db+Background+Sectio

Popular tech writers and a sizeable share of academics that write about the Internet take spatial metaphors too literally. Terms like “cyberspace” and “web site” are holdovers from William Gibson’s cyberpunk novels and an Internet presence seemed more like a place you went to than a layer of digital information on an analog world. These metaphors were always misleading, but today they seem more misguided than ever. Books like //Alone Together// (Turkle 2011) and //The Shallows// (Carr 2010) assume a very large and identifiable gap between social action online and offline. Interaction that happens offline is fundamentally different and less meaningful than online interaction. By portraying digitally augmented social interaction as a zero-sum game, many authors are able to conclude that the social media and digital tools are making us more anti-social and less emotionally fulfilled.

The online and the offline, however, are not completely separate worlds and the identities we form online are deeply enmeshed with the lives we live offline. Studies conducted by Pew Internet and American Life Project have shown that 66% of active social media users have used their services to engage in civic activities (Lee Rainie et al. 2012) but do not use the internet to learn about local activities or news (Tom Rosenstiel et al. 2011).

Early BBS forums were defined by interests and geographic location (Coleman 2012). Recent advancements in mesh wifi networks and local, place-based web platforms have reintroduced the primacy of locality and geography to digitally augmented communication. Commotion Wireless and compatible open-source mapping tools are some of the first steps in providing local control over both content and the connection itself.


 * Carr, Nicholas G. 2010. // The shallows: what the Internet is doing to our brains // . New York: W.W. Norton.
 * Coleman, Gabriella. 2012. // Coding Freedom - The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking // . New Jersey: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
 * Lee Rainie, Aaron Smith, Kay Lehman Schlozman, Henry Brady, and Sidney Verba. 2012. “Social Media and Political Engagement”. Pew Internet and American Life.
 * Tom Rosenstiel, Amy Mitchell, Kristen Purcell, and Lee Rainie. 2011. “How People Learn About Their Local Community”. Pew Internet and American Life.
 * Turkle, Sherry. 2011. // Alone Together : Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other // . New York: Basic Books. http://www.worldcat.org/title/alone-together-why-we-expect-more-from-technology-and-less-from-each-other/oclc/535492220&referer=brief_results.

As stated in the introduction, STS has produced a cluster of theories and methods in the last few years, meant to shed light on new and emerging forms of knowledge work and goods production. Many of these new forms of work organization are enabled or afforded by advancements in digital communications technology and social media. Common binaries like private/public; online/offline; work/play; government/citizen; and consumer/producer are shifting, changing, or disappearing all together (Collins and Evans 2002; Eubanks 2011; Kelty 2008; Eglash and Banks Forthcoming; Zittrain 2008; Jurgenson 2012; Eglash et al. 2004).
 * Version 2**

// State of Theory // : This project introduces the term "technologies of public space" and defends, challenges, and qualifies the term across three heterogeneous case studies. The term "technologies of public space" is meant to compliment existing work that focuses on "popular technologies" (Eubanks 2011), generative technologies (Zittrain 2008) and recursive publics (Kelty 2008; Eglash and Banks Forthcoming).

Eubanks (2011) defines “public technologies” as “an approach to critical technological citizenship education based on the insights of broadly participatory, democratic methods of knowledge generation.” It is also “informed by the lessons of social movements … engaged in popular education, participatory action research, and participatory design. (P. 104).” Participatory action research (PAR) can trace its origins to the early 20th century, but its current incarnation emerged in the 1990s as an effort to tackle social problems that could not be dealt with in highly specialized sub-disciplines. PAR focuses on how individuals “are located in, and are the product of, particular material, social, and historical circumstances that //produced// them and by which they are //reproduced// in everyday social interaction…” (Kemmis and McTaggart 2005, 565).

