Neolithic Survivor: Role-Playing Globalization, Culture, and Technology

Note: I now blog at Blownhorizonz.com.  It's much prettier to look at, and more focused on fun stuff like weird fiction, extreme music, and awesome art.  Also check out my Tumblr at blownhorizonz.tumblr.com.

Note: What follows is an experiment.  I had a very productive class session last semester using this activity to teach about cultural globalization, and decided to write it up for publication in a pedagogy journal.  I just finished a rough draft, and decided, what the hell, might as well make it available for teachers now rather than waiting for publication. And while I'm at it, I might as well solicit some last-minute editing tips, right?  In particular, I'm a bit concerned that this somewhat complicated game is not really clear.  So, if you enjoy this and find it useful, you might repay me by offering any pointers in the next couple of days before I submit.  Thanks!

“Neolithic Survivor” is a single-class activity exploring concepts of cultural formation, intercultural communication, and technological change.  The activity is appropriate for courses on intercultural communication, cultural globalization, and communication and technology, and is intended to help students think expansively about the role of technology in shaping cultural values and ethnic identity.

A Neolithic Survivor game in progress.
Note the three different colors of figures,
representing three different teams.

Theoretical Grounding:

The spread of communication technology has combined with more open post-Cold War trade regimes and social liberation movements to increase the flow of information, goods, and people across cultural and political boundaries.  This condition of the current world system is commonly referred to as “globalization” (Beck, 2000; Castells, 1996; Pieterse, 2009).  Globalization involves a distinct heightening of the frequency and intensity of the interaction of nations and groups from different cultural, economic, and historical positions.  The mixing of these different cultures includes not just the sharing of cultural texts (music, movies, television), but also the increasing uniformity of the global technological infrastructure.

There are long-running arguments about what impact communication and other advanced technologies have on the structures and practices of disparate cultures, particularly including traditional cultures or those still in the process of modernizing.  Some have argued that the spread of communication technology is sufficient to transform traditional societies into modern ones, and that this process should be celebrated and promoted (Lerner, 1958; Schramm, 1964). Others, particularly after the failure of early ‘modernization’ efforts globally, have argued that the implementation of new ICT (information and communication technologies) can conflict with basic cultural values, either rendering the technologies less impactful or altering the culture’s underlying values (Kyem, 1999, 2012).  Finally, more and more scholars have pointed out ways that both technologies and messages are re-articulated to local needs, resulting in significant differences in how similar communication tools are used across cultures (cf. Appadurai, 1996).

This debate builds on ideas about the relationship between technology and culture explored by Harold Innis and Marshall Macluhan, who argued that the formal properties of communication technology have a more profound impact on societies than the content of the messages those technologies transmitted.  For instance, Innis argued that certain forms of communication emphasized extensions of a culture’s power through space to construct empires, while others provided superior duration of cultural influence through time (Innis, 2008; McLuhan & Lapham, 1994).  To fit the curriculum of my courses, my version of “Neolithic Survivor” emphasized and specifically rewarded students for engaging with these concepts of ‘time-binding’ and ‘space-binding’ media.  Technology cards and other elements of the game can be easily modified to emphasize different key course concepts.

It can be difficult for students to get a big-picture view of how the dispersion and adaptation of technology can restructure something as subtle as culture.  As with most communication courses, the first task in teaching about globalization is often to get students to look at themselves and their own surroundings as ‘unfamiliar,’ as having origins and differences , as something other than a completely natural and taken-for-granted norm.  The goal of the “Neolithic Survivor” activity is to take students out of their familiar settings and push them to think of culture as a ‘blank slate’ that is formed in a complex interaction between cultural practices, ideas, and interactions between groups.

Preparation:

Technology Cards:  Use the attached file to print and then cut several dozen cards representing a randomized selection of ‘technologies’ that will be handed out to teams.  These are the most important element of gameplay.  We define ‘technology’ quite loosely here, with a few examples of things teams can ‘discover’ being: stonecarving, navigation by stars, pottery, money, bronze, large stone structures, numbers, writing, the wheel, agriculture, musical instruments, religion, stone inscription, fire, stone tools, smoke signals, and the bow and arrow.

Obviously these do not represent any ‘logical’ progression, and sequences of discoveries that might seem strange do arise – but as we’ll see, this is part of the game’s learning potential.

