All Tomorrow's Cultures

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 interact...