October 27, 2009

What one does after a week without Twitter

Thankfully, my Twitter account has been unsuspended. Hooray!

After being suspended I promptly contested the suspension through Twitter’s support page. To tell you the truth, I kind of had high expectations of Twitters support team. I told myself someone would fire back a message rather instantaneously and I would be back in business. However, this was not the case.

After a day of my request sitting there with the status informing it was yet to be assigned to a support person I decided I best submit another. This time I used the ’support’ email address. Almost another day passed until I heard anything from them. I rejoiced at the new message from Twitter in my inbox, but opening it revealed all they were telling me is that they were deleting my ‘duplicate’ request so that my initial request may be ‘processed’ faster. The message told me the suspension could be a minimum of 30 days. Wtf? Would someone just please respond. Acknowledge you’ve got my request, even.

On day three I began commenting on my initial message. Each day my comments would become increasingly urgent.

It was around day four that I forgot what they had told me about submitting multiple requests. I submitted a bunch more…with words like HELP, and I’ve been WRONGLY SUSPENDED in large capitals. I even started a temporary account called @HelpImSuspended. I used this to message BiZ Stone himself, message @spam to tell them I’m NOT spam and to plea to anyone at all that I’d been wrongly suspended!

Anyways. One of these methods must have worked, because a lovely Twitter employee named ‘Ginger’ messaged me back on the seventh day of my famine to let me know she had unsuspended my account – Hallelujah!

I really believe that Twitter has been a useful tool for my project. It has allowed me access to participants I would have never otherwise had the chance to be in touch with. More importantly though, like many others, I have become quite reliant on Twitter as a stream of information and communication with particular friends, colleagues and scholars. A week without Twitter was not a minor deal in my life. Many of my friends joked about its insignificance. Rather, I was unable to consume information in the ways that I have become so accustomed.

But you know what the worst part about it all was!? After Twitter unsuspended my account….I thought that all the stuff I’d missed would just become visible in my homepage stream. This was not the case! Any tweets posted while I was suspended were not delivered. What’s more…any tweets directed at me (@alexdefreitas) during that time, were rejected! This was a big bummer. Especially because the day before I was suspended I had just sent a bunch of messages to potential new participants in my study.

So the answer to what one does when they are back after a week suspended from Twitter? Well, I manually went through all of the (important) profiles I follow and scrolled through catching up on what had been said. While time consuming, at least I could rest knowing that links shared….reports linked to…scholarly banter had not gone on without me.

Don’t underestimate the power of Twitter as a research tool. There are even conference workshops approaching that address microblogging like Twitter. I chose to use my personal account for my research as that is the way I would approach someone physically and ask them to take part in my study. I am not some far off researcher….just a person…another WiFi user. But I’m learning from the experience. My requests for people to participate started as a copy and pasted message. As it turns out…this is considered abuse of the @reply feature in Twitter’s terms and conditions. Now? well, I will have to make more of an effort to address people personally. This is fine, but it means the amount of people I can reach will drastically lower.

Needless to say. It’s been a fun experience this past year. Learning Twitter. Learning new cities. Learning ethnography. Justifying Twitter’s significance in the public realm and exploring the unseen ways we are going about our daily lives on mobiles and laptops. The more I think about it…the more I’m beginning to see first hand the ways in which the city is not a built, fixed, material thing….rather, a process, an experience…a performance.

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October 21, 2009

Day two of life without Twitter

I’m well into my second day without Twitter. The thing about being cut off by Twitter, is not that I can’t tweet, or message my friends. I can get over that. It’s that I can’t keep up to date with the daily stream of information the people I follow provide me with. These links to blogs and new people of interest are indispensable, and can’t be replicated in an RSS feed etc.

What shall I do when I finally get my feed back? Do I spend days reading back on all that I’ve missed!? Do I just forget it and move on?

