I am in Fredericton, New Brunswick this week and next, doing fieldwork research for my thesis, and for the CWIRP project. I have come here to find out more about North America’s first free public wi-fi network, the Fred eZone. This study complements the work I have already done as part of Montreal’s Ile Sans Fil. As I settle into this small, polite city of 50,000 people I feel that I have arrived in a Canada that I haven’t visited in a long time.

Although I grew up far from here, I grew up in a place like this: where you say hello and make conversation with people on the street, where most residential streets have no traffic at all, and where the local park is busier on a Sunday than the downtown. A place where after the university theatre department’s performance, a traffic jam forms.

Fredericton is not the largest city in the small province of New Brunswick: that is Saint John, a seaport city whose architecture still testifies to the wealth of the early nineteenth century. But it’s home to the oldest university in North America, and the seat of the Anglican Church in Canada. In fact, it was considered a city (in cultural terms) only after building its cathedral. Walking around, I see comfortable homes hunkered down in midwinter snow, fellow skiers in the park, and many university students trekking across campus or toboganning down its hills in the dark.

Trying to put the city’s efforts to build their own communication infrastructure in context reveals to me my own biases: the ones I have developed from living in big cities for the past six years. Not everyone is looking for the Next Big Thing, nor to sharpen the cutting edge. Many people want to live in places where they feel safe, happy, and comfortable, with good jobs and the same advantages as everyone else. They also want their efforts to be recognized when they do something remarkable – like becoming their own telecommunications operator (AND giving away free Wi-fi) when the big companies tell them they are too far away from the main markets to get fair rates.

At home in Montreal some folks I know have been complaining about a lack of “buzz” around new technology projects. What is more important? The buzz, or doing what needs to be done? From the snowbound banks of the St. John River, I am arguing for the latter.

I bought a “design” book yesterday for a friend of mine. Not so much of a surprise, since for the last week I have been working on an article on the relationship between IT research and design theory and methodology. The article has been a struggle, taking me out of my comfort zone and into the conflict between art and science, between the description of the present and the imagination of the future.

I bought the book because of the cover image, which is of the Nabaztag rabbit, a WiFi router in bunny form that talks, collects information, and communicates with other rabbits. I interviewed one of the designers of this rabbit this summer, and besides falling in love with the rabbit, I was also struck by the way the designer saw this “cute thing that people will buy” as an illustration of something much greater, the development of a pervasive computing network. But pervasive, interconnected networks are hard to explain. No one knows what they might be good for. But a blinking rabbit that moves its ears? Much more accessible.

Design, the creative, aethetic, imaginative, problem-solving kind, might be what makes the abstract accessible, and illustrates how we might want to communicate. As more of the messy infrastructure of communication moves into the background or into the abstract, is there some kind of expanding role for this sort of design? Maybe what we need to make sense of our world is more talking bunnies.

Just before I finally got home for good (where I am sitting, recovering from a cold and looking out my office window at the scattering leaves), I was at the Telecommunications Policy Research Conference in Arlington, Virginia. Along with my Canadian colleagues Leslie, Catherine, and Andrew, I participated in a series of panels on municipal broadband and WiFi networking. This series of panels made me think again about what exactly a network (or, for Mike, communications infrastructure) is.

At the TPRC, I saw Yochai Benkler present his work on the Wealth of Networks for the second time – compared to the WOS4 presentation it was much less conceptual and focused much more on examples. The debate on the panel turned primarily around questions of whether the “network effect” and the peer production that Benkler proposes is really an effective or substantial departure from other forms of production or ownership. It was a question, in essence, of whether network forms actually necessarily produce different kinds of behaviours or structures. Do networks necessarily give us something new? And if so, is it really revolutionary?

But we have to remember that communications networks are one of many human endeavors that alter the way we think, do, and feel. I am reading, for the third time, the landscape architect Paul Shepheard’s book: The Cultivated Wilderness: Or, What is Landscape . Shepheard tells lots of stories of walking across various landscapes, looking at the different kinds of traces of human habitation. At one point, he writes, “the new Ely bypass road swings past the city, cutting clean across the old radial roads as it does so. These fast-traffic highways are connected like a huge net across the country and are laid over an older net of smaller detail, which consists of market towns like Ely . . .I should call the old net a web, because of its time-woven quality. Net? Web? This is not about the bitstream, remember, but human settlement. The new net of fast highways has its own systems, its shopping malls and gas station eateries, its industrial parks and housing estates — you can spend all your time on one circuit and never touch the other” (p. 13-14).

