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DECONSTRUCTING VIRTUAL CITIES: FROMUNREALITY TO HYPERREALITYDaniel Z. Sui aa Department of Geography, Texas A & M University, CollegeStation, Texas 77843-3147 Tel: 409-845-7154 Fax: 409-862-4487 [email protected] online: 16 May 2013.
To cite this article: Daniel Z. Sui (1998) DECONSTRUCTING VIRTUAL CITIES: FROM UNREALITY TOHYPERREALITY, Urban Geography, 19:7, 657-676, DOI: 10.2747/0272-3638.19.7.657
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.2747/0272-3638.19.7.657
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PROGRESS REPORT
DECONSTRUCTING VIRTUAL CITIES: FROM UNREALITY TO HYPERREALITY1
Daniel Z. Sui Department of Geography
Texas A&M University College Station, Texas 77843-3147
Tel: 409-845-7154 Fax: 409-862-4487 [email protected]
The problem is not the technology, it is the action of an extremely powerful technology in a social vacuum which is the crisis of our civilization.
—Manuel Castells, 1985
My previous report reviewed the converging literature of computers as tools in urban studies and computers as emerging new places for people to dwell in (Sui, 1997). These dual trends in urban literature clearly indicate that telematics—the converging of computer/information technology, telecommunications, and media—are not only changing the way urban scholars study cities, but also challenging the traditional conceptualization of cities and urbanity as well. As Harasim (1993) so aptly summarized, "Computer networks are not merely tools whereby we network; they have come to be experienced as places where we network: networld" (p. 3). The rapidity of these two converging trends and the profound changes they will bring to society are unprecedented in human history (Castells, 1996). Perhaps because of the potential revolutionary nature of this new technological episode in humanity, not everyone embraces computers as the dominant urban research tool with the same enthusiasm as GISers and urban modelers. Likewise, not everyone shares the same optimism about the changes this telematic revolution has brought to urban life. Quite to the contrary, numerous scholars in various disciplines have reflected critically on the methodological and social/cultural implications of computer networks and networlds (Poster, 1990). Indeed, excessive force in one direction always creates a counterbalancing force in the opposite direction. This report aims to identify major schools of deconstructive thinking on virtual cities with the ultimate goal of embracing these differing perspectives in order to achieve a comprehensive understanding.
The remainder of this report is organized into three sections. Part one addresses the deconstruction of computers as tools. Part two presents the deconstructive efforts on computers as places and the broader impacts of virtual cities on the urban social, economic, and cultural fabric. Part three serves as a summary and synthesis of these different narratives relating to new urban life and emerging virtual cities.
657 Urban Geography, 1998, 19, 7, pp. 657-676. Copyright © 1998 by V. H. Winston & Son, Inc. All rights reserved.
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THE PRODUCTION OF UNREALITY: DECONSTRUCTING THE TOOL
Antithetical to the belief that computers can enable urban researchers to represent and model cities more realistically, critics argue that computer-based GIS and urban simulation models derived from mathematics, physics, and biology reflect and conform to the internal logic of computer technology and the disciplines from which the models/metaphors were derived more than they truthfully represent urban reality (Barnes, 1996). Far from reconstructing an objective urban reality, those critical scholars emphasize that these dazzling simulation results and the fantastic images generated using the state-of-the-art visualization technologies have actually produced an elusive unreality that may have nothing to do with urban reality at all (Boorstin, 1962; Baudrillard, 1996). In an analysis of the TV advertising industry, Mitroff and Bennis (1993) found that the deliberate manufacture of falsehood and fantasy not only is profitable but has become part of our culture as electronic media become the dominant mode of representation. They further pointed out that two kinds of unreality have been reproduced: artificial reality in which it is often difficult to differentiate between actual and virtual worlds and pseudo reality in which attractive presentation overwhelms the desire to differentiate that which is real from that which is not. Couclelis (1996) described striking parallels between TV-generated unreality and computer-generated unreality. Because she saw GIS as failing to make the partiality and selective vision of reality explicit, Couclelis further contended that the technology would more aptly be termed geographic illusion systems. The pictures and images generated through GIS and various urban modeling techniques are driven more by aesthetic and propagandists concerns—much as those in the advertising industry are—than by utilitarian considerations. In a similar vein, Kellner (1989) observed that "in the society of coded simulation, urban planners modulate codes of city planning and architecture in creating urban systems, in much the same way that television producers modulate television codes to produce programs. Models and codes come to constitute everyday life, and modulation of the code comes to structure a system of differences and social relations in the society of simulations" (p. 80). To an increasing number of critical thinkers, the growing popularity of GIS and the renaissance of large-scale urban modeling efforts (Klosterman, 1994) precisely reflect this trend of "unreality production" in the information age. They argue that GIS and urban models are deeply implicated in the social, economic, and political processes, and that critical theories of various kinds must be invoked in order to con-textualize and fully understand the social consequences of these technological and methodological innovations in urban studies. The following paragraphs highlight some of the critical thinking one encounters in postmodern writings relating to GIS and urban modeling.
