April 20, 2006
Anne Galloway
LOCATION-AWARE TECHNOLOGIES, SPATIAL-ANNOTATION, AND THE FATE OF URBAN COMMUNITY
Location-aware technologies such as GPS and RFID are increasingly being used for a variety of European and North American urban spatial-annotation projects. These desires to “tag” the world-around-us, I argue, can be understood as particular intensifications and materialisations of Western political longings for unified community in times of fragmentation and diversity. But what senses of belonging are we presupposing when we attempt to bind collective memories to singular places? And what kind of community is possible when the technologies and protocols that underpin such projects may be understood, following Mackenzie, as 'kludge' or an 'ill-assorted collection of poorly matching parts, forming a distressing whole'? Borrowing concepts from Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy and Marc Augé, I explore tensions between mobility and dwelling, difference and commonality, memory and forgetting. Accordingly, questions concerning political and ethical participation, and the role of affective encounters such as alignments, identifications and appropriations take on special force. Ultimately, it is my position that any kind of technologically-enabled communalism or collective memory that privileges unity and order threatens to undermine the senses of contingency and potentiality necessary for a politics of hope in everyday urban life. [blogged by Anne on Purse Lips Square Jaw]
Posted by jo at April 20, 2006 11:30 AM