It strikes me that this sense of a double-layered net over a physical landscape might have some resonance with our negotiation of information networks. There are many nets now, and many webs of connection. You can spend time on one and never touch the other – you can get faster download speeds for the things you buy on ITunes and never have any sense of what people used to call “virtual community.” Is this perspective, what is the role of the community-based network? Which scale is it built on? And who does it touch? What kinds of information landscapes are we building in this wilderness?

At the Wizard of OS conference in Berlin, where I spent the weekend, I learned many things. Some things were about the wealth of networks, some others were about the Read-Write culture. These things came with fancy Powerpoint slides and speeches delivered from a stage by people with a lot of good ideas — and a lot of influence. Some things, presented on a smaller stage, challenged me with new ways of thinking about networks — of people, machines, code, images, and radio waves. The work of Simon Yuill stands out here, as does the creative “play” of my friends at Hive Networks. Others, like the talks by Onno Purbo, Macolm McDowell, and Bob Horovitz, braided together concepts old and new, creating the kind of thread that links actions like building a WiFi antenna out of a wok with careful advocacy for open radio spectrum at the international policy level.

But mostly I learned things at the picnic table. Between the big shiny venue where Lessig, Benkler and the other big names peeked out from under the lights, and the smaller hall where folks discussed everything from new copyright laws for digitally traded music to the “future of open-source software”, yellow umbrellas sheltered picnic tables, provided power for way too many laptops, and hosted experiments, late-night meetings, conversations, and chance meetings. At the picnic table we said, “Hey, do you two know each other? You should talk! And ten minutes later the two were four, and eight, and there was a meeting, and a list of things to do, and a volunteer project manager.

The picnic table is the antithesis of the boardroom, of the presentation room in the university department. No one makes you sit there, and you can leave when you want. You can ask dumb questions, or watch videos on your laptop, or produce the most fabulous DJ mix ever, or fall asleep listening to people debate whether network routing protocols should insist on centralization or whether they should promote a radical decentralization of a network . . . “and then”, someone says as I dozed, “we could do away with Internet Protocol all together”

The picnic table is the centre of radicalism, of the potential for innovation. It is, in short, the third place, reinterpreted in the age of open-source.

But.

This picnic table, this culture of action, of experimentation, of using artistic practice and creative hacking as “proof-of-concept” that the networks we use to communicate don’t only have to be how they are, and might be able to be combined together to make the world (at least in some terms) a more just and beautiful place, is still such a privileged space. It’s taken me two years of listening at picnic table and barstools and in engineering lecture halls and in basements and living rooms, two years of listening and watching, writing notes and trying to understand what this box, this cable, this hardware, this dizzying rush of code across a screen, this invisible network might mean. Now I can sit at the picnic table and understand. I can take the ideas parcelled out in all the formal settings and make them make sense. I can make the link between politics and art and code. But just barely.

How do we get more people at the picnic table? Does it have to take two years to get there? If the issues are as important as the speeches inside the lecture halls seem to indicate, then there’s more reason to be outside trying to make them live. If not, the conversations at the picnic table will turn around themselves. It’s okay if the technological utopia doesn’t work out as planned. History says that it never has. But if the potential to make ANY kind of social change requires a “degree in Pointless Computer Physics” to happen, the Revolution is through before it’s really started.

I have been thinking about the different ways communication networks/infrastructures are built. In particular, I have been trying to come up with a way to explain the relationship between built things and our understanding of built things , which is especially important when the built things are supposedly what let us communicate with one another. This is a salient point in the hype-o-rific Web 2.augh! universe, when we are constantly being told that we are building our own things even as they are being fed into some larger structure . . .

I’m playing with the idea that there are both models and representations of communications infrastructures, and that each plays a role in some kind of construction or innovation. How do they fit together? I’m not sure.

Models can be mental or regulatory models- bottom-up models, top-down models. Policy models. The model responds to the question: how is this system supposed to work? New models are sociotechnical in nature, and have economic and cultural aspects. A model can be and often is physical, but even new mental model – a new way of doing things, thinking about things, and structuring things. In previous generations of communication infrastructure a model was imposed from above. But Wi-Fi, and other kinds of ad-hoc communication infrastructure models, developed from below (and connected to representations of WiFi as emancipatory technology. However, the models can be applied in other representational contexts other than the ones in which they were developed; for example, the model mesh networking is now used in a different representational context.

