Readings

Lopez, Barry. “The American Geographies.” About this Life. (1988). 131-144.

Lopez offers an account of American landscape here that is varied and forgotten. The idea of forgotteness helps accentuate memory as one of the factors that shapes landscape and the navigation of place. In this short reading, Lopez adopts several cultural points of view to critically examine place. He also adopts several time scales to show how long memories last and where their influence diminishes.

            Toward the article’s end, Lopez brings out the issue of false geographies—an illusion of knowing about a land because you are located within it. He also addresses the disappearance of local geographies as we become more globalized.

Rationale: This reading is based mostly in the traditional notion of geography that a student is familiar with. Lopez does a good job contextualizing geography within memory. Using this article also allows me to transition into talking about how place is portrayed in film (a topic I bring up in the Mobility Project Part I assignment sheet). 

Degen, Monica M., and Gillian Rose. “The Sensory Experiencing of Urban Design: The Role of Walking and Perceptual Memory.” Urban Studies 49.15 (2012): 3271-3287.

Degen and Rose look at the mobility of walking and its impact on the shaping of space. This article though provides an extra dimension though: sensory perception. This article also foregrounds notions of spatial design with an eye toward how people navigate and experience the place.

            Like several of the other articles annotated here, this paper makes use of towns as case examples. (And here I should note that most of the research on mobility is conducted by the urban studies folks, so there is a vested interest in cities; however, even the geography and sociology folks tend to be city-centric. Geocaching is a move away from making spatial rhetorics necessarily urbanized.)

            The first section of the article introduces the case studies and their planners’ intent to create certain sensory effects. The experience of the visitor to the space is often described by the designer as achieving a certain “feel.” Information gathering methods are described in the second session. Participants were given a short survey that focused on their experience and walk throughs. The walk throughs seemed to garner more detailed information and anecdotal evidence whereas the survey provides a frame for the research write-up. (Walk throughs also consisted of recording convesations, taking pictures, and conducting debriefing interviews). Students in my 171 should take note of what methods the authors found most beneficial and emulate those same methods in Part I of their Mobilities Project.

            Ultimately the authors link the sensual to memory (an area I explore in my libraries website). Memory, the authors argue, acts as a mediator between place and perception. Memory becomes most prominent when a space is experienced more than once. Participants often overlaid one experience with another to inform their current experience. (And here, I should note what I see as a pedagogical implication of this research—people learn how to navigate systems by association.) The comparative memories fell into two categories: two places were contrasted in the person’s memory or the site of study was compared with itself over a course of time.

            The conclusion of the article is a call to pay further attention to perceptual memory of place and for urban developers to make efforts to engage memory to develop a feel as they create spaces.

Rationale: The first unit of my course (weeks 1-4) focuses on culture being shaped through media. During these first few weeks I raise the question of memory—how film contributes toward our perception of culture and history. In this course unit, we look at certain elements of film that map time, location, and social and political movements. The movement of the camera as an actor (in all senses of the word—Latourian and filmic) is foregrounded (see also the work of Mike Crang).

            In this second course unit we begin to talk about how movement is recorded and transmitted through other technological means including mobile devices. We take the work of Andre Bazin’s Total Cinema from the first course unit and begin applying it to the convergence of sensual media as described by Degen and Rose. The blog post gets at the question of reality: How do we experience place? Is technology closing the gap between reality and media? 

Cresswell, Tim. "Place: Encountering Geography As Philosophy." Geography 93.3 (2008): 132-139.

In this practitioner-focused piece Cresswell is encouraging students and teachers to trouble their notions of place (133). Cresswell looks at how settlement, landscape, fixedness come to create a constellation of material things that occupy a particular segment of space and have sets of meanings attached to them.

            At the heart of geography and studies of place, Cresswell asserts, is experience. Cresswell gives some historical background into how the human experience has come into geography studies and how this led to the development of humanistic geography. This interest in the interactions between people and their environments, Cresswell notes, is indicative of “radical approaches inspired by Marxism, feminism and, later, post-structuralism” (136). He goes on to examine how places come to define “others” both existentially and physically through normative structure. He closes with three examples: immigration, works of public art, and the connection between material place and digital landscape.

