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08-iot
Think piece Jenny Lee 05/24
In the last think piece, I wrote that post-phenomenology depoliticizes technology by treating it as a mere mediator of humans’ relationship to social reality (by referring to the reading on virtual reality technology’s different impact on men and women). This week’s readings prove that I have been mistaken. Verbeek (2020) asserts that post-phenomology’s emphasis on technologically mediated human experience offers crucial guideposts to understanding the politics of technology and its relationship with humans. He achieves this by introducing Verbeek the notion of political hermeneutics of technology, which implies that technological mediation informs our interpretive lens of the world, including our politics. Verbeek (2020) outlines three main ways in which the hermeneutic aspect of technology mediates human experiences and have political implications: technology “shape(s) our interpretive frameworks” at times highlighting one framework as superior to the other (such as racist and anti-homeless technology), “help organize political interaction” and lastly “shape what is at stake in political discussions” (Verbeek, 2020, p. 153).
Verbeek also observes how approaching smart cities through the lens - political hermeneutics of technology - opens up fruitful discussion on the implications of datafication of society. Similarly, Zhao (forthcoming) challenges the understanding of technology as detached from the user and explore the various relations users have with technology and how these relations subsequently guide their interaction with the world. Both Kitchin (2014) and Li et al. (2019) emphasize how smart cities are envisioned to improve the quality of life of city denizens and how the internet of things shapes peoples’ experience and understanding of their surroundings. While Li et al. (2019) approaches smart cities through a pragmatic lens, Kitchin (2014) takes these observations further by hinting at the politics of data accumulated by smart technologies. Data are neither neutral nor free from ideology. Instead, they are “situated, contingent, relational, and framed and used contextually to try and achieve certain aims and goals” (Kitchin, 2014, p. 9). By directing attention to issues such as surveillance and corporatization of technology, Kitchin (2014) engages in what Verbeek (2020) calls discussing the social implications of technology in a democratic way. Kitchin’s (2014) observation of how datafication of society is dominantly understand in the language of corporates that serves corporates interests highlights the importance of the democratization of technological design mentioned in Verbeek’s paper. In addition, Zhao's (forthcoming) emphasis on peoples' mediated experience of place through technology can also further illuminate the implications of smart technologies. The implementation of internet of things – “also known as everyware” – (Kitchin, 2014) into our cities is discussed as inevitable due to the great benefits it can generate. While these are important factors behind the growth of smart cities, the question of how smart cities can take place in democratic ways should not be overshadowed by questions of efficiency, productivity and profitability of technological advancements.
I really like this week’s readings because it synthesizes a lot of the topics that are highly relevant to my study area in urban planning. I will first begin with discussing the article by Li et al (2019). In her article, she discussed many popular terminology and technology that are currently implementing to “smarten” the cities, e.g., ICT and IoT. She discussed “smart-card data” which used to analyze the mobility of passengers and VGI (volunteered geographic information) activity which can be used to map disaster-related issues involving crowdsourcing. Some other ideas include ABM and CA which are agents-based models to simulate phenomena such as land use/cover change. She also mentioned dashboards, which are a useful tool as we see during the pandemic (e.g. Zhao’s article talked about the John Hopkins Covid dashboard). One aspect we may not very familiar in this class is big data technology such as Hadoop or Apark Spache, which I hope we can discuss more in our leading presentation.
Li et al not only give examples of these techniques but also raised critical thinking in the use of ICT or IoT. For example, surveillance about IoT and smart cities has recently gained a lot of attention. Citizens start to realize and refuse the unexpected surveillance of their daily lives, e.g., using face recognition in a residential area. In China, for example, face recognition techniques have penetrated almost every aspect of our life, from grocery payment to entering the buildings. Therefore, the ethics of big data and data gathering should consider more in-depth users’ needs and concerns. In Verbeek’s reading (2020), he discussed the politics of things and that is also very important in the smart city’s movement. We do hope technology will not enlarge the gap between the rich and the poor, the city and the rural, but we do see agglomeration of resources and bigger gaps happening due to the new technology. But technology is by nature no right or wrong, good or bad, what matters is how we use them.
