This is a short piece I was invited to write for an arty journal called "Acoustic Space: Trans Cultural Mapping"....
We currently stand at a unique moment in history as technological forces gather to reshape the urban environment through the use of locative media. The roots of this moment date back to 1979, when cellular telephone service was first introduced in Tokyo. One might even trace threads of our current conundrum back to Nicola Tesla, the father of wireless communications, and the vast possibilities he envisioned for its social and geographical impacts....
The rapid convergence of mobile communications, automated positioning technologies, and geographic information systems (GIS) into 「locative media」 is raising the possibility of a dramatic transformation of the way we perceive and move about the urban environment, and how we interact with each other in urban spaces. Endless possibilities for locative media are being proposed that promise increased convenience, awareness, transparency, and access to information and social opportunities that break traditional power structures.
Simultaneously, at this moment of realization of the potential of locative media, there is an emerging sense of helplessness at the potential for control, misuse, and subversion of these technologies. Whether by states or anti-state organizations like al Qaeda, locative media extend the ability of the powerful and mobile over the weak and immobile. Cross-referenced information through geographic tagging adds many more dimensions to the problems already raised by unchecked, widespread linking of relational databases in industry and government.
However, a clear understanding of the implications of locative media, good or bad, is unlikely to emerge soon from research and observation. The problem is simply too complex for easy answers. These technologies are being deployed in a highly decentralized manner by a wide variety of actors. On top of this is layered a mosaic filter of cultures and subcultures absorbing these new innovations at different rates and appropriating them for their own needs.
One way of bringing some structure to this debate which I have employed lately is to place this moment of indecision about locative media into a historical context, looking back to previous technological transformations of the urban landscape, as well as forward to the kind of future I think might provide the most livable environment for the most people.
In short, what is urgently needed is a structured discussion around what kind of settlements we want to build in the next century, and what the appropriate role of locative media could play in realizing that vision.
As the UN Habitat Project reminds us every few years, the world's human population is rapidly becoming urbanized. While population trends are notoriously difficult to predict over such long periods, it is entirely possible that by 2050 most of the world's people will be concentrated in a belt of urbanized land stretching from Asia and Europe through Africa and the Americas. Their energy demands for heating, transportation, and food production will skyrocket, much as we are currently witnessing with China's urban explosion.
A growing number of urbanists believe that locative media have the potential to disrupt urban activity and consumption patterns in the 21st century city to an equal or greater degree as the automobile shaped the 20th century city. Yet like the automobile, locative media are likely to boost demand for mobility and the energy consumption required to achieve it. While efficiencies will surely be realized in supply chains and other bulk distribution services, it may all be offset by increased movement of individuals engaged in spatial arbitrage to gain an advantage in social or professional transactions.
However, locative media will also extend our awareness of the urban condition and give urban planners the kind of real-time data that climatologists and astronomers already use to understand their own complex systems. Thus locative media could very well drive a fundamental shift in our awareness of how cities function as collective organisms, perhaps leading to improvements in controlling their food intake and waste production.
Thus there are two equally possible scenarios – that locative media are the trigger for an unsustainable explosion in personal mobility in the world's great cities, or that they are the key to unlock knowledge that will help us achieve a sustainable global urban system.
Few questioned the long-term effects of the automobile when it appeared in the 1920s, and it was not until GM's Futurama exhibit of the 1939 World's Fair that we saw a coherent vision of what the car could do to our cities. Unfortunately, the corporate goals of GM have led to an American urban landscape that isolates, fattens, and stupefies its residents. The discussion about locative media and the future of urban life needs to start today.
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