It's a nice place to live, but I wouldn't want the RSS feed

A few weeks ago, I subscribed to a service called EveryBlock.

About EveryBlock

EveryBlock filters an assortment of local news by location so you can keep track of what’s happening on your block, in your neighborhood and all over your city.

“What’s happening in my neighborhood?”

For a long time, that’s been a tough question to answer. In dense, bustling cities like Chicago, New York and San Francisco, the number of daily media reports, government proceedings and local Internet conversations is staggering. Every day, a wealth of local information is created — officials inspect restaurants, journalists cover fires and Web users post photographs — but who has time to sort through all of that?

Our mission at EveryBlock is to solve that problem. We aim to collect all of the news and civic goings-on that have happened recently in your city, and make it simple for you to keep track of news in particular areas. We’re a geographic filter — a “news feed” for your neighborhood, or, yes, even your block.

The concept of a local news aggregator (with RSS feed) has a metaphorical backward compatibility about it, at least in the task of (re)connecting people to their offline communities in and amongst all the online networking consuming our time. I like the idea behind connecting with a specific place - particularly one we call home - while at the same time embracing the task of ordering the chaos inherent in today's socio-digital placelessness. In this way, EveryBlock is like a streamlined, editor's-choice Craigslist (one of the sources of its content, actually). On another tangent, the potential to recall real-world spaces, community membership, and artifacts with which we seek a tangible connection, presents possible future integration with an emerging Internet of Things to include places, landmarks, and service points as well as objects.

EveryBlock initially caught my attention because it complements some of my own research on the importance of locality in understanding Internet use, pervasive computing and ubiquitous technologies (including location-aware mobile services). Still, now that I think about it, I've been living abroad for quite some time. Perhaps I hoped that an updated feed of local events from where I grew up would somehow make me feel "closer to home" (whatever that means).

I subscribed to EveryBlock and searched for my zipcode so that I could pull up my old neighborhood. Its focus on pure urbanity meant that I reluctantly settled for one digit away from my block, a symbolic reminder that cities have borders, too.

I don't know what I expected to receive when I subscribed to my neighborhood feed, other than that comforting flicker of recognition of names and places, yet more evidence of a fading habitus. I'd forgotten about the service pretty rapidly, as it was a week before any news arrived. It was strange to recall the street names, locations and other hallmarks of my distant memory (such as an excess of textured aluminum siding visible in real estate listings), and amusing to browse few quirky, geotagged Flickr photos. The content is generally pretty sparse for my block, nestled in the veritable hinterland of urban space; a product of suburban sprawl. In the end, not much reminiscing was inspired, but I still like the idea behind EveryBlock and I keep it in my list of feeds.

I have, however, started to notice some disturbing patterns. EveryBlock markets itself as a useful tool because it mines the web to provide local "news"; important things people need to know about where they live, such as civic information, police reports, mentions of local politicians in the popular press, and miscellaneous fun. For my feed that mostly means (scary) crime reports, (horrific) restaurant inspections, and (feline?) photos.

Exhibit A: Yikes


Exhibit B: Gulp


Exhibit C: Meow?

Some things just take the charm right out of the old neighborhood, not that it had much to begin with. If I ever make it back, I'll be sure to never eat out, insure my belongings regardless of cost, and be more aware of the heightened numbers of creepy cat people living nearby.

In seriousness, my overall review: I think EveryBlock has a good thing going. At first I thought it was missing something because of the conspicuous absence of user interaction, but my Web 2.0 hypersensitivity was causing me to miss the point. It's useful because it mines third party information and gives geographically relevant news, without the added build-up of additional comments, comments and more comments, which one can find in the source material. Not all of the news appeals to me (liquor licenses in particular), but I like the public service information (graffiti cleanup and street condition reports) and flags for place name mentions in the media. Another fun aspect is exploring parts of the city you haven't been to, all in the form of daily news bites. It's obviously better and more informative for densely populated urban areas, where there are newsworthy events and community activities that large groups of people would like to have syndicated (cultural events, for instance). That enhances the personal, communal feel to it all. And, well, it's doubtlessly more useful if you are actually living in the area you're syndicating, not just spying on it like a bored anthropologist.

