A key insight into public authoring that both the trial and our bodystorming experiences have provided was that this technology need not simply be an individual experience, but sharing the experience with other people rather seemed a powerful motivation. The action of public authoring prompted serendipitous interactions with strangers on the street, connecting people both via the UT application, in real and virtual space.
In working with intergenerational groups we found that unlocking older people's memories and stories of the places they know with teenagers and authoring them in places familiar to the younger generation, new points of contact between generations emerged.
These social and cultural implications offer intriguing possibilities for reflecting on what it means to be a citizen: how our interactions with others help create the social context in which we live, and what we share with our friends, neighbours, colleagues and the strangers we pass daily.
Public authoring could add a whole new layer to the public commons, provoke new categorisations of informal knowledges. It could be a platform for people to build their own applications, their own categorisations of place and knowledge.
What benefits to civil society and cultural life can we bring with these technologies?
What costs can we foresee, and where might we intervene to ameliorate their effects?
Posted by Giles Lane at February 13, 2004 05:35 PMPeoples perceptions of belonging, their ability to connect with each other and build different kinds of communities are a vital part of a sense of citizenship. I don't see why this is less valid than the political, municipal or regional, in fact the informal networking and community building is one of the most important aspects to citizenship.
One way of thinking about this is to think of and example of a city like Sao Paulo where peoples sense of connection and belonging to the city, the streets and neighbourhoods has been so eroded by fear and crime that there is a loss of a sense of citizenship and hence a loss of an innate sense of ownership of place - or vice versa. Attendant on this is the loss of communities and the ability to communicate. Now I don think Urban Tapestries would solve these problems but I do see it as one way of helping people and communities to hold onto and extend their relationships with each other and their environment and to build pride and belief. This way of belonging is what citizenship is all about. So I do think that UT is absolutley and intrinsically related to citizenship. I don't think it is just about enhancing - it is about allowing new routes and approaches and encouraging new communication and investment by people in their communities. I believe that access to innovative cultural forms is a crucial part of the process of social and cultural development and an important route to what for me - is a sense of citizenship.
Very well said Alice, and in many ways I agree. I can see how UT can facilitate this kind of connection - particularly, as an important 'sense of citizenship' - but I think there are two things that need to be considered.
First, I have had my work (on new media and citizenship) critiqued because citizenship and belonging are not the same thing. This is not to say that they are exclusive (and I am still trying to work out the differences and similarities), but even in your lovely example of Sao Paolo I'm not sure you're talking about 'citizenship' rather than something like residency. One of the things that 'citizen' infers is also being a passport holder, a relatively exclusive group who are nationally endowed with rights and obligations, while the sense of citizenship you refer to
- 'the new routes and approaches to community and communication' - are open to all users, not just those with passports (or the rights to a passport). I think a number of folks would say that UT is more about social capital rather than citizenship, and I think that it is important to be able express these differences.
Second, from a normative stance (which I personally find a bit dull), emerging dimensions of citizenship are dismissed because the kinds of connectivity you are referring to occur outside of the state and its institutions. This view relies on the fact that 'it can't be citizenship unless the state or the institutions of the state are somehow involved.'
I think there are at least three ways of challenging the latter perspective (but don't necessarily get around the first), these are the emergent nature of this 'sense of citizenship, cultural citizenship and a shared understanding of public space (or the public sphere). Perhaps I'm being overly academic about this, but I think it's important to think about how UT is about citizenship specifically, rather than social capital, residency or social cohesion.
Posted by: Zoe Sujon at February 13, 2004 07:21 PM