I have sent multiple requests to Twitter advising them of my dilemma. I’ve done this through multiple avenues…contact pages…support email addresses etc. So far, no luck at all. Haven’t heard a peep. In a desperate attempt this morning, I started a new temporary twitter account and messaged Biz Stone. Like he will ever hear me though. He receives like 1000 @reply’s per minute.

The problem here is that I was not using a separate account to message potential participants. Instead, in line with my research, studying the technologies and practices that are so finely engrained into our daily lives, I used my personal Twitter account. An account that has been active for my own personal communications since early 2007!  Hopefully I hear from Twitter soon. My page is on lockdown!

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October 20, 2009

My Twitter account just got suspended!

account suspended

I wake up this morning to my worst nightmare. My Twitter account has been suspended! WTF?

The long story is that I have been collecting relevant tweets on my RSS reader. When there are a few sitting there, I reply to them and invite the tweeps to participate in my study by chatting to me a bit. Well, after all the travel and chaos over the last few months I didn’t have 30 or 40 tweets to reply to….I had 200+.

There’s two things that could have happened here. One is that Twitter might have automatically suspended my account for too much activity in one day. That would be fair enough. I never send more than a few tweets on any given day (apart from yesterday!). The other is that someone I approached reported me, or marked my tweet as spam. If that’s the case, it’s pretty stink of them…because I’ve been super friendly and made a bunch of friends and followers through my research in these digital worlds.

Anyway. I would have normally tweeted about something like this….but I’ve been cut off! It’s an odd feeling. Look at the numbers of my followers and following. I didn’t realize how much I needed it until it was gone :-(

I’ve sent the obligatory request to Twitter explaining to them that I think it was in error and I want my account back please, Mr. It’s only midday in LA right now….fingers crossed they can sort me out by this afternoon. Aarg.

This is where all the traditional ethnographers I know with their tape recorders and transcripts are smiling and quietly saying “I told you so”

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October 18, 2009

Auckland, 2100 AD

I think it’s necessary to begin this post on a personal note. In the month since I last wrote, my wife and I have wrapped up life in Toronto and headed back to NZ. It’s hard being back. The purpose of being in Toronto was to be close to public WiFi spots and people who use them regularly. For me to be able to use them regularly. To be near to inspirational and helpful people. A stone’s throw from New York City. Close to universities, conferences, exhibitions and academics I have been privileged enough to meet that, and lets be honest here, would probably have never responded to my email cries for help from oceans away. It’s hard being back because Toronto is a city that its citizens are proud of. I’m proud of Toronto. Determined to bring some of my T.O. back to my NZ.

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With that said, NZ rules too. In the photo above, taken just this weekend, my friend Tilly and I are on top of the world. Being back means it is time to take stock of what I’ve achieved over the past year. I’ve seen my methodology change its course one hundred and eighty degrees which is awesome. Over halfway into the three years I’m funded to do this, I can finally see some progression. It has been lonely, most days I just want to quit, but it feels just that little bit more possible right now. Time to account for it all in writing eh!?

The reason I’m here today though, is to begin posting more broadly. While this site must remain central to my PhD work, I feel like it’s time to begin writing a little further afield. After all, I’m not a technologist, nor do I particularly want to be 0ne. I’m a social scientist. A geographer, an urbanist, fascinated by cities, art, architecture, literature, photography, design and exploring the ways that our social lives collide in amongst it all. I want to start thinking more generally about my surroundings. When I was an undergraduate student, I published a blog called ‘Imagining the City‘. Maybe I should rename this site that, or at least give it some kind of a title other than my name…How boring.

Anyways, in line with expanding on what I think about here I present to you below some beautiful imaginations of Auckland in 2100 AD by students of the Media Design School. I came across them via Andy Hudson-Smith’s Digital Urban blog. It’s worth checking out more of them on the school’s Vimeo page, but I’ve embedded my favorites below. I’ve always said that we need to just make the most out of where we are now. I’ve never really spent that much time worrying about tomorrow. If these don’t challenge one to begin thinking about their city in new ways I don’t know what will. It’s the kind of stuff we frequently see applied to Los Angeles or New York City in film, but right here at home. Eerie visions of deserted streets and crumbled, overgrown Sky Towers. Rad. Choice work MDS students! What a great assignment. Especially check out Ravi’s wrecked Harbour Bridge (the third video).

