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Emergent media technologies and the production of new urban spaces

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Emergent media technologies and the production of new urban spaces

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Content emergent media technologies
and the
production of new urban spaces
by
d aniel d avid c hamberlain
a dissertation p resented to the
facult Y of the gradua te school
uni Versit Y of southern california
in partial f ulfillment of the
r equirements for the d egree
doctor of philosoph Y
(critical studies)
a ugust, 2009
copyright 2009 d aniel d avid c hamberlain
ii
Acknowledgments
While only one name is allowed on the cover, this work would not be possible without the
considerable support – some intellectual, some financial, some emotional, all appreciated – I
have received along the way.
My broader intellectual debts are acknowledged repeatedly in the pages that follow,
but I would like to thank especially those who advised me in the process of writing the
dissertation. Tara McPherson has been an invaluable colleague, friend, and committee chair,
providing tremendous support, pointed advice, helpful introductions, regular employment,
and considerable encouragement. Each of the individuals who served as dissertation and
guidance committee members at the University of Southern California, including Phil
Ethington, Steve Anderson, Anne Friedberg, Greg Hise, Curtis Marez, and Anne Balsamo,
helped to shape the perspectives that I brought to this project. I would also like to thank
Dana Polan, Marita Sturken, Manuel Castells, Jonathan Gray, Mimi Ito, Max Dawson,
James Bennett, Aram Sinnreich, Marissa Gluck, Matt Gainer, Miranda Banks, Heidi Cooley,
Scott Ruston, Chris Hanson, Richard Hodkinson, danah boyd, Jorie Lagerwey, Suzanne
Scott, and Dan Herbert, each of whom generously shared insights and support during the
dissertation process. Matthew Tinkcomm hooked me with an amazing seminar when I
began graduate school, and Lisa Parks demonstrated a model of dedicated, empathetic, and
engaged teaching and research that I will always keep in mind. I would also like to thank
my colleagues at the University of Michigan’s department of Screen Arts and Cultures, where
I had the opportunity to teach while I completed and assembled this work, as well as the
students in my courses in Ann Arbor who helped me to test and refine the ideas that follow.
iii
I was fortunate to have been supported by a number of fellowships over the past few years,
and would like to thank the Annenberg Center and the Graduate School at USC, as well the
Anna Bing Arnold family for their financial support and votes of confidence.
Finally, I would like to acknowledge the continued support of the friends and family who
provided encouragement along the way, including Gabriel Lichstein, Barbara Lempel,
Carin Friedman, Jeremy Greene, Elizabeth Greene, Emily Asofsky, David Asofsky, Gene
Dorosh, Marilyn Dorosh, Daryl Chamberlain, Michelle Chamberlain, and my parents,
Lila Chamberlain and David Chamberlain. I truly enjoyed the love and absurd distractions
offered by my children, Zoe and Berkeley Chamberlain, and the ideas, patience, friendship,
strategizing, editing, and insights of my hilarious partner in all things, Jennie Chamberlain.
iv
T able of Contents
a cknowledgments ii
t able of contents iv
l ist of f igures vi
a bstract viii
c hapter 1: introduction 1
configurability a ccross m edia and s pace 4
conceptual a pproaches 9
o verview 31
c hapter 1 e ndnotes 36
c hapter 2: s cripting though n etworks and protocol 38
n etwork infrastructures 41
infrastructures in the h ome 44
wired l ivingh ome 51
infrastructure e verywhere: wires and e ther 56
powerful infrastructures: The b ack-end 66
protocol 72
c hapter 2 e ndnotes 84
c hapter 3: m edia interfaces as interactive s cripted s paces 87
interfaces e verywhere 89
control at the i nterface 94
interface a esthetics: s creening m etadata 105
perfomative m etadata: agents and a daptive agents 114
branding and t iering at the interface 120
interfacing t elevision s tudies 126
f rom n on-places to m edia s paces 129
c hapter 3 e ndnotes 134
c hapter 4: n etworked m edia s paces and the c ultural l ogic of
n etworked personalized m obility 138
making n etworks l egible 139
s ocial s pace 144
l eaving h ome 147
The s patializing e ffects of n etworks 152
The rise of n etworked m edia s pace 158
The c ultural l ogic of n etworked personalized m obility 170
v
m odulations of control 175
c hapter 4 e ndnotes 180
c hapter 5: s cripting the community in p laya Vista 183
The h istory of the land at p laya Vista 187
The last s tand: ballona, playa Vista, and d reamworks 197
play Vista’s influences: n ew u rbanism 204
s cripting playa Vista through n ew u rbanism 213
f inishing the s cript: l ive/w ork/consume 224
s cripting playa Vista: n etworked m edia community 232
The s cripted community: i nteractivity as exclusivity 247
c hapter 5 e ndnotes 250
c hapter 6: distributing the s cript 254
b eyond playa Vista 259
s cripting the c ity: d owntown l os a ngeles 265
r endering the c ity through discourse and i magery 274
c hapter 6 e ndnotes 284
bibliography 285
vi
List of Figures
f igure 1.1: Acura TL advertisement 5
f igure 1.2: s taplton d enver price r ange f inder 18
f igure 1.3: l evittown, n Y 18
f igure 1.4: s elected s cripted s pace of l os a ngeles 25
f igure 2.1: h ome n etworking a esthetics 50
f igure 2.2: The wired l ivingh ome 52
f igure 2.3: landscapes of n etwork infrastructures 60
f igure 2.4: g oogle d ata center in The d alles, or 70
f igure 2.5: f ive-layer ip s tack and d ata e ncapsulation m odel 75
f igure 3.1: t elevision interfaces 88
f igure 3.2: t elevision interfaces e verywhere 91
f igure 3.3: t ime- and place-shifting 96
f igure 3.4: t iV o s uggestions 103
f igure 3.5: interface s creens - layers of d ata 106
f igure 3.6: w atching t ime on t elevision 108
f igure 3.7: interfaces u sed for information and s egmentation 109
f igure 3.8: integration of t emporal c ues in programming 111
f igure 3.9: interfaces, agents, and a daptive agents 116
f igure 3.10: operational m etadata 118
f igure 3.11: t elevision n etworks r espond 122
f igure 5.1: playa Vista’s Vision 185
vii
f igure 5.2: playa Vista a erial Views 188
f igure 5.3: The h istory of the land at p laya Vista 193
f igure 5.4: playa Vista’s t ransition 195
f igure 5.5: h ughes c ulver c ity plant 197
f igure 5.6: d reamworks plans for playa Vista 200
f igure 5.7: e mergent m edia c ampuses at playa Vista 201
f igure 5.8: f ilm production at playa Vista 205
f igure 5.9: h igh-profile n ew u rban communities 208
f igure 5.10: a rchitectural diversity at p laya Vista 218
f igure 5.11: configurable d esign at playa Vista 223
f igure 5.12: t echnology at playa Vista 236
f igure 6.1: prospect n ew t own near l ongmont, co 260
f igure 6.2: madrone l ofts by John lainge l uxury 265
f igure 6.3: d owntown l os a ngeles plan 267
f igure 6.4: la l ive d evelopment 271
f igure 6.5: grand a venue project 273
f igure 6.6: grand i ntervention 273
f igure 6.7: park f ifth in d owntown l os a ngeles 276
f igure 6.8: d owntown l os a ngeles d evelopment r enderings 277
f igure 6.9: d owntown l os a ngeles h omeless population h eat maps 281
viii
Abstract
This dissertation argues that emergent media technologies and contemporary urban spaces
are corresponding phenomena, connected through cultural and economic emphases
on personalization, mobility, and interactivity. Interrogating developments in the built
environment alongside changes in media technologies — like linking modernist urbanity
with the cinema or mid-century suburbia with broadcast television — this dissertation
engages material developments and the cultural constructions that make them possible.
Conceptually, emergent media technologies and spatial practices are critiqued as interactive
scripted spaces that surface ideological forces of interactivity, personalization, and mass
customization in spatial and technological realms. Materially, the technological scripts of
network protocols and infrastructure yield new media interfaces – like TiVo and iPod screens
– that emphasize interactivity and personalization. Similarly, the spatial scripts of urban
planning and development yield new urban spaces – such as neotraditional communities and
adaptive urban regentrification – that emphasize flexibility and customization. In everyday
environments the regular and repeated articulation of networks, interfaces, and spaces yields
new practices and expectations of how the world should respond to our technologically-
inflected desires. Grounded in media and urban theory as well as through engagements
with real-world developments – like Playa Vista, a new urbanist community in Los Angeles,
and downtown Los Angeles itself – this dissertation argues that Networked Media Spaces
are created wherever media interfaces are engaged with media networks, and the extension
of interface-associated notions of personalization and customization into these spatial
environment in turn yields new modes of techno-mediated thinking that shape individual
and cultural imaginaries regarding the built environment. These new spatial demands have
been met with substantial changes – the establishment of revitalized downtown centers,
ix
technoburbs, neotraditional neighborhoods, wired homes, flexible work environments,
and gated communities – that are determined in part by affinities with emergent media
technologies and in part by the broader economic imperatives of neo-Fordist mass
customization. Perhaps most crucially, these practices are framed by changes in a cultural
vision of what it means to live in a moment of significant techno-spatial development. From
master planned communities to gentrifying urban cores to ubiquitous WiFi hotspots, these
scripted interrelations of capital, media, and space are ultimately negotiated on an everyday
basis through a cultural logic of networked personalized mobility.
1
Chapter 1: Introduction
This dissertation argues that emergent media technologies and contemporary urban spaces
are corresponding phenomena, connected through cultural emphases on personalization
and mobility that are both actual and imagined. This argument builds on a tradition of
situating developments in the built environment alongside changes in media technologies
— such as understanding early twentieth century urbanity as a process linked to the cinema
or mid-century suburbia as a phenomenon imbricated with broadcast television — in a
manner that is attentive to both material developments and the cultural constructions that
make them possible. Like these precedents, the argument is not simply that emergent
media technologies shape the physical and imaginary construction of contemporary urban
developments, but that a culturally distinctive mode of living is built upon specific types of
technological engagement and upon new spatial practices. Because the media technologies
under consideration — laptop computers, digital video recorders, mobile phones, portable
media players, and the array of infrastructure that support them — are not as culturally
singular as common understandings of “the cinema” or “the television,” a large part of the
current project is given over to exploring their affinities as interface-intensive networked
computing devices. Because the urban spaces under consideration — new urbanist
neighborhoods and newly gentrified downtown cores, primarily — are not as obviously
dominant as the mass-produced post-war suburb, some effort is made to explain how
divergent built environments operate within similar conceptual frameworks. These emergent
media technologies and emergent built environments are cultural and technological forms
built upon the remediation of previous systems and decades worth of development and
experimentation, not simple ruptures with the past. Yet these technologies and urban spaces
both took on notable cultural salience at the same time, roughly from the middle of the last
2
decade of the twentieth century to the economic collapse at the end of the first decade of the
twenty-first.
So what kinds of affinities exist between emergent media and urban spaces? What does it
mean to think about them as corresponding phenomenon? Are new types of spaces created?
Do people practice space differently simply because emergent media technologies allow for
new forms of mobility? Are technologies being developed to explicitly take advantage of new
types of urban space? This dissertation argues that the relationships are intertwined, as new
technological engagements encourage people to use spaces differently and new spatial forms
encourage the development of appropriate technologies. More importantly, however, the
development of emergent technologies, urban spaces, and spatial practices are constitutive of
a set of broader economic, cultural, and social changes that impact the very manner in which
individuals come to know and imagine their everyday life experiences.
This techno-spatial phenomenon manifests itself in the establishment of new spatial forms
and a fresh cultural logic, both situated within an overarching neo-Fordist reorganization
of the cultural and economic spheres. At the heart of the continued modulation of
global capital is a profound shift toward the commodification of interactivity and the de-
differentiation of production, reproduction, and consumption. Not simply subject to the
discipline of capital, individuals are specifically and systemically incorporated into neo-
Fordist networks through new relations of power that offer considerable freedoms and
flatteries in exchange for constant monitoring and the tacit approval of the system. This
dissertation argues that the relations of emergent media technologies and spatial practices
can be understood through a framework of interactive scripted spaces which surfaces the
ideological forces of interactivity, personalization, and mass customization in spatial and
technological realms. The spatial scripts of urban planning and development have yielded
new urban spaces – such as neotraditional communities and adaptive urban regentrification
3
– that emphasize flexibility and customization. The technological scripts of network
protocols and infrastructure have yielded new media interfaces – such as TiVo menus
and iPhone screens – that emphasize interactivity and personalization. Moreover, even
as this technological script yields the virtual space of the media interface, the engagement
of network infrastructures through media interfaces also transforms the familiar built
environment into a new spatial form, the networked media space. Ultimately, these scripted
interrelations of capital, media, and space are negotiated on an everyday basis through a
cultural logic of networked personalized mobility.
The broad impact of these corresponding and intertwined media changes and spatial
developments can be seen in numerous examples of contemporary social practice. The
potential for ubiquitous network connectivity leads many individuals to prefer, expect,
and demand that all places provide network access. The everyday use of technologies that
allow for customization and personalization leads individuals to expect malleability in other
aspects of their social life. The flexibility of certain architectural configurations increases the
expectation that all places can be rearranged. Broadcast television is challenged by time- and
place-shifted viewer selected video, and individuals re-organize their uses of time and space
to take advantage of new flexibilities. Phones have become mobile and are no longer limited
to the exchange of mediated voices, allowing their users the ability to remain connected to
social networks even as they roam about disparate spatial environments. Office layouts have
become modular and decentralized as communication systems are increasingly governed by
place-independent login credentials rather than place-based access. Cafes are now places
of work for patrons as well as baristas. Exurban housing developments have traded in the
identical ticky-tacky little boxes of mid-century suburbia for a new conformity based on
dozens of housing configurations and hundreds of personalized options. Millennial urban
renewal involves pliant soft-lofts and an emphasis on communal social spaces in buildings
4
and on lots previously reserved for industrial use. These disparate spaces and corresponding
lifestyles are underwritten by network infrastructures that allow for mobile synchronous
communications and personalized asynchronous media consumption. Places formerly
dedicated to work, leisure, consumption, and socialization have in many instances lost their
singular purpose and have become hybrid environments supporting complex and shifting
spatial practices. Contemporary technological and spatial experiences are simultaneously
scripted in advance and increasingly responsive to individuals’ desires. Individuals expect
to experience feelings of freedom and control in their everyday social engagements, even as
their actions are commodified by an economic system increasingly designed to incorporate
individual choice into the production and circulation of goods and services. In short,
our expectations of the world have changed to the point where we expect flexibility,
responsiveness, and customization in situations where we might have previously faced more
rigid choices. A new cultural logic is at work, one that emphasizes mobility, personalization,
and control.
Configurability Accross Media and Space
This cultural logic can be seen, for example, in a 2008 commercial for the a cura tl . in this ad,
which premiered during the s uper b owl, a young man sits in an upstairs den maneuvering his
mouse around a computer screen. (f igure 1.1) h is surroundings suggest an easy sophistication
— spare white walls, mid-century modern furnishings, an a pple imac resting on a glass table,
and an entire wall of windows looking out on a well-manicured private yard. glancing out
the window, he contemplates the car in his driveway. r egistering the dichotomy between the
interactive, customizable, and engaged experience he has with his computer and the seemingly
static relationship with his car, the man uses his wireless mouse to drag the cursor off of his
computer screen. with the all-powerful pointing device now liberated, he begins to drag and
drop icons representing his digital lifestyle off of physical objects, through the upstairs window,
5
and onto the car below. h e first selects the icon for a mobile phone, magically upgrading his
car to include a “bluetooth hands-free link.” n ext he chooses an ipod, so that his car might
possess “mp3 connectivity.” r ounding out “the luxuries of the modern world” are a surround-
sound system and, incongruously, a golf bag. The vehicle, somehow primed for networked
customization, takes on the attributes of the devices and systems selected with the mouse.
The commercial ends with a voice-over suggesting the benefits of leading a mobile lifestyle
in a configurable automobile as the newly-modern car eases through a sylvan scene. This
advertisement is clearly an attempt to generate interest in a product by associating something
familiar — a high-end sedan — with something new and exciting; the association with a pple
computers in general and the ipod in particular is a strategy followed by the advertising and
feature appointment of many carmakers in recent years.
More notable in this advertisement is the suggestion of an affinity between the configurable
experience offered by emergent media technologies and the broader world of daily
engagements with the objects of everyday life. The implicit argument in this spot is twofold.
First, that individuals – who, presumably, can afford a two-level home in a leafy suburb and
f igure 1.1: Acura TL advertisement
configurable m edia, configurable w orld, Screen grab by author.
6
a car outfitted with the latest in media technologies – are accustomed to engaging with a
host of entertainment and communications media technologies that allow for regular and
compelling interaction and customization. Although this particular spot foregrounds the
familiar user interface of the computer and mouse, it also references the personalization
offered by the interfaces of the iPod and the mobile phone. Beyond mere familiarity with
and appreciation of the modes of interaction offered by contemporary media technologies,
the advertisement suggests that individuals accustomed to configurable media experiences
expect a greater degree of responsiveness in other aspects of their lives. Crucially, the spot is
not simply about the mediation of automobiles, but the idea that the material world should
be more easily subject to our desires. The product being sold in this spot happens to be a car,
but one could imagine an extension of this approach to a range of objects, spaces, and even
other people. The man upstairs now wants point-and-click control over his entire world.
Of course we should also be attentive to the particulars of the representation on offer, and
ask whether this presumed mastery over the world is exclusive to the upper-middle class
white male offered by this advertisement, or if this cultural vision finds a broader purchase.
Certainly this commercial is invested in the association of set of material privileges with a
particular social identity, as it is selling an aspirational lifestyle vision as much as a specific
car. Yet we can point to advertisements for both technologies and urban spaces that feature
a broader representation of subjects, at least along vectors of race and gender. We shall see
in the case study in chapter five that this cultural vision is often sold as being universal, even
predicated on diversity, while the actual cost of participation means that different individuals
will have different expectations as to how responsive the world will actually be.
This advertisement is representative of both the cultural salience of configurable media
experiences and an associated spatial logic that extends the ideal of personalization beyond
digital devices and into those parts of the material world not strictly associated with media.
7
This dissertation explores these themes by connecting the spatial implications of emergent
media technologies to their fundamental conceptual underpinnings. In a meaningful sense,
understanding the details of network infrastructures, networking protocols, and code-
driven media interfaces provides insight into both contemporary media engagements and
the social spaces that support them. The argument is not simply that new gadgets drive
new uses of space. Although many determinist examples of new techno-spatial practices
exist, from iPods on the subway to mobile phones on the jetway, it is more productive to
consider how we are engaging in a more fundamental shift in which the intersections of
media interfaces and pervasive communications networks are producing an entirely new
paradigm of spatiality for the network society. Most any space, at most any scale, has the
potential to become a configurable, contingent environment produced through physical,
social, and networked engagements. We can already see changing spatial practices at work
in homes and places of work, on commutes, in cafes, and indeed in almost any public
place, with individuals simultaneously engaging the media interfaces in front of them – on
laptops, iPods, iPhones, Blackberries, mobile video devices, and some gaming platforms
– and the social world about them. In some ways this is an extension of the manner in
which previous associations of space and urbanism emphasized a shared cultural logic and
featured era-specific manifestations in the built environment. The urbanism of the modern
city, for example, has been understood as linking the new modes of seeing, knowing, and
desiring associated with specific modes of transport (streetcars, strolling through the city)
and consumption (arcades, department stores) with the developing language of the cinema;
at the same time, this urbanism featured specific spatial practices like nickelodeons and
movie palaces. The urbanism of the postwar era has been critiqued as completing a circuit
of distracted consumerism through linked practices of television viewing, automobile travel,
and mall shopping, practices which all coalesced around the material expression of the
mass-produced suburban home. The emergent urbanism of our contemporary moment
8
emphasizes continual mobility at multiple scales (air travel, heavily mediated automobiles,
an emergent emphasis on transit and pedestrian issues); features ubiquitous, integrated,
and often mediated retail environments; and is expressed through a number of spatial
practices, including the deployment of network infrastructures, an emphasis on de-zoning
and adaptively reusing previous places in favor of new mixed-use environments, and a
broad trend toward flattening de-differentiating productive, reproductive, and consumptive
spatial practices. Although the emergent urban mode clearly builds on the cultural
logics of previous eras, it is fundamentally of a different order in that it also supports the
personalized mediation of most any space. In other words it is not just that emergent urban
spaces are developing in a manner that has affinities with the development of emergent
media technologies, or that media and space occasionally come together to find a material
expression in the built environment. It is instead the case that everyday media and everyday
space are becoming so fundamentally intertwined that they must be thought together; their
cultural logic must be one of identity as well as analogue.
Accordingly, in addition to highlighting the connections between emergent media
technologies and spatial practices, this dissertation considers how the regular and
repeated articulation of networks, interfaces, and spaces yields both material changes to
everyday environments and shifting expectations as to how spaces should respond to our
technologically-inflected desires. Configurable media experiences have developed alongside
responsive socio-spatial developments, such as flexible work environments, modular
layouts of retail and residential space, and changing expectations toward ratios of living,
working, and consuming. Although some of these shifts toward flexible spatial practices
have developed over decades, they have found broader expression and cultural signification
in recent years as a variety of technological and cultural factors have encouraged the de-
differentiation of space. As suggested in the case study in chapter five, the move toward
9
more flexibly produced housing and communities is tied to both contemporary economic
imperatives and systematized design ideals. Along these lines we might also consider how
media interfaces have analogues in spatial interfaces. These metaphorical, ideological, yet
material approaches to place-making – such as new urbanist neighborhood design and loft-
style urban revitalization – build upon the logics of control and personalization emphasized
in media interfaces. Just as media interfaces enable the filtering of entertainment and
communication experiences, spatial interfaces work to order other lived experiences and
screen out undesirable possibilities. If in the past we have seen conceptual and theoretical
affinities between industrial-age urbanism and the cinema, or between post-war mass-
produced suburbia and television broadcasting, we can now begin to detect how such
affinities between emergent media technologies and contemporary spatial formations
work within and help support a shift toward an economic and cultural moment based on
principles of mass customization.
In a sense, then, this dissertation is about emergent media technologies, how people use these
technologies in specific places, how people use space differently as a result of the use of these
technologies, how specific instances of the built environment are being adapted to these new
techno-spatial practices, how these media and spatial practices resolve into the formation of
distinct lifestyles, how a cultural imagination of the contemporary social world is built upon
the promise and practice of such lifestyles, and how all of these developments are framed by
a specific moment of the global political economy. This set of questions is broad, and the
project of this dissertation is to understand what binds them together.
Conceptual Approaches
The intended contributions of this dissertation to the bodies of thought around media and
space are threefold. First, the conceptual approach, which is present in this introduction
10
and throughout the dissertation, is to think dialectically about media and space through
the interdisciplinary application of specific modes of critique. In the simplest terms, the
arguments that follow often deploy terms familiar from the study of spaces to critique media
artifacts and practices; or they apply terms developed within the field of media studies to new
types of spaces. The complexity of emergent media networks, for example, is considered as
an analogue to the complexity of the urban environment and is critiqued through the rubric
of legibility advanced by Kevin Lynch.
2
Flexible new homebuilding practices are treated as
analogues to new media interfaces and understood through the logic of customization that
governs many contemporary technological engagements. The concept of the scripted space
is used to frame both new spatial practices and emergent media systems. Such approaches
illuminate the subjects under consideration with fresh perspectives and allow for the
development of synthetic concepts that more pointedly address the intersections of media
and space. This last point is crucial, as an underlying tenet of the arguments here is that
space and media are sufficiently entangled at this point that they must be addressed with
interdisciplinary conceptual tools. Attentive to changing entertainment and communications
media technologies, the pressures of globalization, and the history of urban development, this
interdisciplinary project connects new media theory, as practiced in critical media studies, to
the broader traditions of cultural studies, the spatial concerns of critical geography, and the
historical specificities of urban studies. Put differently, it pushes media theory beyond the
surface of the screen. At the same time, it considers how the spatial turn of the humanities is
altered by the salience of emergent entertainment and communications media technologies.
3

Ultimately, the aim of the project is to advance a set of critical concepts that recognizes that
the relations of media, space, and society are sufficiently interrelated that the study of this
formation demands an interdisciplinary approach.
11
A second contribution is the introduction, situation, and extension of a set of terms that
describes contemporary media and spaces. This is accomplished primarily through the
framing of networks and interfaces as the salient characteristics of emergent media technologies
and systems, and the subsequent use of these terms to explore the affinities between emergent
media and emergent urban development. This is not intended as a determinist or a formalist
effort, as the argument that follows is not particularly interested in policing the boundaries of
what qualifies as emergent media, nor does it engage often with specific examples of cultural
production. Indeed, this broad framework is deployed largely to resist a simple engagement
with individual devices or technologies, and to instead consider the broader cultural logics in
which these devices participate. The arguments that follow instead wrestle with the slightly
amorphous collection of devices and services that support interpersonal communications
or entertainment in the twenty-first century. To be sure, specific examples — from mobile
phones to laptop computers to digital video recorders — are presented throughout the
chapters, but the project is focused on the type of social and cultural interactions that stem
from an environment in which all of these technologies interact in a broader media ecology
comprised of networked micro-computing devices.
Specifying even this loose definition raises questions about terminology, which must be
sorted through in order to understand the relationship between contemporary media
technologies and space. As the issues at stake in the 100-day 2007 Writers Guild of America
strike reminded us, the contemporary media landscape is populated by destabilizing
technologies of production and reception, and battles over semantics have material
consequences. The WGA leadership called for a strike over a number of issues, including
jurisdiction over reality television programming, animation, and made-for-the-web content,
a greater participation in home video revenues, and standard increases in minimum
compensation, but the primary point for negotiation was focused on residuals for content
12
produced for newer technologies.
4
Even as the guild again capitulated in its negotiations
over DVD and home video revenues and gained little ground in its battles over jurisdiction,
it steadfastly maintained demands for a financial stake in content produced for or distributed
through “New Media.” As used in these high-profile industry negotiations, this term
primarily referred to the distribution of made-for-broadcast television programs and
theatrically-released films through the Internet or on mobile phones, but was intentionally
left vague and future-looking in order to account for permutations of platforms, technology,
and programming. In industry argot, new media refers to television-like content that is not
“free television, basic cable, pay TV, videodisc/videocassette and radio, even if digital.”
5
The
specifics of this definition might seem narrowly defined given the array of products that have
been popularly discussed using this term over the past decade and a half. Indeed, the term
“new media” has been deployed in so many popular and critical contexts over this period
that it has lost any commonly understood meaning. Worse than that, the term tends to stop
critical discussions before they can get going, in no small part because, as Carolyn Marvin so
memorably noted, all old media were once new.
6