Rationale: This reading is a good introduction for students into seeing place as more fluid (a space of flow). It also helps contextualize these flows within the contexts of history and social movements. After reading this piece we will revisit Gee’s triparte identity (real world, virtual, and projective) and relate it to place, asking if we have projective spaces and what they look like and how are they navigated.

Farman, Jason. “Locative Live: Geocaching, Mobile Gaming, and Embodiment.” Plenaries: After Media—Embodiment and Context (2009).

Farman’s peer-reviewed online text argues for a “cohesive sense of embodiment gained through a ‘proprioceptive-semiotic’ convening of bodies, technologies, and socially constructed spaces.” With this focus on embodiment, Farman begins to analyze the game space of geocaching. I acknowledge that we are readings several sources now that describe geocaching; what Farman provides is a different perspective, one that looks at augmented landscapes as well as the traces of the players in a physical and digital sense. In describing the gameplay of geocaching, Farman draws the relationships between the physical and digital spheres—the game is dependent on the collaboration of the two spheres.

            Of particular interest for your projects is the idea that spaces become repurposed through this collaboration of spaces. The author provides anecdotal evidence of spaces he navigated differently than their intended use (like the Portland OR Public Library). Extending French philosopher De Certeau to his work, Farman states that the practice of everyday life has become the interfacing of the material with the digital.

Rationale: This article’s tone and use of visuals makes it especially accessible to students. He makes explicit the one of my overall goals for this course—realizing underlying systems and subverting them with countersystems. [Side note: Perhaps when we start looking at publics on the web, the debate over whether or not the web is a public would be quelled somewhat if we called them participatory systems...] This article also does a good job illustrating the movement between the digital sphere and the physical world. In describing this oscillation, Farman is careful not to assign one sphere the role of the social over the other (Lefebvre). Instead, the activity determines where social activity—and publics—occurs. 

           

Cline, Ernest. Ready Player One. (2011). NY: Random House.

Cline’s novel is set in a dystopian near future that is heavily steeped in gaming. The backstory is that a Facebook and World of Warcraft entity encompass most of the public sphere. People shop, live, socialize—whatever—using the Oasis, the game server. The book picks up when the megabillionaire owner of the Oasis, James Halliday, dies, leaving his fortune to no one in particular. An eccentric loner, Halliday devises the world’s largest game to compete for his money. In order to win the game, players have to understand the culture of his childhood (the 1980s) and the Oasis.

Because the world is so depleted of its resources and ghettoized, the competition for this money is stiff—even murderous. A resurgence of 1980s culture—films, slang, games comes into vogue.

For the purposes of this class, you should pay special attention to how school is conducted in the Oasis, how relationships and identities are defined, how commerce is conducted, how gaming structures are set up, and, most importantly, how culture is formed through technology.

Rationale: This novel replaces Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano as the “big fiction read.” The book spends quite a bit of time focusing on the game’s infrastructure and how that has reshaped how people navigate in the real world. Even more important is that the book shows the reverse also happening—people’s interactions and navigation of the real world inform how the game is structured.

Neustaedter, Carman, Anthony Tang, and Tejinder Judge. "Creating Scalable Location-Based Games: Lessons From Geocaching." Personal & Ubiquitous Computing 17.2 (2013): 335-349.

This article looks at geocaching as a location-based game involving players and non-players. In examining other location-based game systems like “Uncle Roy,” the authors look at the creation and orchestration of game content and activity (335). Specifically, they are looking at the scalability of the game on two levels: First, how can the game be played over a long period of time? And secondly, how can the game involve thousands of people? To answer these questions, the authors participated in geocaching communities for one year and conducted a survey of 185 geocachers.

            The participation of the geographers in the geocaching community is of particular interest to me. As the article describes how the geographers became part of the group, they describe what James Gee has called intuitive design (from What Video Games have to Teach Us)—the idea that a gaming structure teaches as you go instead of the classroom teach-then-test model. The authors describe some of the basic geocaching customs and systems that help them develop into better players. Again, this supports the gaming perspective on what is also called a social activity.