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September 17, 2009

The Invisible Publics

The moment I was first inspired to pursue research on public WiFi came during my undergraduate studies. Writing an essay on geography and technology, my lazy trawling through Google Scholar results led me to a Master’s thesis, Unwiring New York, by Andrea Zoltanetzky (evidently, it’s not clickable as a document anymore. Weird). She wrote of how one could be on Bryant Park’s WiFi network without ever having stepped foot in the park. WiFi didn’t conform to traditional spatial boundaries. This fascinated the budding geographer inside me.

My interest with WiFi and mobile technologies continued into graduate studies. Here I discovered theory and methodological traditions that were beginning to think of city spaces as relational and layered; comprised of bodies and networks and things and flows of information. What’s more, ‘public space’ became a confusing term at best. Especially due to the conditions presented by these wireless technologies. To use a mobile phone or WiFi network, one must me firmly located in physical space, yet, the possibilities of also being connected elsewhere were seemingly infinite.

It was only when I began my doctoral research though, that I began to realize exactly how invisible these spaces were. For a social researcher, an ethnographer, whatever, this presented some unique challenges. My initial plan was basically to hang out in WiFi networks and spot people on laptops. I’d be able to chat to them about their experiences and how their use of the WiFi fitted into their daily life, perhaps, how it might change the way they negotiate the city and it’s public/private spaces. I wanted to gain a more nuanced understanding of personal experiences with technology, rather than conduct a generic survey of 100 or 1000 participants. Since every experience in space was unique, just following the lives of a handful of people would be more than enough.

The thing is, I couldn’t find them! I would sit for hours at coffee shops and public WiFi hotspots and only observe a handful of users. This problem seemed to be shared by others doing social research on WiFi – spots with few or no people to ‘observe’. Access to Wireless Toronto’s network statistics whilst hanging out in WiFi spots revealed to me that the number of connected users according to the statistics never matched up with the number of people I could see out in the park or cafe.

That’s when I realized I was going about things entirely the wrong way. Rather than find people in physical public spaces, I began to find them online. If you read this blog, then you see where I am going. An online ethnography, at least, an ethnography that was initiated by online participant observation quickly revealed the use of free WiFi across the globe in millions more spots than it would have ever been possible for me to sit and physically observe.

People weren’t only using WiFi from their laptops, that’s so 2005!…they were logging on from mobile phones, PDAs and an array of other portable devices! Recent research confirmed that iPhones and mobile devices were popular for logging onto free WiFi networks (even when paid 3G or mobile data was an option)….This was a pleasant surprise given that many of my peers snark at the prospect of free WiFi as they consume gigabyte’s of costly mobile data.

…And finally I could see. Right at this moment I am in Bryant Park. The first time I visited here I scanned the seating arrangements for laptops. When there were few or none, I just accepted it. Now my eyes see differently. I see the people perusing their iPhones and Blackberries, the groups of friends and the old dude reading the newspaper. I see the groundskeepers and the women in the great white tent preparing for Fashion Week. I know now it’s about more than what my eyes can see and these people can’t be discounted as wireless users or not, public or private. Some may not ever go online (or lack the means to do so). Some will sit online for hours. Others might connect just long enough to upload a latest Twitpic. Either way, free/open WiFi is far from everywhere. Even here, in New York, you can’t just log on from every street corner as some writers might lead you to believe. Public space is both as alive as ever, and as confused and contested as ever and understanding it necessitates the researcher’s presence both on and offline.

Just because you can’t see it, doesn’t mean that it’s not there. (is that a saying of some kind?)

