The Spatial Practice of Online Social Networks What are the relationships between the city and the social media used in the city? I assume that social media have had an impact on the ways we relate to the city. This, after all, was one the goals in utilizing Twitter in #Occupy protests—to organize people in space. During those protests, social media helped evoke alternatives to hegemonic spaces structured by capital flows. On the other hand, I also assume that social media is shaped by historic and contemporary urban practice—by flanerie, by different systems of mobility, by contemporaneous technologies such as books, newspapers, earphones, and by the history of media in the city. But how do we understand this give and take? Many of the analyses of Twitter in the city have been variations on Big Data: that is, work has tended to answer questions about large-scale movements of ideas and discourse. In the process, many of the small questions...
Occasional posts on anthropologically interesting science fiction, anthropological futures and my own future as an anthropologist.