Our mapping project [ born out of this prompt: 'Using Google Maps, you should explore how everyday life can be represented and made productive through mapping. More information will be handed out in class. ] , Stalking Consciousness, didn't reveal many new things to me. This isn't to say that it wasn't a good learning experience. However, I think our hypothesis were kind of obvious, and, and I think anyone familiar to the technologies and locations we were monitoring would have drawn the same conclusions pretty easily. Even in cities, the more actively, populated centers will contain more active, individually conscious people. Similarly, people using technology will be less conscious of their surroundings, more conscious of their own desires, intentions and goals. The combination of these two results in a kind of hypernetworked, hyperindividualized drone, tuned in to so much information, and driven towards personal goals. Remove either and this effect is reduced, remove both, and a person becomes much more aware of what's around them. This effect is not universal, but can be measured with relative regularity. All in all it wasn't a particularly controversial hypothesis, and it was proved easily.
On the other hand, I found it interesting because it embodied the kind of play/work/life fusion that I think a number of the technologies which have been placed under the rubrik of Web 2.0 While blogging, social media and wikis may not be new technologies, they were certainly given a new context and adopted with enthusiasm unseen in the previous decade. There are a number of factors that I'd suggest contributed to the public's enthusiasm for Web 2.0.
For one thing, the generation that Dannah Boyd says ' hearts' social media was too young to use social media in its previous 'web 1.0' incarnation. [Author's note – I can't stand the term web 2.0, but it's the common parlance, and it's a part of the article to which I'm responding, so I'm speaking in its terms.] They may have e-mailed a bit, but they couldn't use it as a serious socialization tool. Similarly though there were communication technologies such as AOL chatroom, IRC and instant messengers, these technologies were often restricted by parents of what were then young children. Now that they've grown up, the technology is presented to them in a fresh way.
The technology now exists on different levels of complexity. Those who are not tech savvy can figure out facebook pretty quickly, while those who are can use the social network as a development platform. In the past, IRC was daunting to those without at least a little technical know-how. Meanwhile AOL Chat was dauntingly vanilla to those able to use something like IRC. Things are such now that we have the same blogging platforms being used to publish gossip blogs as are used to blog about web development.
So at this point, we have everybody involved and playing on the same turf, regardless of what their game is. Though I use the analogy of a game, there is a great amount of play in all that we are doing online. I found Kristi, Onion and Bill's map interesting because it told a story. It was a kind of treasure map. At the same time, the data itself was informative. I now know about many different places to get local food. My group's project on the other hand, attempted to retrieve more ethnographic or sociological data, and yet in order to do so, we wound up playing a little game, following people around, writing things down. We were all like little detectives, and the map that we came up with, while maybe an interesting illustration, is really a sort of memento of the game we were playing.
I think what those of us who study the field need to consider is how that changes the way we engage with information when our interaction can turn into play. Should we embrace that or does it delegitimize serious intentions. How far can we really take the idea of play, and where is it simply never going to be welcome? In an office setting, for instance, its tough to think of any kind of playful interaction that would benefit the business. It might be good for worker moral, but in regards to aggregation or manipulation of data, I'm not sure.
I will say that this project made me personally want to map more. It made me yearn to move around, to have interesting encounters in a multitude of places, such that I could put them all down for posterity. Ultimately, I'm not sure if that map would be anything more than a geodiary. I'm hoping to discover some way to make it mean more, or to serve some other purpose for those who find it.
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