. In the 19th century, the Flaneur had maps to follow and clean, new shopping arcades, but the Flaneur always chose to follow his nose and the more natural energies of the city.