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September 15, 2009

Learning the great art of (online) ethnography

Supposedly I am an apprentice of sorts. During my undergraduate studies someone once told me that the PhD is like undertaking an academic apprenticeship (and Google confirms that this is quite an established concept (see Green, 2005: 50)). Sure, I guess that sounds about right, but if this is indeed the case, I’m yet to figure out to whom I am an apprentice – who my guide/instructor/wise mentor/Mr Miyagi is. My supervisors/advisors I hear you say? – not in my experience. While I have been envious of those I’ve met along the way who research and publish alongside their advisors, that’s not my own experience at all. I’ve met people from MIT’s SENSEable City Lab , and a host of other schools that are dedicated to researching in the specific area of the PhDs – again, not my own experience at all.  I’m just here, rather blindly foraging on my own, given a couple of years, and expected to have it all together and figured out before the scholarship runs dry.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m doing this. I will get there. I rejoice the days I feel as though this thing is moving forwards….and I can’t bear to look back on months that pass and nothing seems to have changed. I am indeed grateful for the funding my school has given me….and when you think about it….I really have one of the more desireable ‘jobs’ around. I enjoy that feeling of my mind twisting and I love going to ‘work’. After all, I’m the one always telling people to do what they love (and quit if you don’t!) – and I can’t wait to get back to tutoring.

Regardless of who my teacher may be, I’ve been spending the meantime learning to take baby steps of my own. If I could have explained to you what my research was about at the beginning of the year (some of the dusty corners of this blog probably still do to some extent), it would be nothing at all like what I would tell you now. Most significantly of late, I’ve been teaching myself the ways of the ethnographer. You don’t learn this stuff in the undergraduate courses at university, maybe not even in a condensed year of Master’s research. The further I walk down this road, the more , for the most part, things begin to make sense – but time moves quickly in digital realms (Did you see what a central role Twitter played on the red carpet of last night’s MTV VMAs!?).

From early proposals with the intention of sitting in WiFi parks, approaching laptop users, then interviewing them and pressuring them to further communicate with me and provide me with things like photographs – my ethnography quickly led me online, into digital worlds and spaces already quite familiar to me where communications seem to occur more naturally. Unlike the social scientist who visits foreign civilisations and new worlds, my research space felt normal – a part of my existing everyday life. I needed a way to separate my ‘life’ from my ‘research’, or at least, a methodology that was sympathetic to my embedded position. It became less about arriving at a particular outcome, and more about exploring the ways in which I was  trying to get there. The real work lays in now understanding the effectiveness of my methodology as a tool for understanding social/spatial relationships as they might relate to existing theoretical currents – perhaps illuminating some potential shortcomings and/or suggesting a minor change or two.

I’m not sure where I was going with this post other than to point out the changes that take place as one goes about social research. Good social research. Messy social research. My ethnographic stroll has meant that I’ve been spending increasing amounts of time just ‘being’ in online public spaces as much as physical material ones. I realise that many people would disagree. Others perhaps don’t know it yet, but certain social media, especially Twitter, are very much like the more traditional conceptions of a public space. I’m not sure the academic literature has gone there at all yet. Indeed, it is talking and listening in public spaces that are perhaps the oldest form of democracy. These things are not disappearing, or a dying art. They are very much alive – the job of the ethnographer might be to show this to the others.

Slowly, I am learning the great art of ethnography. An ethnography that is by no means established; rather, one that is evolving and seems to provoke me as much as I attempt to shepherd it.

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August 21, 2009

Twitter is about to become a lot more interesting to the geographer…

spadina

the point on the map this post is coming at you from

A bunch of Twitter third party applications already contain information on user location, but it is about to get a lot more interesting as Twitter prepare to release an API that can include latitude and longitude in every tweet. The feature will be optional, and of course, there will undoubtedly be cries over privacy concerns, but it’s set to make the Twitter service a lot more interesting (if not, even more exploitable by companies seeking to advertise location-based etc).