I would encourage instructors to use their own creativity to add technologies to the stack that are either relevant to specific lessons, or that they just think would be fun to work with and talk about.

Playing Pieces:

You’ll need about a dozen markers or figures about the size of nickels to represent players’ tribes.  They should be four different colors, or otherwise marked to be distinguishable by team. If you happen to be a board game fan, you can probably find something appropriate around the house – I was able to use various figures from a Dungeons and Dragons board game.

Playing Board:

You’ll need a playing surface divided into roughly even-sized squares that fit your figures.  The attached file representing the Fertile Crescent may be used, or if appropriate for your class you may use a different regional map and turn it into a play surface.  Scale is not really important to gameplay.

Depending on your technology circumstances, you may want to print your map out on a transparency.  The ideal possibility would be if your classroom is equipped with an overhead projection camera, allowing the image of the board to be magnified for the whole class, in which case you can just print on plain paper.  Otherwise, you may need to project the board as a transparency, or in a worst-case scenario you can place the playing board in the center of the room and allow students to look at it more closely as needed.

The Activity:

Neolithic Survivor is a turn-based game that simulates cultural change and hybridization over time as a group of small tribes in a nonspecific prehistoric period move, grow, and adopt new technologies.  While it is played in part on a game board, the largest portion of its gameplay consists of collaborative storytelling, in which the players make decisions whose outcomes the instructor determines.

This kind of gameplay is based largely on the creative and collaborative model of tabletop role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons[1].  While such games often involve complex statistical systems to simulate probability and outcomes (most often in combat), their more deeply distinctive feature is the way players make choices and a gamemaster improvises the consequences of those decisions in a way that constructs a larger narrative.  Neolithic Survivor focuses almost exclusively on the storytelling element of such games, with the instructor serving as gamemaster-for-the-day.  As we’ll see, this means that the game calls on an instructor’s ability to be creative on the fly.

A game of Neolithic Survivor tells the story of three or four primitive tribes and their transformation, over the course of hundreds orthousands of years, into sophisticated communities with distinct identities and mutual relationships.  The emergent story is a parable, and is not meant to reflect any real instance of similar development.  Instead, it is intended to capture a sense of what it means for a culture to make decisions about technological usage and interactions with others, and to develop in particular ways as a result of those decisions.

At the beginning of the game, read this script:

As the game starts, you are playing as the leaders of a tribe of very early humans, living a very rudimentary nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle in the Tigris/Euphrates river, far back in human prehistory.

Each receives one technology card per turn, for every five population.  After receiving your card, you have three to five minutes to work as a group to write one or two sentences about how you will use your new knowledge.  How will you use it increase your power?  How can you use it to influence your population?  The population of another tribe?  Can you use it to claim territory?  Be creative!  Try to come up with actions that will either improve your tribe’s monopolization of space or your monopolization of time. You may use a computer/smartphone/tablet to research ideas for how you will act each turn.

But you can only use your new technology in ONE way, so be thoughtful!  For example, if you discover fire, you can use it to construct a system of communication by smoke signals or to cook food, but not both.  Your communication enhancement might give you greater ability to move or more prowess in battle, but more healthy food would increase your population.  Also note, some technologies can interact with previous discoveries!  For instance, if you have already discovered bows and arrows, you can use fire to make flaming arrows.

After all groups submit their actions for the turn, I will determine the outcome of the turn.  I will award “population points” based on the creativity and effectiveness of your planned actions each turn (or I may take points away!). Everyone starts with five population points.  Each additional five population points earns you an extra population marker, which grants you an extra population figure, which allows you to control an extra territory and gain an extra card each turn.

Following this introduction, the game proceeds as follows:

11.     Divide students into three to five teams.  Ideally, this is an activity in a class of no more than 30 students, so that each group is small enough to operate collaboratively.  Have each team, or tribe, pick a name.  The instructor then creates a visible scoreboard on a whiteboard or the like, with a column for each team.  Each team begins with five points.  In this game, ‘points’ represent the population of a tribe, and can grow or shrink on the basis of game outcomes.

22. Using an overhead projector, display the map.  Using any method to decide order of selection, have each team pick a starting location, with each team represented by some sort of figure or marker.  Council them that map features make a difference – encourage them think through what it might mean to plant their tribe on a river or coastline, for instance.