Representations are cultural. We represent models, but representations might also create models – as new ways of thinking create new ways of doing. These are where we find differences in interpretations of models. Representations respond to the question of “what is this? What am I supposed to do with this?” Representations help us distinguish between change in models and change in what models MEAN. This is most obvious when we consider the case of sharing. A representation of sharing is not exactly the same as a model of sharing, but at the same time, it might be a way of eventually producing a new kind of model. For example, the representational connection between “free WiFi” and “open networks”, which involves an invocation of the other kinds of “free” and “open” representations appears to be creating a mental model of open infrastructure – unlike existing models (how, I can’t exactly explain).

Both representations and models are tangled up together. Untangling them means creating a distinction that rejoins that of the distinction between discourse and practice. This is dangerous stuff for someone who advocates the consideration of sociotechnical systems. However, I want to retain them to help to explain how cultural influences (in the domain of representations) interrelate and influence socio-economic and technical factors (in the domain of models) as various kinds of communication infrastructures develop.

Another conference, at the west end of France, in Brittany. Hosted by a great friend and colleague, Michel Briand. Michel, like most of us, wears many hats, but he manages to make being an activist, the assistant mayor of Brest, and the Dean of Students at ENST Bretagne look easy. He also owns (half) a wonderful boat, and took all of us Wikigraphists, Colibristes, and erstwhile sociologists out for a tour of the harbour. Milles mercis Michel!!

The Forum was characterized by an interesting mix between very techy types, the “monde associatif” (more interested by organizing people, money, and projects than technology), multimedia and net artists, and some scientists, social and otherwise. I wasn’t supposed to present anything, but did an off-the-cuff introduction to ISF’s WiFiDog, as well as an unplanned intervention on my work for the LabCMO.

I had some great conversations about the limits of public WiFi in France, met some artists and researchers, and now feel I understand much better the issues and problematics the inscribe “public space” here. Meeting people who deal with public funds and public policy on a daily basis always helps to move beyond the abstract. The Forum did a particularly nice job of making obvious the connection between free and open content, especially multimedia and art, and greater accessibility. But sometimes it felt hard to pull the thread together: between the people who just wanted to teach, learn, and keep their banlieue offices solvent, and those who wanted to integrate new functionalities into their VJ kit. But maybe it’s all part of making things together.

I had the honour to represent my “chef”, at a meeting of the “cyberterritories and prospectives” group supported by the DIACT, the French ministry of regional development. The group has a very interesting purpose: to imagine “prospectively” how urban, exurban, and rural spaces will develop in the next 25 years, along with communication technologies. To do this, a coalition of government representatives, civil society advocates, tech company researchers, professors and graduate students meet every month for day-long meetings featuring presentations of current research, discussions, “creative exercises” and drafting of a final report.

I am not so keen on the term “cyberterritory” – it seems too much like “virtual world” but I found the mandate of imagining the future sort of inspiring, if a bit forced. But on the other hand, if no one forces city planners to look 25 years in the future, who will?

The first presentation, by Michel Vol, talked about ICTs in business. I had two issues with his framing of the ICT issue: first, his model for institutional change was based on Bertrand Gilles, who argues that historical catastrophes provoke inventions, which then create the conditions for future catastrophes. I much prefer Innis’ conception of monopolies of knowledge, which presents the transfer of knowledge as something that happens organically (while still based on changes in methods and manners of communicating.

The second set of presentations was a recap of things I had already been thinking about: Dominique Cardon and Christophe Aguiton from France Telecom presented on bottom-up innovation and Web 2.0. Dominique reiterated that nodes of innovation are very small-scale – not necessarily geographically bounded, but also potentially restricted in terms of creating very tight communities of interest. Christophe looped around onto the same point, evoking Danah Boyd’s concept of glocalism to explain the valorization of certain kinds of localities in global space. He provided the example of Craigslist to illustrate how San Francisco is everywhere through the Craigslist format (this is true, at least in Paris: one finds primarily ads from expats on the list here . . .).

I loved the first section of Chantal de Gournay’s presentation, which provided a literature review of various philosophies of urbanity, and then connected the results of her comparative study (Brazil-UK-France-Spain-Reunion-China-Japan) with these different visions of urban space. She argues that the currently emerging model is the Far East model, where the distinction between the city and the country is effaced, and where the public sphere ceases to be the primary operator between unknowns. This is interesting, and perhaps prescient given the decline of the American empire, but this conception, as well as the presentation as a whole, didn’t really take into account North American city models, with their sprawling suburbs and individualistic design.