Zhao’s article (2021) about humanistic GIS reflects upon Ihde and Verbeek’s work, also include his new interpretation of “why spatial is special”, and what humanistic point of view brings to the new research agenda of the GIS community. I am curious about the “figure-ground” discussion in the article. In one of the classes I taught (“urban form”), we showed urban planning students how to draw a figure-ground map based on one of the famous examples by Nolli about 18 century Rome. What we discussed in that class is: traditionally we perceive buildings as figures and everything else as background (roads, landscapes, etc), but when we flip around, we will see new relations emerge – for example, we can understand the relations between public and private space. In Nolli’s map, we realize how the public plazas in Rome are connected to some space inside the Pantheon, thus forming a flow of public space within the city. (see links below). So I would like to hear a little more thoughts about this figure-ground relationship with the rest of the discussion in this paper.
Nolli’s figure-ground maps: https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2017/01/19/nolli-map-tool-small-developers http://nolli.uoregon.edu/default.asp https://ohiostate.pressbooks.pub/exploringarchitectureandlandscape/chapter/nolli-map/ http://www.urbandesign.org/
Zhao (2021) expands upon our first Verbeek reading by recognizing the unique role that GIS has in human perception by orienting these relations around the perception of place as it is conceptualized by humanistic thinkers. While most of the expanded definitions of technology-human relationships have the same names (hermeneutic, embodiment, background), Zhao includes an Autonomous relation, closely related to the alterity relation of Ihde in that the technology in this scenario can be experienced as a thing in itself (robot vacuum), but more deterministic, in my view, since the technology itself is both separate from the human and an essential element of the place as it is perceived by the human. Experiencing a place in the autonomous relation includes the presence and function of GIS technology and the capacity for the GIS to interact with the world (DJI drones) whereas the alterity relation only requires that the technology be experienced as a distinct entity. Ultimately, by applying the technological relations of Ihde to include place and GIS specifically, the hermeneutical gap between human perception and the world can be more systematically analyzed with the epistemology it makes possible. The increased intimacy that GIS brings to the human-technology relationship is even more consequential when the politics of these technologies are taken into account. While Verbeek presents a hopeful picture of how technologically mediated relations can still function in a democracy, I have serious reservations about the pace at which it is happening and the structures we are applying these new technologies to. The concept of path dependency is core to sociology; it is the idea that initial actions and conditions put an institution or innovation on a particular trajectory. Path dependency unfolds via a similar mechanism to how Verbeek explains technological mediation as something that pre-structures or constrains our choices (p. 145). If Path dependency applies in this scenario (which I think it does) what are the implications of beginning the process of converting modern cities to “Smart Cities” at a time when our society is still ravaged by socioeconomic and racial inequality? Li (2019) explains the many virtues and uses of real-time technologies for making cities more efficient and functional. But, who is going to be at the center of deciding what is most efficient? Who will be deciding where the first sensors will be installed, and as a result, what areas will initiate the path of becoming a smart city? Is the capacity of technology to mediate power relations and individual interaction (Verbeek, 2020) enough to overpower well-established processes of institutional development like path dependency AND powerful enough to effectively work backward to ensure that the technology is truly democratized in heavily stratified societies? I hope so, and since the continued incorporation of these technologies is inevitable, I hope we go forward with these concerns in mind.
Wenwen Li, Michael Batty & Michael F. Goodchild 2019. Realtime GIS for smart cities, International Journal of Geographical Information Science
Bo Zhao, Humanistic GIS: Towards a Research Agenda
Verbeek, P.P. 2020. Politicizing PostPhenomenology. Reimagining philosophy and technology, Reinventing Ihde, Springer Nature Switzerland
Steven 05/24
The readings from this course, especially those for this week, make me appreciate the post-phenomenological understanding of technology and human society. As human experiences are becoming increasingly emphasized not only in academia but also in the “practical” world, it is crucial to realize that such our human experiences are mediated by all types of technological artifacts (Verbeek 2001), which, interestingly, are designed and created by us human beings with political implications (Winner, 2007). Therefore, human experiences and technological artifacts are inseparable, as “human beings and technologies co-constitute each other.” (Zhao, forthcoming). Meanwhile, because it is human beings who both have experiences and create technologies, human beings, not technologies, should remain central in this stage of modern, technological society.