Building off Raymond Williams’ description of the processes of culture, I find it more
useful to think about changes in the contemporary media ecology using the terms emergent,
dominant, and residual.
7
Such a formulation recognizes that the experience of media has
not necessarily been radically altered for all viewers in recent decades, even as it points to
the likely direction in which media experiences are heading. In the case of television, for
example, the residual mode of viewing television exclusively via over-the-air broadcasts
still applies to approximately 14% of U.S. television households.
8
The dominant mode of
television consumption refers to the constellation of cable, digital cable, and digital satellite
that feeds the majority of television households, but where those viewers tend to retain the
residual viewing patterns of watching programming on dedicated television sets according to
13
programmers’ schedules. The emergent mode of television viewing characterizes time-shifted
consumption associated with watching television on digital video recorders and digital video
discs as well as off-television consumption through the Internet or on mobile phones. In the
case of television, this formulation recognizes the distinction between the various viewing
practices without reducing these distinctions to individuals or devices. It also allows for the
conditionality and indeterminacy of emergent modes of media engagement, which need
not be celebrated simply for being new or automatically praised as liberating advancements.
Some emergent practices will catch on and become culturally significant, even dominant
(like Satellite television in the 1990s), some will persist even if forgotten about (like the
VCR+ recording system), and others will just disappear (like Laserdiscs, which never became
a major mode of television viewing, even though some series were released on the format).
Emergence at once describes a temporality, an associated set of technologies, and a cultural
practice of these technologies.
Building on this conception, the term emergent media technologies is used in this project to
refer to those devices and services that rely on interactive engagements with microprocessors
and networks. Emergent captures the sense in which networked computing technologies
have become a meaningful part of the contemporary media ecology without simply replacing
dominant cultural practices. Such dominant cultural practices around communication and
media technologies still support local phone service, broadcast television, video stores, and
the like, but these practices are, by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century,
being seriously augmented and challenged by a set of emergent media technologies and
practices. More than simply using new devices or viewing content in new locations,
emergent media practices that involve users programming their digital video recorders,
multi-touching their iPhones, or watching YouT ube videos go further, engaging users with
information networks, media interfaces, and the programming and protocological code
14
that describes both networks and interfaces. These fundamental conceptual properties are
simultaneously functional and ideological, delineating both the apparatus and impact of
emergent media. That is, networks, interfaces, and code exist as technical specifications
that describe how emergent media devices and systems actually work; at the same time,
they proscribe the functional limits of emergent media and the expectations users have as to
what is possible from emergent media. Defining emergent media in these terms periodizes
the argument to roughly the past fifteen years during which network infrastructures have
been built out, microprocessing devices have proliferated, and media interfaces have been
developed. In a similar vein, using the term emergent urbanism to describe developments
such as new urbanism and urban gentrification serves to highlight the ways in which
these developments are culturally significant if not absolutely widespread phenomena.
Contemporary trends still favor dominant modes of suburban and exurban development that
extend decades-old practices, but these emergent forms of development have coalesced into a
recognizable phenomenon over roughly the same period as emergent media technologies.
This is of course not the only way to conceptualize the contemporary media landscape,
and other popular approaches emphasize different concepts. As discussed in chapter three,
the most popular tack for describing the current moment recognizes that the cultural
importance of configurable media experiences is popularly linked with specific devices, such
as Apple’s iPod or TiVo digital video recorders, and with a shift toward a media ecology
operating within a broader rubric of convergence. Understood as convergent devices, specific
technological gadgets bring the processing power of computers to bear on digitized media
in a manner that allows users to store, organize, and access media content using customized
filters, agents, and layouts. This technologically-determinist approach, popular with Wired
magazine and countless techno-centric online venues – like engadget, gizmodo, or Wired’s
own gadget lab – roughly equates digital devices with convergence and increased user
15
control. Such an approach buys into the “black-box fallacy” critiqued by Henry Jenkins
in Convergence Culture.
9
Whereas Jenkins forcefully argues in favor of understanding
convergence as a series of discourses representing the interests of conglomerates, professional
cultural producers, and engaged media users, it is worth unpacking the black boxes a bit
further in order to understand how their role in a convergent media ecology may be more
symptomatic than determinative of greater economic and cultural shifts. Recognizing that
specific devices will come and go, the black boxes in question are certainly emergent media
devices that can be described in terms of the aforementioned networks, interfaces, and code.
Framed by their conceptual underpinnings rather than as branded gadgets, such devices can
be productively critiqued rather than simply discarded. Manuel Castells, for example, has
argued that the network usefully describes most forms of contemporary social organization,
has an unevenly distributed materiality, and implies a binary logic of inclusion/exclusion
that has the power to disenfranchise the disconnected.
10
Alexander Galloway has drilled
further into the architectures and code needed to make the network function, suggesting
that the distributed nature of networks have engendered and enabled protocol as a system
of control that is material, textual, and political.
11
And William Uricchio has argued
that media interfaces serve to give users a sense of control even as they actually advance
a “radical displacement of control” in favor of filters and adaptive agents.
12
By engaging
both the material nature and conceptual power of these elements – network, interface, and
code – these critiques retain an interest in the technological functioning of emergent media
technologies but insist on a more complex understanding of their social impact. For Castells
and Galloway in particular, it is not simply that technological networks or computer codes
cause change, but that material networks and existing protocols are instead manifestations of
complex changes in social relations. Castells understands the network as a primarily social
form that has instantiations of materiality. Galloway sees protocol as a mode of power,
arguing “protocol is how technological control exists after decentralization.”
13
The power of
16
each of these rubrics – including the underexplored media interface – is precisely that the
technological mode is but a facet of the changing social formation.
Accordingly, we must situate these massive shifts in technological function within and
alongside significant changes in the social and economic orders. Beyond the vague but
unmistakable interplay between technological change and the forces of globalization exists
a more distinct relationship to post-Fordist business strategies, a now-familiar and pervasive
flattening of hierarchies, outsourcing of contract work, employment of part-time or short-
term labor rather than career employees, and relocation of the sites of labor. Overarching
neoliberal imperatives have driven both this regime of flexible accumulation and associated
changes in modes of marketing and production known as mass customization.
14
As opposed
to mass production and distribution, companies emphasizing mass customization attempt to
slightly alter their products to meet the desires of niches of individuals or directly incorporate
consumer interest and feedback to truly customize products to personal tastes. The mode
of mass customization is emergent in the sense that it does not simply replace previous
modes of production, but generally exists alongside more traditional methods. Flexible
employment and production practices are prevalent in nearly every industry in which this
mass customization takes hold, but this approach takes on new valences in digital media
economies, where consumer labor is commodified right into the service being offered. Mark
Andrejevic has noted that “one of the cannier strategies of mass customization is its claim
that surveillance works to the advantage of consumers by allowing producers to more closely
meet their wants and needs” and that this effect is heightened by the surveillant capabilities
of emergent media technologies.
15
Like networks and protocol, mass customization is an
integral characteristic of contemporary media industries and an emergent phenomenon with
broader social salience.
17
Moreover, the concept of mass customization has specific resonance with regard to emergent
forms of urban development. Although much of the boom in housing construction over
the past two decades has been based on familiar patterns of quickly thrown-up cookie-cutter
neighborhoods of near-identical homes, an emergent pattern of construction and renovation
has been focused on the configurable possibilities of contemporary building. Especially
in greenfield neighborhoods built in accordance with new urbanist principles, an effort is
generally made to provide a wide array of housing options, ostensibly to ensure a diverse
community. In the enormous community of Stapleton currently under construction on the
grounds of the former Denver airport, for example, the master developer has embraced an
approach they call “variety by design,” which features thirty-four different home styles in five
distinct neighborhoods. The builders’ sales representatives instruct potential purchasers to
first pick a price range from their handy “Price Range Finder,” which quickly narrows the
field to one or two of the sixteen home builders. With a builder selected, the prospective
homeowner can set about selecting from an array of housing types (“Single Family Home,”
“Live-Work/Townhome,” “Condominium,” “Row Home,” or apartment), home styles,
floor plans, color combinations, amenities, and technology packages (See Figure 1.2).
16

The available combinations result in thousands of different possible configurations for any
individual homeowner, and a neighborhood aesthetic that is a far cry from the conformity
and limited design choices that has long characterized mass produced suburban housing
(see Figure 1.3). While this approach guarantees some aesthetic diversity in certain new
urban neighborhoods, the typically high and fast-appreciating home values of these signature
communities tends to limit the economic diversity. In the less centralized emergent
development occurring in many downtown centers, additional diversity is often present,
but primarily in the sense that high-end, highly-flexible forms of housing have recently been
constructed within urban centers that have for decades been home to multiple forms of
low-income housing. Chapters five and six details how certain modes of construction and
18
adaptive reuse can be understood as emergent development efforts based on the precepts of
mass customization.
In addition to enacting an interdisciplinary approach and advancing certain conceptual
terminology, the third significant contribution to the bodies of thought around media and
space offered by this dissertation is to diagnose the relationship between emergent media
f igure 1.2: s taplton d enver price r ange f inder
f igure 1.3: l evittown, n Y
Each builder hands out this community card along with their own materials.
Mass produced housing.
Joseph Scherschel, Time Life Picture Collection, Getty Images, 5/7/1958
19
technologies and emergent forms of urban development. Building on the two points
described above, this is done by considering the conceptual linkages between emergent media
and spaces and by examining specific examples of how urban spaces are being constructed
with emergent media technologies in mind. Most pointedly, the answer offered below is
that emergent media technologies and new urban spaces share a common cultural logic that
I call, in the tradition of Raymond Williams, networked personalized mobility. Explored in
detail in chapter four, this cultural logic helps to explain how the contemporary tendencies
towards connectedness and customization that govern emergent media and spatial practices
have advanced to the point that Williams’ concept of mobile privatization is no longer
sufficient to explain the relationship between media and society. At the heart of this cultural
condition is the encouragement of mobile lifestyles through the provision of networks in
multiple spatial environments, which I refer to as networked media spaces. Networked media
spaces are created whenever and wherever media interfaces are engaged in the presence of
media networks, from domestic environments to workplaces to spaces of leisure like cafes
and parks. These networked media spaces are notable not only for their seeming ubiquity
and their challenge to established notions of public and private space, but also because the
extension of media interfaces into everyday spatial environments foregrounds new notions
of personalization and customization. This introduces new modes of techno-mediated
thinking – epistemologies of control at the interface – that impact individual and cultural
imaginaries for the responsiveness of the built environment. Some of these new spatial
demands are met with actual changes in the built environment – the establishment of
revitalized downtown centers, technoburbs, neotraditional neighborhoods, wired homes,
flexible work environments, and gated communities – that are determined in part by
affinities with emergent media technologies and in part by the broader economic imperatives
of mass customization. Perhaps more crucially, these development and building practices
20
are framed by changes in a cultural vision of what it means to live in a moment of significant
technological and spatial development.
The twin concepts of networked personalized mobility and networked media spaces go
a long way toward diagnosing the social implications introduced by the corresponding
phenomena of emergent media technologies and new urban spaces. Applying these modes
of thinking makes it clear that not only are media experiences also spatial (and therefore
social) experiences, but that spatial experiences are increasingly mediated experiences as
well. Across the globe, few places are not inscribed by at least one media network, and most
places are subject to multiple network infrastructures. Densely populated and economically
prosperous areas tend to command the majority of infrastructural investment, but satellite-
based entertainment and communications services can reach most places on the globe; of
course, these networks are effectively invisible unless the appropriate receiving technology
is present.
17
Part of the tension in the study of emergent spatial and technological practices
is that they are global in the sense that examples of each can be found all around the globe
and because economic and cultural globalization is deeply related to their emergence, yet
they are decidedly not universal in the sense that there are plenty of places where these new
cultural logics do not register in the same way. To that end, this study is primarily focused
on the manner in which the mode of networked personalized mobility and the establishment
of networked media spaces has taken hold in economically developed portions of the world.
Within this frame, my positioning as a resident of the City of Los Angeles has led me to
privilege examples from Southern California and the United States. Although many portions
of the argument that follows might very well be applicable in international contexts, the
specific urban development patterns and the associated logic of networked personalized
mobility would likely need to be nuanced to account for local spatial and political histories.
Within this context, networks are increasingly designed to support personalized rather
21
than communal media experiences, and the design of places has responded by emphasizing
architectures and designs that support other forms of communal engagement. Emergent
media devices are marketed and critiqued based on their spatializing effects, and all manner
of spaces are now designed to explicitly support and respond to expected mediations. The
concepts of networked personalized mobility and networked media spaces underscore the
idea that practices of media and space are fundamentally intertwined, and prod us to think
about the economic and cultural conditions that have supported this development.
The concept of the interactive scripted space serves as a synthetic conceptual anchor for much
of the discussion that follows, as it provides a powerful framework for thinking through the
conceptual linkages between media, space, and mobility. While the term scripted space has
been used to describe exceptionally planned physical environments, the argument below
abstracts this concept from its primarily spatial meaning and repurposes it as interactive
scripted space to frame contemporary cultural and economic affinities between emergent
media and urban space. The most developed use of the term scripted space to date can be
found in Norman Klein’s The Vatican to Vegas , where he deploys it to describe the “special
effects” that architects, designers, planners, and entertainers have for centuries used to
deceive, direct, and enthrall visitors to exceptional places. As his project is pointedly a
“history of special effects,” he presents examples that range from the baroque architectural
efforts of the sixteenth century to world’s fairs of the nineteenth and twentieth, arguing that a
scripted space is one in which planners have gone to great lengths to design an environment
that generates an expected reaction from visitors to the space. Building on these early
examples, Klein proceeds to connect the designed experiences of the twentieth century (the
cinema, Disneyland) and the twenty-first (Las Vegas, video games, computer generated video
effects) to a broader history of designed spaces.
18
Across these varied eras and environments
Klein sees similarities in the attempt of designers to chart a path that visitors to a space will
22
follow, as in the way the painted ceiling domes of renaissance Italy attract the eyes upward or
the panoramas of the Victorian era immerse visitors in a bodily experience. Scripted spaces
are designed to entice and enthrall visitors, flooding their mental and corporeal faculties
with carefully calibrated sensory inputs. And yet the very power of scripted spaces is that
they are intended to hide their design, to place the emphasis on the experience of the visitor
rather than the genius of the system. As Klein argues, scripted spaces quite carefully work to
give individuals a powerful sense of agency within an environment that has been exquisitely
calibrated: “The scripted space is a form of predestination, where the consumer ‘acts out’
the illusion of free will.”
19
This construction is quite important to Klein, as he largely
understands consumers of scripted spaces as actors playing out a narrative that has been
plotted in advance. Importantly, it is precisely at this point that Klein questions the political
nature of scripted spaces and the place of resistance to such exercises of power:
We review the plain facts: A special effect, by definition, “fools” the audience. By
fooling, it manipulates them, on behalf of whoever runs the game; let us say, on
behalf of those “in power.” But this is hardly a sin, not in our civilization. Many very
great Renaissance/Baroque masterpieces qualify as media manipulation. And those
are worshipped. What’s more, we all love to be tricked by some version of the sublime
(or by submlimation, at least). So rather than praise or condemn how manipulative
effects can get, why not simply discover their nuances, as well as their cracks?: When
is a trick as thin as an eyelash? How does it “work” an audience – “immerse” them in
scripted revelation, from resurrections of Jesus to a night at the casino?
20

Here Klein is arguing not for a politics of resistance, nor for a ban on special effects or for
a type of culture jamming that would shut down the rides at Disneyland or the tables at
the Paris Las Vegas casino. He is instead arguing for a mode of critical inquiry that seeks to
understand how power works through scripted spaces, to lay bare the apparatus and power
relations that are at work in the production of such special effects. The goal of this critique
is to not be so easily fooled and to begin to see the powerful role that scripted spaces play
in contemporary culture. Klein clearly has a conflicted relationship with scripted spaces,
acknowledging their pleasures while remaining skeptical of their politics. Although much of
23
his writing on the subject is written in a playful style, one section in particular points toward
a critical imperative:
We cannot ever rely simply on our personal relationship to a movie or a scripted
space. That is only a third element within the whole: program; design; reception.
We must take each step on its own, and see the problem as ideological (program);
epistemological (script); and ontological (reception). In other words, at the level
of the program, the political use of ideology is fundamental, and must be studied
that way (how political interest is manifested within the codes generated to protect
those at the top, or condemn their perceived enemies). At the level of the script,
there is a code of how knowledge is supposed to be set up, how the branches and
winding paths reveal a knowledge. And on the level of reception, the virtual is always
relative; there is always a crisis about real/unreal, a suture between the two that makes
the story exciting…At the heart of these philosophical issues is a sense of codes
themselves, how they are hidden, how they are turned into real space, how they are
hinted at cautiously, and whether there is ever a codified version that applies as the
ideal form of reception (there isn’t).
21

As Klein sees it scripted spaces are not just about the script, but also about a more complex
relationship that brings together the programmers, the script that is programmed, and the
consumers who engage with the script. This model is supple enough to foreground questions
of power without reducing such forces to a one-way flow. Klein does, however, privilege
the power exercised by those interests involved in establishing the program, and sees little
political power for consumers. He acknowledges consumer pleasure in experiencing scripted
spaces, and smartly suggests that success of any scripted space is its ability to charm with
both the “gimmick” and the “machinery.”
22
By allowing individuals with disparate critical
competencies (or interests) to revel in the ontological experience (“wow, this is amazing”)
or the ideological competency that brought it to them (“how did they do that?”), well-
executed scripted spaces disarm consumers not simply through the power of spectacle, but by
empowering them with the feeling that they are in on the trick, are part of the system. But
Klein argues that even these insightful engagements are largely preprogrammed, another trick
to get participants in a scripted space to ignore the actual scripting process. As special effects
impress consumers in the ontological realm and raise questions about the ideology behind
the system, Klein argues that “we accept the epistemology as a truth,” as the script itself takes
24
on the quality of an arrangement that simply exists in the world. Our full participation in
the scripted space blunts our critique of the space itself, and thus scripted spaces become
an accepted aspect of our everyday experience. We can tell each other that Disneyland is
a carefully-Imagineered construction, even point to the Disney Corporation and its many
subsidiaries as the forces behind its facade, yet Disneyland persists as a feature of the built
environment and a lure to millions of visitors. Everyone knows that Las Vegas is clearly a
fantasy space that has effectively pre-scripted the actions of its visitors, yet millions gleefully
play their part with the full knowledge that the house always wins. The power of scripted
spaces is not in their special effects, but in their ability to incorporate experience and critique
as forms of interactivity that can be sold back to consumers.
This concept of the scripted space can be quite usefully amended to provide specific insight
into contemporary correspondences of media and space. Klein himself connects the special
effects of the cinema to those of physical environments, and makes passing references to
the scripted nature of computer games. But this concept can be reformulated to help
explain much more about the structure of contemporary media, space, and society. To
begin with, we can rather straightforwardly apply the concept of the scripted space to
markedly less exceptional spaces than those considered by Klein. Whereas he points to quite
specific environments, like Disneyland and the casino, the concept of the scripted space
also now describes the everyday consumer environments of various “lifestyle malls,” “retail
and entertainment centers,” “town centers,” and new urbanist communities. In Southern
California, for example, the term scripted space accurately describes some exceptional
spaces (like Disneyland or Universal Citywalk), a growing collection of consumer havens
(like The Grove, the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, LA Live, Hollywood and
Highland), and hybrid live/work/consume environments (like the Americana at Brand
or Playa Vista) (see Figure 1.4). Without being so glib as to suggest that we all now live
25
in an entirely scripted world, the diffusion of the scripted space from entertainment
destinations to residential developments suggests that hyper-planned spatial environments
are increasingly familiar features of the built environment. As suggested in chapter five,
new urbanist communities and development practices are effectively efforts to script the
space of entire communities, a practice that quite powerfully pairs the interests of residential
home developers with a late capitalist imperative to repurpose retail experiences as lifestyle
enhancements. The explicit promise in new urbanist communities is precisely that the
developer has conceptualized and provided the elements potential community members
will need to satisfy a lifestyle that incorporates production, reproduction, consumption,
and socialization. The ontological special effect of these neighborhoods is not simply that
they provide an ersatz version of a mythical small town, but that they actually create a
Clockwise from upper-left: Walt Disney World, LA Live, The Grove, Americana at Brand
Walt Disney World resort map
LA Live promotional gallery (lalive.com)
The Gove promotional gallery (thegrovela.com)
Americana at Brand promotional gallery (americanaatbrand.com)
f igure 1.4: s elected s cripted s pace of l os a ngeles
26
community by inviting residents to interact with each other in a manner consistent with
the script of the space. Residents of and visitors to such scripted communities generally
have the same freedoms of action and behavior as individuals do in non-scripted spaces, but
scripted residential neighborhoods effectively channel interactivity and behavior into a self-
reinforcing system. As explored in chapter five, the script in such neighborhoods endeavors
to ensure a consistent experience by encouraging a homogenizing self-selection of the
residential population, establishing invisible barriers to community participation (through
factors such as housing prices and limited access to amenities), publicizing certain aesthetic
restrictions that lead to community self-policing, and fostering feedback systems that channel
community activism through community-affirming channels.
In a more provocative fashion, we can also extend the concept of the scripted space to frame
the function of contemporary media engagements. Chapter three advances the argument
that media interfaces can be considered in explicitly spatial terms, so extending the concept
of the scripted space to emergent media means first thinking through the ontological registers
of emergent media technologies and systems. The phenomenological experience of emergent
media has been described in various ways, using a number of different metaphors. One
has only to look at the names of prominent web browsers for examples of how interface
users are cast as explorers, navigators, or hunters, naming conventions that suggest the
browser itself acts as a colonizing aide to web surfing (another metaphor). Lisa Parks has
argued that we should resist these conceptions of unfettered movement in favor of a set
of “epistemologies of movement at the interface” that more concretely reflect the actual
geographies involved in web culture. Parks points directly to “the place of the interface”
as the precise site where the complex set of technological infrastructures and systems that
support the world wide web and the Internet itself are effectively screened out in favor of a
set of simplified metaphors of user control.
23
In a similar vein, Tara McPherson has situated
27
the interface as a site for exploring “the experience of using the Web, of the Web as mediator
between human and machine, of the Web as a technology of experience.”
24
In an effort
to explain what the experience of navigating the web feels like, McPherson advances the
concepts of volitional mobility, scan-and-search, and transformation. For McPherson these
are “related sensations,” modalities of experience that are registered as web users feel the
impact of their clicks and interactions through the interface. These are explicitly volitional
phenomena, as the distinguishing characteristic of each of these modalities is that users
feel a sense of choice and feedback. As in Parks’ analysis, McPherson also insists on tying
her phenomenology back into a broader cultural and economic system. Whereas Parks
is primarily interested in the types of knowledge that can be gleaned when users augment
the standard interface with a deeper technical knowledge of that which the interface elides,
McPherson questions how interfaces entice consumers to participate in circuits of exchange:
“Choice, personalization, and transformation are heightened as experiential lures, accelerated
by feelings of mobility and searching, engaging the user’s desire along different registers
which nonetheless still underwrite neo-Fordist feedback loops.”
25
Both McPherson and
Parks are interested in challenging the prevailing metaphors that characterize the ontological
experience of navigating the web. Their medium-specific analyses emphasize the valuable
position occupied by the interface — in this case the web browser and its navigational
conceits. While graphical user interfaces as we generally think about them have a history
that is situated alongside the development of the personal computer and the Internet,
chapter three details how we might think more broadly about media interfaces as the
graphical intermediaries that now structure our interactions with all emergent media devices
and media experiences. Like web browsers, media interfaces introduce new modalities of
experience that both elide the complexities of the systems they represent and commodify
user interactions. Using the rubric of the scripted space, media interfaces can be considered
the equivalent of the spatial environment in that they constitute the ontological realm of
28
reception. The experience of emergent media technologies is built less upon the special
effects of the spectacle, however, than around the effect of interactivity at the interface. In
essence the experiential modality of the media interface is about choice and personalization,
expressed through interaction with the interface itself. As suggested in chapter three, we can
see this at work in the popular celebrations of TiVo’s friendly interface, the iPhone’s touch-
screen haptics, and Hulu’s streamlined presentation and personalized queue. The media
interface is effectively a scripted space, impressing consumers with an engaging experience
that largely obscures the complex script that makes it possible.
If the interface can be thought of as an emergent media space, the script that frames the
function of emergent media technologies is essentially comprised of distributed network
infrastructures and the protocological code that manages the flow of data through these
networks. The function of this script is split, as it is responsible both for creating an
aesthetically pleasing spatial environment and for facilitating the interactive processes that
constitute the special effects of the scripted spaces of emergent media. Whereas most of
the examples of scripted spaces provided by Klein are planned by a single, often identifiable
entity, however, a distributed assemblage of interests analogously scripts the emergent
media ecology. Although the mechanism may be different, the effect is quite similar, as
the visible and compelling interactive scripted space of the media interface draws attention
away from the relatively unscrutinized aspects of the networks and code that make the
interfaces function. The main thrust of chapter two is to interrogate the specific materialities
of information networks, engaging critically with the concept of materiality as it relates
to networks and considering the ways in which they also establish the condition for new
flows of power. Networks, comprised of infrastructures and code, essentially provide the
epistemological structure that supports the legible scripted spaces found in media interfaces.
Because these systems are designed to function by incorporating user desire into the script
29
itself, the emergent media script produces knowledge for and of its users. By working
through conceptual approaches to the function of power advanced by Michel Foucault,
Gilles Deleuze, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, and Alexander Galloway, this chapter argues
that the distributed script of the network foregrounds questions of freedom, control, and
interactivity.
Indeed it is through these ideological parameters that we can sketch out a sense of the
program behind the interactive scripted space of emergent media, and perhaps update the
concept of the scripted space itself to include not only hierarchical notions of ideology
and power, but also the more contemporary modulations of control that work through the
decentralized processes of mass customization and user feedback. Asking questions about
the ideological dimensions of the scripted spaces of emergent media means determining
whose interests are served by a script that demands user interaction. To answer this
question we can look toward those entities that specifically traffic in the collection and use
of the data produced through user interactions, like mobile phone service providers, cable
operators, service providers like TiVo and Google, data aggregation firms, and, in some
cases, government agencies. In order to provide interactive experiences and moments of
customization for their users, companies providing emergent media services through the
scripted spaces of interactive media interfaces must collect information on user interest
and desire and then tailor the user experience based on this information. Critics like
Siva Vaidhyanathan and Mark Andrejevic have argued that the companies that provide
services based on user interaction data should have their practices scrutinized. Andrejevic
in particular has suggested that the problem is of transparency and asymmetry, as these
corporations have the ability to amass vast amounts of information about their users’
habits but rarely, if ever, make this information available for users to review and question.
26