Lefebvre and the Social Production of Space
Roberts and Schein (1995) invoked Lefebvre's tripartite scheme of representational space, representations of space, and spatial practice (Lefebvre, 1991) to critically assess the social contexts of GIS and associated technologies. They argued persuasively that print advertisements for geographic technologies (as representational spaces) are dialec-tically related to the technologies themselves (as representations of space) and our every-
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day lives (as spatial practices). By contextualizing GIS within Lefebvre's theory on the social production of space, Roberts and Schein were able to situate geographic technologies and claims made on their behalf within a complex of social relationships. Accordingly, it was shown that the unreality promoted by GIS advertising poses a danger to societal spatial practices. Viewed from Lefebvre's tripartite scheme, GIS are more than technical tools; they fully entail "ways of knowing, seeing, ordering, and reproducing the material lived world and social relationships" (p. 179). And the public face of GIS advertising does more than provide decorative visual images. As the representational spaces within Lefebvre's triad, such images embody and reproduce the assumptions and claims of geographic technologies. But magazine advertising represents only one moment in the ongoing social dialectic surrounding GIS and associated technologies. GIS also produce representations that draw upon the invented Western traditions of 3-D spatial subject-object relationships. The image on the computer screen is embedded within its taken-for-granted world view—a selective representation of space (ontology) within a particular frame of knowing (epistemology). Roberts and Schein further argued that the representations of space heralded by GIS technology cannot, and should not, be regarded as mimetic reproductions of the real world. Instead, GIS shatter the world into manipulatable bits of information. Thus the authors identified several salient advertising themes: power, control, manipulability, and breaking up and recombination of data. They concluded that, as representations of space, GIS and associated technologies are significant not only in terms of how they involve themselves in representational spaces, but also in how they become part and parcel of contemporary spatial practices. Such links were traced in terms of the political economy of GIS and in their applications—for example, cold war planning, gender space technology, multinational corporate strategies. Many of these themes are celebrated in GIS's representational spaces—that is, magazine advertising. The work of Roberts and Schein demonstrated Lefbvre's triad to be a powerful framework for situating GIS technology within the social production of space through spatial practices.
Habermas and the Communication Theory of Society
Using famed Frankfurt school critical theorist Jürgen Habermas's communication theory of society, Aitken and Michel (1995) challenged the instrumental rationality in most existing urban planning applications of GIS technology. Habermas (1984, 1987) distinguished instrumental action from communicative action. Instrumental action relates means to ends and techniques to goals without reflection on the rationality or the social constitutedness of goals themselves. It is rooted in a self-oriented, subjective goal to dominate and control nature and other people. Communicative action is oriented toward understanding, agreement, and uncoerced consensus. The essence of Habermas's communicative theory of society, according to Aitken and Michel, is to analyze "how individuals and/or organizations systematically manipulate communications to conceal possible problems and solutions, manipulate consent and trust, and misrepresent facts and expectations" (p. 20). Any form of knowledge is a product of human wishes, including the will to power, as well as the practices of negotiation and communication. Thus, Habermas (1987) called for a paradigm shift from a philosophy of consciousness and self to a philosophy of language and communication. The philosophy of consciousness operates with the methodologies of instrumental and strategic rationality. The philosophy of language oper-
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ates with the methodology of communicative rationality, which raises the validity claims of individuals in the drive for inter-subjectivity. In a society of generalized communication, Habermas (1987) contended that we increasingly witness the dissolution of grand narratives and centralized perspectives.
Aitken and Michel (1995) proposed that dominant GIS and urban modeling practices, which emphasize instrumental rationality and are characterized by a dichotomous "means/ends" relationship, fail to pay sufficient attention to the social embeddedness of GIS technology. GIS applications are geared toward problem-solving and policy-making activities that inadvertently involve themselves in the selling of democracy and the corn-modification of the public sphere. The technology can also be used to manufacture public opinion, and the fact that such electronic spectacle is capable of capturing the attention of a majority of the citizenry places the foundations of democracy at risk (Habermas, 1989). The unreality industry also undermines the public sphere by inventing a kind of buyable and sellable phony discourse that displaces genuine communication. In its espousal of a shift from instrumental rationality to communicative rationality, Habermas's theory can help GIS practitioners to understand the social construction of knowledge and its role in, for instance, the explication and transformation of gendered power relationships in society. Perhaps more importantly, Habermas's theory also sheds light on the perceived danger of an electronic colonization of the life world, and thus enables us to have a more detached view of the hegemonic rise of GIS and computer modeling in urban planning practices.
Heidegger and the Enframing Nature of Technology
Heidegger (1977) asserted that whenever we apply a piece of technology to solve a problem, we are enframed by the implicit assumptions of the technology. Technology not only defines who we are, it is deeply implicated in Being's mission. Heidegger believed that the essence of technology is to cover the question of Being—that it represents a mode of revealing by concealing. It is not simply that technology can be used for controlling or manipulating people; it is that the "essence" of technology deludes us into thinking that we are in control, that we can explain everything in terms of causes, and that it can bring everything near to us. Heidegger presented us with a recognition of the enframing nature of technology and how we are constrained to work within it (Argyros, 1990). More profoundly, Heidegger recognized a distortion in our ability to appreciate things in their essence, as being different and revealing (Borgman, 1987). Similar to what quantum physicists have revealed to us, whenever an instrument is applied to the measurement of a given phenomenon, it inadvertently alters the physical conditions of the system being measured, which always leads to unavoidable indeterminism. Heidegger further argued that the danger of the enframing nature of technology does not come from potentially lethal machines or the apparatus of technology itself. The real danger is that we are increasingly becoming blind to other ways of looking at things when we turn to technology for solutions to social problems. Technologies represent more than mere exterior aids; they represent interior transformations of consciousness as well. This clearly echoes both McLuhan's aphorism that "the medium is the message" (McLuhan, 1964) and Wittgenstein's belief that "language is not only the vehicle but also the driver" (Wittgenstein, 1968). In the same vein, Karl Marx also argued that "technology discloses man's mode of
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dealing with nature and creates the conditions of intercourse by which we relate to each other" (quoted by Postman, 1992). By stretching Heidegger's idea further, Postman also argued that our minds have been conditioned by technology, that "embedded in each tool is an ideological bias, a predisposition to construct the world as one rather than another, to value one tiling over another" (p. 31). Obviously, to those critical philosophers, technology is a prison house that locks us into particular modes of understanding and separates us from the world (Winkler, 1993). The opacity of technologies stems from the fact that there is no neutral, univocal, visible world out there to match our vision against. Indeed, there is no vision without purpose, and the innocent eye is blind, for the world is already clothed in our systems of representation. As such, our representations of the world cannot be other than partial truths. Heidegger prescribed that we must strive to let things reveal their "thingness" instead of relying on a particular technology to do it for us.