Generative technology is a term coined by Jonathan Zittrain (2008) to refer to technologies that are easy to leverage, master, alter, improve, and transfer (to other technologies) by nonexperts. Zittrain contrasts generative technologies with appliance-like technologies such as the iPhone. Generative technologies are usually harder to use than appliances but, once mastered, they provide more open-ended functionality that can be determined by the individual user at any given time. There are no “purely” generative technologies, but some examples that capture Zittrain’s argument include: Lego, Arduino, and the Commotion Wireless community Wi-Fi project. Generative technologies are often adopted and created by free software communities, which in turn, use them to build and maintain their community. Chris Kelty (2008) calls this sociotechnical phenomenon a “recursive public.” A recursive public is any public “//that is vitally concerned with the material and practical maintenance and modification of the technical, legal, practical, and conceptual means of its own existence as a public; it is a collective independent of other forms of constituted power and is capable of speaking to existing forms of power through the production of actually existing alternatives”// // (Kelty 2008, 3 italics in the original) //. My work with Ron Eglash (Eglash and Banks Forthcoming) extends these two concepts by creating a spectrum of recursive “depth.” By treating “recursive public” and “generative technologies” as one pole of a diverse spectrum, we provide a metric for identifying self-referential and self-sustaining qualities within a given project that produce capacity for further social action and innovation.

Most discussions of what constitutes “the public” begin with Jürgen Habermas’ concept of “the public sphere.” In //The Structural Formation of the Public Sphere// (1989) Habermas describes the public as a place of rational debate and structured argument. Ideally, the public sphere is won through argumentation and not physical violence. Enlightenment notions of governance and human nature inform this view of the public sphere. It favors rationality and structure of argument over appeals to emotion or claims based in anecdotal experience. Hess (2011, 3) summarizes post-Habermasian conceptualizations of the public (that is those that define “the public” in critical response to Habermas) as, “networks of organizations and individuals [that] make alignments between their sectional interests and the general good by claiming to speak for the society as a whole and its ‘public interest’: that is, what the public is, needs, and should have.” This view is informed by the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1993) who notes that the very boundaries of public and private are in contestation all the time. Additionally the private experiences and viewpoints of individuals are key in making public arguments and swaying public opinion. Discussion of public space follows a parallel course. Mona Domosh (1998) writes, “Scholars lamenting the loss of public space in the postmodern city depict the streets of the nineteenth century as the preeminent sites of ‘democracy and pleasure’ (Sorkin 1992, xv)” (P. 209). Domosh goes on to compare Michael Sorkin’s romanticized notion of “authentic urbanity” and his characterization of present-day cities as “theme parks” with the work of Mike Davis (1992) and Edward Soja (1989) who describe militarized public spaces that are hostile to all except those anointed with state-legitimated power. Domosh herself argues, through a study of mid-nineteenth century New York City that “the democratic potential of public spaces may still be possible, even in our contemporary ‘theme parks,’ if we direct careful attention towards slight, everyday transgressions” (P. 210).

Recent developments in theorizing social action on the web suggest that online and offline social action are not a zero-sum game (Jurgenson 2012; Boyd 2008). Rather than impeding or slowing the development of public space, social media is radically changing what public space looks likes, how it behaves, and how individuals interact with each other and the built environment. //State of Method:// STS has at its disposal a wide variety of learn-through-doing methods, which I will refer to from now on as “praxis.” Praxis can take many forms; the oldest of which, Participatory Action Research (PAR), has already been mentioned. PAR has been joined in the last two decades by two other praxis-based methods that focus more closely on computer science or engineering related projects. Critical Technical Practice was developed by Philip Agre (1997) out of a desire to “deepen” the technological problem solving skills of computer scientists working on artificial intelligence projects. Agre argues that what is needed is a “technical practice for which critical reflection upon the practice is part of the practice itself” (P. xii). Agre asks that his fellow computer scientists question their disciplinary assumptions and bring their attention to the “structural and cultural levels of explanation—to the things that happen through our actions but that exist beneath our conscious awareness” (P. xii) Critical Making, developed by Matt Ratto, builds off of previous work in participatory design and human computer interaction (Sengers et al. 2005; Dourish and Finlay 2004; Shapiro 2005) but focuses specifically on “the constructive process as the site for analysis and its explicit connections to specific scholarly literature. Critical making emphasizes the shared acts of making rather than the evocative object” (P.253).