Such critiques are appropriate if our primary concern is the new role of surveillance, and
30
in particular the role of dataveillance, in the course of our everyday engagements with
technology.
27
We must also ask, however, how these surveillant practices fit within a
broader shift in forms of social power. Considered in chapters two, three, and four, much
of the argument in this dissertation engages with the notion that the disciplinary societies
described by Michel Foucault have in many ways morphed into societies of control, and that
this transition is accelerated specifically by the broad deployment of media networks and
interfaces that work to re-spatialize power away from the monumental forms associated with
Foucault’s bureaucracies. The program behind the interactive scripted spaces of emergent
media are not simply the media conglomerates or Silicon Valley upstarts, but an entire
post-Fordist economic system that works through decentralized spatial practices and the
incorporation of individual desire more directly into systems of production. Rather than just
pointing out which entities currently manage such scripted spaces, we might instead consider
how the broad pattern of economic and cultural changes has created a techno-spatio-political
system in which various entities — corporate, entrepreneurial, political, and governmental
— can advance their own interests through the eager participation of individuals willing to
exchange valuable data for specific media experiences.
Ultimately, the concept of the interactive scripted space can be used to frame a relation
between the script of the network and the script of urban space itself. The program
that governs these spaces is singular, as the ideological imperatives of freedom, control,
interaction, personalization, and mass customization seduce individuals into engagements
that are personally pleasing, socially experienced, and productive for capital. This program
is processed through analogous scripts, as the epistemological structuring of network
infrastructure/protocol is matched by the planning efforts that drive changes to the built
environment. These analogous scripts are expressed through the parallel spaces of emergent
media interfaces and new urbanist neighborhoods, environments that invite interaction
31
from users. The affinities between emergent media and emergent urban formations are not
simply coincidental. These are related scripted spaces, carefully arranged but also designed
to incorporate user feedback into refined user experiences and new relations of power. The
harmonious nature of these technological and spatial scripts is reflected in their conceptual
similarities, in the proliferation of networked media spaces, and in a mode of living that
encourages a cultural vision of networked personalized mobility.
Overview
The chapters that follow support this conceptual argument with detailed engagements
with some of the conceptual ideas advanced above. The argument proceeds by initially
establishing the technological conditions that characterize the contemporary mediascape
before ultimately exploring the relationship such media have with new spatial configurations.
It begins with two chapters directly addressing the changing technological assemblages of
emergent media. These chapters respectively engage with the two salient features inherent in
all emergent media technologies: the network and the interface.
Chapter two interrogates the networked nature of emergent media technologies, arguing
that the network is the imaginary and rhetorical foundation upon which emergent media
technologies are built and the conceptual gateway to theorizing emergent media. Networks
have been studied and theorized from a number of different perspectives; the argument in
this chapter focuses on the materialities of networks, bringing together ideas from those
critics that have considered network infrastructures and others that have foregrounded
the protocols that allow computer networks to function. The provision and function of
these materialities effectively constitute the script of emergent media technologies and
systems, as they are the mechanisms the guarantee specific user experiences. This chapter
emphasizes how networked media technologies simultaneously open boundaries for social/
32
civic connections and establish new limits, shifting the emphasis from physical barriers
to limitations on access and rights management. Even as this circumscription raises
crucial questions about the limits on participation in a networked media ecology, this
chapter concludes that the most insidious consequence of emergent media networks is the
configuration of control as the contemporary logic of power, authorizing new forms of
surveillance and enclosure that function wherever media technologies reach.
Chapter three picks up on these themes, emphasizing the role of the user interface as
the site at which users engage with and experience networks. While the network is a
discursive formation that drives and delimits emergent media technologies, the physical
communications networks on which it is based generally displace their own materiality,
leaving users to interact with screen-based interfaces. Accordingly, this chapter establishes
and critically situates the increasing dominance of the media interface, paying particular
attention to how the user interface has shifted from a phenomenon associated with
computers to one inherent in nearly every emergent media technology, such as ‘smart’ cable
and satellite systems, digital video recorders and digital media players, and online challengers
(such as Hulu, YouT ube, and other social software) to established media producers
and distributors. These interfaces generally present themselves as neutral information
providers designed to assist viewers confronted with an expanding array of programming.
A closer inspection reveals that such interfaces reflect dramatic changes in the aesthetics,
commercialization, and experience of entertainment media. Moreover, this section concludes
that emergent media ontologies of user customization, personalization, and control are
exercised at the interface, as it is the site at which we both experience the sensation of control
over technology and subject ourselves to technological networks of surveillance and control.
These changes are not confined to the living room or the desktop, and the fourth chapter
considers how the intersection of media interfaces and pervasive networks changes the
33
way we think about spatial possibilities. The first key argument in this chapter is that
the networked nature of emergent media technologies is reconfiguring the private/
public dialectic in favor of a new paradigm of spatiality for the network society – the
networked media space. Rather than a totalizing theoretical construct or statically pervasive
phenomenon, the media space should be conceived as a telescoping spatiality of social-
technological relations that can take on different characteristics depending on which social
relations, identities, and technologies are being articulated in any given instance. Different
registers of private-ness and public-ness are engaged through such factors as physical
propinquity, the mode of communication, the variety and types of networks present, and
the social practices being performed. Inherent in each networked media space, however, are
the elements of control, surveillance, and enclosure endemic to the network. Furthermore,
networked media spaces are complicated by the multiple, mobile, and customizable nature
of media interfaces moving within and outside the home, across laptops, mobile phones,
and portable media players. While these devices offer different form factors and degrees of
engagement, their interface screens act as familiar and often customized means of organizing
and accessing content, a touchstone working to orient viewers in these newly colonized
media spaces. Ultimately, the extension of the logics of personalization and control into a
field of networked media spaces threatens to alter viewers’ expectations of and engagements
with the physical nature of their surroundings, while simultaneously laying the foundation
for new spatial imaginaries, including new conceptions of the relationship between space and
identity. This chapter concludes that the cultural logic of networked personalized mobility
governs the manner in which individuals negotiate a cultural terrain governed by scripted
spaces and networked media spaces.
The final chapters extend and test these theoretical trajectories through case studies of how
these new spatial imaginaries create the conditions for changes in the built environment.
34
Each case study situates the networks, interfaces, and media spaces of a particular urban
development in the context of the social, economic, and historical specificities of the
development and the region. The primary case study focuses on Playa Vista, a new-urbanist
community under construction in Los Angeles and the second on the recent and planned
developments in downtown Los Angeles. Playa Vista takes quite seriously the prospect of
establishing community through technology and has embraced emergent media technologies
to an unprecedented degree, providing future-proofed fiber-optic wiring in every home,
a high-tech preview center and on-site technology concierge, a local intranet, the regional
headquarters for the Entertainment Arts corporation, and wireless network access throughout
the neighborhood and its parks. Whereas Playa Vista is controlled by a single entity, the new
condominiums, lofts, and entertainment and cultural facilities being built in downtown Los
Angeles are the product of dozens of developers, international financiers, city leaders, and
local civic organizations. Even as the actual deployment of emergent media technologies
is quite varied, the entire enterprise of re-gentrifying the downtown area is premised upon
and enacted through the establishment of new communication networks. In each of these
cases, actual deployments of networks, interfaces, and media spaces are examined, and these
terms are also considered as metaphorical links between technological change and changes in
the built environment. As part of this analysis these case studies engage a variety of primary
sources. The Playa Vista study, for example, brings together planning documents, publicity
materials, interviews, direct observation, and an analysis of popular and critical discourse. In
each case study, contemporary engagements with emergent technologies are situated within
the social, economic, and historical specificities of the development and the region. As such,
the case studies also reveal something about the social and political struggles through which
built spaces emerge. In the case of Playa Vista, a centralized approach to technologically
mediated development took decades to gain legal approval and is still fending off challenges
from its detractors. The multi-developer re-construction of downtown Los Angeles, on the
35
other hand, reveals tensions between spatial imaginaries and social realities, battles being
contested in civic forums, the press, and virtual public spaces. Even though these places
have quite distinct histories and development models they nonetheless reveal themselves to
be scripted spaces, and the nature of their scripting suggest how this conceptual framework
needs to be updated to critically engage new ideological imperatives.
Emergent media technologies foster and support distinct spatial formations through
both new material practices and changing cultural imaginaries. The material nature of
these developments center around the provision and use of networked media spaces and
new infrastructures are being constructed to extend connections to entertainment and
communications networks. In addition to existing as physical manifestations of the spatial
order, these infrastructural networks and nodes provide the physical and protocological
foundation for networked media spaces. In turn, such spaces, at the scale of the home,
neighborhood, city, or region, are being reconfigured to support emergent media
practices. Even as these material changes take hold at various scales, the physical spaces
of contemporary life are also impacted by a cultural imagination of how a life inflected by
emergent media technologies should be lived. As such visions popularly infuse cultural
artifacts such as films, books, advertisements, and technology-centered magazines, they also
pointedly structure prospective modes of living envisioned by urban planners, architects,
developers, and prospective consumers of newly developing spatial environments. The
interaction of media and space in a moment of capital characterized by globalization, flexible
accumulation, and mass customization results in a conceptual mode of living, networked
personalized mobility, that seeks to make sense of the scripted spaces of contemporary
life. This dissertation approaches such questions by situating a critique of technological
determinism alongside an engagement with the spatial implications of media in an era where
media technologies are based on networks, interfaces, and code.
36
Chapter 1 Endnotes
s ee the ipod c ar integration page at the a pple website for a description of car integration features 1.
and lists of automakers with integrated ipod options. f ully integrated solutions from a udi, bmw , and
infinity were highlighted as of a ugust, 2008, and the site suggests that nearly every major automaker
offers some form of integration. http://www.apple.com/ipod/carintegration/#car_browser_audi
Kevin l ynch, 2. The Image of the City (c ambridge, ma : mit p ress, 1960), 2-3.
edward s oja, “t aking s pace personally, ” in 3. The Spatial T urn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives , ed.
barney w arf and s anta a rias (n ew Y ork and l ondon: r outledge, 2008), 25.
m ichael c ieply and brooks barnes, “w riters s ay s trike to s tart m onday, ” 4. The New Y ork Times ,
n ovember 2, 2007, sec. business / m edia & a dvertising, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/02/
business/media/02cnd-hollywood.html; “The 100- d ay w riters’ s trike: a t imeline, ” New Y ork Times
Media Decoder Blog, http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/12/the-100-day-writers-strike-
a-timeline/; w riters g uild of a merica, “contract 2007 p roposals, ” http://www.wga.org/subpage_
member.aspx?id=2485.
w riters g uild of a merica, “sideletter on l iterary material w ritten for programs made for n ew 5.
m edia, ” f ebruary 26, 2008, http://www.wga.org/contract_07/n ewm ediasideletter.pdf.
c arolyn marvin, 6. When Old T echnologies W ere New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the
Late Nineteenth Century (n ew Y ork: o xford u niversity press, 1988).
r aymond williams, “b ase and s uperstructure in marxist c ultural Theory, ” 7. New Left Review 82
(1973): 3-16.
e ven this will become a digital, computed, and interfaced phenomenon with the final transition 8.
to digital broadcasting, occurring in the u nited s tates by June 12th, 2009. f ederal communications
commission, Third Periodic Review of the Commission’s Rules and Policies Affecting the Conversion to
Digital T elevision, mb d ocket n o. 07-91, d ecember 31, 2007: 16.
h enry Jenkins, 9. Convergence Culture : Where Old and New Media Collide (n ew Y ork: n ew Y ork
u niversity press, 2006), 13-16.
manuel c astells, 10. The Rise of the Network Society , 2nd ed. (o xford ; malden, ma : blackwell, 2000).
a lexander r . g alloway, 11. Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (c ambridge, ma :
The mit p ress, 2006); a lexander r . g alloway and e ugene Thacker, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks
(m inneapolis: u niv of m innesota press, 2007).
william u ricchio, “t elevision’s n ext g eneration: t echnology/interface c ulture/f low, ” in 12.
T elevision After TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition , ed. l ynn s pigel and Jan olsson, console-ing
passions (d urham, nc : d uke u niversity press, 2004), 175.
g alloway, 13. Protocol, 8.
d avid h arvey, 14. The Condition of Postmodernity : An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change
(o xford, u K ; c ambridge, ma : blackwell, 1989).
mark a ndrejevic, “The Kinder, g entler g aze of big brother: r eality t V in the e ra of digital 15.
c apitalism, ” New Media & Society 4, no. 2 ( June 1, 2002): 256.
37
“d enver s tapleton price r ange f inder, ” http://business.stapletondenver.com/data/uploads/price_ 16.
r ange_f inder_031109.pdf.
a ccording to the coverage charts provided by the gsm association almost the entire planet is 17.
covered by satellite gsm services, with the exception of the two poles and certain islands in the middle
of the pacific o cean. These charts also quite powerfully reveal how disparate coverage for terrestrial
mobile infrastructure, with huge chunks of several continents served only by satellite communications.
n onetheless, these population centers support nearly four billion gsm connections. “ gsm coverage
maps, ” gsm w orld, http://www.gsmworld.com/technology/roaming/gsminfo/index.htm; “market
d ata s ummary, ” gsm w orld, http://www.gsmworld.com/newsroom/market-data/market_data_
summary.htm.
it should be noted that Klein dates the end of the twentieth century to the fall of the b erlin wall, 18.
and thus his chronography is slightly different from that which is commonly accepted.
n orman m. Klein, “The e lectronic baroque: Jerde c ities, ” in 19. Y ou Are Here: The Jerde Partnership
International, ed. f rances a nderton and r ay bradbury (l ondon: phaidon press l imited, 1999).
n orman m. Klein, 20. The V atican to V egas : A History of Special Effects (n ew Y ork: n ew press, 2004),
8.
ibid., 328. 21.
ibid., 329. 22.
l isa parks, “Kinetic s creens: e pistemologies of m ovement at the interface, ” in 23. MediaSpace: Place,
Scale and Culture in a Media Age, ed. n ick couldry and a nna m cc arthy, comedia (n ew Y ork and
l ondon: r outledge, 2004), 39.
t ara m cpherson, “r eload: l iveness, m obility, and the w eb, ” in 24. New Media, Old Media: A History
and Theory Reader , ed. w endy h ui Kyong c hun and Thomas w . Keenan (n ew Y ork and l ondon:
r outledge, 2005), 201.
ibid., 206. 25.
mark a ndrejevic, 26. iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era (lawrence, K s : u niversity
press of Kansas, 2007).
f or a discussion of the term dataveillance see: greg e lmer, 27. Profiling Machines: Mapping the
Personal Information Economy (c ambridge, ma : The mit p ress, 2004).
38
Chapter 2: Scripting though Networks and Protocol
Perhaps there is no greater lesson about networks than the lesson about control:
networks, by their mere existence, are not liberating; they exercise novel forms of
control that operate at a level that is anonymous and non-human, which is to say
material.
1
T ruism today: there are no networks outside of society. Like all human-techno
entities, they are infected by power. Networks are ideal Foucault machines: they
undermine power as they produce it. Their diagram of power may operate on a
range of scales, traversing intra-local networks and overlapping with trans-national
insurgencies. No matter how harmless they seem, networks bring on differences.
Foucault’s dictum: power produces.
2
Do we live in a network society? Are networks integral to contemporary politics, economics,
culture, and social practice? Are networks actually the fundamental structuring principle
of all human social relations, the key to understanding our genetic underpinnings, and
simultaneously the new foundation for political resistance and counter-resistance? A broad
range of critics have advanced such positions over the past decade, writing largely in the wake
of Manuel Castells far-reaching trilogy on The Information Age, first published between
1996 and 1998. Castells himself brought together a broad array of sociological studies to
suggest that the concept of the network could be used to explore and explain the globalized
economy, the organizational structure of enterprises, new communications systems, the
experience of social space, resistant social movements, underground economies, and
global political realignment. Others, such as Albert-László Barabási, Alexander Galloway,
and Eugene Thacker have argued that principles of network organization are at work in
biological organization, from DNA codes to epidemiology.
3
Such general network theories
productively group together some of the most important political and conceptual questions
of our time, and putting ostensibly disparate discourses in dialogue has the potential to yield
surprising theoretical insights.
General network theories may be generative, but lost in the mix of this high-level theorizing
is attentiveness to the specificities of contemporary media networks. Networks participate
39
in broad social and cultural formations, but our approaches to understanding the function
of networks must be grounded in their materialities, in the details of their composition
and the relations of power that support them. As Eugene Thacker suggests in the
introduction to Alexander Galloway’s Protocol: “Understanding networks not as metaphors,
but as materialized and materializing media, is an important step toward diversifying and
complexifying our understanding of power relationships in control societies.”
4
This chapter
makes a simple proposition: in order to understand the social and spatial implications of
media networks we must consider their dual nature as infrastructure and protocol. From this
basic heuristic framework we can develop a much thicker understanding of the everydayness
and the complexity of networks, as their physical existence at multiple scales impacts both
the built environment and the manners in which individuals engage in the networked media
spaces supported by these infrastructures. Network infrastructures quite literally exist as
spatial manifestations, in the form of the ever-changing constellation of servers, switches,
cables, buildings, outlets, and radio transmitters that perform the generally unseen work of
shuffling digital information from one place to another, and this chapter works to ground
the more abstract elements of network theory in the quite material conditions of networks
themselves. This manner of ground truthing reveals that networks are neither binary nor
smooth, but rather quite diversely constructed and experienced. Moreover, emphasizing the
differentiation of networks reframes them from purely functional systems to technological
artifacts that also signify in cultural and political terms. Being networked matters, but the
specifics of how one is connected also impacts individual and social network practices, so we
must press on the political questions regarding public and private obligations in the provision
of network infrastructures. This chapter explores examples of network infrastructures at
multiple scales in an effort to make them visible, as these infrastructures have been quite
adept at evading extensive cultural and critical analyses. This process is complicated by the
fact that network infrastructures further depend on the quite invisible protocols that act as a
40
kind of infrastructural code to keep all of the machines talking to each other. Protocols are
part of the material infrastructure of networks, and their provision is fraught with cultural
and political implications. Perhaps most pointedly it is with and through protocol that
invisible relations of power take hold. Whereas network infrastructures yield some verifiable
traces of their political function, protocol works to modulate network access in ways that
are not culturally visible. Protocol is also more malleable than infrastructure, both because
it exists as code and because such changes are hidden from sight. Taken together, network
infrastructures and protocol are effectively the script governing the interactive scripted
spaces of emergent media, unseen and often unexamined, yet crucially linking the everyday
function of emergent media interfaces with the ideological pressures of interactivity and mass
customization. The social and cultural value of a network is dependent on the quantity and
quality of its nodes, who has access, and how that access is used; but the network itself is an
articulation of silicon, fiber, and code that powerfully structures the preceding factors.
The network is the conceptual gateway to theorizing emergent media, as it is the imaginary
and rhetorical foundation upon which emergent media technologies are built. The term
is deployed by marketers, journalists, critics, and everyday consumers and citizens with a
common if vague understanding of networks providing connectivity; as often as not, the
Internet (“the net”), itself a system of interconnected networks, stand in metonymically
for “the network.” Many theorizations and critiques of contemporary cultural practices,
from convergent culture to smart mobs to free culture, while valuable contributions to our
understanding of how emergent media supports certain types of social practice, are in many
ways dependent upon the under-examined trope of the network. In such formulations, the
network is taken for granted, a foundation upon which devices circulate, culture is produced,
and meaning is negotiated. This goal of this chapter is not to overturn the primacy of these
heuristic endeavors, but to instead to brace those approaches with a richer understanding
41
of what constitutes a network, or, more specifically, what constitutes the materiality of
networks. This chapter will first consider the infrastructural aspects of networks before
engaging in a discussion of how protocol works to interconnect network infrastructures.
The synthesis of these two discourses reveals how networks produce space by establishing
specific infrastructural geographies, effecting material digital divides, and enacting limitations
based on access and differentiated rights management. Even as this framework raises crucial
questions about the limits on participation in a networked media environment, this chapter
argues that the most insidious consequence of emergent media networks is the configuration
of control as the contemporary logic of power, authorizing new forms of enclosure that
function wherever media technologies reach. Ultimately, approaching networks in this
dialectical manner reveals them to be spatialized and spatializing phenomenon, possessing
their own materiality while underwriting and delimiting distinct modes of mobility and
spatial practice.
Network Infrastructures
The infrastructures of media networks are an integral part of our experiences with emergent
media technologies, even though our general conception is not of interacting with networks,
but with devices, interfaces, and content. In most cases, we deal with infrastructural
questions as consumers, and primarily in interstitial moments - connecting the cable at a
new home, switching mobile phone providers, visiting a new place for the first time. Our
emergent media devices have been designed to connect to infrastructures without much
help. Many mobile phones work on multiple bands, ensuring that our handoffs from tower
to tower are fairly smooth, even as the network infrastructure changes. Best practices for
operating system designers allow portable computers to self-configure when connected
via an Ethernet port or wireless card, save perhaps the input of a password (a step that can
be skipped upon subsequent connections). Television set-top boxes are designed to be
42
configured once to connect to the network, a task often handled by professional installers.
While emergent media technologies might be headed in the direction of becoming self-
configuring appliances that completely obscure our engagement with network infrastructures,
this is in most cases a horizon state.
5
We still notice network infrastructures, if only when
they fail us. Dropped cell phone calls, the lack of a Wi-Fi signal, or weather-impaired
satellite television images are frequent enough occurrences that they remain the backbone of
many marketing campaigns - “can you hear me now.” Even though we often have a sense
that the problem actually rests with a network we know little about, we tend to pound on
our laptops or complain about our phones when a problem occurs because we have a more
familiar relationship with these consumer items. We see and touch our devices throughout
the day; the network recedes into the background.
Yet the elements of our network infrastructures are all around us, in our homes,
underground, in the sky, in our cities, and in distant camouflaged locales. Such network
infrastructures consist of a complex set of interrelated technologies that collectively serve
to connect us to many different kinds of networked flows. In the same way that we might
imagine a journey that traces the history of the water that comes out of a faucet — back
through the pipes in the house, the trunks in the neighborhood, the regional distribution
facilities, the treatment facilities, and, depending on where you live, a potentially multi-
hundred mile journey through aqueducts back to the original source — we might ask the
same spatial questions of our network infrastructures. For some networks this task is not so
difficult to visualize. A local broadcast television station that produces its own news program
captures its news anchors with video cameras, edits the video feed on the fly by adding
graphics, switching cameras, and inserting pre-recorded footage, then broadcasts a radio
signal from a tall tower. A home antenna captures this signal and relays it to a receiver, where
the signal is processed and turned into a set of images and sounds. We could complicate this
43
simple picture by gradually adding in the infrastructures that support a local station, like the
remote news feed that on-site reporters generate and send back via microwave or satellite
relays, or the satellites used to distribute network (e.g. ABC, NBC, CBS) programming and
material. And we could adapt this model to account for the more prevalent distribution of
a local television signal: a transmission to the cable operator’s head-end via fiber optic cable,
coaxial cable, or simply through a commercial grade antennae; a series of equipment that
modulates that signal for distribution over the cable operator’s fiber and coaxial systems;
possibly a series of splitters or nodes to distribute signals within a neighborhood or building;
copper wire running from an outlet to a cable box or cable card, connected to a television
monitor. Add in competing systems — direct satellite, Internet protocol television (IPTV)
— and suddenly the infrastructure necessary to provision television service appears vast. Of
course, most of these same infrastructures now support some form of voice and broadband
internet service, with the appropriate inclusion of the various pieces of professional and
consumer hardware needed to make these services function.
This complexity and detail matters because these network infrastructures inherently structure
our spatial and social experiences. Sometimes these impacts are straightforward, as when
one apartment is chosen over another because the building offers satellite television service,
or a café is selected as a meeting place simply because the Wi-Fi is free. In other cases the
decisions are much more complex, as when a business chooses to locate and support jobs
in one area or another based on the proximity to a telecommunications infrastructure, or
when massive infrastructural investments impact a regional economy. Apple, for example,
announced in June, 2009 that it would be locating its primary East Coast data center in
North Carolina. This decision only occurred after North Carolina passed legislation allowing
for certain tax incentives to be made available for large, capital-intensive business. The actual
figures will depend on the final investment, but it is estimated that Apple could earn $46
44
million worth of tax incentives if it invests over $1 billion in land, property, and equipment.
The economic justification is based on expected jobs for fifty Apple employees, up to 250
contracted employees, and perhaps as many as 3,000 temporary positions supporting the
construction of the facility; it was feared that without tax incentives Apple would have
located in Virginia.
6
From everyday spatial practices to competing infrastructural providers
to large-scale infrastructural investments, the details of network infrastructures matter in
terms of who has access to networks, where this access is available, and what the externalities
of this access entail.
Infrastructures in the Home
Material infrastructures are an everyday part of our network society, from our homes to the
server farms that process our data requests, and all of the connections in between. Take, for
instance, contemporary homes, where network infrastructures constitute both functional and
signifying systems. Setting aside all of the peripherals (digital video recorders, Slingboxes,
mobile phones, flat screen monitors, wireless routers, etc.) that are endlessly marketed
as part of a networked digital lifestyle, contemporary urban homes are run through with
network infrastructures. The specific infrastructure supporting any given home depends
on many factors, with redundant and premium infrastructures available to those who are
willing and able to pay for premium services. Nonetheless, the data on communication
and entertainment services suggests that the majority of households in the United States are
served by multiple networks. Of the estimated 116 million households in the United States
at the end of 2008, 99% had televisions, over 90% subscribe to multi-channel services (61%
cable service, 28% direct satellite service, less than 2% have video service through AT&T or
Verizon). Of the 115 million television households, 81% have home computers, 74% have
Internet access, 57% have broadband connections, and 30% have digital video recorders.
The vast majority of homes have telephone service of some kind, and approximately 87%
45
of people in the U.S. have mobile phones. Almost no homes are off the grid to the point of
getting completely beyond network infrastructures, especially if one considers the satellite
footprints that blanket almost every place in the U.S. The data above suggests that most
homes have the ability to tap into radio signals from satellite, broadcast, and mobile phone
services, as well as wired signals from companies that we used to think of as cable, phone,
and electricity providers, even though most of these companies can effectively offer the same
services via their (increasingly less) different infrastructures.
It is important to note that this does not imply sameness or equivalence in the provision
of network infrastructures and networked media spaces. As Lisa Parks reminds us in her
study of communities not served by cable providers, different infrastructural formations
yield specific media practices: “Satellite television in the desert is a different technological
and cultural formation than over-the-air television in the city or cable television in the
suburbs. Studying television’s differences across these locales can challenge deterministic
understandings of the medium in its past and its future.”
7
Although nearly every home is
addressed by various network infrastructures, individuals engage with media in particular
ways depending on the type and quality of infrastructure available. Of course this
consideration holds beyond just television, as the user experience of Internet-based services is
highly dependent on the type of network infrastructure being provisioned. We heard often
(even if not often enough) of the digital divide during the first era of the commercial Internet
in the late 1990s, a phrase born out of concern for the social, cultural, civic, and economic
disparities that could be induced by certain citizens not having Internet access. As this
version of the digital divide has narrowed over the past decade to the point where over 70%
of individuals in the U.S. are Internet users, many, including the Obama administration,
have signaled concern over a new broadband digital divide. Such disparities carry over
to almost every emergent media technology, as the initial price and provision of both
46
technological hardware and infrastructure nearly always creates an early and often persistent
divide on socioeconomic lines. Even in those cases where technologies mature to the point
that service becomes broadly available, infrastructure providers tend to tier their service plans
to provide premium services at premium prices.
So how do we make sense of network infrastructures? How can we understand their
scale and scope? Because they are often the most visible, a useful first place to start is by
considering the elements of network infrastructure present in spaces of everyday life. As
suggested by the preceding discussion, homes tend to have infrastructures that support
multiple forms of engaging flows of information through networks. The actual ownership
of the infrastructural elements is complicated and depends on the type of service under
consideration (as they are regulated differently), the type of dwelling, and the specific
history of service providers in that dwelling. Prior to the divestiture of AT&T in 1984, the
company had owned not only most of the lines and switches that comprised the national
and local phone networks, but also the wires into homes and in many cases even the phones
themselves. Over the past two and a half decades, particularly after the Telecommunications
Act of 1996, the laws in the U.S. have made a clear distinction between the portion of
the network infrastructure that is clearly outside of the home and that portion of the
infrastructure that is within the home. Legally, local telecommunications and cable
companies own and are required to maintain the infrastructure up to a demarcation point
located within or close to a dwelling. Simply put, portions of these network infrastructures
have effectively been privatized, to the point where consumers effectively own (or lease) the
devices, cables, jacks, and connectors necessary to connect their devices to these demarcation
points. Cable and telecommunications companies in turn own and operate the rest of the
cables and equipment that link up distributed housing units to local and regional head-
ends and switching stations. Telecommunications service providers routinely service the
47
entire infrastructure, up to and including the jacks, wires, and devices in the home, but this
portion of the infrastructure is legally the responsibility of the building owner. In the case
of information transmitted through radio waves, the infrastructural relationship is more
straightforward. The broadcast antennae, microwave relays, orbiting satellites, and mobile
phone towers are clearly owned by the corporate service providers, and individuals own the
aerials, cables, and receivers. Direct satellite companies lease their small receiving dishes, set-
top boxes, and access cards to subscribers, although some satellite television viewers choose
to own their own equipment. Individuals using mobile phones carry their antennae and
receivers as they are integrated into the phones themselves.
The portion of network infrastructures that encroach upon the home are caught up in
complex associations of utility and signification. The broad distribution of the telephone
into domestic environments during the twentieth century and the mid-century development
of automatic switching established both a model of communications service as a public
utility and the expectation among consumers that networked services be constantly available
and seamlessly automated. Indeed, the goal seems to be that network infrastructure in
the home be invisible, redundant, and persistent. According to the National Association
of Home Builders (NAHB), the best practices for home connectivity include redundantly
pre-wiring new homes with structured wiring (multiple low-voltage coaxial and twisted-
pair cables per room for external connectivity, security, internal communications, and home
automation) so that high-quality, high-speed connections will be able to support multiple
networks service providers; a communications closet that brings all of the networking cables
together into switches then connected to the service providers’ equipment at the demarcation
point; and often a wireless router to provide in-home mobility.
8
Because so much wiring
and hub space is easier and cheaper to install before the walls go up, over 50% of new homes
built since 2003 include structured wiring; such installations also provide a profit margin to
48
the original builder and premiums in home resales.
9
In a very real sense, such installations
situate network infrastructures on par with more familiar gas, water, and HVAC systems
that have long been capitalized into home purchases. In this regard it is notable that of
the available technologies builders offer only structured wiring is relatively standard, while
monitored security, multi-room audio, home theaters, automated lighting controls, energy
management, and full home automation are offered as standard packages in under 10% of
new homes.
10
The main network infrastructure is becoming a utility, supporting a number
of other home automation technologies that are sold as optional premiums. With the
primary (if not every) room in a home prewired, the homeowner’s experience with network
infrastructures is reduced to a phone call for service — which can be easily handled with
a few wires in the communications closet — and tidy outlets throughout the house. The
spread of wireless home networking has put some downward pressure on the number of pre-
wired homes, but in most cases wired and wireless infrastructures are complementary, with
the wired infrastructure providing a backbone of connectivity and wireless systems allowing
for flexibility and in-home mobility.
Because of the broad demand for these services and the potential profit for home builders
and professional electronic system installers, homes with such advanced technological
platforms are marketed to potential buyers as being smart, “future-proofed” investments that
allow for both accelerated modes of home entertainment and productivity. A homeowner
with such systems signifies that she is both savvy enough to demand a superior network
infrastructure and classy enough to make sure that the only traces of this infrastructure
are a tidy abundance of jacks set flush into the wall. A new home with structured wiring
offers a certain degree of convenience, utility, and flexibility for its residents, but also quite
powerfully suggests a certain privileged sophistication. The real work of signification is
thus often displaced from network infrastructures onto more visible forms of engagement
49
with contemporary media. As Barbara Klinger has suggested in her study of the home
theatre systems, contemporary “accounts often depict the husband as a forward-thinking,
savvy master builder, responsible for the modernization of the home in a time when its
digitization (through the smart home concept and other developments) is an especially
prized achievement.”
11
In Klinger’s accounting, the managing of emergent media, which
increasingly rely on structured wiring infrastructures, manifests itself in elaborate home
theatre arrangements, where spectacular deployments of technological devices and theatrical
experiences reflect both a “class-based aesthetic bound up with refined tastes” and an image
of the home as “a retreat from the anxieties that characterize the political and social realm.”
12

(Klinger, 50, 52) Whereas Klinger’s emphasis on home theater installations leads her to focus
on the spectacular nature of domestic entertainment architectures, Lynn Spigel argues that
similar developments in the provision of network infrastructures to the home allow residents
to be engaged in “conspicuous production,” demonstrating their social status through both
the sophistication of their technological setup and the never-ending demands on their time.
13
Framing the domestic elements of network infrastructures as both utility and signifying
practice helps to position more prosaic network configurations alongside these advanced
installations. Of course plenty of home and building owners attempt to retrofit their
existing domestic spaces with professional and DIY structured wiring installations, but the
time, effort, and cost of such endeavors puts off plenty of people who primarily value the
network connections themselves. Although many companies are battling to provision all of
the network services for a given customer, there might be multiple cables running through
a home, connecting directly to a personal computer, to television monitors, or to a wireless
router that handles most of the home’s internal networking; in plenty of homes, even the
large number that subscribe to broadband services, the domestic network infrastructure
is simply a cable sticking up through the floor in a closet or through the drywall near the
50
television monitor. Such messy installations hint at the greater complexity of network
infrastructures, but are generally written off as bohemian clutter to be lifehacked away.
14