33. Distribute, at random, one technology card to each team.  Give teams three to five minutes to collaboratively write a one- or two-sentence description of how they will use their new technology on a slip of paper, with team name.

44. Game master (instructor) collects all technology decisions.  At this point, teams may also move their figure one space, if they wish.  During later turns, when they may have more than one game piece, they can move none, some, or all of their pieces.

55. Game master (instructor) evaluates all technology decisions, and assigns population points, generally in a range between one and three, depending on the creativity and effectiveness of the teams’ declared use of the technology.  Outcomes of decisions may depend on each tribe’s geographic location, or on the interaction of more than one decision.  For instance, land near rivers will provide better results for tribes that choose to invest in agriculture.  Also, in the event of a conflict between tribes (almost guaranteed sooner or later), the game master has to resolve the conflict, deciding how many population points each side lost or gained, and what territory each tribe controls at the end of the turn.  This determination is based on any number of factors including teams’ declared strategy and relative level of technological development.

66. Each turn is identical in structure, though they will get more complex.  Each turn will take at least ten minutes to resolve, so games will generally involve between four and seven turns in one class session. 

77. As the game continues, teams accumulate more population points, and one figure is added to the playing surface to represent every five points of population.  This allows teams to control multiple types of terrain.

88. Teams ALSO receive an additional Technology Card for every five population points they have on the board.   Teams need to describe how they will use each piece of technology.

9 9. As the game continues, teams accumulate more technologies, at random, and become more differentiated from one another, with different advantages and disadvantages.  If teams get a new technology card identical to one they have already received, they can use the same technology in a new way (remember, each new technology can only be used one way).

1 10.  Remind students that because this is a narrative game, decision making and planning are very open-ended.  Students can get very creative, and you may have to improvise, as I’ll show in the sample game described below.

111.  The game ends when time is up.  If you want to debrief in the same class session, allow at least ten minutes, but you may also want to devote a second class session or substantial chunk to discussion of the game.

112.. Count up population points to determine the winning team.  Students will be drawn into a game they think they can ‘win,’ but as with all educational games, who wins isn’t of as much interest as the process.

Gameplay Examples

The rules for Neolithic Survivor are relatively simple, but the real engagement and learning opportunities for the game come from students’ creativity and the game-master’s responses.  Each student decision about how a team will ‘use’ a technology or otherwise act or move produces unpredictable results as they interact with the decisions of other teams.  A few examples taken from games played in the authors’ classrooms will help show how this can work at the level of individual technology uses, on a turn-by-turn basis, and over the course of a game.  To help show the bigger picture of the game’s flow, these examples are drawn from a single real game.  These examples show that while the game emphasizes communication technology and practices, more material aspects of life and technology are also represented.

Example Technology Use 1: A team receives a card giving them the ability to draw durable images on stone.  Drawing on Harold Innis’ discussion of time-binding media, they specifically choose to inscribe religious imagery.  The game-master responds by declaring that they have successfully founded a new religion, increasing social order, and awards them two population points.

Example Technology Use 2: A team, who earlier in the game had learned agriculture and chosen to settle near a river basin on the map, are later given the card granting the ability to create pottery.  They choose to use this technology to store food.  The game-master declares that this drastically increases their durable food supply and grants them four Population Points.

Example Technology Use 3: A team who had earlier discovered the bow and arrow and established a military subsequently invent musical instruments.  They choose to use music as a form of military control.  The game-master awards them 2 population points to represent their increased ability to defend small threats, and informs them that their military is now particularly potent.

Example Turn: A team that has developed both military power and a powerful religion moves to attack a team that has built a larger population by focusing on agriculture and social structure.  There are no rules in Neolithic Survivor for combat – the game-master simply has to make a decision based on what makes sense given the circumstances.  In this case, the game-master chooses to reduce the population of each team, which is much more damaging for the smaller, aggressive tribe.  As a result of this mistake, the smaller, religious, militiarized tribe decides in the next turn to pursue peace with the tribe they had attacked.  The game-master chooses to allow it, and the two teams negotiate a peace and then merge, along with their technology, to form a culture with strong agriculture as well as intense religious practices and military strength. 