Having said that, I can see the appeal for urban anthropologists - myself included - trying to sketch a wireframe of the amorphous urban space into which they wish to venture. Cities are more often than not made up of mini-cities, or neighborhoods, which in turn are made up of mini-neighborhoods, that is, streets/blocks. I'm not advocating relying on web crawling news aggregators to supply ethnographic data, just suggesting that all perspectives on salient features of urban space are helpful aids.

In other news, my posts are becoming fewer and farther between as I get stuck in the quicksand that is my developing PhD thesis. You may have noticed some changes in the appearance of this blog. At this stage in reviewing my research, I am feeling a bit torn in my analysis of technology, newness, redefined methods of communication, and the other digital trademarks of that ever-elusive concept of "modernity". I guess the refined sleekness of brushed aluminum against rustic wooden boards captures the uneasy dichotomy produced (in my mind at least) by synchronic snapshots of technology. What's more, I'm still trying to decide if, at this moment in time, I'm a brushed metal or a knotted lumber.

Tweet

Don't twitter on my Internet and call it lifestreaming

Some time ago now, I ran across Twitter and blogged briefly about the potentiality of "microblogging" or, for more grandiose terminology, "lifestreaming". Since then, I (like anyone else with one ear to mainstream tech-news headlines) have naturally been aware of its expansion into all corners of the web world, lending itself to so many offshoots and modifications personified in an impressive array of homemade widgetry. I lumped it together with the whole Web 2.0 trend, which, it is evident, not only saw the advent of blogs, but the simultaneously and rapid desubstantification* of the written word to bite-sized morsels of gooey, self-absorbed blandness streamed tidily to your handset in RSS.

Granted, this process had long since begun (read: countless and all-pervasive social networking sites). But I feel like it has gone hand in hand with the Web 1.0->2.0 bait-and-switch of adding comment tags and community answer boards to every place on the Internet where they'll stick, with the instant gratification you'd expect from a pile of scribbled post-it notes in place of reference books. You've got to love user-generated content. Instead of knowledge, we get home-grown nonsense. Information is the web-based world's cheapest commodity, while meaning is the rarest.

As a researcher observing interpersonal communication and how it is mediated or mitigated by the Internet and its many facets, I expected to venture back to Twitter quite often. Like Facebook and Myspace, I presumed that I would be led there by participants and respondents - that there would be something of significance for me to engage with or follow up on; that, by sheer force of impact, I would be resigned to the revolutionary omniscience that is Web 2.0. This "new generation" of website has so much potential to change the way that we live and to alter our understanding of modern human society and socialization. Uh, right? Doesn't it? Wait ...

After 15 months of participant observation, I'm not so sure. Yes, I sought to explore Web 2.0 in all its reverent glory. I wanted to understand this community-building force of a previously unforeseen potential. I wanted to be shocked and awed by the construction of elaborate and intricate social networks, keeping us all in perpetual contact from our living rooms to the backs of buses to the insides of cafes, through geohashing and tweeting and vlogging and tagging, via Twitter and MySpace and Facebook and YouTube and Flickr and Blogger. I wanted evidence of exponentially increasing participation levels; of grassroots bombardment of free media at unprecedented rates; of the universal exchange of knowledge for public good; and the opening of doors through open source. I wanted to get stuck in the digital social glue binding together our global society.

Hm, not so much, it turns out.

As an aside, the probable reason for my not finding these utopian ideals (other than their not existing, of course), is that when I set out to engage in participant observation of the Internet, I did what appears to be counterintuitive these days, and set my field location to a place I could point to on a map (not this map). In the end, I find that this perspective has been a refreshing and far less, well, viscous approach to understanding the impact that computers and the Internet have on people (as opposed to users).