While an unkempt display of home networking signifies in its own ways, the practice of
maintaining home networking can be used as an expressive gesture in addition to providing a
connection, as seen in figure 2.1.
At the same time, network infrastructures do not solely signify at the individual level, as they
often hint at broader social and economic relations. For example, Lisa Parks has suggested
that certain network infrastructures allow us to “identify phases of technical experimentation,
competing distribution systems, markets that have not yet been tapped or targeted in the
same way as broadcast or cable-rigged areas.”
15
Parks insists that examining infrastructural
elements and systems allows for a much richer consideration of the limits of television itself,
and forces us to reconsider long-standing assumptions regarding television, localism, and
Left: Flickr user ChrisDag, CC-BY
Right: Image courtesy Gabriel Lichstein
f igure 2.1: h ome n etworking a esthetics
51
government-licensed monopolies. This level of signification might be meaningful primarily
to television scholars, but infrastructures themselves can carry broad social meaning as well.
Charlotte Brunsdon argues that the erection of satellite dishes in Britain in the late 1980s was
not simply about challenging a long-standing programming oligopoly, but was a powerful
site for struggles over class distinction. According to Brunsdon, the rapid and quite public
distribution of satellite dishes onto rooftops pitted working-class dish-erectors interested in
access to programming against professional-class anti-dishers who lamented the impact of
satellite dishes on the visual aesthetics of heritage architecture.
16
The visible evidence of dish-
erectors additionally signified an Americanization and a relegation of public broadcasting in
favor of commercialism. Similar taste cultures are at work in the “fringe areas” Parks studies
in California, as rural and mobile home communities, which experiment and utilize satellite
technologies by necessity, are pejoratively described with the phrase “double-wide and a dish”
while more advantaged urban- and suburbanites have multiple service options. As David
Morley reports, these taste cultures are mapped over even more pointed political concerns in
France, as satellite dishes “are now often referred to as antenne paradiabolique - signifiers of
trouble, if not evil,” that have become increasingly prevalent in the outlying banlieues that
are largely populated by immigrants.”
17
The deployment of specific network infrastructures
is thus often read as indicating a social outlook and attitude in addition to hinting at an
individual’s competence with emergent media developments. Quite clearly, all of these
examples suggest that network infrastructures are also bound up with class distinctions and
taste cultures.
Wired LivingHome
This signifying function of network infrastructures is clearly at work in the Wired
LivingHome, a spectacular, made-for-purchase home that in its very name suggest both
the utility and distinction that comes from a home being wired. The Wired home is a
52
residential tear-down in the Crestwood Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, conceived as “a
showcase of the best in sustainability, technology, and design.”
18
(Figure 2.2) A project of the
LivingHomes company, the house features pre-fab construction techniques, the greenest of
green building features, and sleek, modernist design from Ray Kappe, a big-name architect
and the founder of the Southern California Institute of Architecture. LivingHome’s partner
is Wired Magazine, responsible for outfitting the home with a comprehensive, integrated,
and enviable technological infrastructure, and, of course, lending the cachet and awareness
that the Wired brand confers. Although its emphasis on high-profile design and technology
has all the hallmarks of “the home of the future,” the partners insist that their project, which
has been on the market at four million dollars since a season of public tours in 2007, is a
showcase of the best practices commercially available today.
Although there are a few stand-alone technological flourishes in the Wired Home, like a
biometric iris reader governing entry to the front door, the emphasis is on a larger home
automation system, which will connect the entertainment services, several touch-screen
computers, temperature control, the lighting system, and home security, all controllable
through hand-held touch screen remotes. Like the customized systems used in the much
lauded and critiqued Gates Home, off-the-shelf commercial solutions are brought together
seamlessly in the Wired Home to make it a paragon of the convergent residence.
19
Millions
Images from Wired LivingHome, http://www.wired.com/promo/wiredhome
f igure 2.2: The wired l ivingh ome
53
of home theater owners, home network builders, and early adopting technology users already
have elements of these systems in their homes, but rarely do they have everything working
in harmony. The smooth integration of infrastructural networks and home entertainment
and automation is achieved in this case with the help of an additional architectural element:
the “Control 4 Room,” an antechamber to the media room that is dedicated to storing and
cooling the array of devices that support home automation, as well as connecting this system
to the external network infrastructure.
20
While the integration of media and home automation technologies makes the Wired
Home an interesting technological case study, it is also part of a conspicuous effort to link
Wired’s traditional emphasis on technology with more contemporary markers of smart
living. The ideological banner waved most enthusiastically by the project’s creators is that of
sustainability — the previous house was deconstructed (rather than demolished) and 75%
of that material is to be reused, the home is designed to earn a Gold LEED certification,
efficient lighting, plumbing, and services will be used throughout, and funds raised through
special events and tours will be donated to green organizations. While these are all positive
and overdue steps for the housing construction industry, the no-stone unturned quality of
their incorporation in LivingHomes’ projects seems designed not only to promote green
living as an ethic but also to create green living as a lifestyle category; green is not simply
something you do, but someone you are. As constructed by the Wired home, smart
living means combining green living with the ability to appreciate the refined simplicity
of modern architecture, the benefits of automated technology, and the value of design. To
make sure that the target market understands the parameters of smart living, the Wired
Home has partnered with a range of signifying sponsors, featuring the latest no-emission
vehicles from BMW, computers from HP , and even design elements for a kid’s room from
Cookie, the magazine for children of distinction. Just as Wired and LivingHomes would
54
have it, this is emphatically not the home everyone will be living in ten years from now,
but rather the home that a certain demographic, a niche that is being targeted even as it is
being constructed, aspires to live in right now. Although the elements of the house can be
appreciated individually and as a whole, a primary function of the Wired House is clearly to
commodify sustainability, technology, and design, and to create a profitable market niche out
of those select individuals who can appreciate this mode of smart living.
This showcase home, with its technologies and design out of reach for the vast majority of
homeowners, features a suite of entertainment and information technologies that offer its
occupants unprecedented control over their environment while connecting them to a broader
network infrastructure. “Wired” may be the name of one of the projects major sponsors,
but it is also an apt description of this project’s public ambitions. The prospective resident
of the Wired Livinghome can simply purchase their way into a home that is intra- and
inter-networked. The complex set of public utility infrastructure, in-wall structured wiring,
and tastefully hidden media control room are reduced to a portable remote control with a
touch-screen interface, which can be used to operate all of the home’s automated functions.
The interactive scripted space of the Wired LivingHome quite clearly sublimates its network
infrastructure in favor of a customized graphical user interface.
While the Wired LivingHome is an exceptional case, the network infrastructures of many
contemporary homes, both those built in the past half-decade and the many more older
homes which have been upgraded, work to structure the social spaces in which their
occupants live. These consequences will be considered in extended detail in chapter four,
but the general point is that an individual’s spatial practices are altered by the presence and
practice of networked media spaces. While a home featuring structured wiring or a home
that has been highly upgraded might feature network access in many different spaces, in
most connected homes the network infrastructure places some limitations on the spaces
55
from which network connections are available. This might mean that a computer gets
placed in a living room because that is where the cable modem was installed, that the choice
of which bedroom to convert into a home office is dependent upon where the appropriate
jacks are, or even how a home’s inhabitants interact with each other differently based on
their physical distribution in the home. Rooms with connections function differently for
their occupants than rooms without connections. Even network infrastructures that rely
on radio transmission have distinct spatial impacts, as some portions of a home may have
greater or lesser ability to receive these signals. Broadcast signals may only reach television
sets in one room and not others, limited Wi-Fi networks might lead to spaces of the house
being used differently (especially in cases where a neighbor’s signal is being shared), or fickle
mobile phone service may make certain portions of a home effectively continuous with
the outside and other spaces effectively unconnected. The broader point is that people
use space differently depending on the availability, configuration, and quality of network
infrastructures in their domestic spaces. Of course the practice of social space in networked
homes is impacted by many different factors, but network infrastructures put certain
pressures and limits on the types of and spaces in which activities occur. Understanding
the micro-spatial impacts of network infrastructures in this manner further complicate our
broad understanding of the emergent media landscape. If we seek to have an understanding
of who has a connection to the Internet at home, for example, in addition to quantifying
the number of dial-up and broadband connections we might also want to know things like:
the level of broadband service (given that most providers offer multiple tiers of service);
the type of broadband (cable, satellite, etc.); if the connection is wired directly to a single
computer, shared between multiple computers, or shared through a wireless router; which
portions of the home are effectively networked; if the networked spaces overlap with other
media spaces or if different domestic spaces are set aside for different mediated experiences;
which household members have access to or effective control over which types of media and
56
spaces. Tendencies to reduce questions to binaries (connected or not; dial-up or broadband;
broadcast or multi-channel) mean that merely reviewing connectivity statistics (as done
earlier in this chapter) provides a thin understanding of how media and space are actually
woven together in the actual built environment; the unevenness and complexity of “the
last five feet” of our network infrastructures suggests that we should hold network theories
accountable to a thicker engagement with the lived conditions of our networked media
spaces.
21

Infrastructure Everywhere: Wires and Ether
Even as we seek to better understand the implications of how networks are ultimately
expressed in local built environments, we should not lose sight of the fact that network
infrastructures operate at multiple scales. Media scholars have long appreciated the
relationship between media hardware, residential architecture and design, and daily
patterns of domestic circulation, yet this understanding needs to be updated to consider the
multiple infrastructural networks in which contemporary media are situated and the way
corresponding spatial arrangements affect the uses and practices of domestic technologies.
The networked media spaces created by the integration of entertainment media technologies
with home automation systems and multiple external communications networks are multi-
layered, unevenly distributed within homes and across neighborhoods, and determined
by an array of forces, including municipal arrangements, corporate options, geographic
limitations, cultural preferences, individual finances, and technological affinities. Moreover,
these network infrastructures are inherently spatializing, shaping the social function of
networked spaces. As Kazys Varnelis has suggested, contemporary urban environments are
now structured by “a series of codependent systems of environmental mitigation, land-use
organization, communication and service delivery.”
22
Land use, new construction, and even
individuals’ day-to-day activities are shaped by infrastructures of all kinds. In recognition of
57
this, the provision of such systems has long been provided or regulated by the state, in forms
that vary depending on the type of service. The network infrastructures supporting emergent
media technologies, on the other hand, have been subject to increasingly less regulation
over the past few decades, even as their function in daily life has increased. As Ted Kane
and Rick Miller note, “Freeways, telephones, satellites, Wi-Fi, radio, and television each
provide means by which the everyday city flows and composes itself. This new open-ended
infrastructure doesn’t dictate its form in concrete, but still has an immense impact on the life
and consciousness of the city.”
23
The social and spatial impacts of communications networks
extend well beyond the space of the home, operating both as material elements of the built
environment and to structure the spatial practices of individuals in that environment.
Although we might have some degree of familiarity with the network infrastructures in
our homes, such elements are merely the locally visible endpoints of the vast network
infrastructures necessary to provide emergent entertainment and communications services.
Just as the actual physical deployment of infrastructural elements within the home impacts
the social use of space, so too does the provision of the infrastructural backbone. The
design and buildout of these elements of network infrastructures involves the coordination
of government agencies, communications service providers, and numerous sub-contracted
companies that help to establish and service these systems.
Each type of infrastructure has its own specific history, although broader shifts involving
digitization, fiber optics, the use of Internet protocols, convergent media patterns,
the conglomeration of media industries, and a narrowing of regulatory differences has
ameliorated most conceptual differences between them. Companies that are regulated as
telecommunications providers, for example, generally trace their history back to the Bell
monopoly, with its history of regional infrastructures, back haul networks, and long line
services providing long-distance and international connections. These companies have
58
re-consolidated in the wake of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, subsequently investing
billions of dollars upgrading their systems to handle the transition of local phone systems
to higher-bandwidth data networks and to enhance the long line systems that comprise the
Internet backbone. As these companies have replaced older coaxial and copper networks
with fiber optic interconnections and in some cases fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) they have
repositioned themselves to offer Internet access plans and multi-channel video programming
in addition to the home telephone services that are more commonly associated with cable.
Cable operators have similarly gone through massive waves of consolidation over the past
two decades. While there are still nearly 8,000 cable franchises, there are only 1,200 cable
operating system companies and the top five multi-service operators (MSOs) handle 85%
of all cable homes.
24
Like the telecom companies, these large operators have upgraded their
in-the-ground infrastructure to incorporate high-bandwidth fiber optics — the NCTA
reports that the industry spent nearly $150 billion on infrastructure between 1996 and
2008 — occasionally to the home but more often to a local node that serves a small group
of homes connected via legacy copper wiring. Like the consolidated telecommunications
companies, the large cable MSOs have augmented their service plans to include the “triple-
play” of voice, data, and multi-channel video programming. As the number of subscribers
to residential broadband service grew in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the large
telecommunications and cable operators leveraged their existing and expanding infrastructure
to dominate this market as well. Of the estimated 69 million broadband subscribers in
the U.S. 85% are subscribers of the five largest cable MSOs (Comcast, Time Warner, Cox,
Charter, Cablevision) or the three largest telecom companies (AT&T, Verizon, Qwest).
25
Although their offerings are based on part on regional competition and ongoing technology
and pricing experiments, the cable and telecommunications companies are essentially
competing directly with each other to provide quite similar services. Consumer make
59
choices based on availability, price, speed, quality of service, and, often, simple questions
of availability. The telecommunications companies are required by law to allow third party
companies to resell services over their infrastructures, and many companies have emerged
to sell phone and data packages. Until AT&T and Verizon launched their own fiber-based
video services in recent years, these and other telecommunications companies, including
resellers, augmented their data and voice services by partnering with direct broadcast
satellite companies to provide multi-channel video. Whereas cable and telecom companies
must necessarily maintain and upgrade an infrastructure that includes cables reaching to
every home, satellite video providers instead manage the deployment and maintenance of
communications satellites (or can rent transponder space on an existing satellite). Aside
from some earth stations, the local infrastructure for satellite service is predominantly 18-24
inch receiving dishes, connected to set-top boxes. In addition to providing multi-channel
television programming, satellite service can be used to provide two-way data services,
though latencies, high costs, and bandwidth limitations have made this a less common
option.
Like direct broadcast satellite companies, the infrastructure of mobile carriers is generally
located at some distance from homes, which makes maintenance and upgrading easier. The
infrastructure specific to mobile phones boils down to transceivers on buildings or towers.
(Figure 2.3) These transceivers operate as part of larger base station systems that additionally
process and relay the signal, tying into the backhaul and backbone networks, which are often
owned by the same telecommunications conglomerates. As Ted Kane and Rick Miller have
noted, even this infrastructure tries to hide: “Even their sole outposts in the material world,
cellular phone towers, seek to disappear, camouflaged as palm trees or church steeples to
blend into their suburban surroundings.”
26
The local infrastructure for a mobile phone is
simply the transceiver built into each handset.
60
Using radio waves in different portions of the spectrum are local television and radio stations,
which have their own transmission towers that send signals out to antennae connected to
individuals’ television sets. While all of these industries are regulated to some extent, these
legacy broadcast systems tend to receive the most scrutiny. Unlike cable, data, voice, and
mobile services, broadcast systems in the U.S. have almost always been free-to-air systems.
The federal government, through congressional legislation and the FCC, has historically
managed the set of relationships between programming producers, networks, stations, and
viewers, effectively arguing that public ownership of the airwaves requires that broadcasters
act in the public interest. This regulatory stance has recently had a great deal of impact
on infrastructural decisions, as congressional legislation in 2005 mandated a switchover
from analog television broadcasting to all-digital signals. The subsequent buildout and
testing of digital transmitting equipment revealed that services would change, in some cases
dramatically, for broadcast-only viewers at the fringes of broadcast service areas. Some
station signals will be lost because the new transmitting equipment operates at a lower power
than analog broadcasting systems, others because the digital transmitters are often not located
in the same spot as their analog antecedents. Because of these issues and a number of reports
f igure 2.3: landscapes of n etwork infrastructures
Left: Mobile phone transceivers in Lebanon, IL
Right: Microwave transmitters in Taos, NM; photos by author
61
that indicated that nearly 6% of U.S. Households were not ready for the digital transition
just prior to the February 17th, 2009 deadline, the U.S. Congress passed legislation
extending the deadline to June 12th, 2009. The question of the digital transition received a
great deal of attention because television is viewed as an essential utility, like water or power
service, providing crucial information to the citizenry. It was delayed in part because the
transition was mandated by regulation, and the government did not want to be on the hook
for disconnecting people, in part because the funds set aside to subsidize the new set-top
boxes required to make an old television play a digital signal ran out, and in part because
it became clear that the households most affected by the transition were disproportionately
African American and Hispanic. Less noted in most of this discourse on the transition is that
standard rabbit-ear antennas are often insufficient to receive the lower-powered digital signal,
and that many viewers will need to upgrade to powered external (roof-mounted) aerials in
order to receive the same station broadcasts they have long received as analog signals.
Communications networks have historically been thought of as public utilities similar to
other modern residential services. As Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin argue, in recent
decades many of these public service have become privatized, in the U.S. and globally:
Modern conceptions of infrastructure tended to emphasize the connectedness of
different infrastructures – water, gas, electricity, communications, and transport
all went together. Changing political economies, transitions in cultural politics,
changing practices and ideals of urban planning, and radical restructurings in all
types of nation state have led to changes in cities and especially in infrastructure. The
trend has been toward unbundling of infrastructure, various forms of privatization,
and associated reconfigurations of urban spaces to parallel the changes in urban
infrastructure.
27
As Graham and Marvin suggest, contemporary network infrastructures are not
necessarily connected to other service systems, and are, in the U.S. at least, increasingly
private endeavors operating within a light regulatory context. Certain more established
infrastructure networks, like those operated by telecommunications and cable companies,
have predominantly been upgraded along their existing rights of way. In other cases, like
62
direct satellite broadcasters and mobile phone service providers, entirely new infrastructural
elements have been erected. In these cases, it is particularly notable that these infrastructures
are explicitly private in nature. The federal government may have raised funds by auctioning
off spectrum space or may in the future charge spectrum allocation fees, but the actual
funding and provisioning of the infrastructural networks is a private endeavor. In the case of
mobile phone infrastructures — the now ubiquitous towers and transponders — federal law
prohibits most forms of local intervention that might seek to limit construction, effectively
giving mobile phone companies the right to build or lease space wherever they can find
someone to rent or sell the land, regardless of local public opinion about land use.
28
This is
quite different than the funding models used for building sewer systems, for example, or for
the construction of roads and transit services. Without public funding, of course, decisions
about infrastructure buildout and service provision are left to the private corporations
investing in these networks. As Kane and Miller suggest, this issue highlights broader change
in the relationship between public planning and urban space: “Nor is this simply a question
of technology; the rise of privately funded infrastructure and the subsequent decline of
public control represents a new corporate model of urban planning, with implications for
the future development of the city.”
29
Perhaps the most notable outcome of these private
infrastructural networks is that privately provisioned networks tend to be built out in a
manner that initially privileges consumers over citizens. Mobile phone carriers, for example,
have notably upgraded their networks over time, almost always following the pattern of
upgrading high-traffic, high-income areas with the newest network infrastructures before
extending that infrastructure to areas that will generate less usage. This strategy makes purely
economic sense, but it means that individuals living in certain areas are constantly facing an
infrastructure gap. Mobile phone carriers, for example, are working on a rollout of “4G”
mobile phone networks designed to handle mobile data services, even as their “2G” and
“3G” networks still have plenty of gaps in coverage. The aforementioned digital television
63
transition will provide clearer reception and more channels to urban and suburban viewers at
the expense of certain rural viewers who will lose channels or reception altogether.
In other cases, the privatization of the network results in service tiering and controls that
operate quite differently from previous public utilities. Cable providers have long offered
tiered service plans, and most multi-channel video providers have followed suit. Service
tiering can be understood quite straightforwardly when thinking about an individual
service provider, but this concept can also be applied more synthetically to understand
how different suites of infrastructure are available to different types of citizens, often
based on geographic distribution or income. An individual purchasing a new home in a
new neighborhood within the past few years, for example, is likely to find that it comes
not only with structured wiring within the home, but is also connected the newest and
most robust network infrastructures.
30
Just as developers of new neighborhoods enhance
the value of their investment by including “future-proof” internal wiring, the local cable
and telecommunications networks see value in connecting new communities with a level
of infrastructure designed to accommodate future bandwidth needs. In a similar vein,
developers of new apartment and condominium buildings have, over the past few years,
tended to make sure their buildings are both pre-wired internally and connected in the most
robust manner to the available urban network infrastructures. Indeed, in both of these types
of examples developers and network service providers tend to over-provision their networks,
as it is simpler and more cost effective to install high-bandwidth infrastructure to and into
every home, even if the connections are only turned on for those who choose to subscribe.
As explained in the case study on Playa Vista (chapter five), certain developers will go so far
as to make sure that multiple and redundant infrastructural systems run to a dwelling even
when there is no immediate plan to offer connectivity through these networks, for future
provisioning or just in case a high-paying customer demands premium service. The result
64
in situations like this are that any residents who can afford to purchase dwellings in such
new developments, already an economically privileged group, are given differential access
to network infrastructures based on their demand and willingness to pay. Of course, these
are relatively high-class problems. For individuals who live at the edge of a network service
area, or who live beyond service areas altogether, the limitations on network connections can
be substantial. In the context of tracing the limits of cable television services Lisa Parks has
written compellingly of those spaces beyond the reach of established cable networks. She
carefully points out in her analysis how individuals who live or visit these fringe areas are
either disconnected from multi-channel entertainment or have augmented their connectivity
with generations of satellite services.
31
Although Parks is primarily concerned with the
provision of television services in this essay, we might also build on her analysis to ask
questions about how the geographic distribution of dwellings results in quite distinct forms
of access to data services. The FCC reports that as of the end of 2007, cable broadband
service was available in just 66% of the nation’s zip codes, and ADSL (through phone lines)
in 87%.
32
Although the U.S. Population is concentrated in those zip codes that receive
service, these statistics still indicate that a number of households in fringe areas do not have
the opportunity for wired high speed connections. Moreover, many serviced houses in the
fringe areas will experience poorer connections, as service speed and quality degrades at
greater distances from network hubs; these dwellings also tend to be the last to be upgraded
as systems improve. Individuals in the fringe area might turn to direct satellite or mobile
phone systems for their entertainment, data, and communications needs, but these services
tend to be significantly slower, more expensive, and are often capped in terms of how much
bandwidth an individual may use. As infrastructural decisions are effectively privatized,
connectivity to specific dwellings and geographies are delayed, degraded, or simply ignored.
As Graham and Marvin note, such decisions are inherent to privatized infrastructures:
“Often such bypassing and disconnection are directly embedded into the design of networks,
65
both in terms of the geographies of the points they do and do not connect, and in terms of
the control placed on who or what can flow over the networks.”
33
While the FCC has paid
some rhetorical attention to the uneven distribution of high-speed connections, particularly
to rural areas of the U.S., the current Obama administration has indicated that connecting
all citizens via broadband connections is a high priority, and has funded this effort with $7.2
billion as part of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
Network infrastructures matter. The question of utility and signification that are operative
within a dwelling are refashioned into questions of access and equity when considered at a
broader scale. Urban spaces, which have long been understood as regional agglomerations
of spatial use and practice, are in many ways dependent on and meaningfully defined
by the infrastructural networks that bind them together. In a collection of essays Kazyz
Varnelis compellingly argues that such infrastructures need be rethought in the twenty-first
century as “Networked Ecologies,” broader systems of interconnectivity that situate urban
infrastructures within broader regional, national, and global systems. Using such a model,
we can see how rural, suburban, and urban environments are interconnected by both the
dependencies of infrastructural systems and the mobilities that these systems support.
Indeed, our geographies of social space are built explicitly on actual and imaginary forms
of connectivity, as the constitution of any local space is inflected in part by the actions and
desires of individuals living along other points in the network. Our individual and collective
experience of the network society depends upon who is connected and who is not, whether
their connections are sufficient to allow for an equal engagement or whether their service
is limited, and ultimately upon the overall goals and limitations inherent in our network
infrastructures. As Graham and Marvin have noted, questions of access and control “[force
us] to think about how space and scale are being refashioned in new ways that we can
literally see crystallizing before us in the coming configurations of infrastructure networks
66
and the landscapes of urban spaces all around us.”
34
Where it was once expected — if not
always realized — that every dwelling should have access to water, sewage, electric, and
telephone systems, it is now expected that our networked communications infrastructures
be privately provisioned and our services tiered. If we collectively buy into the oft-heard
argument that network connectivity is the key to both personal economic success and the
growth of the collective national/global economy, then we should be concerned as citizens
and neighbors that our contemporary networks are differentially provisioned. If Graham
and Marvin are correct that “the central dynamic of urban fragmentation and infrastructural
unbundling is thus a reduction of emphasis on standardized connective fabrics within cities,”
then we should also understand that the deployment of network infrastructures is a political
question that highlights issues of social justice and identity construction.
35
“The network”
and “the network society” are often useful shorthand for understanding broad changes in
social, economic, and political realms, but they are also obfuscating terms that tend to flatten
our understanding of the different implications of the type of network infrastructures in use.
Just as Doreen Massey has argued for an appreciation of the “power geometry of time-space
compression” that recognizes that individuals experience globalization differently, we can
similarly insist that this differential experience exists quite powerfully at the nitty-gritty level
of network infrastructure.
Powerful Infrastructures: The Back-end
In addition to personal computers and network switches, we must be attentive to the other,
often commercial, nodes of the network. The infrastructure of the Internet does make
it possible for individuals to connect to other individuals, but much of what takes place
online does so through corporate servers, transmitters, and transponders. In the point-
to-many architecture of television and radio broadcasters, for example, the transmitter
is the key portion of the infrastructure; without that node, the rest of the network is
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useless. This function is also served by direct satellite transponders, cable head-ends, and
telecommunication companies’ central switching stations, with the additional provision that
these networks often have more redundancies built in and are able to capture information
about usage by domestic nodes.
For computer networks, especially the commercial Internet, we must consider how such a
distributed system actually has quite material infrastructural geographies. These geographies
are evident in the corporate location of companies developing and using the Internet,
the agglomeration of companies supporting the industry, and the massive deployment of
servers which store the information that is now so much a part of our daily lives. In a broad
sense, the Internet as a whole is far from placeless, as specific geographies have featured
prominently in its development. Matthew Zook, for example, has demonstrated that the
particular geography of the “Internet industry” does not match the rhetoric of the decentered
and flat world the Internet supposedly creates. He argues that “the development of the
Internet industry is fundamentally embedded in geography and defies simple expectations
of diffusion and the demise of cities and instead illustrates the continued importance of
particular regional and urban nodes in an increasingly globalized economy.”
36
In arguing
this point he shows how users of the Internet are concentrated (from a global perspective),
infrastructure is concentrated (from a global and national/regional perspective), location
of sites/hosts is concentrated (globally, regionally, and in urban areas), and the location
of “internet companies” is most certainly concentrated (globally, regionally, and, most
especially, in urban areas). Andrew Ross has added to this mode of analysis by considering
the specific geographies, architectures, and cultures that emerged as part of the corporate
culture surrounding the first wave of the commercialization of the Internet.
37
In addition,
and in order to explain the findings of his argument about spatialization, Zook suggests
that much of this has to do with the financing situation for the Internet industry: as the
68
boom was primarily financed by venture capital, the concentration of internet companies,
sites, hosts, and infrastructure was agglomerated in those regions that had access to venture
capital. Moreover, Zook nuances this point by suggesting that it was more than simply the
access to funds that drove companies to locate near venture zones, but that “smart money”
venture capitalists were both unwilling to invest beyond a certain geographic radius, and
instrumental in providing contacts, support, and advice to start-ups.
38
As the Internet
became commercialized an industrial agglomeration formed around the key places in which
it was being developed, and the Internet industry as a whole has become part of broader
regional agglomerations of many different types of industry, notably in places like Silicon
Valley/San Francisco, Southern California, metro Washington D.C., and New York city in
the U.S.
In addition to these broader commercial geographies, the Internet features new types of
buildings designed to host the specific needs of network infrastructures. In certain major
cities where local, national, and international network infrastructures come together entire
buildings are set aside for this massive switching operation. As proximity to these switching
points provides a competitive advantage for companies operating online, sometimes nearby
buildings are repurposed to act as a point of presence for hundreds of different companies
who want their servers as close to the Internet backbone as possible. As Kazys Varnelis
has shown, the One Wilshire building is a tall corporate tower in downtown Los Angeles
that has many tenants but few human visitors. The entire structure is dedicated to hosting
servers and switching operations for companies that want to be close to the AT&T switching
center that connects Los Angeles to the rest of the country, and the U.S. to Asia.
39
Servers
are essentially just specifically-purposed computers, and so long as they are connected to the
Internet in a dedicated manner they could be geographically located most anywhere. Plenty
of individuals run servers from their homes, and many companies operate servers from their
69
place of business, but the most robust uses of the capabilities of the Internet tend to be
accomplished by aggregating servers into dedicated data center with hundreds, thousands, or
even tens of thousands of servers networked together and to the Internet. These data centers,
often referred to as server farms, can be owned and operated by individual companies or
can be operated by a third party in order to support the Internet activities of many different
companies. These data centers require a relatively small amount of human labor to operate
once they are built and installed, but require other infrastructural inputs like massive
amounts of electricity to run so many computers and robust water systems to help cool the
entire operation. Such large and concentrated operations remind us that networks, which so
often are described as placeless, actually have quite material instantiations and exist in specific
geographies. Stephen Graham has revealed that some companies offer secure server farms
by locating them inside cold war-era missile silos.
40
The largest companies on the Internet,
like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Amazon, operate many massive server farms around the
world.
To take just one example, Google recently declassified some vital information regarding
the construction and operation of its major data center in The Dalles, Oregon.(Figure
2.4) While it might be a touch sensational to refer to Google in martial terms, their desire
to protect the architecture of their data centers has been guarded with a level of secrecy
on par with their efforts to protect their searching algorithms. The company believes that
part of their competitive advantage lies in the arrangement and type of hardware that the
company uses to provision the various services it provides to Internet users. Indeed, while
Google claims that the reason it shared some information about its data centers and server
configurations in April, 2009 was because it wanted to help green the industry by sharing its
best practices, many suspect that they were willing to part with this data because they have
already protected their competitive advantage by moving on to newer solutions.
41