Illuminated by Heidegger's thoughts on technology, I examined how the use of GIS in urban environmental equity analysis has enframed the results and conclusions (Sui, in press). For example, research reported in the environmental racism literature so far is enframed by the use of secondary data (TRI and census data), the scale of analysis, and the areal unit boundaries used to aggregate the data. Besides the daunting data problems, not just in the technical sense of data-error but in the political sense of data-appropriateness, I have shown that the existence of the stubborn modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP) alone will not warrant reliable conclusions if analysis is conducted according to one single scale and single type of areal unit boundary. It would be prudent to argue that these findings derived from GIS and urban simulations reveal as much about the systems we are conducting our research in as the urban reality they are supposed to be about. Zimmerman (1994) warned that if the public is not informed about the enframing nature of GIS technology, as manifested in the effects of scales and zoning systems used in environmental equity analysis, the public easily could be led to believe in haphazard conclusions.
Derrida and the End of Logocentrism
Building on Nietzche and Heidegger, Derrida's (1977) deconstructive discourse perhaps represents the strongest postmodern rhetoric against metaphysics and logocentrism. It has been invoked to deconstruct the quantitative methods in geography (Barnes, 1996) and the design of information technology in computer science (Coyne, 1995). It is beyond the scope of this paper to review the details of Derrida's thesis. However, three of Derrida's ideas are highly relevant here: (1) the endless reproducibility of language—the primary tool we deploy to think with and represent reality; the notions of mimicry and mimesis are central in our consideration of how language operates; (2) the decoupling of the signifier (e.g., languages, images, or other representations) and the signified (e.g., reality or the things we try to represent); (3) the various challenges to truth and meaning. One of Derrida's deep concerns was that meaning emerges not so much from a bond between the signified and the signifier as from the play of differences within the signifiers—a phenomenon he defined as intertextuality. Derrida went even further by arguing that we cannot know our world outside of our ability to name it. The language we use can both obscure and expose what we subsequently see theoretically, empirically, and politically. The signifier and the signified are already decoupled prior to any consideration of electronic information storage and communication. As images and data, signifiers appear to
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refer to other signifiers in an endless chain. Derrida's point was that there are no final meanings that arrest the movement of signification. This endless chain of signification is not an unfortunate accident of language but a constitutive element of its structure without which the sign would be incomplete. Derrida also challenged the notions of authorship, subjectivity, and intentionality on which we build our modern understanding of technology. The danger of subordinating the signified to the signifier is the ubiquity and exclusivity of illustrations and presentations of things explaining as things explained. Derrida's strategy of deconstruction was to challenge an author's thesis by uncovering oppositions in the text that betray that thesis. He announced that the end of metaphysics and logocen-trism is the discourse of postmodernity.
Viewed from Derrida's perspective, much of the rhetoric about information technology is permeated with metaphysics (logocentrism)—the quest for stability, some primal truth, and an origin or a computable point of reference. Derrida (1997) stated that metaphysics has concerns with presence as opposed to the absent, the supplementary. Contradictions are inherent within logocentrism; primordiality of technology necessitates the deconstructive strategy for the deployment of technology in society. Coyne (1995) argued that the Derrida thesis influences our understanding of information technology at three levels at least: (1) through the critiques it offers to conventional views of communication and language, (2) through its challenge to metaphysics, and (3) through its challenge to Heidegger's notions of Being. When pushed to the limit, as by Olsson (1991), Derrida simply leaves us with a sense of being forever confounded by the vagaries of language. I do not believe that is Derrida's goal. Derrida's main project, in my opinion, is to go beyond logocentric argumentation by putting an end to both metaphysics and the rupture between the signifier and the signified. Deconstruction espouses the dissolution of the spectrum of meaning and truth. Derrida and his followers also have offered us a tool to render information technology as what has always been for language. The dislocation of universals and authority also initiates a shift toward the intertextuality of all texts. Using a text metaphor for GIS, Pickles (1995) argued that all texts are embedded with chains of signification that demand we engage in a process of ceaseless contextualization and recontextualization. To some critics, this is the only viable strategy we can deploy to counterattack high-tech's assault on reality (Slouka, 1995).
Toward a Critical Theory of GIS
In light of these deconstructive perspectives on GIS and computer modeling, it is time to rethink our traditional instrumental views on GIS. Instrumental approaches generally take an atomistic ontological position in which the social position of the researcher is independent from the knowledge she or he produces, and in which the empirically observed world adequately represents the operations and mechanisms of the real world. As information technology is increasingly becoming the lingua franca for a growing segment of society, we are running a high risk of legitimizing and perpetuating instrumental rationality if the seed of a critical GIS theory is not planted in GIS practice (Sheppard, 1995). The critical theory of GIS entails a dramatic shift of our ontological as well as epistemological positions that view the subjects of research and representation as situated in complex webs of power relations that construct and shape those very subjects (Sui, 1996). The critical theory of GIS demands us to be both critically objective and objec-
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tively critical about applications of GIS in society. To be critically objective means to limit one's conclusions as essentially partial and selective among all possible conclusions rather than making radical claims about their universal applicability. To be objectively critical means to make one's position vis-a-vis assumptions and limitations of research methodology explicitly known rather than invisible, because, to a great extent, how we see determines what we see. The critical perspective will enable us to appreciate the fact that computer systems can shape our understanding of social reality so that results are coming not simply from the phenomena measured, but more from the systems measuring it. The critical studies of GIS are a journey upstream toward the sources of everyday facts. This shift from instrumental rationality to critical rationality will enable us to more vigorously examine how space, people, and environment are represented, manipulated, and visualized in GIS and various models, and thus promote more ethical practice of information technology in the social arena.