It seems that, as more and more new technologies are being invented, these technologies create all types of problems for our society. However, many of these problems are not “technological.” The privacy issue in this digital world serves as an excellent example of this. In order to protect privacy, computer scientists have spent tremendous efforts on all types of technological improvements, such as encryption, obfuscation, anonymization, etc. However, the fundamental solution to this privacy issue in the digital world should be building a “civilized cyberspace,” as stated by (Weiser and Scheider, 2014). They established a great parallelity between “civilized cyberspace” and “civilized place” to help explain this idea:
“[A civilized place] is a common phenomenon in stable societies and is what allows us to take a walk on the beach without having to fear robbery. It is mainly implemented by states or local communities. A civilized space, in general, is a space in which behavior is kept inside certain bounds by the rule of law, i.e., by making behavior transparent and subject to collective control, such that misbehavior shows up and can be consequently prosecuted, and people can take certain behavioral standards for granted.”
The center of this proposal for building a “civilized cyberspace” is not on technology, but the human participants in cyberspace, because human beings are the ones who create and gain feelings and experiences from the cyberspace, this shared technological artifact. Yet, it is not to argue that technological improvements are unnecessary because the world we experience could be better mediated through those improvements. Therefore, from a post-phenomenological perspective, I think that in this technosociety, we, as human beings, should remain active and optimistic about creating and improving technologies that could help us better experience the world.
References: Bo Zhao (forthcoming) Humanistic GIS: Towards a Research Agenda Verbeek P-P (2020) Reimagining Philosophy and Technology, Reinventing Ihde. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology: 141–155. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-35967-6_9. Weiser P and Scheider S (2014) A civilized cyberspace for geoprivacy. Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Privacy in Geographic Information Collection and Analysis - GeoPrivacy ’14: 5. DOI: 10.1145/2675682.2676396.
Maybe it is because the end of the academic year is upon us, but Zhao’s paper brought up big-picture questions for me. He argues that geographers must continue to push the scope of research concerning GIS, particularly in the examination of GIS as a “constant mediation between humans and places.” He puts forth a research agenda that conceptualizes Humanistic GIS as stemming from the humanistic tradition in geography. Thinking about theoretical frameworks in geography and philosophy over time that have paved the way to such a rich and generative space in which to examine GIS—like Donna Haraway’s “cyborg,” John Agnew’s work on place and space, and Ihde’s human-place relations ontology—I found myself wondering how the conceptualization of GIS might look different if it was only defined by those in fields like computer science and IT. Also, Zhao's question of how we conceptualize GIS-involved praxis to theoretical frameworks can be extrapolated to any area of study and is one that I am thinking with as I try to gain understanding between the theory and practice in my own subfields. More specific to the relationships between the papers, Zhao’s Background GIS description reminds me of Smart cities and the banality of power (Datta, 2019) who uses Mbembe’s (1992) idea of “banality of power” to make a case that smart cities can hide the power structures that shape a city, through technology that, because of its infiltration and normalization, is perceived as “mundane and banal, and therefore unspectacular and depoliticised.” (Datta, p 388) This idea of hidden power structures ties to Rosenberger’s idea of multi-stability, as discussed in Verbeek…particularly thinking through how an object can be so bound up with the dominant user’s interpretation of that object that other possible uses for that object become invisible. Rosenberg argues that one of the consequences of a “clash of interpretations” can be occlusion. The “politics of visibility,” together with the “politics of multistability,” exemplifies the political hermeneutics of technology. By organizing perceptions and interpretations, technologies embody subtle forms of power, whether visible or not. In contrast to Zhao and Verbeek, both of which contained nuanced discussions of technology, Li’s article, while interesting and informative, struck me as utopian in that it mainly focused on the aspirational logics of smart cities and lacked critical perspective. The dark side of the smart city has been described as an embodiment of state governmentality which at best, strips people of their right to create their own environment, and at worst surveils, monitors, and disciplines. (Datta, 2019)
Developed digital technologies incurred post-phenomenology associated with human experience leading to changes to individual behaviors, and broader cultural understandings. In this regard, humanistic geography features the involvement of the human experience. Furthermore, "place" is differentiated from space with respect to the concepts of location, locale, and sense of place for empirical purposes with respect to human experience. With technology as a mediation, human beings and the place can be discussed in different aspects. For example, Zhao (2021) explained the relationship between humans and GIS through embodiment, hermeneutics, autonomy, and background. In particular, Zhao (2021) argued in terms of hermeneutic GIS, geospatial data could be seen as a representation of a place on a high level.