Debriefing:

This game simplifies culture to a Neolithic context, with a small population, limited geography, and only a few ‘moving parts’, and shows how it grows larger and more complex with innovation.  This model provides easily digestible insights into many fundamental ideas of communication, technology, and culture.  Though the game-master should always dictate outcomes that are sensible and proportionate (i.e. punishing teams that make unstrategic decisions and rewarding those that act carefully), there will ultimately be no neat, linear progression to the game, and the game can be actively engineered both before and during play to emphasize different concepts depending on the course context.

In a course focused on technology and communication, the game could illustrate the idea that communication is constitutive – that forms of communication do not simply ‘reflect’ the cultures that use them, but in fact shape those cultures in non-deterministic ways.  Observations of how fire can be used in different ways can build into discussions of how modern technologized communication has different impacts on the various societies that adopt it.

In a course about identity or globalization, the game could show how cultures and ethnicities are not pre-given, but emerge through a process of change over time.  For instance, in the gameplay example above, the struggling team that chose to ‘merge’ with a more successful team illustrates a fairly historically common process of melding or hybridity (cf. Kraidy, 2005). The game’s mix of randomness (in the discovery of new knowledge) and strategy (in teams use of technology) is particularly suited for illustrating the concept of contingency – the idea that any given cultural formation is the result, not of the logical unfolding of some inherent national or ethnic ‘essence,’ but of a series of historical events that are the product of the strange alchemy of purpose and luck.  The game may, then, serve as a powerful support for a course that advances a position of cultural anti-essentialism (see West, 1990).

The game’s main shortcoming is that it relies heavily on the improvisational skill of the instructor/gamemaster, and on a sense of cameraderie and exploration in the classroom.  The game’s structure is intentionally open-ended, and there are relatively few hard rules in place to deal with the vast number of possible actions undertaken by a team.  An instructor/gamemaster must be prepared to quite literally make things up as they go along.  Particularly in the awarding of points and declaration of a winner, this might lead to student unrest if the course as a whole is not already on a steady footing of collaborative exploration.

Works Cited:

Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1st ed.). Univ Of Minnesota Press.

Beck, U. (2000). What Is Globalization. Polity.

Castells, M. (1996). Rise of The Network Society (Information Age Series) (1st ed.). Wiley.

Innis, H. A. (2008). The Bias of Communication (2nd Edition.). University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division.

Kraidy, M. M. (2005). Hybridity: The Cultural Logic Of Globalization (1st ed.). Temple University Press.

Kyem, P. A. K. (1999). Examining the Discourse About the Transfer of GIS Technology to Traditionally Non-Western Societies. Social Science Computer Review, 17(1), 69–73. doi:10.1177/089443939901700107

Kyem, P. A. K. (2012). Is ICT the panacea to sub-Saharan Africa’s development problems? Rethinking Africa’s contentious engagement with the global information society. Progress in Development Studies, 12(2-3), 231–244. doi:10.1177/146499341101200309

Lerner, D. (1958). The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East. Macmillan Pub Co.

McLuhan, M., & Lapham, L. H. (1994). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Reprint.). The MIT Press.

Pieterse, J. N. (2009). Globalization and Culture: Global Mélange (Second Edition.). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Schramm, W. L. (1964). Mass Media and National Development: The Role of Information in the Developing Countries. Stanford University Press.

West, C. (1990). The New Cultural Politics of Difference. In Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Culture (pp. 38, 19). MIT Press. Retrieved from https://my.ucdavis.edu:443/main_frame.cfm

---

[1] So as not to waken students’ skepticism, it might be best to omit the roots of the game they’re about to play . . .

The App is Not the Territory: Representation and the Just City in Personal GIS

Note: I now blog at Blownhorizonz.com.  It's much prettier to look at, and more focused on fun stuff like weird fiction, extreme music, and awesome art.  Also check out my Tumblr at blownhorizonz.tumblr.com.

Here's the text from my talk at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies 2013.  This has been a great, great conference - I'll be writing more about how it's renewing my faith in academic seriousness.

But for now, here's my little contribution:


Michel De Certeau has written . . . “To walk is to lack a place.  It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper.  The moving about that the city multiplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place . . .” (2011, 103).  This placelessness has been touted as part of cities’ democratic potential – their placelessness leads to the chance encounter that overturns social barriers and creates new possibilities.