Critical GIS theory will facilitate our efforts to explicitly locate objectivity where human cognition is acknowledged within people's multiple power positioning in society, polity, and economy. The applications of GIS should be viewed as very gendered and power-laden processes of discourse and cognition. We need to consciously compare and contrast alternative ways of knowing and to be cognizant of the fact that significant aspects of human existence and experience are not amenable to quantification. Without the light shedding from a critical GIS theory, the instrumental vision of technology tends to lead us to make the claim mat we can see all, and thus leads inevitably to the colonization of the life world in which space is given both metaphorical and material resonance. Achieving a workable critical theory of GIS technology requires constant diligence on the part of researchers to honestly incorporate not only multiple positioning of ontology and epistemology, but also the simultaneity of our existence within these positionings. GIS practitioners are situated in both the academy and society. This betweenness implicitly coincides with the twin goals of the critical theory of GIS technology: to increase our understanding of the contexts of GIS technology and to provide knowledge useful to the incorporation of these contexts into GIS practices.
It is quite obvious that we can make sense of computers as tools only when we simultaneously grasp their roles as metaphors and political icons (Coyne, 1995). Baudrillard (1988) observed that there are three stages in the changing relationship between the signi-fier and the signified. During the first stage, signs are invented to point to reality. During the second stage, signs begin to hide reality. During the third stage, signs begin to hide the absence of reality. These three stages complete what Baudrillard called the procession of simulacra—a gradual transition from reality to unreality to hyperreality. The third stage is characterized by a system of copies and simulations of events, objects, and environments that are more real than reality itself—they have become "hyperreal." With the computer emerging as a new "place"—electropolis—information technology has transcended the unreality production stage as it relates to various social, economic, and cultural activities. A hyperreality, based on virtual signs about our cities and ourselves, is rapidly being reproduced (Wooley, 1994). The current rush to settle cyberspace is a reflection of this process. To more and more critics, the reproduction of hyperreality, via this place-like aspect of computers and telematics, is more detrimental to humanity in general and urbanity in particular than the production of unreality via the tool aspect of computer technology.
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THE REPRODUCTION OF HYPERREALITY: DECONSTRUCTING THE ELECTROPOLIS
As the reach of information flowing along global telematic networks has become increasingly important in defining city boundaries, researchers have found that cities are coming to resemble, more than anything else, a gigantic information-switching center. In sharp contrast to the optimistic—indeed typically Utopian and technologically deterministic—view that the electropolis of the future will further decentralize power, globalize economy, harmonize social relationships, and empower the truly disadvantaged, critics have duly challenged both the promises and potentials of virtual cities as a means of fulfilling the Jeffersonian conceptualization of individual life founded on the primacy of individual liberty and a commitment to pluralism, diversity, and continuity. Instead, they paint a dystopian picture of a more technologically institutionalized society. In parallel to the Utopian visions of the electropolis discussed in my previous report (Sui, 1997), this section highlights a rather pessimistic/dystopian school of thought on the electropolis.
Electronic Commerce and Socioeconomic Polarization
As more and more businesses move on-line as a result of the revolution in telematics, optimists predict that the advent of electronic commerce will lead to a dramatic departure from the familiar social/economic inequities of capitalism. Universal access to these new technologies, it is averred, will put an end to geographic barriers and drudgery. But critics contend that universal access is often assumed or implied. The concept of "time-space" compression tends to be invoked without much social context. The reality is that global economic restructuring underpins a shift toward a more polarized urban society, not a more egalitarian world. A close examination soon reveals that the world of information technology is made for the favored few, and that the mediocre many are being constantly marginalized. For example, only 20% of the United States population is presently involved with Internet usage, and the greater proportion of those Internet users consists of the wealthy and well educated. The "Net" is also increasingly controlled by corporations in relentless pursuit of profits. Because of the increasing commodification of information, we are increasingly becoming a "pay-per" society. Against this backdrop of growing privatization in information services, we are witnessing a rapid shift from free and public sources of information toward information commodities—to commodified sources of information, information that can be traded, bought, and sold on a bit-by-bit basis. Roszak (1994) noted in this regard that "more and more information is falling into the hands of a profit-making information industry, turning what might be public benefit into a private business. The irony here is acute. At the very moment in history when new technology is making the distribution of information potentially cheaper and easier to access than ever before, interests are at work that seek to use that same technology to restrict flow" (p. 179).
With access being determined by one's ability to pay, critics argue that commodification and the pay-per revolution serve to perpetuate information inequities and accentuate urban problems we already had. Recent trends in society already indicate a growing class division between the information rich (information users) and the information poor (information used). Several recent studies have found that economic restructuring has created a two-tier labor market—with a high-tech minority at the top (e.g., the "information
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bourgeoisie," "flexecutives") and a mass of people at the bottom (the "information proletariat," back-office workers) who have suffered the ravages of automation and are increasingly excluded.