70
Google owns and leases dozens of data centers in the U.S. and around the globe and is quite
secretive about where they are and how they are operated.
42
Google regularly buys property
and leases space using subsidiary corporations to keep their actual operations hidden. The
company chose to locate their first built and owned data center in The Dalles in central
Oregon because this location provides easy access to inexpensive power produced by nearby
f igure 2.4: g oogle d ata center in The d alles, or
Clockwise from upper-left: Bluprints (Image from Harpers Magazine, March 2008)
Existing infrastructure (Photo by flickr user jonmasters, 15 Sep 2008, CC-BY-NC)
Basic server configuration (Photo credit Stephan Shankland/CNET)
Closeup of data center (Photo from Gawker.com, 31 July 2006)
Shipping container cutaway (Photo credit Stephan Shankland/CNET)
71
hydroelectric facilities. At a recent Data Center Energy Conference hosted by the company,
Google revealed that this complex features three external shells filled with 45 specially-
designed shipping containers. Each container holds 1,160 servers, allowing the data center
as a whole to run over 52,000 servers in each building; the data center is made up of three
buildings. Each building also features an array of power connections along the top of the
containers, and a cooling system with water from the nearby river running beneath the
containers.
43
A massive development of this size, which clearly ties into a broader system of
networked ecologies, is a powerful example of the specific material geographies of network
infrastructures. This data center and the hundreds like at that are being built and operated
in out-of-the-way places around the globe represent major nodes of the Internet’s topology,
with a large portion of everyday information traffic running through such facilities. The
Internet may not have a center, but these types of facilities suggest that not all nodes are
equivalent; neither Google nor the Internet would shut down if this facility failed, yet the
scale of this operation suggest that its relationship to the rest of the network infrastructure is
different than that of other nodes. If the discussion of network infrastructures in individual
homes emphasized the differentiated nature of the billions of networked media spaces
engaged around the globe, this Google example powerfully demonstrates that decentralized
and rhizomatic network topographies do not necessarily translate into nodes with equivalent
spatial, economic, cultural, or political implications. Given the scale and nature of the data
Google processes and stores, this enormous installation might be considered as a uniquely
important and sensitive node. Google has built such data centers because it handles a
massive number of daily server requests and because the company is increasingly offering
services that allow users to store personal information — like email archives, web surfing
histories, and documents — on Google servers. This type of service, which is offered in
different forms from many different companies, such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple, is
auguring an online environment in which personal and business computing is increasingly
72
performed not through software applications running on personal or business machines
but instead by outsources storage and processing to companies running such operations
through large data centers. If Google and these other companies are correct in their assertion
that we will increasingly outsource our online actions “to the cloud,” we can expect that
such structures will become a regular feature of the industrial landscape. Their materiality
underwrites our mobility, as the cultural ideal of networked personalized mobility is
increasingly predicated on the interaction of local, customized interfaces with networks
and networked services. As we store our electronic correspondence, calendars, contacts,
everyday data files, and long term backups with companies that operate and use enormous
server farms, we work to simultaneously guarantee our own freedom to move from space to
space and device to device, and to necessitate the further construction of these exceptional
network nodes. Whereas we might intuitively grasp that networked media spaces are created
through the deployment of local network infrastructures, the interactive scripted spaces of
emergent media pointedly foreground media interfaces and screen out the code and deeper
infrastructures at work behind the scenes.
Protocol
The details of network infrastructures are crucial to understanding their social and spatial
function, but a robust appreciation of their materiality includes an exploration of the
protocols through which they operate. Networks are indeed made up of nodes and links,
servers and cables, various physical elements designed for the transmission of encoded sound,
video, and data. But elements of these various network infrastructures have been built up
over generations, are made of different types of material (metal, glass, silicon), function
below the ground and above (even beyond the Earth’s atmosphere), and transmit information
encoded in different ways. How is this vast set of materials made interoperable? These
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networks are catalyzed by protocols, as information passes through infrastructures based on a
shared set of rules.
In a quite direct sense protocols underwrite the diffusion of networked media spaces
because they have been explicitly designed to support the scaler growth of network
infrastructures. The infrastructural nodes — including servers, routers, switches, head-
ends, modems, receivers, and other connected devices — use protocols to make connections
with other nodes, to package information with metadata, and to generally make sure that
the information gets where it needs to go in the correct format. As Eugene Thacker and
Alexander Galloway state: “Put simply, protocols are all the conventional rules and standards
that govern relationships within networks” and “if networks are the structures that connect
people, then protocols are the rules that make sure the connections actually work.”
44

Protocols and rules for encoding are operative for most every form of mediated information
transmission and vary based on factors like the physical properties of the transmission
medium, the network architecture, and the distances to be covered. In some cases, like the
NTSC standard that defined television broadcasting from its commercial inception to the
digital transition and the ATSC standard that is replacing it, the protocol is essentially a
system of standards agreed to by broadcasters and equipment manufacturers so the signals
can be effectively sent and received.
45
These standards determine factors like frame rates,
aspect ratio, color systems, compression systems, error corrections, and programming
metadata; without this protocological rule set information could not be effectively sent
through the network infrastructure. The most widely considered set of protocols are those
used in computer networks, often simply shorthanded as the IP suite, or Internet Protocol
Suite. These protocols were developed in the 1970s and 1980s when the nascent Internet
was still primarily the domain of computer scientists. As Alexander Galloway explains in
Protocol, most Internet protocols are described by RFC (Request For Comments) documents.
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These documents are collaboratively produced by the Internet Engineering Task Force and
implemented by engineers and developers looking to develop hardware and software that will
work with existing network infrastructures.
46
The IP Suite as defined by RFC 1122 and RFC
1123 defines a four-layer model (see figure 2.5) which consists of the following:
47
> An application layer, like http (for web applications) or smtp (for email
applications) that essentially produces semantic data, called datagrams, like web pages
and email messages
> A transport layer, which applies a TCP header to the datagrams so that they can be
tracked and their arrival at another network destination can be confirmed
> A network layer, in which the Internet Protocol applies more header data, breaks
datagrams into smaller datagrams (called packets), and routes these packets through
various network infrastructures
> A data link layer, which establishes a connection between one host and another,
like the connection between a DSL modem in a home and the DSL service provider’s
Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexer (DSLAM), essentially the means by which
DSL modems connect home computers and home networks to the broader Interent
> Supporting this four-layer model is the physical network itself, which demands
specific link layer protocols depending on the type of physical network. This layer
is not explicitly defined in RFC 1122, as the IP Suite is intended to be hardware
neutral.
As Galloway notes, this four level model is similarly defined by a seven-layer Open Systems
Interconnection (OSI) reference model, which essentially expands certain of the layers
discussed above into more detailed sub-layers. Regardless of the specific model, these
protocols are simply agreed upon standards that are built into the function of network
nodes. Any given piece of hardware may choose to opt out of such protocols, but such a
decision would severely limit that machine’s ability to communicate as part of the network;
if it cannot perform the expected function of the network, it will simply be routed around.
As a result, any devices designed to be part of the broader Internet infrastructure must
incorporate these protocols. Data, sound, video, even high-definition television (as in the
case of AT&T’s U-verse service) can be delivered over IP networks. Internet protocol serves
75
as a useful case study because it has long supported the growth of the Internet and is flexible
enough to support new services in the future.
Indeed it is the function of protocol across network infrastructures that effectively scripts
emergent media experiences. We saw above how the provision of network infrastructures
literally adds to the built environment and induces individuals and institutions to alter
their own spaces. But the script is not complete without protocol, as networked social
and cultural practices are made possible through protocol. Conceptualizing networks as
multilayer systems has proven quite effective in terms of critiquing the development of
network culture. The most robust critiques of the cultural impact of the Internet and the
world wide web tend to conceptualize networks not simply as a black box that supports social
practice and cultural production, but more systemically as an interrelated set of functions.
Accordingly, the technical framework outlined above has also been used to more broadly
theorize models of Internet communication:
Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web, uses a slightly different four-layer model
consisting of “the transmission medium, the computer hardware, the software, and
the content.” Yochai Benkler, from whom Lawrence Lessig has drawn, uses instead a
three-layer model consisting of a physical layer, a code layer, and a content layer. Lev
f igure 2.5: f ive-layer ip s tack and d ata e ncapsulation m odel
From UnixWare 7 online documentation set
http://uw713doc.sco.com/en/NET_tcpip/tcpN.tcpip_stack.html
76
Manovich uses an even simpler, two-layer model consisting of a “cultural” layer …
and a “computer” layer.
48
From the most technical seven-layer models to the culturally descriptive models suggested
above, the point is that the establishment of networking protocols has provided both
utilitarian and conceptual models of how information traverses network infrastructures. It
is also important that each of these examples hold in tension a relation between culture,
software, and physical network. Whether the terminology is content, culture, or, Galloway’s
own preferred term, information, the salient conclusion is that each of these network
theories recognizes that a rigorous engagement with the idea of networks and the network
society demands an interrogation of all three terms. To speak solely in terms of network
architecture and topology is to miss the point of the cultural function of networks. To
limit an understanding of the network society to the forms of cultural production it enables
discounts the ways in which physical architectures and software powerfully delimit the
range of expressive possibilities. If we want to think about the social, cultural, and political
meanings of networks we must thoroughly understand how these layered models work at
every level. Insisting on the spatiality and materiality of networks is crucial to this endeavor,
as it challenges theoretical approaches that do not sufficiently account for the differentiation
of networks. Protocols themselves and protocol as a theoretical rubric usefully insist upon
a rigorous appreciation for at least some aspects of the materiality of networks, but even
these gestures rely on a conceptual model of the network that abstracts away from the real
differences across network infrastructures. There exists a real tension between protocol’s
determined neutrality and the actual constitution of network nodes. A topological view
of network architectures – or at least the Internet’s architecture – inherently levels the
differences between nodes and explicitly devalues the individual contribution of any given
node, which can be routed around in any case. A geo-spatial understanding of the same
phenomenon reminds us that protocol is at work not just across nodes, but also through
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different physical media, within machines of different capability, and in configurations that
are vastly unequal. The genius of protocol is its ability to elide difference; but this is precisely
its weakness as a stand-alone theoretical tool.
Holding protocol accountable to actual network infrastructures also gives us insight into
how interactive scripted spaces are intended to function. A framework that includes
both infrastructures and protocol, for example, provides insight into network issues such
as bandwidth limitations that limit the production and distribution of cultural products
and quality of service issues that render certain network experiences effective. But more
importantly we need to think about infrastructures and protocol together to better
understand the power relations at stake in a network society. For in many ways it is in the
details of network architectures and protocological parameters that contemporary forms of
power are constituted and distributed. The signal contribution of Alexander Galloway and
Eugene’s Thacker’s work on a critique of networks has been to diagnose protocol as both
the technological rule set defined above and as a “system of distributed management.”
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Protocol performs the technical function of distributing datagrams. The distribution of this
technical function across the nodes of a network is essentially a move away from hierarchical
or bureaucratic forms of management toward a model in which organization and control
has been distributed to the many nodes of the network. These nodes act autonomously, in
that they are not told explicitly what to do, but they quite clearly work within a system of
distributed management, as they must each use the same protocols in order to function. It is
through this distribution of protocol that new relations of power can be understood.
Such a flattening of hierarchy has been noticed in many aspects of contemporary society,
notably by Manuel Castells in his work on the network society. So what does it mean to
have distributed forms of corporate organization, network topology, political alignment,
and resistance? In his “Postscript on Control Societies,” Gilles Deleuze outlines a broad
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movement away from the “disciplinary societies” documented so thoroughly by Michel
Foucault toward contemporary “societies of control.” Disciplinary societies emphasized
visible yet unverifiable apparatuses of power — like prisons, factories, hospitals, and schools
— and a mode of management based on the rise of bureaucracies of the 19th and 20th
centuries. Deleuze argues that societies of control are characterized by invisible and dispersed
forms of power in which institutions are challenged, individuals are mobile, and power is
exercised through flexible networks. Factories are shuttered in favor of telecommuting and
home-based work; schools are closed in favor of distance-education; criminals serve out
their sentences under electronically monitored house arrest. The signatures and numbers
that defined individuals and populations have given way to passwords and codes that define
“dividuals” and “banks,” forms of subjectivity that exist in and through mediated networks.
Most notably, Deleuze insists that power no longer operates through enclosures but instead
through modulations of control: “Enclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a
modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to
the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point.”
50
In this diagram
of power, “control is what enables a relation to a device, a situation, or a group.
51
Control
is not fixed, but diffuse; it exists as protocol, as a means of distributed management and
interaction that can be used to describe the power relations between machines in a network,
between individuals and machines (both “dividuals”), and between individuals.
Deleuze’s extension of Foucault’s diagram of power preceded the commercialization and
growth of the Internet infrastructure and the use of Internet protocol to manage vast flows
of global information, but it powerfully diagnoses the function of power in the twenty-first
century. Theorists of various aspects of network culture, including Wendy Hui Kyong Chun,
Raiford Guins, Greg Elmer, Eugene Thacker, Alexander Galloway, and Mark Andrejevic have
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found resonance in a control as a diagram of power. For Galloway and Thacker, the salient
point is that control is protocological:
In short, we can say that Deleuze’s societies of control provide a medium through
which protocol is able to express itself. In such an instance it is “information”— in
all the contested meanings of the term—that constitutes the ability for protocol
to materialize networks of all kinds. Protocol always implies some way of acting
through information. In a sense, information is the concept that enables a wide range
of networks—computational, biological, economic, political — to be networks.
Information is the key commodity in the organizational logic of protocological
control. Information is the substance of protocol. Information makes protocol
matter.
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Here the authors recognize that information is the lure, that it is in exchanges of information
that power is operative. To the extent that power modulates, it does so in those moments
where information is passed from one “dividual” to another, whether done through the
protocological engagement of networked servers or the interactive requests of emergent
media users. Power exists in those very moments where networks are activated, when we
make requests for information, download emails, or pause the television feed. As Chun
reminds us, many of these engagements occur on our behalf, even without our direct
knowledge:
Consider, for instance, what happens when you browse a Web page. Your computer
sends information, such as your Internet Protocol (IP) address, browser type,
language preference, and userdomain (your userdomain often contains information
such as your physical location or username). More important, the moment you “jack
in” (for networked Macs and Windows machines, the moment you turn on your
computer), your Ethernet card participates in an incessant “dialogue” with other
networked machines.
53
Chun argues here, and throughout her book on the topic, that much of the discourse about
the Internet has been centered on whether its cultural function is that of providing freedom
to users or whether it is actually a vastly expanded system of control. One key point in her
argument, as seen in the quote above, is that users are not always aware of or in control of
their actions. As Chun is interested in getting past the polemics of freedom and control,
she points out the ways in which rhetorics of freedom mask the actual technological and
protocological engagements that are taking place, and how visions of control as absolute
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surveillance are undercut by the simple fact that computers and systems fail all the
time. Chun agrees that freedom and control function as modulations of power, but she
is concerned that a rhetorical and critical emphasis on these effects — which she locates
specifically within prominent strains of media archaeology inspired by Marshall McLuhan
and Michel Foucault — push us to forget other power relations at work, notably around
issues of race and sexuality in network cultures. Chun insists on her own four layer analysis
of hardware, software, interface, and extramedial representation in order to fully understand
control and freedom, and her demand that we resist the ideological effects of media
archaeologies is a valuable reminder of the limitations of formalist theories. Accordingly,
while this chapter emphasizes the materialities of networks, it does so in the context of a
larger project that considers the spatial dimensions of the social impact of emergent media
technologies.
Chun’s injunction can also be used to change the ways we ask questions about the technology
itself. As suggested earlier, part of the reason to be explicit in our understandings of
the materialities of networks is so that we can get past simple formulations of what “the
network” is and does. By exploring the details of network infrastructures we see how specific
distributions and instances of network infrastructure lead to quite different experiences of
network culture, and how questions about network provisioning are inherently political in
that they are often inequitably distributed and maintained. In a sense, these are the stakes
when people speak of a digital divide - who is connected? How are connections distributed?
Is everyone connected at the same speeds, with the same quality? Are the connections
convenient (at home), accessible (at libraries and community centers), or limited (often at
work)? These first generation questions are still with us today, as we saw in the discussion
above about the Obama administration’s broadband initiative. Such questions of access help
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us get past some of the ideological effects of a media criticism that focuses on hardware and
software.
And considering the role of protocol helps us go further still, especially with questions of
access and divides. For as Deleuze notes, enclosures and limitations on access are no longer
limited to physical barriers and the movement of individuals. In many ways, contemporary
societies of control emphasize and encourage personal mobility, often, though surely not
always, in a volitional sense. The interoperability provided by network protocols allow for
the geographic distribution of residences and for the mobility of individuals. Much of this
movement is supported by network infrastructures that allow for mobile and time-shifted
communication, which is managed by the protocols that govern the flow of networked
information. But protocol is post-humanist, in that it does not address individuals as
autonomous agents, but rather as just another part of the network that either works with
protocol or does not. As a result, we can find many examples in which personal mobility
and network access are not congruent. Take a university campus for example, say the
University of Michigan, which is explicitly a public institution of higher education. As
such, the university goes to great pains to integrate the campus with the broader Ann Arbor
community, and, especially after decades of development sprawling in all directions, there
are no clear barriers between the campus and the city. We could look at public ownership
records to see who owns which parcels of property, or even make an educated guess based
on the individuals passing through any particular space, but there are no visible barriers
separating campus from city. The same cannot be said for the network access. The
University provides two Wi-Fi access signals, one password protected and the other not, but
the unprotected network requires a different form of credentialing before it will allow a Wi-
Fi capable device access to the broader Internet. Similarly, the university maintains many
networked computers, both in dedicated computer labs and in high-traffic public places like
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the various unions, libraries, and study spaces on campus. None of these spaces physically
blocks entry, though the university reserves the right to remove individuals as it sees fit.
Rather these networked computers open to an authentication screen, and thus only work for
those individuals possessing the requisite credentials. In either the wired or the wireless cases,
relatively free physical mobility is allowed, even predicated on the protocological control
working through the university’s network infrastructure. A decade ago one had to show a
university ID to get into a computer lab; now there are no ID examiners, as the enclosure
exists within the network.
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Indeed, wireless signals are available in many places today, yet
are protected from unauthorized use by encryption and other forms of security. For those
who have the password, access is immediate and seamless. For those without the password,
access is forbidden; the network might as well not exist. But quite meaningfully it does
exist. The network infrastructure is there and others may be using it, but a divide still exists,
just now based on the protocol built into the system. And this is not solely reserved for
wireless networks, as homes now come wired for broadband whether or not those dwelling
in the homes have any intention of paying for the service. The infrastructure is in place,
and in some cases even the required hardware is pre-installed in the dwelling, but access
is only granted to those who pay for the credentials. A mobile phone might be capable of
communicating with the nearest transceiver, but if the system determines that the phone is
not where it should be, the user is met with a message indicating “no service” or “roaming,”
which is usurious service. Essentially the entire continental United States is within the
footprint of direct satellite broadcasts and satellite dishes are available for purchase, but
decoding chips or cards are necessary to descramble a commercial signal.
All of these examples, and many more, suggest how questions of access and spatial practice
need to be formulated both in terms of infrastructure provision and protocol, especially in
light of a broader cultural move away from public infrastructure toward private systems. The
83
political and social questions that we must address include not simply getting infrastructure
in place, but also interrogating what it means to have tiered access to the available
infrastructure. Such questions are especially important because they are not immediately
visible. We can see all kinds of disciplinary power at work around questions of access: when
walls go up around a gated community; when homeless people are removed from public
streets; when one community has public water service and another relies on wells; when a
local community has broadcast and another does not. Although visibility does not imply
resistance, the sheer fact that these types of inequities can been seen with one’s proverbial two
eyes makes them harder to ignore. Even as these signs of social differentiation are still quite
visible, we must also turn our attention to the newer, less apparent forms of division inherent
to societies of control. Because we can’t see the restrictions on access, we need to pay extra
attention to their development. Instead of simply celebrating the many mobile hotspots that
dot the urban landscape and the coming 4G mobile phone infrastructure, we should ask two
questions: what happens when our infrastructures are privately provisioned? And who falls on
the wrong side of these new divides? The simplest answers are readily apparent, and we have
already begun to see the results. Those who can pay will get access, and those who can pay
more will get better (faster, more reliable, more secure) access. In the case study in chapter
five we will see how such control in networked media spaces leads to specific challenges to
citizenship and spatial practice.
84
Chapter 2 Endnotes
a lexander r . g alloway and e ugene Thacker, 1. The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (m inneapolis: u niv
of m innesota press, 2007), 5.
g eert l ovink, 2. The Principle of Notworking: Concepts in Critical Internet Culture (h ogeschool von
a msterdam, f ebruary 24, 2005), 18, http://www.hva.nl/lectoraten/documenten/ol09-050224-lovink.
pdf.
a lbert-lâszlâo b arabâsi, 3. Linked: The New Science of Networks (c ambridge, ma : perseus pub.,
2002); g alloway and Thacker, The Exploit .
e ugene Thacker, “p rologue: protocol is as protocol d oes, ” in 4. Protocol: How Control Exists after
Decentralization (c ambridge, ma : The mit p ress, 2006).
Jonathan Zittrain, 5. The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It (n ew h aven, ct : Y ale u niversity
press, 2009).
Jonathan cox, “s tate’s breaks lure a pple - business - n ews & observer, ” 6. The News & Observer , June
4, 2009, sec. business, http://www.newsobserver.com/business/story/1554750.html; gregg Keizer,
“ a pple picks n. c. for $1b data center, ” Computer W orld, June 4, 2009, http://www.computerworld.
com/action/article.do?command=viewa rticlebasic&articleid=9133961.
l isa parks, “where the c able e nds, ” in 7. Cable Visions: T elevision Beyond Broadcasting, ed. s arah
banet-w eiser, c ynthia c hris, and a nthony f reitas (n ew Y ork: n Yu p ress, 2007), 123.
“The consumer e lectronics association t echh ome r ating s ystems g uidelines” (consumer 8.
e lectronics association), http://www.techhome.com/files/t echh ome_r ating_s ystem.pdf.
2006 s tate of the builder t echnology market developed by cea and nahb, from “ cea : digital 9.
a merica - c ustom installation, ” consumer e lectronics association, http://www.ce.org/p ress/cea_
pubs/2070.asp.
ibid. 10.
barbara Klinger, 11. Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New T echnologies, and the Home (b erkeley:
u niversity of c alifornia press, 2006), 45.
ibid., 50, 52. 12.
l ynn s pigel, “d esigning the s mart h ouse: posthuman d omesticity and conspicuous p roduction, ” 13.
European Journal of Cultural Studies 8, no. 4 (n ovember 1, 2005): 426, 403.
s ee lifehacker.com for home networking solutions: http://lifehacker.com/179190/diy-ethernet- 14.
cable-splicing, http://lifehacker.com/242614/how-to-shorten-coaxial-cable, http://lifehacker.
com/400093/diy-pegboard-home-network-wall
parks, “where the c able e nds, ” 116. 15.
c harlotte brunsdon, “s atellite dishes and the landscapes of taste., ” 16. New Formations 15 (1991): 23-
40.
d avid m orley, “ a t h ome with t elevision, ” in 17. T elevision After TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition ,
ed. l ynn s pigel and Jan olsson, console-ing passions (d urham, nc : d uke u niversity press, 2004), 313.
85
“l ivinghomes and wired m agazine a nnounce the f irst-e ver wired l ivingh ome” (l ivingh omes, 18.
June 18, 2007), http://www.wired.com/promo/wiredlivinghome/pdf/wired_living_home.pdf.
l ynn s pigel provides a critique of the g ates h ouse, and future homes in general, in: l ynn s pigel, 19.
“Y esterday’s f uture, t omorrow’s h omes, ” in W elcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar
Suburbs, console-ing passions (d urham, nc : d uke u niversity press, 2001); f iona a llon builds on
s pigel’s critique in: f iona a llon, “ a n o ntology of e veryday control, ” in Mediaspace: Place, Scale, and
Culture in a Media Age, ed. n ick couldry and a nna m cc arthy (n ew Y ork and l ondon: r outledge,
2004).
control 4 is a sponsoring company specializing in home automation software and services 20.
d erek f raychineaud, “personal communications, ” a pril 4, 2007. in our discussion f raychineud 21.
referred to the over-provisioning of network infrastructure within the homes at playa Vista as a
solution to the “last five feet problem, ” a play on the “last mile problem” that makes updating network
infrastructures so expensive for big cable and telecommunications companies with existing connections
to each home.
Kazys V arnelis, “introduction: n etwork ecologies, ” in 22. The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies
in Los Angeles, ed. Kazys V arnelis (barcelona and n ew Y ork: a ctar, 2009), 15.
t ed Kane and rick m iller, “cell s tructure: m obile phones, ” in 23. The Infrastructural City: Networked
Ecologies in Los Angeles, ed. Kazys V arnelis (barcelona and n ew Y ork: a ctar, 2009), 155.
n ational c able & t elecommunications association, i ndustry d ata, march 2009, http://www.ncta. 24.
com/s tatistics.aspx. nct a data based on estimates from snl Kagan.
l eichtman r esearch group, “5.4 m illion a dded broadband from t op c able and t elephone 25.
companies in 2008, ” m arch 6, 2009, http://www.leichtmanresearch.com/press/030609release.html;
f raychineaud, “personal communications.”
Kane and m iller, “cell s tructure: m obile phones, ” 148. 26.
s tephen graham and simon m arvin, 27. Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures,
T echnological Mobilities and the Urban Condition (n ew Y ork and l ondon: r outledge, 2001), xx.
Kane and m iller, “cell s tructure: m obile phones, ” 148. 28.
ibid. 29.
f raychineaud, “personal communications”; s teve Zurier, “f ull-f ledged wireless communities 30.
b eing r olled o ut, ” Builder Magazine, January 20, 2004, http://www.builderonline.com/technology/
full-fledged-wireless-communities-being-rolled-out.aspx.
parks, “where the c able e nds.” 31.
f ederal communications commission, “federal communica tions commission 32.
releases da t a on high -speed ser Vices for internet access , ” January 16, 2009.
graham and m arvin, 33. Splintering Urbanism, 15.
ibid., 16. 34.
ibid., 215. 35.
86
matthew Zook, 36. The Geography of the Internet Industry: V enture Capital, Dot-Coms, and Local
Knowledge, The i nformation age s eries (malden, ma : blackwell, 2005), 5.
a ndrew r oss, 37. No-Collar: The Humane W orkplace and Its Hidden Costs (n ew Y ork, n Y: basic
b ooks, 2003).
Zook, 38. The Geography of the Internet Industry .
V arnelis, “introduction: n etwork ecologies.” 39.
s tephen graham, “excavating the m aterial g eographies of c yber c ities, ” in 40. The Cybercities Reader ,
ed. s tephen graham, r outledge urban reader series (n ew Y ork and l ondon: r outledge, 2004), 141.
James h amilton, “d ata center e fficiency s ummit (posting #4), ” 41. Perspectives, a pril 5, 2009, http://
perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/04/05/d atacenter e fficiency s ummitposting4.aspx.
rich m iller, “g oogle d ata center fa Q, ” 42. Data Center Knowledge, march 27, 2008, http://www.
datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/03/27/google-data-center-faq/.
s tephen shankland, “ g oogle u ncloaks o nce-s ecret s erver, ” 43. CNET News, a pril 1, 2009, http://
news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10209580-92.html.
a lexander g alloway and e ugene Thacker, “p rotocol, control, and n etworks, ” 44. Grey Room (o ctober
1, 2004): 8.
ntsc is the n ational t elevisions s tandards committee; a tsc is the a dvanced t elevisions 45.
s tandards committee; details on all of the a tsc standards can be downloaded at a tsc.org
a lexander r . g alloway, 46. Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (c ambridge, ma : The
mit p ress, 2006), 6.
internet e ngineering t ask f orce, “rfc 1122 - r equirements for internet h osts - communication 47.
layers, ” ed. r b raden, o ctober 1989, http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1122; internet e ngineering t ask
f orce, “rfc 1123 - r equirements for internet h osts -- a pplication and s upport, ” ed. r b raden,
o ctober 1989, http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1123.
g alloway, 48. Protocol, 40.
ibid., 82. 49.
gilles d eleuze, “postscript on s ocieties of control, ” in 50. The Cybercities Reader (n ew Y ork and
l ondon: r outledge, 2003), 75.
g alloway and Thacker, 51. The Exploit , 35.
g alloway and Thacker, “p rotocol, control, and n etworks, ” 20. 52.
w endy h ui Kyong c hun, 53. Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics
(c ambridge, ma : The mit p ress, 2008), 3.
This example matches that offered by lawrence l essig in the introduction to 54. Code 2.0., where he
compares the architecture of internet access at h arvard u niversity to that of the u niversity of c hicago.
lawrence l essig, Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace, V ersion 2.0 (n ew Y ork: basic b ooks, 2006).
87
Chapter 3: Media Interfaces as Interactive Scripted Spaces
While “the network” is a discursive formation that drives and delimits emergent media
technologies, interactive scripted spaces work to displace the materiality of network
infrastructures and emphasize users’ experience interacting with material devices. More
specifically, users primarily engage this script by interacting with emergent media devices
through an ever-expanding repertoire of screen-based interfaces. As older media systems
come under the influence of the digital, and as new media technologies emerge, screen-based
interfaces have become essential aspects of the entertainment and communications media
ecology and the everyday experience of media-using individuals. The images in figure 3.1
represent examples of contemporary media interfaces — intermediaries between individuals
and media content. As the front line of our interactive media experiences, interfaces consist
of graphical screens and the means to interact with them — iPods and iPhones feature haptic
screens and controls, TiVo is engaged with a celebrated remote control, and YouT ube works
through a computer and browser. Whether choosing to listen to music, watch feature-length
films, catch up on television programming, or consume short-form entertainment, we often
begin by navigating menus, following links, registering preferences, or programming searches
and subscriptions. As the distribution of entertainment media is increasingly governed by
digital delivery and playback, media interfaces have become gateways to the content we
desire, shaping our media experiences, crafting individualized viewing patterns, and subtly
reformatting our material and social relationships along vectors of customization and control.
As the location in which interactive scripted spaces are experienced, media interfaces work to
lure users into media engagements and encourage the interaction demanded by the script.
This chapter critically interrogates the prominence of media interfaces across the spectrum
of emergent media technologies. Even though media interfaces are central to contemporary
engagements with television, music, person-to-person communication, and most every
88
emergent media device, the subject of media interfaces has commanded marginal attention
from critical media scholars. This chapter details how media interfaces have become so
important, provides a series of examples of specific media interfaces, and explores how media
interfaces synthesize the complexities of the contemporary media ecology. Because media
interfaces constitute their own space of representation, they can be read as texts in their own
right; indeed, as suggested below, popular critical discourse on emergent media technologies
tends to focus on the visual style of the interface in question. Although a full understanding
of media interfaces demands an engagement with the new aesthetics they introduce, this
chapter explicitly goes beyond the visual register to understand how interfaces change the
manner in which individuals interact with media and how these interactions function
within changing registers of power. The first key argument in this chapter is that media
interfaces are important, ubiquitous, and complex aspects of emergent media. The second
f igure 3.1: t elevision interfaces
Clockwise from upper-left:
Screen captures from Apple.com, YouT ube.com, and TV Guide.com by author.
TiVo screen capture from PVRcompare.com
89
key argument is that media interfaces extend and consolidate specific cultural logics that have
resonance beyond a direct engagement with entertainment and communications devices.
By insinuating a spatialized logic of control – under the rhetorical guise of customization,
personalization, and freedom – across the full field of emergent media devices, media
interfaces condition individuals to operate with this logic in social interactions that operate
within networked media spaces. Which is to say, in much of the contemporary social world.
As the front line of emergent media technologies, media interfaces possesses their own
spatiality, existing in both material and virtual manifestations. At the same time, they also
pointedly alter the social spaces in which they are engaged. Media interfaces are effectively
scripted by the infrastructure and code that constitute communications networks, and as
such they reveal a great deal about the ideological imperatives that underscore interactive
scripted spaces.
Interfaces Everywhere
While media interfaces are convergent artifacts often designed to organize multiple media
types, the rise of the media interface, as a subset of the graphical user interface in general, is
perhaps easiest to understand in the context of delivering television programming. Television
specifically provides a helpful context for the exploration of media interfaces because changes
in the distribution and screening of television figure powerfully in our cultural landscape. As
television is still an everyday experience for the vast majority of American society, changes
to its format and function are dramatically felt. As emergent television practices find
programming delivered to television screens, computer monitors, and portable media devices,
media interfaces are prominently foregrounded in such disparate and mobile environments.
Moreover, the introduction of graphic interfaces in televisual registers is noticeable precisely
because television is inherently a visual medium. Prior to the introduction and expansion
of digital cable, satellite television, digital video recorders, and broadband internet, cable
90
subscribers in the United States chose between about 50 channels and broadcast-only
viewers just a handful. Knowing what was on TV was as simple as glancing at a grid of local
listings or spending a moment flipping stations. As William Uricchio notes, this pre-digital
era is one in which interfacing with television was primarily accomplished through the
widespread use of the remote control device, with control being understood as the “domain
of the viewer”.
1
As the number of US households with a remote control leapt from 29
percent in 1985 to 90 percent in 1996, television viewing was supported by sources like
TV Guide, newspaper listings, or scrolling program guides providing information about
programs and schedules.
2
Even as cable and the VCR dramatically altered the television
landscape, Television Studies scholars continued to productively describe the medium as
one characterized primarily by the ideological and ontological concepts of flow and liveness;
simply speaking, turning on the TV provided immediate access to a stream of programming
that was, or could be, produced and received near-simultaneously.
3
As televisual media technologies have become inextricably linked with the digital, the
microprocessor, and the network over the past decade, perhaps the most noted consequence
has been the explosion of programming options enabled by improved compression
capabilities and an investment in interactive broadband distribution systems. Cable and
satellite providers now offer hundreds of channels of digital video and audio, introducing
problems of “choice fatigue” and findability; with so much to choose from at any given time,
how can a viewer find that programming she would prefer to watch?
4
Moreover, the problem
of findability is not limited to a traditional model of television distribution. Television
shows can be ordered pay-per-view or on-demand; digital video recorders (DVRs) allow
individuals to store preferred content on hard drives in their own homes; YouT ube, Google
Video, and their competitors make available millions of uploaded videos from both amateur
and professional creators; efficient peer-to-peer file sharing technologies carry a brisk trade
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in television and video programming; television networks are selling their programs through
intermediaries like Apple’s iT unes or streaming them from their own websites (figure 3.2).
Beyond even these dramatic changes, television programming has itself become just one
category of content streamed or stored alongside other types of video, audio, images, and
data files, served up by such competing convergent devices as personal computers, set-top
boxes, personal portable media players, and mobile phones. Even the stalwarts who still
receive solely analog broadcast signals and tune their television set by twisting a dial will find
it necessary to employ digital receivers by June 12, 2009, the date by which the United States
government has declared that all broadcast stations in the US must switch to digital. Digital
receivers operate like digital cable boxes or digital satellite tuners, presenting on-screen
interfaces to provide information about the channel and content being broadcast. Media
interfaces are now part of almost all contemporary television viewing practices.
f igure 3.2: t elevision interfaces e verywhere
Clockwise from upper-left:
Screen grabs from Comcast.com, Google Video, ABC.com, and The Pirate Bay by author
92
Although the purview of the influence of media interfaces is limited to those with the means
to acquire and manipulate the requisite technology and service plans, the diffusion of media
interfaces is proceeding rapidly and decisively. While much of the published work on devices
and technologies such as TiVos, iPods, and the conversion to digital broadcasting in the US
emphasizes the early adopter nature – and the attendant classed and gendered characteristics
– of their enthusiasts, we are moving rapidly toward a time in which media interfaces are
dominant across all entertainment and communications media.
5
Both Microsoft and Apple
have bundled television and video management – and attendant interfaces – directly into
their most recent operating systems. Apple claims that the iT unes Store has sold more than
200 million television episodes and 2 million movies, and a significant portion of the 150
million iPods sold since the launch of the fifth-generation iPod have been video-capable.
6
As
digital video recorders have moved from oddities to commodities provided by most major
cable and satellite providers, their interface-intensive reach is now over twenty-five percent
of US homes.
7
Companies like Google, YouT ube, Hulu, Revver, and Joost provide web-
based platforms – and distinct interfaces – for both corporate and non-corporate television
distribution. As a result of these pressures and opportunities, broadcasters and other content
providers have experimented with web-based program distribution. The advent of recent
technologies underscores the plural and mutable nature of the media ecology, yet media
interfaces order engagements with content delivered though digital cable, satellite, over the
web, on personal media players, through DVDs, and ultimately through digital broadcast.
Although it is clear that media interfaces are central to most individual engagements with
emergent media, we must remain attentive to how the broad distribution of media interfaces
brings with it the establishment of new televisual and media divides based on access and
competency. Media interfaces are not interchangeable in their function and effect, and those
with subsidized digital receivers connected to twenty-year-old televisions will have a different
experience with media interfaces than a TiVo-using digital cable subscriber or a cord-
93
cutting viewer of television over the web. Those who possess the technological competence
to program their digital video recorder from their mobile phone will experience television
differently than someone struggling to understand why they now have four ABC channels
to choose from. These divides become even more compelling when mapped alongside the
strategies of flexible microcasting that are already resulting in distinct and differentiated
articulations of platform and content.
8
The fragmentation of the contemporary media
ecology, so often discussed in terms of lifestyle-targeted viewing options, will likely be
exacerbated by differential distribution of media platforms, interfaces, and competencies.
Primarily because of their role in organizing such vast viewing possibilities, screen-based
television interfaces are generally noted for their ability to efficiently guide viewers through
the thickets of television and video content; overlooked is how interfaces impact the very
experience and meaning of watching television. From the initial market research conducted
by their providers to the critical reception they receive, media interfaces are primarily
evaluated on the basis of their visual flair, simplicity of menus, ease of navigation, responsive
form factors, pleasing sounds, and the subjective nature of the intuitiveness or friendliness.
9