Different representations may lead to a misunderstanding of GIS in terms of hermeneutic GIS. There are 3 data types representing spatial characteristics: (1) area, (2) point, and (3) geostatistics because observations are collected in forms of points (i.e., point or geostatistical data) or regions (i.e., area data) located in space. Area data are carried out by aggregation over a defined boundary such as an administrative unit (e.g., census tract). Point data exhibit the actual configuration of points over the study area. On the other hand, geostatistical data represent the characteristics of the interest subjects at residential locations as points. In this regard, it is important to design how to collect data because it affects the spatial characteristics in a spatial analysis. The sampling mechanism is addressing how data are collected. For example, survey data with a complex design would need weighted analyses if the data are not a random sample in space. If the data are not a simple random sample, clustering patterns won’t make sense in regard to the spatial structure in the analysis due to the involved bias in the data collection.
In the post-phenomenological aspect, technologies shape the interpretive framework, organize political interaction, and provide political issues. From a democratic perspective, Verbeek (2020) introduced the beauty of the post-phenomenological approach to the politics of technology associated with central themes such as liberalism and populism. For example, power relations are technologically mediated with limits and opportunities. Also, technologically mediated politics reveal mediated ways to bring people together. Furthermore, technologically mediated politics provide new forms of political issues and opportunities.
Throughout this week's readings (with the minor exception of Sui and Goodchild) I was reminded of David Kilcullen's exploration of the future urban system, defined by unplanned and unmanageable urbanization, littoralization, and connectedness.
Noting that the same information networks often facilitate the organization of licit and illicit activities Kilcullen argues that the features of the future city render it extremely vulnerable and conflict-prone, particularly as megacities are born of climate-driven unplanned mass displacement. The peri-urban space, in this model, is where the greatest infrastructural stress is predicted to manifest, as populations occupy an under-organized space defined by extreme dynamism, waste absorption (the toxic effects of licit and illicit activity tending to accumulate in the peri-urban space), and under governance.
The most important reason that this came to mind was in considering what kind of city was being discussed in the context of these readings. By my understanding, the smart city was something understood to be applied within an ordered and compliant environment - typically marked by already high rates of infrastructural development, given the degree to which 'big data' is collected through modifications to existing infrastructure. With reference to Kilcullen, however, I have my foundational suspicions about the degree to which smart cities can actually and will actually be constructed in the cities of today and tomorrow. Rapid urbanization and the emptying of spaces which are already being ravaged by conflict, resource scarcity, and climate change does not appear to be a phenomenon in decline. And, as a result, I would think that the usage of ICTs would be hindered by competing understandings of the city: one which understands the city through its geography and the concentration of people within a space, and one which understands the city through concentrations of wealth or recognized residents.
Li et al. recognizes the potentials of rapid urbanization, highlighting them in their introduction particularly well, but drowns out the question of 'what part of the city will be smartened' with questions of 'how the city will be smartened'. Certainly, on some level, increases in efficiency and information access would do much to better the urban metabolism, but as Kitchin noted, "technological solutions on their own are not going to solve the deep rooted structural problems in cities as they do not address their root causes. Rather, they only enable the more efficient management of the manifestations of these problems." (Kitchin 2014, 9) Getting to the problem of fragility then, it would seem that maintaining the city as a cohesive structure while adopting a 'smart' approach requires increasing efficiency to such a degree that the decreased threshold for instability is not crossed in the accumulation of urban stressors. This seems to be a risky endeavor in my opinion, particularly given the possibility of unforeseen mass migrations which would quickly contribute to the overwhelming of the urban metabolism despite its efficiency. In Kitchin's understanding of the urban environment, where the city and its residents possess the ability to shape one another simultaneously (Ibid, 2), this seems like a game of tug-of-war between the panopticon and the feral city.