But in cities and across the entire landscape, personal navigation systems are putting this placelessness to rout.  Goals are always at the ready – the best restaurants, the most perfect attractions for the bearer's taste, the places to find one's own kind.  The city may yet appear to be a strange melange, a mix of class and kind without parallel.  But the mobile screen now works to create a different truth – connected to global positioning systems and data networks, the screen labels and divides, inflects the cityscape with information, guides currents of bodies and interest along constructed paths of meaning.

My objects in this study are ‘locative’ applications and the portable platforms they are used through – software like Yelp!, Foursquare, Tripadvisor, Layar, Urbanspoon; the smartphones and tablets by which they are carried through and made to interact with the world; and the Global Positioning System of geosynchronous satellites that fix these networked objects in their landscape.  The most successful and prominent geolocative apps seek to connect residents and travelers with attractions and amenities that meet their desires – for instance, allowing searches for restaurants according to price, style, and location, then providing in the same technological package directions to the destination.  Much of the information in these applications is provided by users, in the form of both basic information and reviews or other commentary on locations.  

However, I must admit that my close reading of these technologies is here going to be very limited, in favor of broader analysis.  Let’s look briefly at a few screenshots to identify features I’ll be building on.  Here’s Urbanspoon, an older app that uses augmented reality technology to place information about restaurants and attractions over the user’s view of the city, as if she were seeing through buildings.  Here’s Yelp!, which emphasizes a deep bench of crowdsourced user reviews, and uses a top-down map view to arrange information – a view that makes us think again of De Certeau, in his description of looking down from a skyscraper: “One's body is no longer clasped by the streets that turn and return it according to an anonymous law . . . It transforms the bewitching world by which one was 'possessed' into a text that lies before one' eyes.” (De Certeau, 184, pp 92).  Both applications, which use data display formats common to mobile locative applications of all sorts, engage in a rhetoric of mastery, of – to use a phrase rooted in a military context shared with GPS technology itself – total information awareness.

Phenomenologically as well as rhetorically, these applications remove sizeable intangible barriers between places – barriers of information that would in a previous era have been overcome much more haphazardly through personal networks, analog media, and chance encounter.  They strip away the layer of mystery that would have driven the flaneur’s urban exploration, and satisfy desire seamlessly.

However, the technological rhetoric of transparency and mastery advanced by locative apps overshadows a class-inflected blindness symptomatic of the neoliberal network society.  The network society, underpinned by internet and transportation technologies and new regimes of free trade, has rendered places like cities and nations increasingly subordinate to the networked flows between them, and subsumed regional and national class systems to a global logic that intensifies local stratifications and differences (Castells).  Personal GPS reproduces and reifies this stratification within the city, linking points of interest and rendering the spaces between mute and irrelevant.  What falls out of this sorting, what is not worthy of the screenholders' attention, disappears.

Critical Geography:

My interest in mobile GPS and mapping is an attempt to add something, from a media studies perspective, to a discourse that is decades old within the field of Geography – a field which, starting particularly in the 1980s, experienced a massive critical turn, in which what had long been taken for granted as a certain scientific facticity of space and landscape, and their representation, was reconceptualized as the outcome of deeply political and power-inflected social processes.  This turn grew out of and was fed by voices outside of geography proper, for instance Michel Foucault’s lament of the Western bias towards the interrogation of the progress of time over the extension of space, and extolling of the promise of a history of “spaces – which would at the same time be the history of powers – from the great strategies of geopolitics to the little tactics of the habitat.” (Foucault 1980, 149).

Maps are obviously key to this power-inflection of space.  Interventions have been delivered by both an interdisciplinary array of intellectuals deploying cartography as a lens for the social problems of the current era, and by a wholesale critical turn in the field of geography itself.  One standard-bearer was Edward Soja, who in 1989 summarized the necessity of the critical turn.  “We must be insistently aware of how space can be made to hide consequences from us, how relations of power and discipline are inscribed into the apparently innocent spaciality of social life, how human geographies are filled with politics and ideology.” (Soja 2011, p.25)

As an easy example of the role maps play in this process, see how in this medieval map, castles, churches, and the houses of important people were larger, or how in contemporary maps found in the United States, the Northern Hemisphere is always on ‘top’ and North America is always centered.  My distinguished panelmate Sangeet Kumar, in an article in Global Media and Communication, has written about how representations in Google Earth intervene in the debate surrounding the disputed territories of Kashmir, and similar global disputes around places like the Senkaku Islands have only multiplied in the era of globalization.