Indeed, the entire industry of instruction and criticism in interface design is predicated on
an ideological foundation of usability and simplicity.
10
Yet television interfaces—and media
interfaces in general—have impacts well beyond such surface-level considerations. This
chapter argues that televisual interfaces are productive spaces that reframe the programming
we watch, introduce new metadata-based aesthetics and alter the rhythms of the time we
spend with television. Beyond the user experience, televisual interfaces also bear the traces of
corporate and industrial struggles between media players established and emergent. Perhaps
most powerfully, televisual interfaces ultimately serve as the site where the emergent media
ontologies of personalization, customization, navigation, and control are invested and
contested.
94
Control at the Interface
As the locus of interactivity in contemporary television experiences, interfaces are the sites
at which viewers experience the long-awaited convergence of entertainment media and
computer technologies. As such, they are also the primary spaces in which our experiences
and engagements with television are changing. Even as the marketing of emergent media
products tends to emphasize the device, network, or service on offer, their interfaces are
the point at which viewers engage and enact new modes of televisual experience. Interface
screens call upon viewers to scroll through choices, make selections, respond to prompts,
and otherwise engage with the devices that control the delivery of content. Regardless of the
mechanism being used to access television programming, as our emergent televisual devices
become complex, digital, and, networked, interfaces can be understood as the (im)material
displacement of the ever-expanding networked media environment, offering the promise
of control in place of complexity. Although they are immaterial in the sense that they are
ephemeral screens controlled by updateable code, television interfaces have a materiality
as they establish distinct televisual spaces—screens and overlays that will be explored in
greater detail below. Beyond that, television interfaces are most often the spaces that require
viewers to make choices about how they will negotiate the streams and databases of possible
viewing options. To the extent that emergent technologies provide for greater viewer control,
television interfaces are the spaces in which that control is exercised. These interfaces are the
material expression of the interactive scripted spaces of emergent media technologies, the
points at which user control and interactivity is deployed as a promise and a lure to engage
viewers in emergent media exchanges. If the previous chapter illustrated how network
materialities are often hidden and overlooked, media interfaces are explicitly designed to
direct viewer attention and behavior.
95
The possibilities of interactivity and control figure in popular discourse as a promise of
empowerment, of consumer sovereignty over technology, information, and consumption.
Consumers are invited to “take control” over their television experiences, for example, by
using TiVo’s digital video recorder or Comcast’s video-on-demand service. As William Boddy
has noted, TiVo’s initial marketing efforts emphasized how their service shifted some aspects
of control over television programming to TiVo-enabled viewers.
11
Much of the promotional and popular discussion addressing the current televisual
landscape emphasizes the conceit of control, usually celebrating the ease with which a
television viewer can select, adjust, and display desired content.
12
The word “control,” often
modified by “total” or paired with the marketing-friendly ”freedom,” is used to describe
an engagement with television through handheld remotes, time-shifting systems, or place-
shifting technologies like that offered by Slingbox (figure 3.3). In the ahistorical rhetoric of
new media hype, what was once the passively-viewed province of the couch potato is now
the dynamically-managed terrain of the techno-savvy. As usual, the effusive deployment
and embrace of liberationist terminology is working hard to cover up the contradictions
accompanying great change. In the case of contemporary television, the dominant references
to viewer control figures as the ideological stalking horse masking the simultaneous
functioning of control in other registers, notably in the consolidation of distribution and
inherent systems of surveillance.
To be fair, individuals really do exert some control over their television experiences through
their engagement with and customization of televisual interfaces. One can watch an entire
season of a program in a day, catch missed episodes on-demand or online before the next is
aired, and stream recorded programming to a mobile phone or distant computer.
13
Yet even
such popular narratives of viewer control belie a subtle complexity. As the gadgets we use
get more complex, so do the registers of control that are central to an understanding of the
96
social, technological, and subjective trajectories enabled by emergent media technologies. At
its most fundamental, baseline control follows a logic of connection: turning on a television;
powering-up a mobile phone; subscribing to cable, satellite, or broadband service. Low-level
control follows a logic of selection: picking a channel to watch; entering a url; conducting
a search or scanning through clips. Mid-level control follows a logic of personalization:
setting preferences with a remote control; programming a digital video recorder; creating
lists of favorite channels or blocking those deemed uninteresting or unsuitable. High-level
control follows a logic of adaptation: TiVo recording programs it thinks its owner might like;
Netflix’s collaborative filtering software selecting television programs to mail out; a mobile
phone providing alerts regarding the availability of a new episode. With regard to how users
engage with emergent media technologies, the logic of control is thus a logic of connection,
selection, personalization, and adaptation, allowing for ever greater expressions of viewer
choice. The lower levels of control are governed by an ideology of participation, whereas the
higher levels are governed by an ideology of efficiency, even to the extent that participation
f igure 3.3: t ime- and place-shifting
Slingbox screen shot from Sling Media website (http://us.slingmedia.com/page/home)
TiVo remote control from TiVo website (http://www.tivo.com/)
97
is sacrificed to technological agents rather than exercised directly. Key to the script of these
interactive spaces is the complexity of control, as empowering ontological experiences screen
out the fundamental power dynamics structuring the script in the first place. The lure of
interactivity is felt so powerfully that it becomes difficult to remember with whom or what
we are truly interacting.
Alongside this viewer controlled consumption are new forms of viewer-controlled
production. Television viewers have long produced eyeballs for sale by networks to
advertisers, but the increased degree of control is resulting in more nuanced forms of
production. The avid time-shifter or online video viewer, for example, produces his or her
own televisual flow in a manner that consistently and instantly avoids undesirable elements
of the programmed flow. Through tightened and networked feedback loops, acts of televisual
consumption also produce new patterns of viewing for both the individual viewer and those
participating in the same network. That is, one person’s TiVo habits can become another’s
TiVo suggestions, and YouT ube videos soar in viewership when linked to, rated highly, or
ranked into the most viewed lists. And, of course, certain new television technologies allow
for the sharing of self-produced content alongside programming traditionally considered
televisual.
But the actual functioning of control is more complex than a blind focus on time-shifting
or remixing suggests. These celebrations of viewer control display a marked historical
shortsightedness, reveal a familiar deployment of gendered discourse, and raise questions
about inequality of access in a rapidly tiering television environment. Moreover, the
emphasis on viewer control masks the preponderance of control exercised by the media
conglomerates that own the broadcast networks, cable and satellite channels, television
production companies, and financial interests in the primary new television-related
companies. While the number of programs, channels, and modes of viewing may be
98
multiplying, the source for a large part of the content – and certainly that programming
which commands the majority of viewer attention – is still controlled by a small number
of large corporations. This means that the benefits of time- and place-shifting should
be understood as still working largely with the programming supplied by the recognized
gatekeepers of television. One may now watch a commercial-free episode of Lost in a cabin
over the weekend, but we should not pretend that this act represents a wholesale transfer of
control from Disney to viewers. At the same time, these same conglomerate interests exert
a significant amount of control over most emergent televisual developments. TiVo, for
example, counts America Online (Time Warner), DirecTV (News Corp.), NBC, Sony, CBS,
and Disney among its equity investors.
14
Google-owned YouT ube has partnership deals with
CBS, BBC, and NBC, among others, and competitor Joost has announced both content and
financing deals with Viacom and CBS. Even in those examples where a major new player
enters the market – like Apple selling television programs through its iT unes store or Google
serving up both commercial television and user-generated video – the influence and control
of the entrenched television distributors remains paramount.
15