Li’s piece (2019) is a well-rounded editorial that reviews the state of art in the following five dimensions of real-time GIS: information and communication technologies, real-time geospatial data in cities, real-time urban simulation, real-time visualization of city data, and real-time GIS process. In terms of real-time visualization of city data, it would be difficult to visualize trajectory data which includes time-varying locations and attributes of objects. It seems it is unrealistic to capture the multi facets of the data at the same time. Rather, researchers should focus on different aspects at a time, such as either temporal, spatial, spatio-temporal, or multi-variate. Even so, it is inspiring to know that space-time cube can be used in combination with multivariate visualization techniques to visualize multivariate data, making visual reasoning become possible.
Kitchin’s piece (2014) provides deep insight into the status quo of a real-time city or smart city. As for the notion of a smart city, I lean toward the second notion in which a mart city ‘encompasses policies related to human capital, education, economic development and governance and how they can be enhanced by ICT’ (p2). ICT, used by humans, can not make a city smart itself. Instead, it conjuncts with human and social capital and wider economic policy, as the author points out. Big data is not objective or neutral, free of political ideology, but is produced and mobilized by different agencies in society such as government, business, and citizens. More importantly, ‘What data are generated is the product of choices and constraints, shaped by a system of thought, technical know-how, public and political opinion, ethical considerations, the regulatory environment, and funding and resourcing. Data then are situated, contingent, relational, and framed and used contextually to try and achieve certain aims and goals’ (p9). Like small data, big data can also be subjective and contextual, especially when it is complemented by small data. One should always interrogate how data is produced and collected under which circumstances by whom, before starting to store, process, analyze, and visualize data. Arguably, big data and ICT themselves apparently cannot solve urban development issues, but can help reveal patterns and provide decision-making support and should be combined with policies and practices in order to assist urban governance. While discussion on smart urbanism sounds critical in this paper and beyond, maybe only with more thoughtful thinking can the real-time city, which seems unavoidably in the current stage or near future, be better constructed.
Internet of things is the new trend that takes advantage of the blooming interaction between digital infrastructure, sensors, smart devices, humans, and space. It is a relatively new topic, and many aspects still need to be further defined.
Kitchin discussed the potential of smart cities that are “instrumented with digital devices and infrastructure that produce big data.” Real-time analytics can be performed on big data to manage how cities function and are regulated. Despite numerous examples of smart city applications such as SmartSantanrerRA and city dashboards, Kitchin raised five concerns about a real-time city that focuses on politics of big data, ethical issues concerning surveillance, data quality, just to name a few. The author was especially concerned about technological lock-in that beholden cities to monopoly platforms and vendors, which I found rather interesting. On a smaller scale, IOT in households is advancement but not quite accepted by customers. I suppose there has not been a mature ecosystem that allows the industry (in the household IoT realm) to compete. But the concern is genius.
Nevertheless, much academic research has been accomplished with the help of big data and IoT devices. Li et al. reviewed information and communication technologies that help transfer data collected from smart city, smart house devices, and mobile phones. For example, radio-frequency identification, wifi, and wireless sensor networks can collect massive amounts of data. Such sensors and devices have been intensively used to study the contact pattern of infectious diseases. Previously the data were collected through dairies in which participants should write down who they encountered and the duration of that encounter (an example of directed data). And one sensor can record the identity and timestamp of other sensors in proximity or infer the distance between them from the signal intensity, which is a good proxy of contact and contact duration. Volunteered data such as the two-way friend status in social networking apps were also used to study the potential spreading pattern of college students.
Both articles put forward more questions than answers, and this indeed suggests that IoT, ICT, smart cities possess huge opportunities to be explored.