As a result of this new division between information rich and information poor, social elites tend to use information technology to reinforce social privilege. Social imbalances in access to networks and services are an intrinsic part of their development. Similar to situations in real cities, access to jobs, services, and amenities in electropolis also are conditioned and differentiated. Access to home personal computers is strongly correlated to occupational class and income in both America and Europe. White schools tend to have twice as many computers as minority schools. Massey (1993) spoke of a highly complex and uneven "power geometry" of time-space compression in which different socioeconomic groups have extremely uneven levels of control and access. As a result, differing groups and individuals are placed in distinct ways in relation to these flows and interconnections. She further identified three main groups within this broad and uneven picture: (1) the affluent and the transnational corporate class, who control "time-space" compression; these groups benefit most by being the target of "cherry picking" by competitive telecommunications companies in the most profitable domestic telecommunications markets; new developments are usually geared toward the interests and communication needs of affluent professionals; (2) back-office workers and home workers whose communications are constantly scrutinized and controlled; (3) persons excluded from this telematic revolution. Although most critics acknowledge examples of the use of computer networks for the empowerment of disadvantaged social groups who seek to overcome social and physical barriers, the reality is that disabled persons, ethnic minorities, women, and people living in remote rural communities tend to face further marginalization from the sources of power, employment, and information services within market-based telecommunications regimes. Frissen (1992) pointed out that the exclusion of women from the male-dominated world of computers is extremely stark: only 10 to 15% of World Wide Web users are female. Phillips (1993) provided concrete empirical data documenting the polarization of American society as evidenced by middle-class declines. The growing disparity between rich and poor has widened, and the politics of rich and poor have become so heated as to nearly reach the boiling point.
The polarizing effect of information technology has also become geographically manifest, both between cities and within cities. At the interurban level, scholars increasingly sense a spatial paradox: "The greater the extent of geographic decentralization, the greater the need for centralization of key control activities" (Moss, 1987, p. 536). Sassen (1991) observed that agglomeration of certain centralizing activities has sharply increased precisely because of the territorial dispersal facilitated by telecommunications. The increasing integration of the worldwide financial market in the global economy testifies to this trend, as evidenced by growing "around-the-clock-trading" between leading financial centers such as Tokyo, New York, and London. Furthermore, the development of telematic networks has created tunnel effects that closely link some widely separated spaces in terms of abstract electronic space, while pushing many physically near places further away. Graham and Marvin (1996) observed that "while some cities converge in electronic space, the physical and electronic separation of these cities from the rest of their hinterland economies can become more pronounced" (p. 139). Consequently, the global urban system is becoming increasingly polarized between command-and-control centers and
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subservient outposts. These global command-and-control centers are typically located on the same sites as transnational corporations and possess massive telematic connections with the rest of the world. Subordinate centers, on the other hand, are places where the back-office and electronic-immigrant workers who serve big corporations make their homes. Global spatial polarization at the interurban level will continue to deepen as the networked economy of instantaneous information, service, capital, and labor flows increasingly shapes the fortunes of cities.
At the intraurban level, scholars have found that inequities in real cities and virtual cities tend to be mutually reinforcing and dialectically manifested in various ways. Those trapped in urban ghettos usually have little access to electronic spaces. As Dear (1995) pointed out, with telematics, "time-space coordinates have been stretched to as yet unknown dimensions" for elite groups, while at the same time "for minorities, the poor, the disabled, and women, the time-space prism closes rapidly to become a time-space 'prison'." Davis (1993) even referred to this polarization as "information apartheid." He further observed that "South-central L.A. is a data and media black hole: without local cable programming or links to major data systems. Just as it became a housing/jobs ghetto in the early twentieth-century industrial city, it is now evolving into an electronic ghetto within the emerging information city" (p. 53). The segregation in virtual cities matches the selective colonization of exclusive urban places as homes for these elite groups. These exclusive areas are increasingly linked together by massive social as well as technical networks while being secured from the rest of the cities in which they are placed. Castells (1989) described how the new professional-managerial class colonizes exclusive spatial segments that connect with one another across the city, the country, and the world; they isolate themselves from the garments of local societies, which in turn become destroyed in the process of selective reorganization of work and residence. Because of the spatial manifestations, Christopherson (1992) pointed out that the downsizing of corporate America reflects their emphasis on increasing the market by closing branch offices in unfavorable areas and targeting affluent consumers both with enhanced branches and improved services using telematic technologies. Teleshopping services are invariably geared toward servicing the better-off, therefore extending the advantages they already enjoy and exacerbating growing social inequities.
In summary, critics argue that we cannot simply say that information technology (IT) is a technology of freedom. Instead, we must recognize that IT tends to offer freedom only to those already powerful social groups. Swyngedouw (1989) argued that increased liberation and freedom from place as a result of the telematic revolution may strengthen the social and economic elite while at the same time lead to the disempowerment and exclusion of others because of their lack of the necessary technical skills and financial resources to access these new technologies. This in turn further accentuates economic and social inequities. Recent trends suggest that the cherry picking of lucrative markets and the social dumping of marginal consumers contribute precisely to what Harvey (1996) called the emerging geography of difference.