            In the second half of the article the authors begin to talk about the online interface that allows geocachers to provide feedback. This is an area that collapses the nature of geocaching by removing physical distance, yet the game is entirely facilitated through what some would consider a non-space. Gee’s notions of gaming arise again when the geographers start breaking the groups down into players (real world), player identity (virtual world), and how they interact (projective).

            In their conclusion the authors examine what makes geocaching a successful game structure (though some of the results at this point have become apparent). They boil their findings down into four areas: Type of play, type of content, player interactions, and who creates content (347). For me the most interesting results are that “light to complex” content can be transmitted using geocaching. This further complicates the notion of delivery in the digital age: the content is delivered, but it is “light”; the bulk of the learning actually comes through the navigation of the interface and the asynchronous interactions with other players. Pedagogically speaking, the idea that players are the content creators is integral.

Rationale: As students move into the second half of the mobilities project, they should be seeing movement through space as relating to game systems (and idea further aided by Cline’s Ready Player One). The idea of game systems as systems of learning is already present in the class. Now the question of “Is navigation of space and place a form of learning?” is raised. The article also poses some good questions that foreshadow course content in the coming weeks, especially queries into what makes a good gaming structure (see McGonigal).

McGonigal, Jane. “The Engagement Economy.” Reality is Broken. (2011). NY: Penguin.

This chapter from Reality is Broken highlights a few key concepts in addressing the role of publics. Using the “Investigate your MP’s Expenses” movement, McGonigal addresses the growing trend of crowdsourcing, and by chapter’s end, the engagement economy. The potential to address major problems facing large populations is present as the MP Expense example highlights, but the problem is creating a system that engages an audience and sustains the effort. McGonigal then describes what makes a good game structure (the “I rock vibe,” game mechanics and community, sustainability). She provides some more examples of engagement structures and non-game spaces (like Wikipedia) that employ gaming tactics to create engagement structures. She closes the chapter by emphasizing the future of crowdsourcing and engagement as mobilizing “real world” efforts.

Rationale: As student projects are coming to a close, I want them to start thinking reflectively about their projects. I also want them critically examining the actors they are networked with—mobile technologies, landscapes, objects, online communities, etc. This article also acts a good preface for Cresswell’s “Towards a Politics of Mobility” by providing students with concrete examples of social change being enacted through participation within the digital sphere.

Cresswell, Tim. "Towards A Politics Of Mobility." Environment & Planning D: Society & Space 28.1 (2010): 17-31.

Cresswell looks at the “entanglement of movement, representation, and practice” (17) through a new mobilities paradigm. After troubling the notion of a new mobilities paradigm by using other theorists, he continues the work he started in his book, On the Move. He recognizes his book did not cover the “aspects of mobility that have the capacity to make it powerfully political” (17)—an issue that comes up in several of the texts here, including Wilkins.

            Cresswell breaks mobility into six parts: motive force, velocity, rhythm, route, experience, and friction” (17). By examining and arranging the parts into “constellations of mobility,” Cresswell is able to historicize mobility and transfer the meaning of physical mobility into more sociological practice.

            Cresswell spends the first half of the article defining these parts and how they uphold hierarchy and lend themselves to politics. (Velocity, for example, becomes associated with class in context: Faster is better in terms of airlines [like the defunct Concorde] while slow food is something seen as bourgeois.) In the second half of the article Cresswell begins to examine how these facets of mobility have historically been regulated and by whom. He ties the physical regulation and hierarchy of mobility to societal, global and political movements. In the context of my project, I am of course looking at the mobility institutions grant to their patrons. In particular I am looking at the ways that online spaces encourage and restrict mobility and to what effect.

Rationale: This is one of the most dense and heavily theoretical texts I use in this course—hence my saving it for the end. Cresswell assumes the reader has some working knowledge of NMP and humanist geographies. My students will be asked to compare this article to the previous Cresswell article (which is written for a broader audience as an introduction into complicating place). The question I end up asking is, “Are we moving toward mobility?” and “What do you see as the politics in mobility?” Hopefully at this point, students are looking at the infrastructures of systems in a critical way that allows them to answer these questions.