Writing in 1968, Henri Lefebvre inaugurated the more local demand for what he termed the “right to the city”, which argued for control over space-making as a necessary feature of any truly democratic enfranchisement (Lefebvre 1996).  David Harvey – almost certainly the world’s most famous geographer – addressed the city as a specific problem/nexus of capitalism, and read the efforts of urban planners like Baron Haussmann and Robert Moses as, in essence, acts of class warfare (Harvey 2009).  Harvey emphasized the project of democratic city-making as one that should be collective and communal (Harvey 2008).  

The need for these interventions was acute: used undemocratically, computerized, centralized Geographic Information Systems (GIS) were proven very capable of furthering and accelerating the process of disenfranchisement and disempowerment, for instance when decisions are to be made about the placement of polluting industrial facilities or the distribution of access to amenities.  Throughout the 1980s and 1990s geographers pushed hard for greater community involvement in the usage of GIS, though with little consequence.  As to whether smart phones, locative apps, and their crowdsourced “Volunteered Geographic Information” represent a ‘democratization’ of what was once a strictly centralized and largely governmental GIS regime, I unfortunately only have time here to point you to Jose Van Dijck’s great piece “Users Like You,” which unpacks the rhetoric and reality of open access on Youtube.

Compared to issues like territorial dispute and environmental justice, my interest here seems less urgent: the ideology of urbanism, and the phenomenology of the urban experience.  The famous inaugurator of the urban experience was the 19th century city-walker, the flaneur, whose openness to organic, randomized encounter, whose hunger for difference and novelty, was a marker of sophistication.  Personal GIS is the final death knell of this ideal.

The City and the City

A haunting metaphor for the experience of the networked city is found in China Mieville's The City and the City, a Borgesian thought experiment distended into a novel.  Mieville, a Phd-holding Marxist best known for his hallucinatory contributions to the techno-critical subgenre known as steampunk, in this book imagines two Central Asian cities – Ul Qoma and Beszel – that share the same geographic space, but are, in accord with a centuries-old convention, completely functionally and psychically separated.  A citizen of Beszel, for instance, might walk the same street with Ul Qomans, but through the learned ability to 'unsee,' would never interact with them, even in the most subtle ways.  A citizen of Beszel could never enter a shop 'in' Ul Qoma, even if it were physically next door to their house in Beszel.  

Though taken by some as a metaphor for the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, The City and the City stands much more easily as an exploration of the new kind of citydwelling produced by neoliberalism and the network society.  Beszel and Ul qoma are separate, and unequal – Beszel struggling in poverty, while Ul Qoma stands within and beside it, rich from commerce.  Just as in real contemporary cities full of homelessness and desperation, passing without seeing is a survival mechanism, a means of avoiding conflict and contradiction and getting about one’s business.

To go from the fictional to the real, we can take my current hometown of Tampa, Florida, where I moved a year and a half ago.  Tampa is a radically stratified and geographically bloated place, whose population is starkly divided between haves and have-nots – here very closely related to the drives and the drive-nots.  There are traditionally segregated neighborhoods in Tampa – places like Channelside and South Tampa where elites can be left undisturbed.  My own neighborhood, though, is more paradigmatic of 21st century distributed urban geography – Seminole Heights, and adjacent Ybor City, are neightborhoods in redevelopment.  I knew within a few weeks of arriving in Tampa where I ‘belonged,’ and a traveler of my social ilk would have known the same thing within a few hours.  This is a map representing the path between places like Ella’s Americana Folk Art Café, the Independent tap room, Microgroove Records, Yesterdaze Vintage, the Mermaid Tavern, Tempus Projects art gallery, etc. etc. etc.  What would not show up on a visitor’s map is that Ella’s is right next to a pawn shop, the Mermaid is right next to a used tire store, and across the street from an hourly hotel.  Tampa is two cities, three cities, many cities existing side by side, but the map reduces it to the one you want it to be.

