digital ethnography

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abstract_digital ethnography

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gaspare caliri, marco lampugnani

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Bruno Latour’s Pétite philosophie de l’énonciation (1999) introduced the idea of “proxy”, a delegation of “speech act” from a (non-human) actor to human ones. Our research wants to apply this concept to the city, in a constructional approach that mixes up semiotics, ANT and latest theory of architecture. City is a device which communicates and which needs city-users to communicate. We propose that city could delegate city-users to produce its “communication acts” and discursive expressions.

The so-called city users receive proxy from city and try to carry it out, for example through urban-crossing.

City uses many devices to suggest the way in which city-users could obey the proxy: traffic signs, barriers for pedestrians or means of carrying, and also urban planning, in terms of distribution of spaces for categorized actors. But, in nowadays cities, another crucial way to structure and implement delegation could be ubiquitous computing. According to Latour’s doubts about the terms included in the expression “Actor-Network Theory”, we don’t want to study ubiquitous computing as a network, but as a “worknet”, looking for a discursive projection that “textualize” the relationships between actors. In other words, we don’t care about ubiquitous computing as a given network but as a catalyst for links, relationships, and, in a deeper view, for actanctial weights.

We want to discuss this approach focusing on two specific projects we designed: an ubiquitous computing-community for a social housing in Milan and a cyclists-community for the next bike-sharing in Copenhagen. We will develop this case studies underlining how urban technology, ubiquitous computing, devices, maps, light urbanism and human actors interact creating a discourse. We look at the public as a consequence rather than a premise, the product of a constant negotiation among subjects/places/power. Our aim is to highlight how a material semiotic approach succeeds in unfolding the construction of public as a result, where human and non-human actors, tangible and intangible devices and organizations are as the same potential level of intervention. We are interested in studying the split between virtual and real spaces, related to neighborhood practices. Moreover, we would like to underline how in ubiquitous computing cities it could be important to uphold and keep an ethnographic process of observation. Ubiquitous computing is a new arena for public actvism, in which brand new behaviors and relational patterns took place. As this happens realtime and 1:1 scale, the need for an ethnographic approach is – once more time – fundamental to track, understand and interact iwith those processes. We call it Digital Ethnosemiotics: the disciple which could watch, analyse, and explain the proxy in ubiquitous computing cities and public spaces. We will try to argue how it is basic, in our perspective, to mesh up fieldwork and profiling systems, UGC (User Generated Content) devices and physical practices. In the end, we will account for ub.comp. cities’ relationships just to look for ANT and semiotics mutual contribution in “closing” and defining observable texts in the urban discourse, with no added sociological terms and categories, outside the observable processes.

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contributo per la conferenza EASST_010, proposto per la categoria “are we still halfway of the turn? practicing semiotics, performing science and technology studies”

Posted on Sunday, January 10th, 2010 at 12:01 AM. Filed under: + research Tags: actor network theory, ANT, architettura, bruno latour, delega, etnografia, etnografia digitale, etnosemiotica, partecipazione, pianificazione, proxy, semiotica, spazio pubblico, sts, ubcomp RSS 2.0 feed.