Week in Review P4

Yet another interesting book: (in progress)

CITY OF BITS: SPACE, PLACE & THE INFOBAHN
-Willam Mitchell

"(The Neuromancer* fantasy of cyberspace that totally masks physical space - and so produces completely disembodied electronic existence - represents a theoretical limit, not a practical condition.)"

[* A book by William Gibson (1984) - where he coined the term cyberspace as "a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions."]

I will read this book, later.

Anyway, the reason Mitchell points to this example is that he is describing how "for millenia architects have been concerned with teh skin-bounded body and its immediate sensory environment...Now they must contemplate electronically augmented, reconfigurable, virtual bodies that can sense and act at a distance but that also remain partially anchored in their immediate surroundings."
The idea that physical design in our real-world must take into account the idea that we will exist on two planes: the physical and the digital. Therefore, the physical spaces must be designed to accomodate these two parallels.


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"...every node is potentially both a publication and consumption point, such centralized concentrations of activity will be supplanted by millions of dispersed fragments."

This is a interesting and realistic idea as it relates clearly to the digital but how it could also relate to the physical (although it could somewhat represent itself to the terrible idea of urban sprawl). Given the way internet access has changed our relationship to space and how we obtain goods and services, nodal living could easily be a reality as all that we need and desire could be ordered and delivered.
I also think of how information has become nodal in that our main sources are slowly deteriorating to the vast choices offered by the information superhighway. However, as a former journalist, I worry about the increase variety reducing the credibility. Can something be done to give access that relies on many user interaction rather than one producer and many consumers (such as the blog phenomenon). {Can it make Fox news go away??}