My PhD project has been experimenting with ways of using tweets and twitpics as a means of understanding human lives as they are performed in public spaces, both digitally and physically. While it has its limitations, an online style ethnography, approaching participants in this way through social media allows for a far wider range of spaces to be explored. Rather than sitting in a WiFi park or cafe approaching users with laptops, I have been chatting to users on iPhones and PDAs, on beaches, up mountains, and in back alleys all using open WiFi as a means to get online…sometimes for an instant, sometimes for an entire day. There is no way that my measly PhD budget would have ever permitted that kind of travel physically! I think that the culture of Twitter allows for some urgency in responses too. Twitter users are far more likely to ‘tweet’ back quickly compared to sending an email or Facebook message for example.

Additionally, the photograph itself provides an entry point into a discussion with participants concerning their personal experience of the place they discovered WiFi and the image often hints at their surroundings. Sometimes these hoptspots are open public spaces that encourage gathering of WiFi users and non-users alike. Other times the web connection is a welcome, albeit unexpected encounter. In either case, my research has been most interested in the immediate surroundings….the physical space the WiFi was being used, the potential space facilitated by access to digital realms, and how these spaces might alter the ways people move about and engage with their urban surroundings.

Access to location coordinates would provide the opportunity for a far more rich set of data. Geographers love maps graphs and all manner of illustration. Location specific data might add another dimension to my understanding of public space. Taking an image of a space that is often out of context….and associating it with a definite point – on a map. Imagine that…I could have some maps in my dissertation!

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August 6, 2009

WiFi takes up more (less important) space?: Pulling the plug on sociality?

In an earlier post I mentioned cafes switching off their free WiFi in an attempt to avoid ‘wireless squatters’, particularly at peak times. I encountered this personally for the first time at a Panera Bread in Santa Monica in March this year:

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Off topic, but I’ve just noticed that the above sign totally contradicts the Panera Bread page I linked to above that proudly proclaims:

“Yep, it’s free. Just sit down, open up your laptop and you’re ready to go. Send an email as you munch a warm bagel. Read the news as you sip a latte. It’s a nice alternative to the office, isn’t it? Please relax, do what you need to do, and enjoy our Wi-Fi. It’s free all day long.”

It’s funny, because it is something that was written about four years ago, but the Wall Street Journal recently published an article documenting New York City cafes that have begun to restrict WiFi usage at certain times (or in some cases, all together!).

Blaming the economic downturn, the WSJ article suggests that idle workers, perhaps unemployed, with more time on their hands are sitting for hours without substantial purchase and preventing other legitimate cafe patrons from sitting and socialising in cafes. The author, Erica Alini, spoke with cafe patrons and owners about the line between usefulness and abusing complimentary WiFi. The general response seemed to be that WiFi users in cafes isolate themselves from their surroundings and prevent conversation (and consumption) from taking place.

At Café Grumpy in Chelsea, Ty-Lör Boring, a 32-year-old chef, says he often uses his laptop at coffee shops, but loves it when there are none around because, then, people talk to one another.

“You can isolate yourself behind a laptop,” he says, “but look at this place: Almost everyone is having a conversation.”

This view is supported by others who have blogged about the WSJ article:

I once had a strange experience in a cafe in San Francisco called Jumpin’ Java which is located on Noe Street (between Market and 14th). Jumpin’ Java has Wi-Fi, decent coffee and good snacks, so I decided it would be a good place to meet a friend I had not seen in a long time. When we arrived, we were shocked to see that nearly everyone in the cafe was working on a laptop, each person occupying one table. There was no conversation at all in this cafe (which accurately fits the term “zombie cafe”). It was as silent as a library. Some customers even had their headphones to increase the isolation and screen out the real world. The ones who did not have headphones gave us dirty looks because we were talking and laughing. I never went back.

