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| From Wikimedia Commons, courtesy Michiel1972 |
In a sociological tradition stretching back to Durkheim, the city represents the apogee of alienated life, with residents adopting a variety of strategies to cope with their anonymity and to preserve their privacy amidst multitudes of other residents. Especially important are techniques for managing contact in public transportation—trains, buses and subways—where interactions are simultaneously intimate and anonymous. Those strategies include ways of looking, but also a variety of technologies that urban-dwellers adopt to avoid contact with others: newspapers, books, and, in more recent decades, a variety of technological devices, including MP3 players and smartphones.
But
while analysis of these techniques and technologies has revolved
around avoiding contact, it may be more useful to think of
them as techniques for relating to the anonymous city—for
initiating contact through differentiated interactions. All of these
technologies, including subways, books, buses and smartphones, can be
said to enable a certain construction of place: a networked knowledge
of the city that connects to people and space in particular ways.
As we become more urban, these technologies are quite likely to increase. The future, then, may bring new excesses of anomie, but it will also
result in new ways of networking to place and people.
This
is certainly the case with Korea’s largest city (Seoul) and its
second-largest (Busan), both with highly-developed subway systems and
ubiquitous computing infrastructures that ensure that residents will
never spend an instant unplugged from various social networks, even
as they navigate complex, transportation networks above and below
ground. Living in the city means initiating and managing
relationships in time and space while in constant motion. Some
analysis has suggested a “bang” (room) culture that constructs a
variety of “third spaces” between home, work and school, but the
ubiquity of online social networks means that these liminal spaces
can also be mobile--appended to the cityscape during the course of
everyday perambulation.
This
is particularly evident in the profusion of social networking
software and social apps available for smartphones, including ones
available for setting up bling dates (소개팅)and managing appointments,
locative mobile social networking (LMSN) utilizing GPS in order to
pinpoint friends and potential contacts amidst an urban scape, as
well as locational games that overlay the Korean city with digital
game networks. These can mean novel ways of associating, and even
new forms of politics. For example, the candlelight vigils following
the liberalization of beef imports in 2008 have been seen as a
watershed in Korean politics because they involved a preponderance of
school-aged girls, and because they were organized through online
social networking.
Ultimately,
this may say something about the
development of urban living as not only a contemporary phenomenon,
but as a bellwether for urban futures around the world. However,
the profusion of applications and the near-universality of the
hand-set in Korean life don’t necessarily signal a “break” with
the past and the emergence of a new way of urban living. Rather, the
focus on the network discloses the networked character of the city,
as shifting assemblages of connected urban systems rather than as a
static tableau of spaces. Life networked to the city through the
smartphone doesn’t so much initiate new forms of living as
re-invent the urban as the elaboration of networked technologies—as
the creation of new lines of flight focused on transportation and
communication technologies.
This
has important consequences for the study of the future. First, the
profusion of smartphone applications and social networking suggests
an immanent social critique—the projection of a utopian ideal over
the grit of the real city. That is, the popularity of these forms of
networked socialites suggests the production of multiple “invisible
cities” over the existing one, the analysis of which may suggest
the direction of urban futures. Second, although the Korean city
construed as an assemblage of transportation and communication
suggests ways of living and interacting that may be particularly
Korean, it also signals urban futures for other parts of the world
where these systems are not yet as developed, including urban spaces
in the United States where IT infrastructures have not yet reached
the level of integration of Korean cities.
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