Electronic Democracy and Social Surveillance/Control
The socially polarizing effect embedded in the telematics revolution inevitably manifests itself in the political domain as well. The story of the rush to cyberspace has repeat-
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edly shown that the availability of low-cost computing power may move the baseline that defines the electronic dimensions of social influence, but it does not necessarily alter the relative balance of power in society. According to Ogden (1994), the weakness of the idea of an "electronic democracy" is that it is easier to commodify than to explain. The commercialization and commodification of public discourse is only one of the grave problems posed by the increasing sophistication of information technology. People living in elec-tropolis are more easily manipulated and misled. The same technology that enables citizens around the world to communicate with one another also allows governments and private interests to gather information about them. According to some critics, information technologies are increasingly becoming the perfect "Panoptic" prisons proposed in the 18th century by Jeremy Bentham—a model that happens to fit the real capabilities of today's telematics technology. Foucault (1977), in his Discipline and Punish, stressed the importance of both the idea of the Panopticon and its architectural design. He believed it to be a literal blueprint for the way future tyrants would use surveillance technologies to wield power. Drawing extensively from Foucault (1977, 1980), critics argue that telematics at the most fundamental level are control and surveillance technologies that can exercise control and surveillance across space and time boundaries (Gregory, 1994). Owing to all these technological advances, the growing power of the state and corporations to sur-veil and monitor—to see but not to be seen—further perpetuates the uneven power geometry and the massive invasion of privacy. Computer networks have increasingly become the means whereby power is exercised over space, time, and people by corporations and the state.
The increasing use of computer networks and various media systems for teleshopping, telecommuting, and all kinds of opinion polls enable corporations in charge of telematics to collect massive amounts of information on users. Corporations not only know what you want to buy, they also know who you are and where you live (Goss, 1995). With the help of telematic technologies, more and more companies and firms are able to conduct precise targeting of potential buyers, and traditional mass advertising is gradually being replaced by targeted marketing as a key tool to stimulate consumption. Technically it is possible now that every consumptive activity will generate information pertinent to the modification of future production. Personalized marketing serves to boost more flexible and targeted production, distribution, and consumption systems. Personalized marketing needs personalized information about each individual. As a result, the increasing digitization of our urban lives and social existences is accompanied by decreasing individual privacy. Nowadays numerous corporations hold masses of sensitive personal information that are being bought and sold in the marketplace.
What concerns some scholars is that technological advances not only have empowered the state to surveil and invade citizens' privacy, but also have enabled it to confuse, control, and even coerce its citizens. Robins and Webster (1986) noticed that "the new communication and information technologies—particularly in the form of an integrated electronic grid—permit a massive extension and transformation of that same (relative, technological) mobilization to which Bentham's Panoptic principle aspired. What the technologies support, in fact, is the same dissemination of power and control, but free from the architectural constraints of Bentham's stone and brick prototype" (p. 36). This trend has been reflected by an increasing use of telematics to exert social control over welfare systems. Electronic fingerprinting for welfare recipients is currently operational
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in Los Angeles, and these files of electronic fingerprints are linked to the police departments. The use of Global Positioning Systems (GPS) has been proposed to monitor the real-time movement of the homeless in cities. All these invasive uses have led some commentators to argue that computers are more likely to be used, by the police or the welfare agency, against a poor person than by a poor person (Davis, 1993). Computerized systems are increasingly being used to monitor employees' social and economic behaviors, online social interactions (e.g., e-mail, Internet relay chat, and subscription to discussion groups), and even the frequency and length of toilet visits.
Foucault (1980) warned that the Panopticon comes in many guises. Telematic technologies have always been dominated by the military and will continue to be dominated by the military, police, and intelligence agencies into the foreseeable future. In the past, the state has always tried to control the emergence of new communications media. Each citizen should be aware of the possibly horrific future applications should totalitarians get their hands on telematic technologies. The machinery of the worldwide communications network resembles a kind of camouflaged Panopticon. The building of controlled plazas and walled-off neighborhoods is complemented by the creation of an array of sophisticated electronic monitoring and surveillance technologies—from computer communications in police departments to telematics-based alarm systems, infrared sensors, motion detectors, and Closed-Circuit TV (CCTV). We are at the threshold of the universal tagging of property and people—both criminal and noncriminal—monitored by cellular and centralized surveillance (Davis, 1990). Cities are becoming real-time urban Panopticons in an increasingly Orwellian Big Brother society. The information revolution has led not only to the prison or factory, but to a social totality that functions as a hierarchical and disciplinary Panoptic machine. As Foucault (1977) said, "Our society is not one of spectacle, but of surveillance; under the surface of image" (p. 217).
Electronic Cottage and the Identity Crisis of the Digital Individual in Electropolis
The digital gold rush into cyberspace is still on—growing at a rate of more than one million internet users per month. The virtual lifestyle cyborgs are cultivating in cyberspace raises many fundamental questions about ourselves, our communities, our (real) cities, and ultimately our society in general. To optimists, virtual communities offer the potential to redefine who we are and resuscitate the public sphere of cities with new forms of urban conviviality. To critics, this is just another Utopian illusion. Quite the contrary, critics argue that the virtual lifestyle has posed an unprecedented challenge about who we are and what kinds of cities and communities we are going to have tomorrow (Glass, 1993).