While I totally agree that WiFi users spread themselves unnecessarily across more than one seat and may stay for long periods of time without additional purchase, I’m not sure we can make the argument that they are being any less social. You see, the person quietly sipping on their latte as they flick through a magazine, or even the business meeting taking place on the opposite table may be socialising and interacting with their surroundings – so too is the WiFi user. Most WiFi users I have observed in cafes and public spaces are in fact aware of what’s going on around them. Just like ‘offline’ cafe patrons, the WiFi user smiles and agrees to loan someone a spare chair, or grins as the gentleman behind them makes a funny remark.  In the majority of cases, these people have chosen to connect from public locations for a reason.

Moreover, the WiFi user is connected in ways the offline cafe patrons are not. They can (as I regularly do) engage in multiple conversations simultaneously, with friends and strangers alike. The WiFi connection opens new possibilities for learning about the immediate surroundings, or of breaking news elsewhere. While it may seem less (anti?) social to be fixed to a glowing screen, I think we should be wary.

I’m not suggesting it’s better to be in public online or offline. Rather, just reminding us of the possibility for being somewhere in-between the two. As our social lives are increasingly complicated by the intersection of digital and physical spaces, public and private – there’s a need to think carefully about what this means for our understandings of life in public. Is one more public than the other? What about those who are less mobile? Is reading a paper copy of the New York Times acceptable in public, but accessing, commenting on, and twittering about the same online article amongst hundreds of others not? What activities we are and aren’t permitted to do from public places will undoubtedly strongly influence the future public life in the 21st century.

I used to read a lot about ‘what is the public?’ – Now I can’t stop thinking about ‘where is the public?’

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July 31, 2009

Technology that (dis)connects our world…

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Hurried WiFi use between meetings at Yonge-Dundas Square, Toronto, July, 2009

Today I was informed by a WiFi user who I  discovered through my Twitter research (thanks @ccano) of Barnes & Noble’s move towards offering free WiFi access in all of their stores. Previously a fee was charged for access through AT&T much like the case of Starbucks. At first I dismissed the news story as just another retailer publicising the addition of WiFi to their stores. After all, we all know that offering free WiFi is an affordable way of attracting and catering for customers – Independent cafes have been doing so for years. However, after visiting the Barnes & Noble page advertising the addition of WiFi I was struck by the use of language.

“We have always wanted our stores to feel like home—a place where people can relax, explore and connect with ideas and each other at their leisure. So it is only natural that, in today’s world, we want our customers to enjoy complimentary Wi-Fi. You can explore the world the way you always have at Barnes & Noble with the technology that connects us to the world today.”

In today’s technologically driven world where being online plays such an important role in our lives, it is often argued that the use of certain technologies in public can be disrupting to social life; People talking on their mobile phones are disengaged from the public life around them – iPod users are tuning out of the conversations on the bus – Cafe patrons on laptops barely take the time to look up and acknowledge their server or surroundings.

While I’m aware it is advertising hyperbole coming from one of the worlds major corporations, but the text struck a chord with me – WiFi use is indeed part of our lives, not disconnecting us from the world around us, rather, connecting us to our world as we know it. As I read it I was sitting as I so often do conducting observations at Yonge-Dundas Square, a major free public WiFi spot in Toronto. Barnes & Noble are acknowledging the ways offering WiFi allows people to “connect with ideas and eath other” through a “technology that connects us to the world“.

It’s a pleasant thought, as I sit here watching people on laptops or glancing back and forth between their friends, surroundings and their iPhone displays. Although to me, the observer in physical public space, these actions may seem disengaged or unhealthy for maintaining a vibrant public realm, perhaps to them, the WiFi presents the opportunity for being connected to others and really taking part in their world around them. Simple observations or even interviews don’t let me the researcher into that world. Well, not as much as I’d like to be. Turning to Twitter and beginning to think about online ethnographies is helping me get there.

In a world where my conceptial theoretical understandings tell me the digital cannot be separated from the physical, and public not kept neatly aside of private. In a world where my practical real life experiences tell me that being in a city space can be invisibly (to some) online as much as visibly (physically) present – I’m becoming increasingly aware that where methodology takes place is important. When seeking to understand spatial practices as the geographer does – place indeed makes a difference to methodology.