This sort of situation holds in any number of redeveloping neighborhoods in cities from the south to the rust belt, for example in Columbus, Ohio’s Short North, where I really tried to encourage Sangeet to buy a condo a couple of years ago.  These trends, roughly dateable to the mid-1990s, are a reversal of the urban planning realities of the 1960s through 1990s, best characterized by City of Glass, Mike Davis’ poetic study of what he termed “fortress Los Angeles,” in which opaqueness and impenetrability were politicized strategies for dealing with the frictions of urban class disparity.  For Davis, the early projects of the architect Frank Gehry, with their “walled compounds and cities . . . offer powerful metaphors for the retreat from the street and the introversion of space that characterized the design  backlash against the urban insurrections of the 1960s.”  Between those insurrections and the crack wars of the 1980s, there was a powerful, mounting sense of a nationwide confrontation between the forces of urban 'order' and dispossessed, predominantly nonwhite citizens.  This mounting tension culminated in the Los Angeles Uprisings of 1992-1993.

But since that nadir, many urban centers have experienced a change in the social fabric that is, if not total, certainly drastic, and that has significantly altered the nature of the barriers confronting visitors and outsiders.  With the exception of outliers such as Baltimore and Detroit, America's largest cities have experienced almost uncanny drops in the crime rate since 1993.  The phenomenon is still not entirely understood, but it is at least partly underpinned by new technologies and practices of relocation – particularly, GIS-driven ‘smart’ policing which has, in turn, fed a pathological expansion in the relocative prison-industrial complex, removing and neutralizing entire segments of the population seen as foolish enough to engage in open, violent class warfare.

With this oppressive support, urban geography and planning have begun to reflect a superficially gentler mode of class coexistence, primarily characterized by 'urban renewal.'  Though this can often consist of large-scale municipal projects or high-dollar developments, it also encompasses the smaller, fragmentary efforts of middle-income, mostly young, often white professionals to take advantage of inexpensive housing and retail stock in neighborhoods that are no longer perceived as zones of class warfare.  Thus the fortress mentality of high-dollar enclaves in Los Angeles may now be less typical than the appearance of coffee shops and trendy restaurants in struggling neighborhoods now seen as full of ‘potential’.  

They can be scattered geographically and cater to highly specialized social niches.  Smartphone location applications including Yelp!, Foursquare, and Layar are technological corollaries for this re-entry into the city, and of at least some degree of retreat from the late 20th century ‘fortress’ mentality – but, in a classic illustration of the tenets of neoliberalism, the appearance of systemic neutrality – ‘we’re just helping you get where you want to go – is based on, and reinforces, displaced inequality and subtler mechanisms of exclusion.  In addition to the looming shadow of the prisons, these proliferating individualized sites present their own implicit cultural barriers to strangers, visitors, and community members, while creating rich distraction from persistent despair in the urban landscape.

In moving from one of these islands of gentrification to another, with the aid of a locative app like Yelp!, the user is enacting a radical reversal of the ‘global village’ envisioned by Marshall McLuhan and other optimistic thinkers of the network era.  They are using what Mark Graham has termed “virtual portals,” connections of the same sort that connect distant points and drive macro-globalization.  But rather than crafting international connections that shorten long distances, in this case virtual portals erase local space, creating phenomenological shortcuts that craft a different, narrower city out of the variety of raw materials at hand, in a process of very selective collage by which social and economic worlds that share continuous physical space are separated into tiers of varying value and power.

So, while the automobile was perhaps the gravest blow to this democratizing ideology of the flaneur, with its expectation of randomness and joy in experience, personal GIS is its final death. The flaneur is replaced with an elite urban subject who is a strategic neoliberal maximizer.  We are able to instantly determine, in any city where we as the mobile international elite might find ourselves, the right ‘kind’ of places for our ‘kind,’ represented on screens that erase the spaces between them – the spaces of the poor, dirty, and hungry.  Thus the pursuit of pleasure renders us terrifyingly fixed within an informational-social matrix – a prison of excess knowledge.

Conclusions: Writing the City

That a technology promoted as an enhancement to seeing might actually have the effect of hampering it isn’t surprising.  All vision and representation is inherently interpretive, not a progress away from filtration or blockage or distortion, but a choice between the different varieties of modulation and meaning-making inherent in human sociability.  In this sense (not to be too much of an intellectual imperialist) critical cartography is inherently a branch of media studies.  That personal mapping technologies are overwhelmingly capitalist (rather than, like the old maps, statist) is the defining vector of their meaning.