Above all, through web-based research I have found that the content readily available on the Internet makes the enterprise feel, more often than not, helplessly futile. On occasion, what I find is enlightening and enriching, but, alas, I fear that will never outweigh the instances when it is hopeless and uninspiring. Anthropologically à propos.

In my current fieldwork, it was a pleasure to get away from the mindboggling amount of meaninglessness which assaults me at every turn in my own daily forays into the depths of the web (not to mention in academia...). The more I try to understand about people through online content, the less I want to keep digging and trawling through a muddy jungle of misinformation, aggression and frivolity that is of Amazonian proportions and just as venomously charged.

Like Wikipedia^, then, it is for this reason that Twitter gets under my skin in a most uncomfortable way. It doesn't mean anything. It is genuinely uninformative, ego-centric and self-obsessed drivel. The audience is no one and everyone; the subject is nothing and everything. I don't need to know when someone brushes their teeth or takes out the trash or picks their nose. I really don't. Humanity is exceptionally ridiculous. We seek out freedom of expression as our one and only avenue to universal truth, then we turn it into a free-for-all reality televisionification** of daily banality. A like mind explains it well.

But still, in all my inherent negativity ... I am saddened by the initial hopes that the "idea" of Twitter (though not only Twitter) stirred in me upon discovering it. Its romantic potentiality still calls to me from beyond its disappointing reality. As a quirky tool for relaying to oneself and their friends or strangers some spur-of-the-moment lucidity or lack thereof, it remains (at least) generally amusing, and (at best) even cathartic. I foresaw the temptation of running to Twitter when I coined some spectacularly funny turn of phrase, clever insight or revelation which could so easily be lost among the 50,000 processes running off my mental CPU at any moment. (It never actually happened.)

But what about the fleeting thoughts which lead to some much-needed invention, a solution for world hunger, the first step to the eradification of stupidity as social doctrine ... or any other great idea otherwise lost and without audience? Similarly singular lines of thought have launched revolutions and have defined whole eras in human existence. After all, if we stopped engaging in the silly and pointless for the sake of intellectuality, it would be counterproductive. Much of what is worth knowing and doing in life is found in the absense of forethought or any explicit search for meaning.

So in insulting Twitter, am I scoffing over the potential for quality because my academic mind resents minimalized quantity? Perhaps. But the truth is that the McNuggetization*** of thought is not the same as literacy. Still, that doesn't mean that Twitter can't be a genuine tool for the betterment of humankind. After all, I learned through Twitter that I really don't care as much about what other people do and think as I thought I did (or should).

Call me a snob, but I draw the line when people start microblogging about their underpants.

* Man, I've just googled it and it turns out that this word isn't my own invention.

** Wow, this either ...

*** I give up.

^Edit: Those not familiar with my rants on Wikipedia may not agree with my analogy here. I find Wikipedia to be a source of knowledge as potentially useless as it is helpful. I like wikis in general and think that they can be extremely beneficial collaborative research tools and repositories of information when implemented correctly. Like most people, my Google searches and inevitable Wikipedia trawling probably make up more of my common (non-specialist) knowledge than I'd like to admit. But it remains unreliable as a source of factual data and for as long as the content remains disputed, everything it contains needs to be taken with a grain of salt. This is something I have difficulty conveying to people. The same people who agree that you can't trust anything you read on the Internet will cite Wikipedia with glee. Maybe it's the suffix. I have problems accepting assignments from my students which cite Wikipedia as an authority, because it is authorless, unaccountable and open to being edited at a whim. The extent to which its reliability compares to that of peer-reviewed academic writing is another blog post entirely. In short, I see Wikipedia as gap filler in my knowledge on certain subject areas where I have little to no awareness, but the bits of information I glean from it are partial and almost inevitably biased. I use it out of laziness to truly investigate a subject or ignorance as to how to go about it. In this way, it it feels rather like empty calories, and is therefore analogous to my view of Twitter.