Beyond the contradictions between viewer and distributor control, emergent televisual
hardware incorporates control into new registers of power. Most of the latest technologies
are inherently underwritten by surveillance, as in most cases it is required for a technology to
function appropriately. Compare broadcast television with digital cable and a DVR. In the
earlier mode, the broadcast station sent its signal out but had no sure means of knowing who
was receiving it. The digital cable operator, on the other hand, is expected to respond to user
requests – made through the interface – and thus has more data on user viewing habits than
it knows what to do with. Not only does its set top box provide a premium user experience,
it also has the capability to capture user preferences and viewing patterns. The ability to
track and measure user behavior is now the foundation of TiVo’s business model, and the
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TiVo-to-go system, like the iT unes Store, relies on digital rights management software that
tracks which devices are authorized to access purchased content. The iPod relies on digital
rights management software that tracks which devices are authorized to access purchased
content. Digital mobile phones keep track of the minute-by-minute use of the technology
across space, either through tower use or GPS built into the phone itself. Mobile phone
companies helpfully remind their customers of this detailed tracking each time they send out
a monthly usage statement. As Steven Shaviro has written of the new logic of control:
Once we have all been connected, there is no longer any need for the Panopticon’s
rigid, relentless, centralized gaze. The new forces of control are flexible, slack, and
distributed. In a totally networked world, where every point communicates directly
with every other point, power is no longer faceless and invisible. Instead, it works in
plain sight. Its smiley face is always there to greet us. We are fully aware that its eyes
are looking at us; it even encourages us to stare back. Rather than shrouding itself in
obscurity and observing us in secret, the network offers us continual feedback even
as it tracks us. It does not need to put us under surveillance, because we belong to it,
we exist for it, already.
16
Shaviro quite forcefully emphasizes the omnipresence of the forces of control, and his
account smartly observes that more than simply inducing a willful ignorance of how
our actions and behaviors are constantly being tracked, the logic of control encourages
individuals to participate in the control society explicitly because the tracking of their actions
results in the provision of emergent media services. By offering the enticement of user
empowerment, media interfaces invite interactions which allow emergent media platforms
to set limits on what viewers can do, monitor actual behavior, and potentially induce
surveillance-aware behavior patterns. Enter the control society.
As suggested in the discussion of power in the previous chapter, the logic of control clearly
describes the functioning of power in our contemporary social milieu. As this ideological
imperative structures the interactive scripted spaces of emergent media, the media interface is
the key point through which individuals are incorporated into the logic of control. The term
control is thus used to describe individual’s experience with emergent media and the manner
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in which emergent media participate in a broader realm of social power. Though these
rhetorical constructions of “control” are not quite homonymic, neither are they equivalent;
each describes an enabling of power, but the flow of power is asymmetrical in that the control
exercised by users is generally accounted for (and literally counted) by the companies that
provide the services, but that viewers generally have no visibility into the control exercised by
these providers.
17
This double logic of control is lenticular, functioning differently if not quite oppositionally
depending on one’s perspective. I am borrowing the construct of “lenticular logic” from Tara
McPherson’s who describes it as a visual logic in which interlaced images are viewed through
a lens that allows one to see only a single image at a time—like the little hologram cards
that reveal different images depending on your angle—providing a mode of viewing and
understanding that produces fragmented knowledges.
18
Situating control as a lenticular logic
helps us to understand how one deployment of the term tends to displace the other meaning.
The discursive control promised in so many advertisements and technology reviews omits
or plays down the fact that corporations providing new devices and services explicitly adjust
and refine their business models based on data collected from individual viewers. TiVo can
promise you “TV your way” without fear that consumers will question TiVo data collection
and privacy policies. Google can ask users to “Search. Don’t Sort” and expect Gmail
subscribers to accept context-sensitive advertising in exchange for the free service. As Mark
Andrejevic has forcefully argued, the well-marketed promises of customer control entice
users of emergent media technologies into the digital enclosure, where their enthusiastic
participation is then recorded and managed.
19
While Andrejevic helpfully underscores the
function of control in incorpating users into digital enclosures, this sort of analysis can
be taken further by looking beyond the rhetorical efficiency of marketing language and
examining the real work that is being done at and by the interface. Control is certainly a
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broad cultural logic at work through communications networks, but our understanding of
how control plays out is greatly enhanced by specifically noting that media interfaces are
the ontological realms in which interactive scripted spaces are expressed. Media interfaces
seductively engage viewers, offering aesthetic pleasures and, crucially, a sense of individualized
control over forces and quantities that seem unmanageable. With aesthetics, distraction, and
flattery, interfaces give viewers an angle on interactive experiences that discourages looking
for the technological, industrial, and ideological forces that work through such interactions.
The media interface is the lens through which control is fragmented, promising new
freedoms to users while simultaneously subjecting them to new modulations of power.
The details of this lenticular logic can be seen by examining the interface associated with
TiVo, the most celebrated of contemporary television interfaces. As suggested earlier, the
initial promise from the marketers of digital video recorders (DVRs) was that these new
products could shift the control of television programming from networks to viewers. With
TiVo, a series of interface screens allow viewers to search for desired programming, set their
TiVo for future recordings, play and advance through recording programming with ease,
and, most notably, pause live television. Each of these actions either responds to an on-screen
interface or causes one to appear, accompanied by a distinct chirping sound that confirms
the TiVo’s response to viewer input. Viewer empowerment is experienced either through
the direct feedback provided by the television interface, or, paradoxically, the handing off
of control to the service itself. In a short history of televisual interfaces, William Uricchio
suggests that:
Control—which was once seen as the domain of the television programmer and,
following the widespread use of the RCD, as the domain of the viewer—is now
shifting to an independent sector composed of metadata programmers and filtering
technology (variously constructed as search engines and adaptive interfaces).
20
As Uricchio notes, the idea of control is reformulated under emergent media technologies to
more obviously include technological agents that sift through content and descriptive data
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used to aid in the processing of such content. In the case of TiVo, viewers are encouraged to
use the interface to sign up for a “season pass” to television shows, an action which prompts
the service to record all (or specified) future occurrences of a show; similar preferences can
be indicated to automate the recording of programming featuring viewer-specified actors,
directors, sports teams, or other keywords. In this manner, the TiVo interface induces users
to give up control to software agents in order to provide them the sense of even greater
control. While previous moments of televisual technological change, like the introduction of
the remote control and the VCR, yielded distinctly viewer-driven articulations of practices
and technological devices, emergent television technologies introduce adaptive agents and
networked services into the practice of television. Part of the interactive promise of emergent
media technologies is that user control can be leveraged through the careful managing of
non-human actors that can efficiently and constantly engage the metadata that describes
actual content and communication. Like the protocol discussed in the previous chapter,
these agents are software constructs that work behind the scenes to guarantee the pleasure of
the interactive scripted space. They are, in a sense, part of the unseen and rarely interrogated
script that supports interactive exchanges.
It is through these same interactions with television interfaces that individuals subject
themselves to the opposite meaning of control, most notably in terms of surveillance. The
provision of a premium user experience requires TiVo to capture user preferences and viewing
patterns. In some cases, this interface-enabled surveillance is quite direct and apparent to
users. The TiVo Showcase (figure 3.4), for example, is placed prominently on the TiVo
main menu and gives advertisers the opportunity to present viewers with detailed, long-
form, interactive product pitches alongside promotional content such as film and premium
television previews. These showcases allow for an interactive engagement with viewers, can
serve as direct marketing leads, and could possibly be used for “couch commerce” in the
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very near future.
21
As part of TiVo’s comprehensive research program, advertisers purchasing
showcase spots automatically receive detailed reports on the performance of their placements.
Well beyond the capabilities of Nielsen, this data includes daypart and geographic market
information based not just on impressions but also on level of interaction.
In this and many other ways, the famously user-friendly TiVo interface is also optimized for
the seamless collection of user data, which is explicitly used to further gear TiVo’s services
to meet advertiser interests. Beyond these showcases, TiVo collects aggregate viewing
data—including data on commercial viewership, not just program viewership—and markets
this to all advertisers, and as a result has already established lucrative arrangements with
existing market research organizations IRI, Nielson, and Starcom MediaVest. As DVRs have
become generic product offerings from cable providers, TiVo has worked to distinguish itself
no longer to consumers, but to advertisers and cable companies as a software provider and
sophisticated market research organization.
22
Some of the more recent enhancements rolled
out include the ability to deliver branded banners as viewers fast-forward over commercials
and a product that allows viewers to program agents to find advertisements matching user-
specified metadata criteria. Each of these revenue-generating capabilities is predicated on the
primary role of the TiVo interface as part of the subscriber experience.
f igure 3.4: t iV o s uggestions
TiVo screen capture from PVRcompare.com
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TiVo is not alone in the sophisticated use of interfaces to simultaneously provide users
with a sense of control over their media experiences while collecting a store of actionable
information. Cable operators create a treasure trove of data when they offer video-on-
demand services. Apple’s iPod/iPhone/AppleTV/ iT unes Store nexus tracks purchases,
rentals, and, using digital rights management-enabled files, usage. And the media producers
and distributors that make their content available for streaming or download, at sites
such as NBC.com or Hulu.com, get a constant stream of metrics describing the breadth
and depth of viewer interest. In the most sophisticated examples, such as with TiVo and
Hulu (discussed in detail below), the interfaces implicitly offer viewer control through the
language of personalization, encouraging viewers to establish viewing queues, subscribe to
content, and customize elements of the interface appearance. By foregrounding the practice
of personalization, these interfaces allow for the gathering of more detailed data on viewer
preferences. In all of these cases the lenticular logic of control allows viewers to revel in the
empowerment provided by interactive media experiences while willfully ignoring how such
engagements with media interfaces have become the most prominent ways we make our
actions trackable. It is difficult to see the powerful function of surveillance when caught up
in the conceit and pleasures of interactivity and control.
The surveillant nature of such systems and devices suggests that control is the organizing
logic of power whenever and wherever the flexibility and mobility of television interfaces
are connected to a network. Data is gathered every time someone downloads a video to a
mobile phone, rates a program using a digital video recorder, or visits an even moderately
sophisticated website. As beloved companies like Google, Apple, and TiVo continue to
roll out new services customized to individual user’s preferences, they further become
information warehouses. Taken at their word, such vast stores of data will be used to
improve technology, services, and the user experience, but this massive centralization of
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data should be noted by anyone concerned with privacy rights. To judge by the millions
of mobile phone, digital cable, and digital video recorder users, the tradeoff of privacy for
perceived empowerment is worth making at most any level for most consumers.
The functionalist imperatives of media interfaces not only conceal these multiple layers of
complexity: they offer their screens as the solution to a deeper complexity, providing menus
and choices in place of data, network, and code. Whether experienced in association with set-
top box, laptop computers, mobile phones, or other digital media platforms, media interfaces
are essentially the software that organizes our experiences with technological gadgets and
programming. As the interface is the site at which we both experience the sensation of
control over technology and subject ourselves to technological networks of surveillance and
control, it is also a privileged space for understanding certain epistemological impulses of our
network society, particularly as digital media ontologies begin to shape our spatial and social
imaginaries.
Interface Aesthetics: Screening Metadata
If interactivity and control are the favored discourses framing emergent media devices, what
is most directly overlooked is that the experience of watching television is dramatically
impacted by the presence and function of media interfaces. Most apparent is the simple
fact that these interfaces take up screen space—or indeed introduce screens—when they
are actively being used, introducing new elements into the aesthetics of television. In
the least invasive situations, this might be as simple as a time indicator showing at what
point a television program was paused—helpful information layered on top of television
programming (figure 3.5). At other times a media interface can take over an entire screen,
requiring a viewer to navigate a maze of menus or scroll through options prior to accessing
the desired programming (figure 3.5). While the majority of the marketing and journalistic
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rhetorics surrounding new television technologies focus on choice and control, the
immediate viewer experience is one of looking at and responding to a new type of image on
the screen. These images, the media interfaces, have become the non-places of television; they
are transient, functional, crucial screens that connect us to the content we supposedly desire.
Non-places is a term overloaded with meaning, and is intended in this context to spark
associations with both the spatial aspects of media interfaces and the anodyne nature of
their implementation. I am repurposing the term “non-places” as developed by Mark Auge
in Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, where it has two distinct
meanings for Auge. On the one hand, the term refers to those spaces of transport/transit/
commerce/leisure that are in-between places; on the other, it refers to the relations, primarily
anonymous, that people have in these spaces. Auge sums it up: “As anthropological places
create the organically social, so non-places create solitary contractuality.”
23
Media interfaces
perform a similar interstitial function for individuals interested in media content. They
are not our destination, yet they are obligatory stopovers required to access and manipulate
programming proper. These screens have a material spatiality, in the sense that they quite
literally take up space on the screen that demands they be visually registered and navigated,
but immaterial and ephemeral in their temporary, particular, and in some cases partial
command on our attention. This immateriality is emphasized when metadata is layered
f igure 3.5: interface s creens - layers of d ata
TiVo screen captures from PVRcompare.com
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over programming, particularly noticeable as later-generation interfaces embrace transparent
styling. At the same time, the experience of these televisual non-places is not simply
transactional, as they generate a definite affect in their users. For those who feel comfortable
navigating these new environments, the engagement can be quite pleasurable, reinforcing
the heavily-marketed feelings of mastery and control. For those unfamiliar with the terrain,
however, these non-places can be impenetrable, hence the discursive emphasis on simplicity,
usability, and friendliness. Moreover, just as airports, malls, and retail transit establishments
– Auge’s non-places – may be ephemeral and rootless from some perspectives while for others
they are sites of work, play, politics, and historical development, media interfaces also reveal
tensions between individuals, corporations, freedom, and control. These issues will be taken
up in more detail below.
The everyday experience of media interfaces as non-places is perhaps most pointedly
demonstrated by considering the time indicators that are a key visual element of most
every media interface, as these layered graphics reveal crucial connections between media
interfaces and media experiences. It has become nearly axiomatic that emergent media
technologies are dramatically impacting the fundamental temporalities of television. Often
cloaked in the hype-friendly language of the gadget industries - time shifting, webisodes,
place shifting, mobisodes - the general tendency of such pronouncements, as discussed
above, is to emphasize the control viewers gain over when and where programming (and
if and how sponsorship) is consumed. The public face of this transformation is embodied
by high-profile companies like TiVo, which emphasize viewers’ ability to record, pause, or
skip television programming, and YouT ube, which promises viewers the chance to avoid
television altogether, but these are merely the best known among a host of technologies
and services that challenge the decades-old practice of watching television programming in
broadcaster-scheduled half-hour and hour-long blocks of time. While the ability to watch
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an hour of prime time television in forty-two minutes, at four in the morning, in a plane,
on a mobile phone, is certainly a break from an earlier era of television, celebrations of
temporal mutability have overshadowed the importance of a related phenomenon, temporal
conspicuity.
Watching time is now part of watching television. Once a structuring element in the
presentation of television, time is now directly made part of the image through the media
interfaces that govern access to content. This phenomenon is probably most familiar to
TiVo owners, who conjure an informative and affirming time bar each time they pause or
fast-forward through programming (figure 3.6). This simple graphic concisely indicates
the length of a recorded program, the portion of a program already captured, the current
progress through a program, and the speed at which the video is being played back.
YouT ube, the standard bearer for web video (including many captured television clips),
constantly displays a video toolbar, including a progress bar and current/total time display, as
well as interactive controls for manipulating video, audio, and display preferences. Perhaps
more importantly, YouT ube also prominently foregrounds the total length of each clip in
many of its video listing guides.
f igure 3.6: w atching t ime on t elevision
Apple iPhone with YouT ube Application (http://www.apple.com/iphone/ads/ad1/)
Widescreen TiVo HD Progress Bar
(http://dynamic.tivo.com/resources/images/downloads/Baseball-Pause_HD.jpg)
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In an attempt to keep up with the changing technological environment, the major broadcast
networks all stream selected series and episodes on their websites using a variety of video
players that similarly display time and related information. CBS’s Innertube uses Real Player
to serve video, providing information similar to that offered by YouT ube. NBC, using a
Flash player, provides a different set of time-related information. An area below the video
player indicates the segments (often mapping to act breaks) available, and a time indicator
in the video control bar counts the currently playing segment down to zero; unlike CBS,
total program length is not provided. ABC’s customized video player streams Flash video
and provides a segmented time bar as well as total running time (figure 3.7). In the network
cases, of course, the programming is not simply broken down into clips for ease of access, but
because the privilege of viewing each segment is earned by first watching a commercial. The
ABC player even gives a thirty second countdown as the commercial plays, making the time
of advertising as apparent as the time of programming.
Regardless of the display technology, software platform, or content delivered, the prominence
of temporal metadata associated with watching video in these emergent contexts alters
one’s relationship to the video itself. When watching television in this manner the obvious
temporal cues make it difficult to get lost in the story, as the interface graphics underscore
the temporal constraints on television’s narrative trajectory. Pleasure in a dramatic scene
f igure 3.7: interfaces u sed for information and s egmentation
ABC Full Episode Player, showing temporal details of the pilot episode of Daybreak
http://dynamic.abc.go.com/streaming/landing (screen grab by author)
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can be tempered by the knowledge that there are precisely thirteen seconds left in the scene,
and uncertainty regarding an episode’s likely narrative closure can be altered by knowledge
of its temporal progress. To be sure, US television has long signaled the constraints and
peculiarities of its temporality through its rigorous adherence to hourly and semi-hourly
program starts, its regularized act and commercial breaks, and a varied assortment of
strategies to maintain interest across the programmed flow. Yet none of these techniques is so
bold or affecting as to actually foreground time as a visual element.
On the few occasions where temporal representation has been directly integrated into
programming, such as with the “real-time” clock on Fox’s 24 or the “22:00”-minute
countdown clock in the first few episodes of NBC’s 2002 series Watching Ellie, the technique
was so striking as to dominate initial critical and popular discussion of the programs (figure
3.8). In the half-decade since these experiments debuted, time displays have not caught on
as a widespread trend for scripted programming, but have instead become integral features of
the media interfaces that overlay television. 24’s pre- and post-commercial ticking clocks are
analogous to the TiVo time bar often summoned at commercial breaks, and Watching Ellie’s
countdown clock functions similarly to the timers on YouT ube and the broadcast network
sites. Yet even as the temporal cues provided by media interfaces perform a similar function,
their incorporation into such interfaces has freed them from the critical scrutiny which
attended their presence in programming.
As television becomes a multi-platform viewing experience, time bars and elapsed-time
displays serve both functional and aesthetic purposes. In the case of Current TV’s dual-
platform approach, time indicators on the website, like at YouT ube or most any online video
site, provide information that eases interactive engagement with clips. Similar time bars on
Current’s television broadcasts are primarily aesthetic flourishes indicating that the network’s
pod-based programming model is rooted in a new media environment, but also serve the
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function of providing temporal cues to viewers unfamiliar with variable-length programming
(figure 3.8). The result is a striking departure from the standard television viewing
experience, as the progress bar both informs and distracts from the content it describes.
The conspicuous presentation of temporal information works beyond just providing
a constant reminder of how a program’s narrative is working against time constraints.
Fundamentally, the ubiquitous display of time is a reminder and invitation to viewers
that they have the ability to manipulate their television controls. Regular engagement
with temporal metadata even changes related viewing practices, leading viewers to call
up metadata screens when watching films on DVD or growing antsy in situations where
temporal cues are not as directly available (such as watching a film in theatres or watching
live television without an interface).
f igure 3.8: integration of t emporal c ues in programming
Clockwise from upper-left:
Watching Ellie on YouT ube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MN8rljSwWc)
Current TV’s SuperNews, featuring televised progress bar
(http://www.current.tv/pdf/Current_Ekit.pdf)
“Real-time” clock from Fox’s 24 (http://www.panopticist.com/archives/197.html)
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In online contexts – visiting the YouT ube site, for example – clip length is a crucial piece of
metadata, along with title, rating, number of views, and submitter, that allow one to decide
which clips to play. A ten-minute clip might seem like a waste of time, whereas a fifty second
clip or two might appeal as a pleasant distraction. Or consider how this dynamic works for
Current TV. What effect does clip length have on how viewer created content is evaluated?
Might a five-minute pod receive a “greenlight” rating while a longer or shorter piece gets
rejected out of hand? Is it that some types of content have natural lengths that make them
more attractive, or that the length itself is both a prominently displayed aspect of the
program and de facto criteria for evaluation, even before a clip is viewed?
What remains to be seen is if and how temporal conspicuity will work into the array of
factors putting pressure on standard program lengths. Already we see HBO giving limited
flexibility in running length to most of its marquee programs, stunting with non-standard
lengths of NBC programs like The Office , extended versions of many shows on DVD,
shrunken versions of kitchy television classics on the MySpace Minisode Network, and
block programming with multiple consecutive hours of shows like 24. As these and other
programs are increasingly viewed in contexts that foreground their temporal parameters,
time indicators and descriptors will become increasingly powerful elements of the viewing
experience. Moreover, as conspicuous temporal indicators lead viewers to manipulate
temporal controls, this invitation to interactivity provides the producers and distributors of
television and video content with valuable insight into the types and length of content the
viewers find appealing. Once again the interactive scripted space produces valuable data even
as it provides pleasure to the viewer.
Beyond the impact on viewing practices exemplified by the forgoing discussion of time
indicators, media interfaces more broadly represent a new aspect of televisual style. This
new style is unique in that it is based on an aesthetic of metadata that it is both visual and
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functional, threatening to change the manner in which we find, select, and appreciate
television and screen-based media. Rather than just attending to temporally organized
broadcasts, individuals using enhanced television technologies also navigate metadata-
described interfaces, foregrounding genre, popularity, alphabetical order, featured actors,
duration, or any number of other metadata tags. As suggested earlier, these screens are
generally critiqued on usability or simplicity, or, in other words, how cleanly they organize
the metadata that describes all of the programming options.
24
But interfaces are actively
screening metadata, deploying metadata as key aesthetic features, as navigational elements
leading to related screens, and as actionable criteria upon which interfaces and media
experiences are customized. Highlighting the name of an upcoming program on a TiVo
grid or similar interactive programming guide, for example, can reveal the genre, year of
production, rating, viewer rating, actors, summary, and other pieces of data; the same data is
used by the YouT ube interface to suggest related videos and guide viewer behavior. In most
programming guides, the main element used to initially organize programming choices is
still the channel of distribution, yet many systems allow, and some systems emphasize, other
criteria, such as genre or rating; still other, more advanced services are viewer-configurable
along any number of metadata-driven criteria. SnapStream’s Beyond TV, for example,
foregrounds a category browsing feature in its interface as well as a search service that will
automatically record programming that matches user-entered terms in metadata categories
such as episode title, description, rating, or station call sign. With the rise of television
interfaces, the act of screening metadata becomes a seamless part of the television viewing
experience: the primary channel grid is often visited immediately upon turning on the
television; supplementary information is presented with each channel change or use of
time-shifting controls; informative and affirming time bars appear and recede with each
touch of the controls; experienced users learn to perform their televisual maintenance—
programming future recordings, deleting unwanted material to make room on a hard drive,
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searching for interesting upcoming options—while low-attention programming continues
in the background or as a small image in one corner of the screen. On the surface, media
interfaces create a framework of simple menus, translucent screens, friendly icons, and cheery
sounds. These frames are filled not simply with content, but often with layers of metadata
that takes on a look of its own. Moreover, both the frames and the metadata explicitly
invite user interaction. The form of media interfaces is also function, with the process of
screening metadata simultaneously filling the screen with stylized data and precipitating the
personalization and control promised by the interface.
The impact of applying and foregrounding metadata can also be seen quite powerfully at
work on Google’s YouT ube service. Like the related Google Video service, YouT ube uses
genre and popularity for filtered views of stored content, and offers open-ended searches to
parse the sheer number and diversity of hosted videos. In addition to the ability to search
titles, descriptions, and genres, YouT ube foregrounds user-generated tags, discussion groups,
and other forms of social organization. The importance of metadata to the YouT ube viewing
experience is such that the functional aspects of the video player—play/pause button, time
bar, volume controls—are forced to compete for attention with dozens of metadata-defined
hyperlinks. Part of YouT ube’s early success is due to the manner in which the prominent
placement of related, featured, and popular videos encourages visitors to the YouT ube site to
keep clicking from one video to the next.
Perfomative Metadata: Agents and Adaptive Agents
Ultimately, screening metadata is even more potent when media interfaces work with
agents and adaptive agents to collect programming based on pre-selected tags. Metadata
is crucial for sifting through the open-ended stream of media content and in some ways is
now determinative of which programming is viewed. Even as metadata works to drive new
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televisual aesthetics, it also forms the basis around which emergent television and media
systems begin to offer advanced features. As William Uricchio notes, the application and
processing of metadata allows emergent television technologies—like the DVR, YouT ube, or
video podcasts—to disrupt and reorganize televisual flow:
Instead, a new factor enters the equation: the combination of applied metadata
protocols (which code the program within certain limited parameters) and filters
(search engines or adaptive agent systems that selectively respond to the metadata).
Neither of these factors are neutral. Metadata protocols, much like a catalog in
an archive or index in a book, determine what texts we will be able to locate.
Consequently, there is a great deal at stake for both producers and viewers in terms of
precisely what will be labeled and how, and thus what will be seen.
25
As a first step, most providers of digital cable or satellite television initially sought to ease the
challenge of findability by upgrading from the simple scrolling guide channels of analog cable
to more complex electronic or interactive programming guides. These guides were capable of
providing detailed information about both current programming and that occurring weeks
in the future, and were in limited ways sortable via certain metadata categories; the latest
version of such guides are also compatible with newer offerings such as video-on-demand,
high-definition channels, and DVRs. Going further still, TiVo has set itself apart through
its deliberate integration and celebration of metadata-driven agents. Aside from the ease
of timeshifting, TiVo is probably best known for its “Season Pass” and “Wishlist” features,
through which subscribers can set agents to automatically record programs described by
certain categories of metadata—like series title, actor, director, genre, or keyword (figure 3.9).
Beyond this, TiVo offers a “Suggestions” service that recommends and automatically records
programs based on users’ preferences; this adaptive agent works through a collaborative
filtering system based on millions of subscribers rating individual programs (figure 3.9).
26
In
the case of “TiVo Suggestions”, an adaptive agent relies on both metadata and the networked
nature of the TiVo system. A similar combination of metadata and a networked environment
is at the heart of the online video sharing through Google video and YouT ube. While each
site uses genre and popularity for filtered views of the stored content, the sheer number and
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diversity of hosted videos makes search a vital findability component. Google emphasizes its
ability to search titles, descriptions, and genres, while YouT ube foregrounds user-generated
tags, discussion groups, and other forms of social organization. YouT ube also allows viewers
to subscribe to channels of content organized by creator or keyword, and offers related
videos featuring metadata similar to the video currently selected. In each of these examples
it is clear that the metadata that accompanies each piece of content has become a crucial
component of the assemblage of entertainment media technologies and that media interfaces
function primarily by organizing individuals’ engagement with this metadata.
27
Such adaptive agents are at work in many different emergent media systems, extending the
functional logic of control across the spectrum of convergent media technologies. As with
the TiVo, the iPod interface has been singled out for its simplicity and ease of use (figure
3.10). Once an iPod has been used in conjunction with iT unes or another compatible media
management application, the individual audio and video files can be accessed through a
hierarchy of folders corresponding to media type, genre, artist, album, series, etc. (figure
3.10). While these filters represent a small portion of the many metadata categories tracked
via iT unes or similar personal computer-based media management software, they allow for a
new type of de-materialized relationship between user and content.
f igure 3.9: interfaces, agents, and a daptive agents
TiVo screen capture from PVRcompare.com
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For example, consider an engagement with the iPod media interface that bears the traces
of long-standing relationships to materially commodified music in the form of records,
tapes, and CDs. In this case, one would ‘find’ desired music on an iPod by following the
hierarchical logic of first selecting an artist, then selecting the album, playing the album
straight through from start to finish. Yet this common approach is limited by an interface
that is configured in a manner that makes songs near the beginning of the alphabet easier
to navigate to – particularly with storage capacities that now allow for thousands of songs –
suggesting the possibility of favoring music not based on its merits, but instead on the band’s
name. An alternate approach could be to select the ‘song’ filter – which organizes all of
the music on the player in alphabetical order – and scroll to a single track; this would result
in a desired initial song, but if the player were left to run it might well move through an
eclectic mix of music spanning many artists, albums, and genres, but all beginning with the
same letter. In either of these cases the metadata-driven filters of the iPod menu lead to new
user experiences and suggest the possibility of unintended consequences. Precisely because
these new types of relationships can be disorienting or frustrating, Apple has repeatedly
emphasized the role of playlists in their marketing and user instructions. The ability to create
customized groupings of tracks allows wary users to avoid repeated interaction with metadata
and filters and enables sophisticated users to deliberately structure their listening experience
according to even more complex metadata-driven patterns. iT unes’ “Smart Playlists”
features work to solve the challenge of findability by allowing users to program dynamically-
updating agents according to user-selected metadata criteria. More recently, Apple has
pushed this approach further through the use of its “genius” feature, which uses collaborative
filtering technology to create playlists of locally-stored songs based on data provided by the
millions of networked iT unes users. The function and force of adaptive agents are part of
the convergent media ecology in that they organize access to and extend user control over
multiple media forms and across multi-media platforms. In all of these cases metadata are
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present as visual and ontological descriptors, are actionable elements that foster interactivity,
and allow for certain forms of outsourced interactivity through the programming of agents
and adaptive agents.
The process of screening metadata is crucial in three regards. First, it organizes users’ relations
to content by foregrounding descriptive information that distinguishes an individual video
or television program from the mass of entertainment and information on offer. Content
without metadata has become the proverbial tree in the forest, unknown if not unfindable.
Interfaces assume their importance in direct proportion to their ability to package and
present metadata in forms that both inform users about content and flatter their mastery
and control over a world of audio and video that has become unimaginably large. Second,
metadata is the actionable data that allows the service to function behind the scenes. Third,
screening metadata is also the process of filtering out information deemed unhelpful,
undesirable, or, in some cases, unprofitable. If the great benefit of television interfaces is that
they allow users and their agents to locate content on the basis of metadata, the downside
is that the selection of which metadata to create, store, index, and display is left primarily
to the companies providing these interfaces and to the content producers and distributors
who work within these systems. Users are not given the entire database of information
f igure 3.10: operational m etadata
Screen captures from Apple.com and Apple iT unes made by authorv
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describing content to filter on their own, nor may they create new categories of information
to be captured. While the set of metadata provided by services like TiVo or iT unes is
explicitly limited by their corporate providers, the user experience of the more expansive
keyword and tag based organization of YouT ube is increasingly influenced by the categories,
favored videos, and promotional efforts that dominate the screens of their purveyors. The
screening of metadata sometimes allows users to find content they want, and sometimes
to find the content others want them to see. Emergent media producers and distributors
largely understand the power of metadata to direct user attention and experiences, and the
more sophisticated players use this knowledge to advance their interests, from highlighting
sponsored content to removing material that potentially infringes on copyright claims. Even
in contexts where metadata fields are open to user creation, enterprising emergent media
players can productively commodify this form of interactivity.
More ominously, therefore, we can also think about the aesthetics of interfaces by considering
what they screen out. By providing screens and overlays that are either functional or dazzling,
television interfaces encourage viewers to interact and engage at a surface level, allowing
more complex operations to continue beneath the surface. When looking at colorful wish
lists, suggestions, and favorites, we are considering our own customized view of the vast array
of content available; because we could not possibly know about—let alone view—every
television show or video available, we must settle for some means of sorting and selecting.
Television interfaces allow us to screen out possibilities, in many cases by flattering our
stated and inferred preferences, but often reflecting the priorities of the entities behind the
interface. Recognizing that “the anarchy of real bit-space” and the sheer blizzard of digital
information flow is too great to fathom directly, Steven Johnson has argued that interfaces
allow us to ignore complexity:
It is undeniable that the world has never seen so many zeros and ones, so many bits
and bytes of information—but by the same token, it has never been so easy to ignore
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them altogether, to deal only with their enormously condensed representatives on the
screen. Which is why we should think of the interface, finally, as a synthetic form, in
both senses of the word. It is a forgery of sorts, a fake landscape that passes for the
real thing, and—perhaps most important—it is a form that works in the interest of
synthesis, bringing disparate elements together into a cohesive whole.
28
Johnson’s argument about the synthetic nature of graphical user interfaces is useful because
it addresses both the manner in which interfaces offer up a materiality of their own and
conceal a vast array of operations at work beyond the surface of the screen. More specifically,
Johnson helpfully frames interfaces in explicitly spatial terms, suggesting that the “landscape”
of interfaces conceal “real” operations. Although Johnson was more directly addressing
the graphical user interface of the computer screen, his argument applies equally to the
extension of the computer’s graphical user interface across the spectrum of convergent media
technologies. Johnson’s account is compelling, but we must add to it a political accounting.
Television interfaces are designed to perform certain functions and limit others. They are
designed by individuals and companies that have their own interests and agendas. As a result,
television interfaces are screening out more than content, more even than shifts in the media
ecology; they deploy their ideological simplicity to hide the complex functioning of code and
networks that ultimately control what shows up on the screen, as well as those entities that
influence the code and networks. As suggested in chapter two, the complex infrastructural,
protocological, and software-based scripts are designed to recede in favor of the enticements
and entrapments offered by interactive media interfaces.
Branding and Tiering at the Interface
Media interfaces have become sites where the future of media ecologies is contested
and fought over by distribution entities, production companies, advertisers, hardware
manufactures, and additional service providers. TiVo, for examples, represents both the most
fundamental challenge to the televisual status quo and a model for its maintenance. For even
as TiVo’s time- and place-shifting capabilities severely undermine the outmoded Nielsen
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system of audience measurement based on sampling, TiVo has found a way to position itself
as an entity directly serving viewers, advertisers, and distributors. If TiVo can be thought
of as the catalyst for televisual interface dissemination and industrial destabilization, and
YouT ube as a site that placed user generated content side-by-side with corporate offerings, the
most significant recent developments in the advance of televisual interfaces is the response
by the Hollywood content producers/broadcasters. With their business models challenged
by both time-shifted viewing and unregulated online re-distribution of programming, each
of the major US broadcasters has established an online presence (Figure 3.11). Each of the
US broadcast networks began to experiment with online video streaming in 2006, generally
inserting single-ad breaks at various points in the programming. Early experiments during
the Fall 2006 television season saw AT&T and Visa’s sponsorship of the ‘online premiere’
of NBC’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (which also had pre-broadcast runs on Netflix and
YouT ube) integrated into the video stream and as an overlay to the interface itself, while pre-
broadcast previews of Fox’s Prison Break could be viewed within the frame of an American
Express card. In addition to the challenge of balancing the promotional functions of their
web sites against the demand for online viewing, broadcasters have also dealt with the
problem of online streaming rights. Even in a conglomerate era favoring networked-owned
programming, broadcasters cannot simply offer everything online that they do over the air
without extensive negotiations with multiple production companies.
NBC is the most interesting example to explore because it has taken the unusual step of
providing content for streaming and downloading at the NBC.com site and also partnering
with News Corp to create a high-profile destination for Hollywood-produced television
programming, Hulu.com (Figure 3.11). On the NBC site itself, which has changed a number
of times between 2006 and 2008, each streamed series has both its own mini-website—where
clips, information, and activities can be found—and a separate space featuring a flash-based
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video player designed for streaming ad-supported content. The video-player interface forms
a frame around the content itself, with the standard controls for play/pause, volume control,
and time bar perpetually present. Like video streaming options from ABC and CBS, the time
bar is broken into sections, with each section of content viewable only after streaming a new
advertisement; half-hour programs tend to be divvied into four sections, hour-long shows
into six. Like offerings from the other major broadcasters, the streaming service and interface
are basic and occasionally frustrating, with broken videos, repetitious advertisements, and
difficult navigation. NBC, like its broadcast competitors described their effort as promotional
and experimental. The tension between NBC’s interest in serving its own promotion and
research needs and its interest in meeting the demand for content from site visitors is evident
in the cluttered layout of each show’s sub-site, the separation of promotional content like
webisodes from broadcast content, and the multiple means of navigating to the video player.
Such clumsy navigation is evidence of a half-hearted attempt to compete with file-sharing
f igure 3.11: t elevision n etworks r espond
Clockwise from upper-left:
Screen captures from ABC.com, CBS.com, NBC.com, and Hulu.com by author
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technologies and upstart services, such as YouT ube, Joost, and Apple, while still grappling
with the imperatives of corporate branding and promotion. As suggested by James Bennet
in the context of the BBC’s use of interactive television, a clear organizational mandate can
result in interface navigation that is simple and familiar for users.
29

