Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age of Embodied Information

351 Pages·2013·33.05 MB·English

by  Malcolm McCullough

Ambient Commons
Ambient Commons
Attention in the Age of Embodied Information
Malcolm McCullough
The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England
© 2013 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McCullough, Malcolm.
Ambient commons : attention in the age of embodied information / Malcolm
McCullough.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-262-01880-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Architectural design—
Philosophy. 2. Information commons. 3. Computer-aided design. 4. Human–
computer interaction. I. Title.
NA2750M35 2013
720.1’08—dc23
2012030277

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
for Kit
Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Prologue Street Level 1
Part I: Ideas of the Ambient 5
1 Ambient 7
2 Information 25
3 Attention 47
4 Embodiment 69
5 Fixity 91
Part II: Toward an Environmental History of Information 109
6 Tagging the Commons 111
7 Frames and Facades 137
8 Architectural Atmospheres 167
9 Megacity Resources 195
10 Environmental History 225
11 Governing the Ambient 253
12 Peak Distraction 275
Epilogue Silent Commons 285
Notes 295
Name Index 335
Subject Index 339
Preface
To sit down with a book, gentle reader, seems less and less what
life is like. To be alone with your thoughts was perhaps never the
usual human condition. Whether in a traditional tribal society or
amid today’s tastes for perpetual messaging, some people don’t
share so much as generate their thoughts, even their deepest feel-
ings, through constant social connectivity. Solitary reflection
may have always been the exception, a chosen path for a few, or
for a few chosen hours in a busy life; introspection remains a dif-
ficult art. Fortunately, to sit with a book is to enter a dialogue in
any case: unlike feeding among so many short, separate messages
at once, it is to take up a longer transaction between reader and
writer. It is also enjoyable: books exist not only for greater depth
or nuance, but also for the sake of language itself.
Here the transaction is this: like a highway resurfacing proj-
ect, Ambient Commons asks your patience with a temporary
inconvenience for the sake of permanent improvement. The
project seems justifiable enough: whether you call it “overload”
x | Preface
or “superabundance,” the flood of mediated information defines
this era. This book adds a tiny (albeit dense) drop to that flood.
For, as the philosophers explain, often the solution to too much
information is still more information, not only for tagging and
filtering, but also for making sense.
So with hope for improvements in how you cope with
superabundance, Ambient Commons invites you to rethink atten-
tion itself, especially with respect to your surroundings. You may
sometime want to look past preoccupation with devices such as
smartphones, and to notice more situated, often inescapable
forms of information, but this isn’t just about stopping to smell
the roses. At the very least, this book may help you justify greater
attention to your surroundings as something better than nostal-
gia. There is a practical new sensibility here. It belongs to a cog-
nitive revolution. So the next time you mumble, “Be here now!”
at someone texting while walking in your way, this book could
help you mean more by that.
You might also understand that anyone, in any era, may
have felt overload. That seems safe to assume. The world has
always been overwhelming, all the more so whenever such basic
needs as food or safety haven’t been met. If you believe the old
truism that you can keep only seven things in mind at once, then
perhaps people began sensing overload as soon as there were
eight.
Yet today surely something has changed. Much more in the
sensory field comes from and refers to someplace else. Much
more has been engineered deliberately for the workings of atten-
tion. The seductions of personalized media seem quite the oppo-
site of a numbing, monotonous din. They don’t lead to overload
so much as to overconsumption. They aren’t confined to specific
Preface | xi
sites like the workplace or the literary salon (where ladies and
gentlemen of centuries past complained of overload—from the
pressure to memorize too much poetry). Perhaps the biggest
change is their ubiquity: as you may have noticed, the world is
filling with ever more kinds of media, in ever more contexts and
formats. Screens large and small appear just about everywhere;
physical locations are increasingly tagged and digitally aug-
mented; sensors, processors, and memory are not just carried
about in pockets and bags, but also built into objects in everyday
life. All these augmentations increasingly connect. This isn’t the
clanking industrial city that led sociologists to emphasize distrac-
tion, nor the media monoculture that led them to situationist
critiques of spectacle, nor the all-seeing Orwellian state that
many assume to be the inevitable outcome of unchecked media-
tion. Today’s embodiments of information have become some-
thing far, far more chaotic, often quite culturally fertile, with
ever subtler cognitive appeal. The twenty-first-century arts are
the arts of interface. But interface is no longer just about sitting
at a machine. To describe how this new technology, these new
surroundings, and this new outlook for attention have begun to
interrelate, this book adopts a single name, “the ambient.”
When it comes to making sense of what just happened, a
book still works best, at least across any time longer than a
moment ago. (There is Twitter for that.) Although slow to pro-
duce, a book may still be the best way to trace an enduring path
through the ideas of a recent decade or even a recent century.
Here in the twilight of print, it helps to remember that. Although
a book can’t interconnect ideas nearly so readily as the web, it
can penetrate some of them better. As a longer form in a consis-
tent voice, a book may improve individual access to a field of
xii | Preface
ideas from many sources. I wrote this one to find out, and not
from a position of expertise so much as one where I could do
some digging. I wrote to help others find out for themselves, and
for people in different disciplines to find out about one another.
Please don’t read this to learn something new about your own
field. Read it instead as one writer’s inquiry. The word inquiry
should keep coming up. To write is to learn. To write well is to
bring others along, even through superabundance. Know that,
in the quickly rising flood of data, something just happened for
attention to surroundings.
Acknowledgments
Let me begin by stating how much Ambient Commons reflects my
good fortune to work at the University of Michigan, one of the
world’s foremost research universities. I especially value its com-
binations of expertise in tangible interface, cognition and envi-
ronment, social history of technology, and networked urbanism.
In all these areas, I am an amateur interloper. My university not
only tolerates but often distinctly values my being so. In particu-
lar, esteemed colleagues Michael Cohen, Caroline Constant, Paul
Edwards, Robert Fishman, Margaret Hedstrom, and John Mar-
shall have generously shown me the way. Taubman College,
where I teach architecture, has consistently provided encourage-
ment for this, a project quite far from its core mission.
My work on this book would never have begun without the
remarkable exposure provided by so many travels, especially in
the boom years 2005–08, in many ways the dawn of embodied
information. My thanks go to more individuals and organiza-
tions than I can name here. For one, I thank the interaction