David Berry’s Stunlaw blog has a series of interesting posts that are building to something very useful as well as through provoking. The one that I want to focus is the recent one on Porosity and Computation. The term porosity comes from the Naples essay by Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis (Benjamin and L?cis, 1925) and describes a bleeding across boundaries for both the social and material lives of the city. In this post, I want to start the process of working with this term rather than it being seen as a final response.
The discussion of the eating places in Naples reminded me of devices on the Internet of Things. The idea of the recipe reminds me of the use of protocols to transfer data between devices but for different purposes. For some it maybe sharing data for later reading, like a smart watch or exercise tracker, or it could be part of an aggregated collection by the device provider, think Strava and their mapping challenges (well, for secret military sites). These point to personal data streams that may or may not be made public1 or kept private unless made available in aggregate form. These raise larger questions about privacy and capture that I will not try to answer in this post, but quite different forms of social life appear when beginning to analyse the data.
However, these devices can be used as ways of ordering social life in the world by slicing the same social cake into different strata. This can be seen in the use of devices like phones to process the data or whether it passes to other connections. At the same time, the devices show multiple forms of social life that may not overlap but are controlled by others. In this way, the visible social life is made porous with varying layers of computation. In other work, I am exploring the interpenetration of these devices and computation behind it so will not say more yet, but there is an intensification of the computation within the area. However, I would argue that it might point to a void that might be filled by imagination or a theoretical approach.
One aspect that the post brings up is the ability to re-interpret both architecture and social lives to make them more palatable for the user, rather than being caught in a a cycle of capture and extraction. I am hoping to work through some of the other posts over the next few weeks – term willing. However, the idea of using this to develop a communal based knowledge project does appeal.
- “I did 5k in 20 minutes” posted to a social media platform, for hyperbolic example, that raises questions about how these devices hint at developing their own porosity. ↩︎
Benjamin, W and L?cis, A. 1925. “Naples” in Benjamin, W., Jephcott, E. (trans.) 1978. Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Shocken Books, New York
No Comments