** References **
 * Agre, Philip. 1997. // Computation and Human Experience // . Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. http://www.worldcat.org/title/computation-and-human-experience/oclc/34549023&referer=brief_results.
 * Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. // Sociology in question // . London; Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage.
 * Boyd, Danah. 2008. “Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics”. PhD Dissertation, University of California-Berkeley.
 * Collins, H.M. M, and Robert Evans. 2002. “The Third Wave of Science Studies.” // Social Studies Of Science // 2 (April): 235–296.
 * Davis, Mike. 1992. // City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles // . 1st, First. 0. Vintage.
 * Domosh, Mona. 1998. “Those ‘Gorgeous Incongruities’: Polite Politics and Public Space on the Streets of Nineteenth-Century New York City.” // Annals of the Association of American Geographers // 88 (2) (June 1): 209–226. doi:10.2307/2564208.
 * Dourish, Paul, and J Finlay. 2004. “Reflective HCI: Towards a Critical Technical Practice.” In // Reflective HCI: Towards a Critical Technical Practice //, edited by Paul (UC Irvine) Dourish, Janet (Leeds Metropolitan University) Finlay, Phoebe (Cornell University) Sengers, and Peter (University of York) Wright. Vienna, Austria. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=986203.
 * Eglash, Ron, and David A. Banks. Forthcoming. “Recursive Depth in Generative Spaces: Democratization in Three Dimensions of Technosocial Self-Organization.” // The Information Society //
 * Eglash, Ron, Jennifer Croissant, Giovanna Di Chiro, and Rayvon Fouché. 2004. // Appropriating Technology: Vernacular Science and Social Power // . Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
 * Eubanks, Virginia. 2011. // Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age // . 0. The MIT Press.
 * Habermas, Jürgen. 1989. // The structural transformation of the public sphere: an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society // . Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
 * Hess, David J. 2011. “To Tell the Truth: On Scientific Counterpublics.” // Public Understanding of Science // 20 (5) (September 1): 627–641. doi:10.1177/0963662509359988.
 * Jurgenson, Nathan. 2012. “When Atoms Meet Bits: Social Media, the Mobile Web and Augmented Revolution.” // Future Internet // 4 (1) (January): 83–91. doi:10.3390/fi4010083.
 * Kelty, Christopher. 2008. // Two Bits : the Cultural Significance of Free Software // . Durham: Duke University Press.
 * Kemmis, Stephen, and Robin McTaggart. 2005. “Participatory Action Research.” In // Handbook of Qualitative Research //, edited by Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, Third, 559–603. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, Inc. http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1990-98965-000.
 * Sengers, Phoebe, Kirsten Boehner, Shay David, and Joseph “Jofish” Kaye. 2005. “Reflective Design.” In // Proceedings of the 4th Decennial Conference on Critical Computing: Between Sense and Sensibility //, 49–58. CC ’05. New York, NY, USA: ACM. doi:10.1145/1094562.1094569. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1094562.1094569.
 * Shapiro, Dan. 2005. “Participatory Design: The Will to Succeed.” In // Proceedings of the 4th Decennial Conference on Critical Computing: Between Sense and Sensibility //, 29–38. CC ’05. New York, NY, USA: ACM. doi:10.1145/1094562.1094567. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1094562.1094567.
 * Soja, Edward W. 1989. // Postmodern geographies: the reassertion of space in critical social theory // . London; New York: Verso.
 * Sorkin, Michael. 1992. // Variations on a theme park: the new American city and the end of public space // . New York: Hill and Wang.
 * Zittrain, Jonathan. 2008. // The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It // . New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press.