Two great recent posts by Adam Greenfield at v-2. Firstly, a lovely response to the Ubicomp conference he’s at (and wish I was at too). Presumably based around the ‘leaving notes in space’ angle, Adam thought of deploying NY Songlines, augmented with other user’s comments, suggestions and trivia, all ‘live’ and pinned to location.
"I was immediately put in mind of the beautiful NY Songlines, which is one New Yorker’s psychogeographical trace through the city he so obviously loves. I started to wonder what the Songlines would be like if they were populated by the comments of hundreds or thousands of users, what New York would look and feel like if all those tags were available to you in real time as you strolled the streets of the city. It’s a simple, almost a trivial, instantiation of ubicomp, and yet it would enrich the experience of citying tremendously – almost painfully, as if the entire weight of the community’s gathered experience was pressing down on you."
He points out this sounds rather more negatively overbearing than he means. It could be an almost elegeic experience. Could be.
Seems a good point to mention the Soundwalks project by Oversampling, which provides mp3 downloads for walking around the city to. A great idea, though only New York, Rome, and Paris thus far, and somewhat 1-way. It’d be great to have a site which you could post up your mixes to, organised by city i.e. a cross between meetup.com and audiogalaxy p’raps. Lazyweb it, anyone?
That would be a great starting point for serious Ubicomp-style action i.e. user comments on the music you’re listening to at that point/location; or even donated mp3s themselves, floating in space, which you experience as you walk through them. So, the Chelsea Hotel is surrounded by sounds relating to Sid & Nancy, Bob Dylan & Leonard Cohen, Jimi & Janis Joplin, Harry Smith, and Arthur Miller & Brendan Behan. Aural ghosts drifting around the buildings … That needs something a little post-Lazyweb though.
The other good Adam-post recently concerned a link to a WSJ piece on the effect of Starbucks on local coffee-shop scenes i.e. not as destructive as is generally made out; potentially quite the opposite. Adam’s wisely cautious about it, but ideas of agglomeration economies and the mutual benefits of local concentrations of specialists (the record shops in Manchester’s Oldham St. are a classic example I used to write about) have been commonplace thought in urban regeneration for the last 10 years or so. And as Steven Johnson points out in Emergence, it’s been a way of organising city space for a lot longer than that.
This piece is welcome in mainstream(ish) media though as it provides, in Adam’s words, some "evidence that economies are more complex ecologies than generally understood, that a city block can offer just as many niches and types of niches as a rain forest. Along with this idea goes the reassuring inference that consumers are more sophisticated and more discriminating – in short, have more agency – than is usually assumed."
Two concepts there usually just isn’t the time for, apparently.
Thanks for the kind words, Dan.
Your idea about location-relevant music may not be the killer app for ubicomp (I doubt there will be a killer app for ubicomp), but it is very, very cool.
I’ve been mulling over various ways we could collaborate for a while, as you know, and I personally find such a service wonderfully useful and engaging and cool. I think you’re onto something, in other words.
Let me talk to a few of the context-sensitive folks I’ve just met, OK?
Cheers from my last hours in Goteborg,
A.
ahhhh Starbucks…interesting piece in the Wall S t Journal but lest it lead to complaicency here in Europe one must remember there is a very different set of models operating with regard to the cost of retail space. In London particularly a venue has to be packed most of the time in order to bear the extortionate rentals. The balance of viability is a fine one and literaly dozens of coffee houses have gone under there as a result of the virulent agression of Starbucks. The cosy drop-in coffee house ambience portrayed in Frasier is impossible there as is the level of service. But this is not the principal reason for opposing Starbucks and the phenomina of chain stores (neither is the fact that they serve coffee I wouldn
t bath a dog in...frankly you get what you deserve if you go in there) the key here is the homogenisation of each and every street in the capital. Where in Paris you do have a series of interconnecting villages each with its own character London now has a series of identical high streets featuring all the same stores in simillar configurations. As the rent issue overtakes all other considerations any possibility of a store developing a unique identity becomes both strategically and financialy unviable. We are actualy battling for the soul of our streetscape. Forget exotic street furnishings and the design of utopian plazas etc. Forget intelegent signage and psychogeography…all this is as nothing to the possibility that the psyche of this city is being pinned wriggling to the landscape by a tattoo of identical very bad, very ugly, very evil green and brown boxes.