Add to del.icio.us

Tweet

Coca-Cola sets up mobile social network

Coca-Cola Co. is creating a virtual teenager hangout like MySpace and Facebook, only on cell phones, to lure more youngsters to its sodas and flavored drinks, starting in the United States and China. Eyeing the success of mostly desktop computer-bound teen social sites run by media companies, like News Corp's MySpace, the world biggest soft drink maker said on Wednesday it was creating a cell-phone network under its Sprite brand where members can set up profiles, post pictures and meet new friends.

Coke, part of a growing group of advertisers putting ad campaigns on cell phones, will make the U.S. site available to Web-ready phones on June 22. It launched in China last week and is eyeing other markets in regions like Latin America.

"The Coca-Cola Company needs to continue to recruit future generations of consumers," said Mark Greatrex, senior vice president of marketing for Coca-Cola. "Mobile marketing is absolutely where it's at for us going forward." [more]


.
Add to del.icio.us

Tweet

I can see my house from here ...

I realize that this is extremely delayed due to my recent lapse in posts and the fleeting state of news in the blogosphere, but I feel that it is worth posting nonetheless. Google has launched its Street View option on Google Maps (US). I spent some time browsing the few available streets in my hometown and concluded that if I am ever in need of a street-level view of a particular building or square foot of pavement, it might come in useful. Over all, however, the novelty seemed to wear off quickly as I found the display increasingly choppy and I struggled to find something worth looking at. As a service, it would probably be better if it were integrated into Google Earth as a desktop application, rather than Google Maps as an online tool.

Of course, there are more critics of this new service than there were of governmental wire-tapping. A host of unethical and dangerous activities are quoted as possible threats to personal privacy and safety. I am undecided as to whether or not this is a good idea, because all good ideas can often be perverted into bad ideas. However, what does interest me is how this relates to the ever-increasing confusion over what constitutes "public" and "private" space. In many (if not all) countries around the world, new technologies - from mobile phones to satellite imagery - are changing the ways in which people interact with, and understand, spatial demarcations in everyday life.

Here's an excerpt from the article:

"There's a distinction between what Google has a legal right to do and what is the responsible thing to do," said Bankston, who believes the company should have blurred the images of unwitting pedestrians before it posted the street-level pictures. "It's a problem we as a society have to grapple with, and I think we are just now seeing the fault lines emerge." While he thinks some of the issues raised by Google's new service are prime fodder for a healthy debate, Weinstein worries that it might inspire overly repressive laws.

"It's a tough area, but it just seems there is no way around the fact that public spaces are public spaces," Weinstein said. "You don't want to create an environment where it becomes illegal to take photos in public. It can be riskier not to be able to see something than it is to be able to see something."


.
Add to del.icio.us

Tweet

Community classifieds

The "classified ad" is another day-to-day task which the Internet is clearly apt to take on. Web sites are basically interactive advertisements, with the "interactive" bit added relatively recently. Small ads for business use might help businesses decide whether or not there is a web-based market for their goods or services. It might also be a way to circumvent conditions which are impeding a more elaborate use of web-building techniques, particularly in less-connected locations (for example).

But I am also interested by the popularity of community-level classified sites, such as craigslist and LoQuo. It seems almost obvious that the Internet be used in this way to connect people who live in relatively close geographical proximity. How much can be said about the people in the places listed on these sites based on their use of them? What kind of impact do they have? I have recently been heavily reliant upon LoQuo to find out details regarding my impending relocation. Then I imagined someone doing the reverse with the craigslist page from my hometown. Would they find what they were looking for, or would they be gravely misinformed? I'm not actually sure.

It is also significant, I suppose, that I saw fit to call these 'community' classifieds based upon their tendency to list items by geographical location. Is that an incorrect assumption on my part? Probably. But it does bring to light new and interesting permutations on the term 'community' that are essential for research in this area.




Add to del.icio.us

Tweet