Adam Greenfield, head of design at Nokia, speaks about the future of mobile computing.

He touches on some issues that I think are going to be integral to describing and theorizing and studying urban experience today:

1)the feeling that people are moving through the “virtual space” of their phones (or computers), and not necessarily the “real space” of the steet or the bus, or whatever. (“Schizogeographic wandering”) The media matters as much as the physical space, in terms of everyday experience. Media IS architecture, and architecture IS media.

2) the feeling that there is so much data flowing through the city at any one time/place, and that this data is incessantly archived in a variety of places, which makes it seem like it’s always “now”, no matter when it is.

3) cities like new york are getting more and more slippery. the idea of how spaces can be made to reject traction, i.e. staying and hanging on: e.g. condo-ization in all its forms, down to the very slippery, flimsy building materials. i definitely think there is some connection between people’s use of these ubiquitous/archival media and the increasing slipperiness (and fogginess) of ‘real’ space.

BUT

i cringed towards the end, at his imagination of times square billboards yelling out directions from the state and the corporations to people. also his pecking order was clear: “designers, consumers [and last, and least] citizens”