To most critical scholars, the home-based virtual style of living in electronic cottages reflects a spiraling fear of the "other." People are opting for cyberspaces over real spaces because they are increasingly alienated by changes underway in American cities. More and more upper-middle-class families are withdrawing into miniature medieval fortresses, cocooned in suburban areas where few, if any, public places even exist. Virtual communities represent hardly more than an electronic antidote to the depressing reality of urban life: to live in them is to shy even further away from reality. Consequently, social fragmentation and the erosion of civic aspects of urban life have prevailed over forces of social integration and over aspects of the telematics revolution that proponents claim are
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beneficial. Virtual communities reflect precisely the repressive and instrumental character of contemporary urban life. The growing number of virtual communities signifies the rapid disappearance of public spaces from our real lives. Various different kinds of virtual communities and chat rooms on the Internet allow people to create and dream and live in ways that they cannot accomplish in their real lives. The growing popularity of electronic singles bars and computer cafes can be taken as evidence of the decay of such amenities in real cities. Just as those fabulous images generated by GIS and urban modeling lead us to an unreal sense of the world, the telemediated experience of inhabiting a virtual community also is illusory and contributes to a decline in the affective aspect of urban dwelling. The real danger of virtual living is to promote the further withdrawal of urban social interaction from real cities, thereby exacerbating urban social problems and shattering communality. Calhoun (1986) argued that "telematically linked communities could fragment our larger society, enabling each of us to pursue isolation from everything different, or unfamiliar, or threatening, and removing the occasions for contact across lines of class, race, and culture" (p. 333). Far from resuscitating the urban public realm, the migration to electropolis will only stimulate further social atomization. Consequently, the poor will only be further ghettoized in the decaying parts of real cities, constantly monitored and surveiled by police. Meanwhile, the rich too will find themselves increasingly confined— both electronically and physically. Everyone will be separated into his or her own security castle, a situation which may lead to the dissolution of society as we know it (Graham and Marvin, 1996). Turkle (1997) commented that it makes little sense to imagine that the way to revitalize communities is to have individuals sitting alone in their rooms, conversing with virtual friends through networked computers. This will only lead to a profound identity crisis of who we are and what we want to become.
Turkle (1984,1997) further asserted that as computer technology moves us away from a culture of computation to a culture of simulation, computers have been transformed from being a second self to becoming a new life on the screen via computer-mediated communication. Computer culture prompts us to conceptualize humans as being, in essence, information processors, and now even as little more than information processed. Such a dramatic transformation has titanic cultural implications, and yet we are hardly prepared intellectually for the profound identity crisis we are entering into. Are we actually being transformed into cyborgs, cyberpunks, and digital individuals (Curry, 1997)? Will protein-based life be superseded by bit-based life? Who are we when we go on-line? And who do we become when we create alternative versions of ourselves—digitally roboticized "agents" or "alters"—to roam the Web in our absence? Telematics allows us not only to colonize each other's brains with endless information, but also to create an essentially decentered multiple self that exists in many worlds and plays many roles at the same time. Cyborg technologies, such as telematics and biotechnologies, are turning into seamlessly integrated parts of the human body through the grafting of such items as portable and wearable palm-top computers, cellular phones, beepers, and GPS receivers. People are less discomforted by their joint kinship with animals and machines (Haraway, 1991) than they once were. Consequently, critics argue, bewildered inhabitants of the digital world find themselves passively caught up in a global cacophony of mass and personal communications (Schroeder, 1994). Telematics produces a culture that tends to complicate and confound many of our notions of reality. It subsumes experience even as the plethora of information it produces supersedes meaning. New technologies supplant and disenfran-
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chise precisely when they seek to seem friendly (Graham and Marvin, 1996). Kroker (1992) argued that the possessed individual is the defining characteristic of postmodern culture. He observed that "these digital individuals are trapped in an increasingly cynical world of virtual aesthetic experiences, drifting aimlessly within the chaos of the tele-mediated signs and symbols which together constitute a simulated and hyperreal world of digital dreams and fantasies" (Kroker, 1992, p. 3). What is really impoverished, some argue, is the affective experience of people interacting face to face with one another (Ger-gen, 1992). This is precisely the diplopic phenomenon Boorstin (1962) warned us about some 30 years ago—this technology-driven flood of pseudo-events and the avalanche of trivia, not knowing authenticity. Boorstin (1982) even argued that America is becoming a talk-show nation drowning in the trivia of an idiot culture. Foucault (1977) commented that "it is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order; it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies (p. 217)."
At a more fundamental level, this telematic revolution has transformed computing technology from something one thinks with to something one thinks about. Along with this dramatic transformation has come a range of changes regarding not only what computers do for us but also what they do to us. This rapid move toward virtuality tends to skew our experience of the real in several ways. Using an ethnographic approach combined with clinic observations, Turkle (1997) found at least four effects worth paying attention to. (1) Cyborgs have increasingly become accustomed to opaque technology that is treated as a black box. People care less and less about underlying ideological biases and implicit assumptions. (2) We have learned to take things at interface value. People are feeling more comfortable with substituting representations of reality for the real. In fact, to a growing number of people, technology has made not only the artificial seem real (The Disneyland Effect), but also the fake seem more compelling than the real (The Artificial Crocodile Effect). Because the virtual experience is so compelling, we tend to have the hallucination that within it we have achieved more than we actually have. (3) We have used our relationships with technology to reflect on the human. With descriptions of the brain that explicitly invoke computers, and images of computers that explicitly invoke the brain, we have reached a cultural watershed: both computers and brains entail simultaneously information processors and information processed. (4) We have sought the subjective computer. Computers are being cultivated as intimate machines. Computers tend to raise egocentrism to the status of a virtue. People explicitly turn to computers for experiences they hope will affect their social and emotional lives, a machine totally different from the analytical engine Charles Babbage conceived in the 19th century. In many aspects, Turkle's concerns for the life on the screen during the age of the Internet resonate with Marshall McLuhan's early thesis on media as extensions of human consciousness during the age of television (McLuhan, 1964).