Overall, the conclusions at the end of the seminar seemed to be that in the short term, the relationship between telecommunications systems and the city is one of service provision and regulation. But this leaves open some important questions. Regulation: by whom? Service: for what? And furthermore, even leaving beside the questions of prospectives for the next 25 years, what do these questions of service and regulation, cross-considered with questions of local innovation, reveal about the role of technology as a cultural vector in local places? Christophe’s talk turned (once again) around the myth of the Bay area as a unique incubator for technical innovation. But is this myth really one of locality? The prospective I propose is that locality is entwined into development, into regulation, and even into service. But all localities are not created, or perceived, as equal. Which territories win? And what role does the increasing power of the “cyber” play in all of this?

At last, finally, a high-tech conference that made sense to me. Mutations of public space, where a Habermasian public space is giving way to a public space marked not only by Goffman’s marking of space, forestage and backstage, but also all of the “entre” of the so-called “entrenet” — the cooperation and competition, the “coopetition”, the social forms emerging at the same time as the economic ones. The pyramid and the net, the rhysome and the elm tree.

The Internet is no longer, in this formation, some kind of great unknown or some kind of gigantic destabilizer. It is a part of an everday mediascape (to borrow Appuradai’s term, elegantly used in the thesis defence I watched this morning), and has, along with, and by producing, other kinds of social and economic formations, created a site of tension between private and public, between action and regulation, between Microsoft and the startup, between accessibility and hierarchization.

With this in mind, I feel like there are a couple of useful things to integrate into my work over the summer and beyond:

1.Questions of governance (in a general sense) are more important than ever, as the interpenetration of practices and media forms continues to expand and as Web 2.0 practices get integrated into enterprises. How do you manage the spaces in between? How can we reflect on the connections between practice, between bottom-up development, and the hierarchization of technology, power, and influence?
2.Whither democracy? This question seethed throughout the weekend and never got resolved. We can begin to talk about participatory democracy based on tools and practices that we see emerging (blogging, social networking, radical reformations of hierarchical meetings like WSIS and the World Social Forum) but democracy is still built on an idea of an individual – historically a privileged, knowledgeable one – and community efforts at reconfiguring democracy are met with fear, misunderstanding, or panic.
3.Localism, and local culture are more and more important. So is use, user innovation, experimentation that takes international standards and makes them local. WiFi might actually be a local technology, maybe even a micro-local technology. But the perception of the internet is still global . . . back to Sassen and Castells for help with this one.

Unconferences seem a lot like conferences. Guys at a table talking with big ol slides behind them. But this one is in Provence, and out the back door there is an amazing blue sky and a forest full of singing birds. The conference is held in a villa. I am stunned, and more stunned by the fact that I know people here — it’s as if I have been absorbed into another kind of identity.

There has been a lot of discususion here about the slipperyness between public and private, the creation of tribes, (what my economist friends call closed networks) and persistent networks of friends and “communities” — which seem to be a new form that companies have identified as a market. There was a very interesting presentation on the spontaneous organization and innovation that produced Bittorrent, and a lot of sociological analysis by theoretical French academics about the shifts in public and private space.

But what I am getting, and what I am working on in my research project, is the instability of this format, of this space between the organized, regulated, and top-down, and the individual in the world. It feels like the individual is disappearing as a social actor, in favour of some kind of perpetual gang of folks with weak ties to one another. What is the significance of this intermediary space between mass culture and the individual? If the marketers (and the economists) are already sure that this exists, how do we understand the social consequences? Does capitalism get reorganized? How do we make policy? And, most importantly, is there any indication about how to manage this shift (if it is really one) for the benefit of others beside the telecom and computer companies.

Two quotations:

“Since the Industrial Revolution, society and culture have been subservient to technology. One of the compelling tasks today is to reverse the process and make technology serve culture and society.”
– Ben Bagdikian (1992)

“To the extent that technology is swept into the democratic movement of history, we can hope to inhabit a very different future from the one projected by essentialist critique. In that future technology is not a fate one must choose for or against, but a challenge to political and social creativity.”
– Andrew Feenberg (1999)

I keep hearing this talk of technology holding values, or of technology waiting for the proper values (democracy, progressive thought, community spirit) to be inscribed upon it or co-created with it. This is wonderful, but I wonder, even if these values are inscribed, will they mean anything to the people who consume, practice, use the technology?

Yesterday after my computer crashed for the 4700th time I noticed that its UNIX OS was still copyrighted to UC Berkeley. Of course, I know my history, but this fact (which brings with it certain values, doesn’t it?) was locked into the black box of my machine. I suspect my curious suprise would have been of a similar, but no less limited type if I had discovered my computer was running Linux. What comes through to the user? What kind of democracy operates shrouded in steel? What do the glorious proclamations mean once the box is closed?

In other news I am trying to write a first draft of my thesis project. Scarier than skydiving.