Kitchin introduced smart city enabled by advancement in ICT. ICT is contributing to real-time city management, city managers and citizens can have access to a variety of information real-time from a one-stop data hub. No doubt, smart cities are making our lives more convenient, for example, smart traffic management is reducing congestion, However, is our city overall made better by ICT? Different people may have sharply contrasting answer. The author discussed five concerns for smart cities, and I think I can add one more concern: the equity of city. Smart city is making city more efficient, but is it making city more equal? What about the need of marginalized population who have only limited knowledge on ICT and less accessed to ICT-embedded resources? Cities are more convenient, in some aspects, but cities are becoming more divided. I am not arguing the development of smart city itself makes cities less equal, but technologies is never value-free and apolitical, before developing smart city we must be clear on whose interest to serve, and to what end. And especially I have concern with Holland's argument that smart city should be business-led and neoliberal, in other words, de-regulation. ICT and Smart city is not panacea, I don't think ICT can solve policy problems. I am afraid business-led and deregulation in urban governance can result in less livable built environment.
Sui and Goodchild discussed the role of GIS and called for a shift from instrumental rationality to communicative rationality. Rather than allowing any technologies to dictate what we do and why we do it, we should dictate how technologies are utilized to serve our goal. As a result, they view GIS as a communicative bridging medium rather than a value-free technical mapping tool. This article was written in 2003, and there have always been such kind of debate as which paradigm is better: consensus building? rationalism? Feminism? Or else? And I assume this debate will continue in the future and may never wither. I agree that instrumental rationalism should be abandoned. Unfortunately the smart city development in practice share more similarity with instrumental rationalism and now we are living in a post-truth era. Is communicative rationalism a viable solution? I can hardly agree with neither. Communicative rationalism is criticized as too ideal and ignore the diversity in race, gender, religion and so on. However, in my opinion, it is exactly our failure to address the diversity in race, gender, religion, in other words, identity politics, that are dividing our society apart. GIS as a science like any other science is in search for rationality, but I think we should acknowledge both the political nature of technology and diverse identities, so that we can find a way to heal the broken society.
Li et al. (2019) mainly discussed about the technology foundation and architecture for a real-time GIS enabled smart city : information and communication technologies (ICT), real-time geoprocessing (visulization, simulation and analytics, data source), smart city applications (i.e. smart transportation, smart disaster management). This article inspire me that I can write one independent paper to describe “public remote sensing fact-check platform”, as long as I finish a demo. When it comes to the second paper, Kitchin (2014) discussed the concept of smart city with examples such as CASA’s London City Dashboard and proposed five concerns related to smart city among which I mainly concerned about hackable cities and panoptic city. Hackable cities: recently the real-time traffic service of google map e in Russia is banned by Googl due to political reason and cyber-attack is happenning between Russia and Ukraine. The examples that are happening certainly show the vulnerability of traditional and centrilized information systems to attack and political manipulation. Panoptic cities: it a similar idea with Foucault’s panoramic prison. Personally speaking, even I can accept my data to be collected, I can’t stand that privileged people can relate these data with me in real world. It’s horrible! I think technologies like blockchain may provide solutions to these two concerns to some extent.
I do think Sui and Goodchild (2003)’s article has strong connection with geographic misinformation and humanistic GIS. In this paper, GIS (especially GIS when considered as a channel for communicate information) was reconceptualized as media which in-line with Zhao’s humanistic GIS- especially hermetic GIS and GIS-mediated human experience. I like the idea, but it seems not suitable for the usage of maps, satellite images on mass media, in these scenarios, GIS seems content instead of channel or media. Besides, I’m really impressed by the assertion that derived from McLuhan’s law of media: ”GIS technology, like all other media and communication tools, can be abused by individuals and organizations to manipulate results and to legitimate and impose political economic and social agenda”. I consider geographic misinformation an obvious type of examples for this assertation - fake locksmith on google map, fake restaurant reviews on Yelp, blocked real-time traffic service in Russia.
Wenwen Li, Michael Batty & Michael F. Goodchild 2019. Realtime GIS for smart cities, International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 34(2), 311-324. Kitchin, R., 2014. The real-time city? Big data and smart urbanism. GeoJournal, 79(1), pp.1-14. Sui, D.Z. and Goodchild, M.F., 2003. A tetradic analysis of GIS and society using McLuhan's law of the media. Canadian Geographer, 47(1), pp.5-17.