The new city-being-written through the confluence of network technology and mobile locative media echoes in microcosm the global trends in social stratification brought about by networks.  Just as Manuel Castells diagnosed early in the process, the construction of a global ‘network society’ has produced increasing stratification within particular geographic spaces, in the place of differentials between geographic spaces.

Thus, under network regimes that both demand personal GIS systems and are reified by them, the reintegration of cities across various lines of difference may be less relevant to the task of social integration and democratization than it might have been under previous technological regimes.  Through writing networks of difference and similarity – particularly networks of class-inflected taste – into everyday experience, these technologies not only re-map, but re-segregate the new, more physically integrated city of the 21st century.  This amounts to a limitation of Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city,’ insofar as the management and construction of the city is taken out of any public process and into the commercialized meta-spaces of information crowdsourcing.

Locative mapping more generally literalizes or embodies the gap in meaning-making processes between built human space on the one hand, and the broader, delocated social discourses that shape their meaning, on the other.  As with so many media phenomena, this is not a truly new thing entering the world.  Older media regularly pointed towards and lent meaning to spaces at a distance, and often in explicitly commercialized form – through advertising, through restaurant reviews, etc.  But the immediacy of this new mapping draws down substantially greater barriers between particular spaces, circuits, and citizen-customer-users.  As all places become written-on, and particularly as the taste dimension of these places become more and more intensely and rigorously reified, the chance encounters that embody the democratic and discursive possibilities of city life will be further and further curtailed.

Was Fukushima Caused by "Japanese Culture"?

The official Diet-commissioned report on the Fukushima disaster was released about a week or so, and a fascinating catch was made by one Richard Katz on the Social Science Japan mailing list. The report is mostly a very specific account of communication failures and lapses in responsibility, but it seems that the English-language version of the report's executive summary lades on some generalizations condemning the root cause of the disaster as Japanese culture itself:

"[The disaster's] fundamental causes are to be found in the ingrained conventions of Japanese culture: our reflexive obedience;  our reluctance to question authority; our devotion to 'sticking with the program'; our groupism; and our insularity."

Katz and others have focused on the discrepancy between the English and Japanese versions of the report, with the reasonable assumption that the English version is specifically conceived as playing to foreign expectations.  But I'm more interested in the fundamental questions raised by the mere idea: how do these claims seem to define "Japanese culture," its limits and boundaries relative to other spheres of culture, and the way culture affects individual behavior?  The points made above seem focused on very local interpersonal behavior, relative to, say, a boss.  This is an important distinction from, for example, 'culture' in the more mediated sense, where it may be more difficult to make an argument for any such thing as a uniquely Japanese culture in an era of globalization.

Relevant sources at:

Asahi Shimbun
National Diet of Japan
Asia-Pacific Research Center, Stanford

Booze Views: Calpis Makkori

I keep things pretty serious around here, so reviews of alcoholic drinks may seem too ephemeral.  But let's not forget that this is actually an incredibly depressing subject!  You see, I am a deeply flawed human being.  Along with billions of others, I deal with my imperfection by periodically blunting my consciousness, papering over the cracks in my own facade with a pleasant haze.  In Japan, this is most often done with booze - and as perhaps the world's most consumerist society, booze comes in a dizzying and ever-changing spectrum of varieties and flavors.  Won't you come with me, then, for some help in choosing how to reconcile yourself to the inherent contradictions of postmodern risk society?



Say hello to Calpis Makkori, the very idea of which is revolting.  Calpis is a Gatorade-esque amino-restorative sports drink, and makkori is a milky-white Korean rice liquor, like a thicker version of sake.  Makkori has made a huge play for the Japanese booze market lately, reflecting the ongoing, broad "Korean Wave" that has included an incredibly diversity of kimchee brands, bibinba fixings made fresh in every supermarket, and (let's not forget) a seemingly bottomless love of Korean pop stars and actors.

Surprisingly, once you get over the idea of drinking alcohol-laced baby formula, this becomes a cheerful suggestion that another, more harmonious world is possible.  It's flat, sweet, and surprisingly fruity.  Could be a good summer jam.