In summary, the emerging electropolis, according to critics, constitutes a massive reproduction of a hyperreality that may be hazardous to our social, political, and cultural values. The current telematic revolution has torn at the social fabric of our cities. Its consequences are so profound that Postman (1992) has argued that we are tending to surrender our entire culture to it. The entire society has become obsessed with gathering more and more information without a clear vision of which problems it wishes to solve. In this mindless quest for data, we elevate information to a metaphysical status and cheerfully
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grant to technology near-total sovereignty over our social institutions and cultural values (Heim, 1993). Technology has become self-justifying, self-perpetuating, and omnipresent. Information has become both means and end. As a result, the possibility that other narratives might lift us to higher ideals has been completely driven out of our collective consciousness (Kroker, 1992). Indeed, as Postman (1992) suggested, how we manage to overcome technological tyranny over our thought world is a daunting task for our technologically dependent society.
SEEKING GROUND TRUTH: FROM VISUAL TO ACOUSTIC THINKING
With the growing popularity of GIS, the resurgence of urban modeling/simulation efforts, and the ascendancy of the Internet, the computer is transcending its mere-tool status in urban studies. As with the new developments in telecommunications and media technologies, computers are changing—and indeed in some cases are becoming—the subjects of our studies. This dramatic shift in computers' roles entails not simply a transition from GIS to electropolis, but also a quantum move from unreality to hyperreality in various facets of our society. The reconstruction of urban reality from GIS (computers as tools) to electropolis (computers as places) in the republic of technology (Boorstin, 1982) echoes precisely what Turkle (1997) called the transition from a modernist culture of calculation to a postmodernist culture of simulation. The deconstruction of virtual cities from unreality (created by GIS and modeling/simulation techniques) to hyperreality (espoused by electropolis) reflects the concerns for and the resistance of the societal transformation of what Postman (1992) called from technology to technocracy to technopoly. During this process, as Postman so aptly pointed out, computers have progressively moved from being subordinate tools serving culture to being integrated components and finally to being the dominating force in our culture.
What I have tried to accomplish in this series of reports is to situate current reconstruction and deconstruction efforts in their broad social, cultural, and intellectual contexts. Ironically, western intellectual history often repeats itself with the alternation of opposing discourses (Berry, 1993). The critical literature on virtual cities may serve as an ideal testimony to the tidal fluctuations currently taking place between opposing scholarly discourses. The voluminous literature on computers as tools and computers as places once again has woven a thesis and an antithesis. On the one hand, computers have been hailed messianically as a panacea for all social, economic, and political ills in our society. On the other hand, computers have been castigated as a devil that eventually will take over and destroy our civilization. Both sides have claimed "ground truth" for their arguments regarding urban reality, but it is obvious that their feet stand on different grounds. According to McLuhan (1964), sharp dichotomy in an intellectual discourse usually reflects bifurcated minds deeply rooted in visual modes of thinking—the result of the Gutenberg (printing press) revolution. McLuhan and Powers (1989) further argued that the passion of the "visual space" mind-set leaves little room for alternatives or participation when no provision is made for two entirely different points of view. The result is usually the exclusion of alternative perspectives. Indeed, as Graham and Marvin (1996) have shown, the various arguments regarding the impacts of the telematic revolution could be profoundly misleading if taken individually. To fully comprehend the new urban reality created by the telematic revolution, McLuhan and Powers (1989) called for a fundamental shift from the
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Fig. 1. Understanding the media from acoustic thinking: the tetrad analysis. Source: McLuhan and Powers (1989). Modified by the author.
values of linear thinking (i.e., of visual, proportional space) to those of the multi-sensory life (i.e., the experience of acoustic space).
The difference between visual and acoustic thinking echoes the functional split of the right and left halves of the human brain. The left hemisphere places information structurally in visual space, where things are connected sequentially—having separate centers with fixed boundaries. The right hemisphere is more responsive to the messages in acoustic space, where things are interconnected simultaneously—having centers everywhere with boundaries nowhere. Visual thinking is thus linear and monolithic. Acoustic thinking is built on holistic and organic ontology. Acoustic space has no cardinal center, just many centers floating in a cosmic system that honors only diversity. This shift demands us to engage in simultaneous understanding and integral awareness. McLuhan (1988) invented the tetrad (Fig. 1) as a means of assessing the shift from visual to acoustic space. According to McLuhan, all media (1) intensify certain elements in a given culture while at the same time (2) making other aspects obsolete. They also (3) retrieve a phase or factor long-ago pushed aside and (4) undergo a reversal when extended beyond the limits of their potential. The four phases of the tetrad manifest the cultural life of an artifact in advance by showing how a total saturated use would produce a reversal of the original intent. The tetrad enables us to reposition ourselves into a holistic perceptive mode—the mode of the dynamically many-centered—to move away from the monolithic linear visual image. Visual thinking usually stresses one figure or ground, hardly both. Acoustic thinking engages us in double figures and double grounds that enable us to evaluate simultaneously the overall effects of an artifact on society. Instead of the simplistic Utopian and dystopian views, I believe that McLuhan's inclusive and irreducible four-part metaphor provides a better conceptual framework to assess the dynamics and social impacts of the current telematic revolution on society. As an exploratory probe resting on a set of questions instead of a bounded theory, the tetrad will facilitate our simultaneous understanding and
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integral awareness. To confine ourselves to only one metaphor, as most authors have done so far, is to engage in synecdoche—to mistake the part for the whole. Without perceiving all four-fold processes in operation regarding the dual role of computers as both tools and places, we will be unconscious of the overall effects of the telematic revolution on society. Indeed, providing adequate answers to the four-fold questions raised in McLuhan's tetradic framework represents an immense challenge for urban geographers in the years ahead.
NOTE
1I would like to thank Peter Hugill, Clarissa Kimber, Eugene McCann, and Daniel Overton for their comments on an earlier version of this paper. Thanks are also due to Bob Lake and Jim Wheeler for encouraging me to write this progress report series.
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