I promise I’ll keep thinking this through more. Heck – I’m just glad I broke a month of ill health and silence on this blog.

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July 4, 2009

Conversations from coffee shops

Sitting in the Chinatown cafe I so frequently find myself blogging from. It’s a beautiful Saturday afternoon and is one of those days where I was riding the long way just to put off being here. Nevertheless, when the wife is at work, I must work. Otherwise there’d be no time at all.

I just had the most beautiful encounter with a women sitting at the opposite end of the table to me. She is an older woman with whispy white hair and because of the presence of my laptop she asked me if I was a student. I had to do the whole confusing story of how I am a student at The University of Auckland, but here for my research. No, I don’t have an advisor here in Toronto, etc. She was fascinated, and my topic, public spaces, reminded her of a woman whose name she couldn’t quite remember, someone by the last name of Jacobs who was interested in many of the same things as me.

Turns out she is a continuing education student here in Toronto. She’d just completed her Masters degree. She began to tell me all about a man she met at this very table yesterday who was doing his PhD in political studies at UofT. We spoke for at least half an hour about public spaces, Toronto, the United States, universities, and the most pressing issue of how few tea leaves the barrista had put in her coffee. Her tea was far too weak. “He doesn’t know how to make tea at all”.

True to my methodology I twittered an image of the scene:

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I hadn’t settled back into my work for more than twenty minutes and we struck up conversation again. This time we spoke for much longer. Her name is Jan. She is from Montreal and compared the ‘French’ cafe culture to what she’s observed living here in Toronto. In Montreal, she noted, people are much more likely to strike up converstation with a stranger. They treat the cafes much differently to here she said. Even the people with laptops were as much a part of the conversation as everyone else.

Our conversation continued about cafe life and the encounters we’d had in our travels. It really made me happy I’d chosen to work from the cafe. I vowed to myself to do so more often. Spend more time in public where I seem to feel much healthier and social than being cramped in a dark corner of the office or bedroom. Jan knew much of Toronto, especially its cafes. She is a huge fan of communal tables such as these and has many favourite places to go and read and socialise.

It was a lively encounter. No doubt it is interactions such as these that should feature prominantly in discussions of public spaces, the public sphere and everyday life. I came here this morning very much with work in mind. My laptop dominates the space in front of me and may seem to be sheilding me from the activities going on around me as if I had headphones in, or my nose deep in a newspaper of book. Indeed, there is a guy on a laptop next to me who looks totally immersed in his work doing some programming/coding of some kind, yet, my experience of this Wi-Fi space has been much more social, both in the activities I’m conducting on and offline.

The most important thing I take away from my chat this morning was raised  by Jan. She passionately spoke of city life that is so fast paced and impersonal – the need to embrace human conversation and emotion. Her favourite places to go were the ones that she’d made some kind of connection with the people there. A cafe that brought her her order because she was too deaf to hear the number called out……a cafe where the owner took a personal interest in her and was grateful she’d travel such distance to get there.

My daily life is unquestionably lived at the intersection of digital and physical realms. I’m sure many others are too. Decisions to move about the city are influenced by spaces of connectivity and n0n-connectivity. This is the geography of public Wi-Fi. Life is extremely fast-paced and I know for many others too, work is blurred with play, family, public, private etc. Material public spaces such as this cafe present opportunities for social life that were previously not possible….at least, not at this pace.

Before I even finish my second coffee (and this post), I have heard from a friend in Vancouver in response to my Tweeted image. You can see then, that understanding the space I inhabit this instant requires consideration of digital and material realms, not to mention the complex, multiplicityof interactions taking place between the two. The image above presents a window for understanding my coffee shop experience as much as the words on this page. I suppose it’s one way of accessing the in-between. Following the network of social life at the intersection of the physical and digital presents many challenges….but I’m hoping that information posted in digital worlds might possibly help me shuffle a little closer towards understanding lives in physical spaces.

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