In order to establish a more fully featured broadband video-on-demand service NBC
partnered in 2007 with News Corp to develop the stand-alone site Hulu.com, which
publicly launched in March, 2008. This service, which offers television and feature film
programming, both current and back catalog, was explicitly designed with video sharing
and social networking principles so that it seemed up to date with its competitors. Like
YouT ube, Hulu.com is a dedicated video distribution site that allows for the streaming,
sharing, and embedding of centrally stored content. Unlike YouT ube, Hulu.com only offers
content owned by its owners and affiliates, so visitors can expect to choose from a wide yet
incomplete array of programming owned by NBC, Fox, and the producers and distributors
that have struck deals with Hulu. Hulu streams both short clips and entire episodes of
television programs, organizing its content by popularity, title, or network. To earn revenue
and defend the advertiser-supported model of television distribution, advertisements are
delivered before and at intervals throughout the programming. Looking past its web-savvy
name—which reportedly means both holder of precious things and “interactive recording”
— Hulu is clearly a well-funded conglomerate response to the perceived threat of emergent
television distribution systems.
30
Recognizing the imperatives of the post-network era,
NBC is hedging its bets. Much as Cathy Johnson has argued that an individual television
program may contribute to the brand identity of multiple television networks, NBC-owned
programming plays a major role in the continued success of many emergent television
ventures.
31
At the same time, NBC maintains an ownership or partnership role in many
of these efforts, even as it struggles to determine what role the NBC brand should play. It
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maintains the flagship brand associated with the broadcast network, owns or has ownership
stakes in a number of cable/satellite networks, was an early investor in TiVo, sometimes sells
programming through Apple’s iT unes store, streams some programming from its own site,
and has partnered with News Corp to develop Hulu.
Hulu sets itself apart from NBC’s original online video distribution system in three key
ways. First, unlike the parochial, partial, and chaotic collection of programming streaming
at NBC.com, Hulu.com claims to deliver content from more than 50 sources, including
properties owned by News Corp and other erstwhile competitors. While this choice to un-
brand network owned programming might seem surprising given the tremendous resources
broadcasters typically invest in packaging and promoting their content, it is in keeping with
broader conglomerate strategies of tiering and targeting.
32
By pointedly emphasizing the
viewer’s ability to customize her own content flow, viewing environment, and video sharing
strategies, Hulu marks a move away from the promotion-heavy approach long-favored
by broadcasters toward a social networking model in which viewers do the sequencing
and promotional work themselves, creating video queues and sharing videos with other
viewers in their personal social networks. Second, Hulu is a video-centric site, and bears
few obvious traces of its corporate ownership. Whereas the NBC.com site is torn between
promoting programming—with an array of transmedia efforts like fan groups, chat forums,
downloadable promotional items, and special events—Hulu is focused on providing video.
As a result, it is much easier to find and view content on the Hulu site. In this manner,
as when Apple approached the music business and TiVo released its early equipment, a
streamlined corporate mission translated into an intuitive user experience on the Hulu site.
Lastly, Hulu organizes and delivers its content through simple and feature-rich interfaces.
Like the YouT ube example considered above, Hulu uses metadata categories to organize
content. The home page, and most subsidiary pages, feature a range of related and most
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popular options, and clearly marked tags allow searching by title, genre, and network/studio.
Although options for user-generated tagging are absent, Hulu has developed a metadata-
centric interface designed to ease and encourage extended viewing sessions. Beyond the
standard set of video playing controls—which pleasingly fade out after a few seconds of
viewing—Hulu has also included in its player interface a series of options to enhance the
manipulation and viewing of content. Prominent icons encourage viewers to share videos
via email, embed videos on their own web sites and weblogs, and even select portions of
content for sharing. In addition to allowing playback at multiple scales—small, large, full
screen—Hulu includes interface controls that allows for the dimming of the computer screen
surrounding video and a pop-out feature that causes a scalable video window to open and
play without any surrounding web browser content. Such attention to the details of the video
interface makes for a more pleasurable viewing experience, and, in line with Hulu’s broader
efforts, helps to position Hulu as a contemporary to upstart video streaming services. Of
course, a smooth interface and contemporary styling helps to distract from the fact that Hulu
is a walled garden configured to track and commodify viewing behavior.
While NBC may be competing against upstarts like YouT ube by developing multiple
distribution channels, its biggest challenge might come from companies not traditionally
associated with television or video. Microsoft, for example, continues to tweak its Media
Center version of the Vista operating system, launched in January 2007, even as it is
simultaneously marketing Interactive Program Guide software to cable operators. Microsoft’s
Media Center and the competing efforts from Apple are designed to provide a common
media interface across computer screens, television screens, and portable screens, so that a
user’s content can be accessed from any of these devices in the same manner. As suggested
in the section on screening metadata, with this standardization comes the limitations and
influences of their corporate providers, who are interested in providing enough options to
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offers users a sense of control without sacrificing their own measure of control in a different
register. In this manner, digital rights management software is often included as part of
the ultimate product, which is sold to consumers on the basis of its flexibility and user
empowerment. Just as these two companies have spent the past two decades developing and
introducing competing yet similar graphical user interfaces, they are set to repeat the process
with media interfaces. In the process they are becoming significant players in the media
distribution business, as evidenced by the individual and collective deals they have negotiated
with the traditional distributors of music, television, and film. The crucial position of media
interfaces in these industrial struggles is underscored by the series of copyright and patent
lawsuits that have been filed against TiVo and Apple’s iT unes by erstwhile competitors, just
as an earlier generation of lawsuits were filed (and settled) over Apple and Microsoft’s use of
various windows interfaces in their operating systems.
Interfacing Television Studies
As the practice of engaging interfaces occupies an ever-greater portion of our time spent
with entertainment media, they introduce functions and aesthetics that impact the very
experience and meaning of the media themselves. A part of the assemblage of every new
entertainment media technology, media interfaces are relatively indifferent to the source and
type of content, equally organizing programming previously thought of as music, television,
photography, web-video, or feature film, and equally applicable on a television screen,
on a laptop computer, at an MPAA-approved film distribution website, or on a portable
media player. As a result of their broad distribution, convergent possibilities, and seductive
functionality, media interfaces have offered personalization and control as a challenge to
liveness and flow as the dominant ontologies and ideologies of contemporary entertainment
media. The lure of the interactive scripted space of emergent media is explicitly its invitation
to interactivity, promising a responsive user experience in addition to desired content. As
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suggested above, the ideological pressures of interactivity and control work to both provide
experiential pleasures and to produce information that can be further exploited.
Even as we turn our attention to new modes of engagement with entertainment media and
metadata, we must also consider how emergent media interfaces refract and redefine our
understanding of the gendered, raced, and classed nature of television viewing. William
Boddy, Lynn Spigel, and others have convincingly documented the gendered dimensions of
the introduction of radio and television.
33
David Morley, Ann Gray, Ellen Seiter, and others
have rigorously demonstrated that the social and cultural contexts in which technologies
such as the VCR and the Internet enter the domestic environment have a great deal to do
with the gendered and classed nature of their use.
34
We should be alert to similar tendencies
in the continued convergence of entertainment and computer-based media. Approaching
these changes to the televisual ecology systemically, John Caldwell has noted media
conglomerates’ tendencies to develop multi-channel niches along the axes of race and gender,
and Lisa Parks has argued that the convergent media system is best understood as one of
flexible microcasting “organized around social distinctions (whether gender, age, race, class,
sexuality, or lifestyle) that are arranged to maximize profit for media producers, networks,
and advertisers.”
35
Building on these considerations of programming strategy and audience
hyper-commodification, media interfaces and metadata systems further the personalization
of the entertainment media experience, and thus participate in a system geared toward
commodifying “layers of individual identity, desire, taste, and preference.”
36
In doing so,
they force us to confront the long-standing gendered practices associated with television
and computer use. Spigel summarizes these assumptions by noting: “…TV is represented
as a mode of leisure associated with feminine pursuits while computers are presented as
masculine.”
37
Parks similarly concludes: “In broad terms, the industry’s ‘sophisticated video-
seeker’ is constructed as an autonomous masculine browser, unlike the passive feminized
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viewer of analog TV.”
38
Spigel, Boddy, and Parks reach their conclusions primarily by
analyzing popular and trade discourses surrounding the introduction of television and
media technologies. While it is difficult in popular sources to separate out the discourses
surrounding media interfaces from the hype about the gadgets and devices in which they
are embedded, contemporary discourses tilt toward a masculine address in the earliest phase
of certain product introductions—targeting the early adopter, as Boddy points out in his
reviews of early DVR advertising—and most high-profile emergent media are associated
with age or class-specific address, as TiVo’s newest “It’s not Tivo, Unless it’s a Tivo” spots.
Writing about networked technologies in the home, Fiona Allon found that “ ‘symbolic
analysts’, ‘knowledge workers’ and info-elite are now the figures of smart domesticity in the
twenty-first century.”
39
Marketers clearly still think about the gendered nature of selling
devices, as evidenced by Sony’s pink/blue campaign for the Bravia flat screen television,
Sky’s introduction of interactive services in the UK, and many other print and television
examples.
40
As television interfaces colonize the final remaining US households as part of the digital
transition in 2009, future research should examine a host of emerging questions. Projecting
from our knowledge regarding the introduction of previous media technologies, it seems
likely that we will see the establishment of interface divides, with some consumers able to
fully afford and embrace the new logics of entertainment media and others left struggling to
work the remote. We are also likely to see inequities in the global distribution of interface
technologies, with some nations leaping technologically ahead of the US and others
lagging far behind; regardless of the technological televisual infrastructure (broadcast/cable/
satellite) in a given system, the interfaces will also vary along with the system’s particular
industrial imperatives. Other issues are more up in the air: Will media interfaces continue
to feature a predominantly gendered address, will the ideal viewer will be constructed along
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other registers, or will the synthesis of television and computer technologies in the media
interface disrupt our existing understanding of the gendered discourses on technology?
How will media interfaces impact the social and spatial uses of television? How will artists
or cultural critics find ways of critiquing or jamming the functioning of media interfaces?
A good first step at beginning to answer these questions will be to determine what other
disciplines and discourses should be engaged in order to better understand the importance
of media interfaces. For a start, we might build on the recognition that interfaces are a
feature of twenty-first century US television to understand them also as graphic images
controlled via computer code. Engaging both software studies and cultural studies, we might
interrogate media interfaces as “material” products fundamentally rooted in the processes of
industrial design, the gendered cultures of programming and engineering, and the delimited
possibilities of computer code. Taking this as a first step will remind us that even as interfaces
become everyday gateways to entertainment and information they are also situated within
complex cultural, economic, and industrial formations. Media interfaces do introduce
important new spatialities, but we must also remember how they also serve to displace critical
attention from the quite material function of network infrastructures and protocols.
From Non-Places to Media Spaces
While the forgoing discussion of the salience of the media interface is crucial to
understanding the cultural functioning of emergent media technologies, central to the
broader argument of this dissertation is the idea that these changes are not confined to the
living room. Media interfaces and the devices that host them move both within and outside
of the home, across laptops and portable media players, repurposing offices, commutes, and
hotel rooms.
41
While these devices deploy different form factors and offer varying degrees of
functionality and engagement, their interface screens act as consistent and often customized
means of organizing and accessing content. The examples above suggest how media
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interfaces directly impact the experience of emergent media technologies, yet the logics
mobilized by these interfaces have further epistemological implications for how we perceive
our world. That is, our engagements with emergent media technologies change the way we
imagine we can interact in broader spatial, social, and political contexts.
Claims of epistemological change based on “new” and “emergent” phenomena have the
ring of hubris and hollowness, but might be able to claw back a bit of credibility when
understood in the context of the broader social, economic, and political changes in which
they are situated. These changes go by many names, from post-industrialism (foregrounding
technology) and post-Fordism (emphasizing labor and corporate organization) to
globalization (stressing the all-encompassing nature of change) and trans-nationalism
(retaining a tension between the global and the local). Regardless of label, each of these
means of understanding changing capitalist relations recognizes that technological
developments are constitutive of and shaped by broader social movements. As they both
enable and represent the networked society, media technologies are a key component of the
broader social changes that have occurred over the past three decades.
42
If we can accept that the logics mobilized by media interfaces are situated in such a
context, then we can begin to entertain how emergent media technologies enable new
ways of thinking and acting. Certainly, we now favor environments that provide network
connectivity, in both the construction of our domestic environments and our use of shared
spaces. Where individuals were once awed by any form of distant communication, we now
expect that our mobile phones will work anywhere, and are beginning to demand the same
for wireless connections to the internet. Corporations and municipalities have worked to
meet demands for connection and selection over the past decade, as they installed internet-
enabled computers in libraries, schools, and public spaces. Now, even as they continue to
promote their own interests, many of these same entities are working to deploy wireless
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networks that meet demands for personalization and adaptation. In this manner, the logic
of control is being built directly into emergent media infrastructures. This is a material
shift in the script of emergent media technologies, as the first generation of infrastructural
development was focused on providing access to virtual spaces, while this second generation
is concerned with allowing virtual spaces to be accessed from a broader range of physical
spaces. To the extent that this is increasingly accomplished using radio and satellite signals
to connect interfaces to networks, the experienced materiality of networks recedes, and the
interactive scripted space is increasingly experienced without the encumbrances of the script
itself.
Perhaps more importantly, we are encouraged to value customization and personalization as
a filter to collective experiences. This is directly true in our consumption of entertainment
media and our use of communications media, but has impacts for our conceptions of how
our physical world should respond to our desires. We don’t simply choose where and how
to live based on a determined relationship to technology, but our exposure to technological
ways of thinking impacts our imagination of what manner of living is possible. If post-war
suburbia can be understood as a spatial logic correlating to a broadcast media environment,
then identity-affirming residential niches should be considered a correlate to a media system
that privileges customization and microcasting. Instead of a dominant mode of spatial
arrangement – like mass-produced suburbia – we now appreciate the mass-customization of
environments as spatially and philosophically distinct as neo-traditional communities, ex-
urban development, immigrant enclaves, and urban gentrification.
As suggested in the discussion of control, we are being trained to look the other way even
when we know our actions subject us to surveillance. Even as we fastidiously update our
anti-virus software and enable firewalls, we record things on our digital video recorders,
purchase limited-use audio from Apple and Microsoft, and happily take advantage of
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unsecured wireless hotspots in airports, coffee shops, and certain determined municipalities.
Somewhat contradictorily, we both decrease our demand for domestic privacy and increase
our expectations for privacy in public. Because the interface is located on our devices and
can be tailored to reflect our preferences, we feel like a bit of our privacy accompanies us
along with our emergent media devices. Networked media spaces might feel public because
physical access is not limited, but the personalized experiences we have at the interface allow
for the sensation of a private exchange. Of course, the interactive exchanges that occur
through media interfaces mean that our felt spatial privacy is underwritten by the exchange
of our behavioral data through the network.
All of these developments raise the question of whether we value other individuals plugged
into our networks more than those individuals who are, or who choose to be, left out.
These are not simply questions about technological development. In interrogating such
epistemological changes, we must insist on emergent media technologies as “simultaneously
social processes and spatial practices”:
…implicated in the on-going construction and reconstruction of social spaces and
social relations, articulating particular spaces (private/public) while also reconfiguring
and transgressing the boundaries of others (the imagined space of the nation, the
demarcated space of the home).
43
As both technological and spatial logics are undergoing manifest changes, the relationships
between social networks based on propinquity and affinity continue to evolve, both enabling
new potentials and raising the prospect of new divisions.
Although these questions are challenging to resolve with absolute certainty, such dynamics
will be examined in the case studies presented later in this project. We can suggest at this
point, however, that as the networked nature of emergent entertainment media technologies
threatens to reconfigure the private/public dialectic in favor of a new paradigm of spatiality
– the networked media space – media interfaces become a familiar touchstone working to
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reorient viewers in these newly colonized spaces. Ultimately, the extension of the logics of
personalization and control into a persistent field of networked media spaces threatens to
alter viewer’s expectations of and engagements with the physical nature of their surroundings,
while simultaneously laying the foundation for new spatial imaginaries.
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Chapter 3 Endnotes
william u ricchio, “t elevision’s n ext g eneration: t echnology/interface c ulture/f low, ” in 1.
T elevision After TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition , ed. l ynn s pigel and Jan olsson, console-ing
passions (d urham, nc : d uke u niversity press, 2004), 175.
a nne f riedberg, “The e nd of c inema: multimedia and t echnological c hange, ” in 2. Film Theory and
Criticism: Introductory Readings, vol. 6 (n ew Y ork: o xford u niversity press, 2004), 919.
r aymond williams, 3. T elevision: T echnology and Cultural Form, r outledge classics (n ew Y ork and
l ondon: r outledge, 2003); Jane f euer, “The concept of l ive t elevision: o ntology as ideology, ” in
Regarding T elevision: Critical Approaches--an Anthology, ed. e . a nn Kaplan (f rederick, md : u niversity
publications of a merica, 1983), 12-22.
John e llis, 4. Seeing Things: T elevision in the Age of Uncertainty (i. b. t auris, 2000).
f or a discussion of gender and t iV o see : william b oddy, 5. New Media and Popular Imagination:
Launching Radio, T elevision, and Digital Media in the United States, o xford television studies (o xford ;
n ew Y ork: o xford u niversity press, 2004), 130-132.
a pple, “ abc , cbs , fo X & nbc offer i ncredible l ineup of programming in s tunning hd 6.
on the it unes s tore, ” o ctober 16, 2008, http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2008/10/16itunes.
html; a pple, “ a pple r eports f irst Quarter r esults, ” January 22, 2008, http://www.apple.com/pr/
library/2008/01/22results.html; a pple, “ a pple r eports f irst Quarter r esults, ” January 21, 2009,
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2009/01/21results.html; a pple, “ a ward-winning mgm f ilms
n ow on the it unes s tore, ” a pril 11, 2007, http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/04/11itunes.
html; a pple, “it unes s tore t ops t wo billion s ongs, ” January 9, 2007, http://www.apple.com/pr/
library/2007/01/09itunes.html.
n ielsen m edia r esearch, “n ielsen r eports t V , internet and m obile u sage a mong a mericans, ” July 7.
8, 2008, http://www.nielsenmedia.com/nc/portal/site/public/menuitem.55dc65b4a7d5adff3f6593614
7a062a0/?vgnextoid=fe63c9769fcfa110V gn Vcm100000ac0a260arcrd#.
l isa parks, “f lexible m icrocasting: g ender, g eneration, and t elevision-internet convergence, ” 8.
in T elevision After TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition , ed. l ynn s pigel and Jan olsson, console-
ing passions (d urham, nc : d uke u niversity press, 2004), 133-162; f or a discussion of interface
competencies see: max d awson, “f ingering the “digital”: e mbodying t V interfaces” (presented at the
s ociety for c inema and m edia s tudies conference, c hicago, il , march 9, 2007).
s ee, for example, references to “the intuitiveness, ease, and power of the original dV r ” in: d ave 9.
Zatz, “h ands-on with the t iV o s eries3!, ” engadget, s eptember 12, 2006, http://www.engadget.
com/2006/09/12/hands-on-with-the-tivo-series3/; “ as a pple demonstrated with the ipod, a simple,
intuitive interface scheme makes all the difference in the mass consumer market” in: l eander Kahney,
“n ew ui showdown: a pple vs. t iV o, ” wired.com, s eptember 13, 2006, http://www.wired.com/
gadgets/displays/commentary/cultofmac/2006/09/71774; “f rom the very beginning ease-of-use was
a goal of the team. They were inspired by appliances and interfaces that ‘just work’ and don’t require
reading manuals or learning the controls” in matt h aughey, “The p Vrb log interview: t en Questions
with t iV o’s director of u ser experience, m argret s chmidt, ” PVRblog, d ecember 8, 2004, http://www.
pvrblog.com/pvr/2004/12/the_pvrblog_int.html.
Jenifer t idwell, 10. Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design (s ebastapool, ca :
o ’r eilly m edia, inc., 2005).
william b oddy, “n ew m edia as old m edia: t elevision, ” in 11. The New Media Book , ed. d an h arries
(l ondon: bfi, 2002), 242-253.
135
f or an example of the discourse of control offered by an online video streaming service that has 12.
partnered with some entertainment conglomerates to deliver made-for-broadcast programming on the
web, see the discussion of “complete control” offered by Joost: Joost, “ a bout us, ” http://www.joost.com/
about/; f or an example of how this discourse is picked up by a prominent technology journalist, see
the dV r comparison report in: d avid pogue, “Video r ecorder d eath match, ” New Y ork Times, Video
l ibrary edition, http://video.nytimes.com/video/2007/04/05/technology/1194817093122/video-
recorder-death-match.html.
f or a discussion of the possibility and pleasure of binge viewing see: Jason m ittell, “exchanges 13.
of V alue, ” Flow TV 3, no. 4 (o ctober 21, 2005), http://flowtv.org/?p=264; m ichael Z. n ewman, “t V
binge, ” Flow TV 9, no. 5 ( January 23, 2009), http://flowtv.org/?p=2280.
f or a list of t iV o’s equity inverstors see the “about” section of the t iV o corporate website: http:// 14.
www.tivo.com/5.4asp
f or a discussion of the relationship between a pple and the entertainment media conglomerates see: 15.
r ay c ha, “g etting the big picture on t elevision on the internet, ” FlowTV 6, no. 9 (s eptember 28, 2007),
http://flowtv.org/?p=850.
s teven shaviro, 16. Connected, or, What It Means to Live in the Network Society (m inneapolis:
u niversity of m innesota press, 2003), 31.
f or more on the asymmetries of surveillance through emergent media technologies see: mark 17.
a ndrejevic, Reality TV: The W ork of Being W atched (lanham, md : r owman & l ittlefield p ublishers,
inc., 2003); mark a ndrejevic, iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era (lawrence, K s :
u niversity press of Kansas, 2007).
t ara m cpherson, “s elf, o ther and e lectronic m edia, ” in 18. The New Media Book , ed. d an h arries
(l ondon: bfi, 2002), 186.
mark a ndrejevic, “The w ork of b eing w atched: interactive m edia and the exploitation of s elf- 19.
disclosure, ” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19, no. 2 (2002): 230-248.
u ricchio, “t elevision’s n ext g eneration, ” 175. 20.
brian l owry, “t ivo t ries to a void b ecoming a f ootnote to h istory, ” 21. V ariety, may 17, 2004.
president of t iV o marty Y udkovitz, “personal communication, ” n ovember 11, 2004. 22.
marc a uge, 23. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (l ondon ; n ew Y ork:
V erso, 1995).
f or example wired’s discussion of a pple it unes and t iV o interfaces: “t iV o more than any other 24.
company so far in digital t V has proved the value of a great interface. it’s the main reason the company’s
fans are such die-hards—much like a pple fans, in fact.” in: Kahney, “n ew ui showdown: a pple vs.
t iVo. ”
u ricchio, “t elevision’s n ext g eneration, ” 176-177. 25.
136
a detailed guide to how the t iV o suggestions service works can be found in: Kamal a li and 26.
wijnand van s tam, “t ivo: making show r ecommendations u sing a distributed collaborative f iltering
a rchitecture, ” in Proceedings of the tenth ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery
and data mining (presented at the The t enth acm sig Kdd i nternational conference on Knowledge
discovery and d ata m ining, s eattle, w a , usa : acm , 2004), 394-401, http://portal.acm.org/citation.
cfm?id=1014052.1014097.
f or a useful overview of the concept of technological assemblage and a review of the related 27.
work by gilles d eleuze and f elix g uattai, see: Jennifer d aryl slack and J. m acgregor wise, Culture +
T echnology: A Primer (n ew Y ork: peter lang, 2005)
s teven a . Johnson, 28. Interface Culture (n ew Y ork: basic b ooks, 1999), 237.
James b ennett, “interfacing the n ation: r emediating public s ervice broadcasting in the digital 29.
t elevision age, ” Convergence 14, no. 3 (a ugust 1, 2008): 286.
Jason Kilar, “what’s in a name?, ” 30. Hulu Blog, may 13, 2008, http://blog.hulu.com/2008/05/13/
meaning-of-hulu/.
c atherine Johnson, “t ele-branding - in - t Viii - -- the n etwork as brand and the programme as 31.
brand, ” New Review of Film and T elevision Studies 5, no. 1 (2007): 5-32.
John Thornton c aldwell, “convergence t elevision: aggregating f orm and r epurposing content 32.
in the c ulture of conglomeration, ” in T elevision After TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition , ed. l ynn
s pigel and Jan olsson, console-ing passions (d urham, nc : d uke u niversity press, 2004), 68-69.
b oddy, 33. New Media and Popular Imagination; l ynn s pigel, Make Room for TV: T elevision and the
Family Ideal in Postwar America (c hicago: u niversity of c hicago press, 1992).
d avid m orley, 34. The Nationwide T elevision Studies , 1st ed. (n ew Y ork and l ondon: r outledge,
1992); a nn gray, Video Playtime: The Gendering of a Leisure T echnology , comedia (n ew Y ork and
l ondon: r outledge, 1992); e llen s eiter, T elevision and New Media Audiences, o xford television studies
(o xford ; n ew Y ork: c larendon press, 1999).
c aldwell, “convergence t elevision, ” 68-69; parks, “f lexible m icrocasting, ” 135. 35.
parks, “f lexible m icrocasting, ” 135. 36.
s pigel, 37. Make Room for TV, 89.
parks, “f lexible m icrocasting, ” 138. 38.
f iona a llon, “ a n o ntology of e veryday control, ” in 39. Mediaspace: Place, Scale, and Culture in a
Media Age, ed. n ick couldry and a nna m cc arthy (n ew Y ork and l ondon: r outledge, 2004), 263.
James b ennett, “‘Y our window-on-the- w orld’: The e mergence of r ed-button interactive 40.
t elevision in the u K, ” Convergence 14, no. 2 (may 1, 2008): 161-182.
max d awson, “l ittle players, big shows: f ormat, n arration, and s tyle on t elevision’s n ew s maller 41.
s creens, ” Convergence 13, no. 3 (a ugust 1, 2007): 231-250.
137
manuel c astells, 42. The Rise of the Network Society , vol. 2 (o xford ; malden, ma : blackwell, 2000);
d aniel b ell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A V enture in Social Forecasting (n ew Y ork: basic
b ooks, 1999); d avid h arvey, The Condition of Postmodernity : An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural
Change (o xford, u K ; c ambridge, ma : blackwell, 1989).
a llon, “ a n o ntology of e veryday control, ” 261. 43.
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Chapter 4: Networked Media Spaces and the Cultural Logic of Networked
Personalized Mobility
We can use the broad rubrics of networks and interfaces to help us understand many of the
cultural implications of emergent media technologies. Networks, as discussed in an earlier
chapter, are culturally salient yet difficult to visualize. The materiality of networks tends
to be hidden, whether buried underground, in the walls, or in transformations to radio
waves. Even when elements of network infrastructure are visible – as in the case of a satellite
dish, stray Ethernet cable, or wireless router – the underlying network itself remains largely
hidden. In any case, local portions of a network infrastructure are merely the occasionally
visible points of vast interconnected systems; networks can rarely be imaged in their totality.
As important as it might be to consider network infrastructures, that materiality is in some
ways simply a conduit for the actual data and code that protocologically traverse the network.
Yet these too are largely concealed. The famed zeroes and ones that are the ultimate lingua
franca of our digital era are legible primarily to microprocessors and, for the most part, we
don’t see the higher-level code that connects user needs and actual computations. Graphical
user interfaces were developed and introduced precisely because networks, protocols,
and code have become complex to the point of illegibility.
1
Their abstractions allow for
understanding and interaction. Complexities are reduced to menus and icons; interaction
is limited to the range of input functions allowed by a particular interface. Such reductions
allow a device/service such as a TiVo – actually a complex assemblage of multimedia
distribution systems, corporate programming guides, an ever-changing network of users,
an advertising platform, a data tracking service, a mix of hardware and cables – to be
experienced as a user-friendly entertainment access device. Apple’s iPhone invited a great
deal of critical discussion about its rethinking of mobile communication devices, but at its
core it is a rethinking of the interface to mobile data and communications. Without losing
sight of the materiality of the emergent media devices that we use to access communications
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and entertainment media, in most respects the chunks of plastic, metal, and silicon that rest
on our desks or in our pockets are essentially nodal combinations of networks and interfaces.
Media interfaces provide access to content, conversations, and ideas, but in a fundamental
way they provide access to networks themselves.
Making Networks Legible
Interfaces allow us to make sense of networks, to distill their complexity into something
legible. Legibility in this sense is not about complete comprehension or understanding, but
rather the ability to translate our local experiences into a sense of the whole through symbols
and patterns. This form of legibility does not refer to a literal mapping of a network, but
rather to a conceptualization of the data paths, flows, and contents that a network enables.
There has been no shortage of attempts to visualize contemporary networks. Albert-Lázló
Barabási has attempted to give form to Manuel Castells argument that the network is the
defining feature of our social moment, arguing that the “new science of networks” is a
form of cartography taking place in contemporary physics, biology, computer science, and
corporate studies.
2
He builds his argument though the presentation and discussion of a
series of increasingly complex network structures, across simple examples of local group
socialization and more complex extensions to the global Internet. Whereas Barabási uses the
simplest models to suggest the rule in more complex systems, writers such as Gilles Deleuze,
Felix Guattari, and Alexander Galloway have emphasized the irreducibility of distributed
networks. Building on Deleuze and Guattari’s cultural vision of rhizomatic organization
and his own background in computer science, Galloway argues that the salient point of a
distributed network is that it can never be visualized in its totality, as a distributed network
is “never complete, or integral to itself.”
3
These approaches are useful to the extent that they
provide a conceptual underpinning of network structure, but neither particularly addresses
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the manner in which everyday individuals make sense of the networks they engage on a
regular basis.
One way to think about the process of visualizing complexity is to consider the conceptual
approaches that urban theorists have deployed to suggest how individuals make sense
of expansive urban environments, where specific forms of legibility enable a mental
construction of the whole. Kevin Lynch advances a pointedly visual concept of legibility in
his seminal study The Image of the City . Lynch uses the term to refer to “the ease with which
[a city’s] parts can be recognized and can be organized into a coherent pattern.”
4
In Lynch’s
specific application legibility is a “quality” that can be designed into an urban environment or
possessed by a cityscape, and his exploration goes on to consider how cities might be rebuilt
with legibility in mind. He focuses instrumentally on the role of paths, edges, districts,
nodes, and landmarks as elements in the construction of a city’s image, arguing that rational
planning methods can be used to orient individuals in ever-vaster urban environments.
Crucially, Lynch also holds his conception of legibility in tension with a related quality
he calls imageability, or the manner in which urban forms can yield “vividly identified,
powerfully structured, highly useful mental images of the environment.”
5
If legibility
is about recognition, imageability is a mental construction that helps to structure our
perceptual world. Lynch slips casually from term to term, but tends to locate legibility in
the visual realm and imageability in the mental. The tension in these terms is especially
productive in that it highlights the situational understanding implied by such modes of
perception. As Rosalind Deutsch has argued, some of those prominent modes of reading
complex urban landscapes – she challenges David Harvey’s celebration of Michel de
Certeau’s voyeristic vision of the city from the top of the World T rade Center as a suggestive
misreading – fall into the trap of idealizing the viewing subject and a fetishizing a regime of
knowledge predicated on mastery and uniformity.
6
Lynch’s terminology, on the other hand,
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suggests that legible elements of the urban landscape give shape to complexity as understood
by pedestrians. More importantly, the move from legibility to imageability is a distinct effort
to recognize the interplay between material elements and individual subjectivity. Lynch’s
image of the city is a projection, a mental construction based on legible objects, and, though
he doesn’t dwell on it, the subjectivity of the individual. Whereas Lynch seems to take as a
given that the city image “is the result of a two-way process between observer and observed,”
we might consider this suggestion in light of the body of feminist criticism arguing for
the value of situated knowledges.
7
Following this logic, a partial and reflexive history of
the specific place under consideration produces the most incisive and objective knowledge
claims because it does not pretend they are stable, universal, or whole. A situated, pedestrian
approach is particularly suited to the consideration of urban environments because it is
flexible enough to change as people and places do. Imageability as an epistemological mode
is grounded in the interplay between individual, legible element, and complex environment.
It is a particularly valuable rubric when applied to the interactive scripted spaces of emergent
media, as it implicitly holds in tension the experiential realm of the interface and the
structuring imperatives of network protocols and infrastructures.
A direct application of these concepts in an urban context is advanced in chapter five,
but the term legibility has salience to the current discussion of networks and interfaces.
Moving temporarily away from urban specificity, I am similarly using the terms legibility
and imageabilty to refer to a sense-making effort advanced in the face of seemingly
insurmountable complexity. In this sense, interfaces structure our experience of networks,
obfuscating much in favor of functional displays designed to manage access and invite
interaction. Interfaces do not reveal the fundamental organizational imperatives of
contemporary networks, but they do frame our explorations into networks’ possibility
spaces. In quite meaningful ways, our understanding of the world wide web is structured
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by the capabilities and limitation of our browsers and their extensions. The experience of
television, still engaging a quarter of the average American’s day, is quite different depending
on one’s interface.
8
Television viewed through a digital broadcast receiver is mediated by the
receiver’s interface, and, as suggested in the previous chapter features a flow augmented by
metadata, on-screen graphics, and navigational tools. TiVo’s interface allows for the arresting
of televisual flow and the reconceptualization of television as a personalized reservoir of
content to be recalled at a user’s convenience. A contemporary generation of cord-cutters,
a term used to refer to individuals choosing to unsubscribe from cable or satellite providers
in favor of watching television clips and programs through a web browser, sees vast oceans
of television programming and other time-based entertainment accessible from multiple
and mobile devices. The networks at stake in each of these cases matters, of course, but the
image of television more directly depends on the legibility provided by the interface. Media
interfaces structure the experience of networks, guiding the manner in which individuals
develop their own sense-making images and navigational conceits.
9
All of this is to say that interfaces and networks need to be conceptually engaged as
interrelated phenomena, indeed as the fundamental elements of emergent media
technologies. Networks are important, and it is vital that we understand the social and
cultural implications of their salience. Interfaces are important, and we should be attentive
to the aesthetic, industrial, and conceptual logics they introduce. But we must also
think about them together, about what it means to invite networks and interfaces into
our social and spatial experiences, to depend on their imageabilty and the ways in which
their conjunction structures our understanding and experience of our world. While the
previous chapters consider in turn networks and interfaces as distinct conceptual gateways to
theorizing emergent media, this chapter re-spatializes them and considers their effects of their
articulation in everyday social space.
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The first key intervention advanced in this chapter is the concept of the networked media
space. This terminology addresses the changes to social space that occur when media
interfaces are engaged within the presence of communications networks. The establishment
of networked media spaces works to reconfigure the private and public characteristics of
any environment in which they are established. Networked media spaces are not necessarily
permanent, function differently in specific contexts, and depend heavily on the types of
networks and interfaces present in an environment. Like interfaces, to the extent that
such spaces are popularly theorized they have been thought of as exemplary of the new
freedoms enabled by emergent media technologies. This chapter reconceptualizes such
freedoms using the concept of networked personalized mobility, suggesting that supposed
new freedoms are better understood as part of a contemporary cultural logic that emphasizes
the constant connectivity of the network society, the vectors of personalization introduced
by the distribution of media interfaces, and the specific mobilities engendered by shifts in
technology and capital. This cultural logic underwrites certain privileged forms of mobility,
but this chapter goes on to argue that the salience of constant connectivity can also be
conceived as digital enclosures, or flexible articulations of despatialized social power. Just as
freedom can be understood as delimited and monitored mobility, this chapter concludes with
a consideration of how personalization can be understood as a new mode of accumulation in
which consumers participate in their own commodification.
The point of all this is not to suggest that we have somehow misunderstood the importance
of new forms of mobility, or that we are simply overvaluing the pleasures afforded by
emergent media technologies. Rather it is to diagnose the complex and contradictory
spatial and social implications engendered by the use of such technologies. On the one
hand this means being attentive to the big picture, to the forms of social power built into
contemporary societies of control. At the same time it means paying attention to the manner
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in which mobility, access, and connectivity are unevenly distributed across geographic and
social boundaries. This chapter lays out conceptual rubrics that are taken to ground level in
the case studies that follow.
Social Space
MediaSpace, then, at once defines the artefactual existence of media forms within
social space, the links that media objects forge between spaces, and the (no less real)
cultural visions of a physical space transcended by technology and emergent virtual
pathways of communication.
- Couldry and McCarthy
Any argument about the impact of emergent media on space must begin with some
specificity as to what is actually meant in the use of the term “space.” Space does of
course have a number colloquial meanings: unoccupied environments; the emptiness
between definite objects or individuals; an area of land without buildings; the environment
surrounding an object, person, or building; the portions of the universe that exist outside
the atmosphere of celestial bodies. In such everyday uses the term tends to be associated
with other problematically familiar term like empty, natural, and open. To some extent
these familiar uses of the term suggest an open-ended conception, a field of possibilities. At
the same time, framing our consideration of space in such general and physical terms makes
it difficult to speak precisely about how spaces function in a cultural realm as sites of and
inspiration for meaning-making phenomena.
So what do we mean by space, if not a natural expanse to be filled with objects? The
arguments that follow are grounded in an understanding that space is fundamentally
socially produced and actively practiced. In the most reductive sense, conceiving of spaces
as phenomena that are socially produced simply means accounting for the various flows of
bodies and power that influence specific environments. Social spaces have histories, change
over time, and are altered by their uses. In order to understand what any given social space
means it is necessary to understand the actual social practices that occur in the space as
145
well as the range of imaginings of what the space could be. Social spaces can be mapped,
photographed, or critically analyzed, but the resulting diagram or textual analysis will result
in a representation that becomes part of the space itself.
This conceptual disposition toward space has, to a greater or lesser extent, been part of a
recent spatial turn in the academic and theoretical understanding of the importance of spaces
and spatial analyses. This perspective was not always dominant. Prior to the 1960s, the
most influential academic considerations of space were advanced by the Chicago School,
a group of sociologists and geographers centered around the University of Chicago. Their
ethnographic approach informed a theoretical understanding of the modern urban form as
a zone-based model in which peripheral regions encircle a dense urban core. In this model
of urban growth, based on the industrial-era development of the city of Chicago, it was
argued that the social experience of individuals was directly related to the type of urban
zones they inhabited. Even as massive urban development, often government-funded and
in the modernist style theorized by Le Corbusier, occurred in the wake of the second world
war, the Chicago School and its descendants remained the primary locus of spatial thought
in the academy. Beginning with the interventions of Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault
in the late 1960s, the retheorization of space proceeded by challenging a dominant mode of
academic thinking that favored questions of time and history over questions of space and
geography. Lefebvre in particular advanced the argument that space is socially produced
and that the meaning of any given space is a product of social interactions within the built
environment, the systems societies design to make sense of social space, and the collective
social imagination of how space can be used.
10
Space for Lefebvre is not something simply
to be filled or mapped, but a rich repository of a society’s self-conception, fashioned in
turns by design, accretion, practice, and imagination. These extensive ideas, collected in his
treatise on The Production of Space , gestured toward a “science of space” and foregrounded
146
questions of space for succeeding generations of philosophers and critical theorists. Of
the many philosophers and cultural analysts that took up Lefebvre’s theoretical approach
to space, Michel de Certeau advanced this mode of thinking in some of the most creative
ways. Although de Certeau’s theorization of everyday life featured many interesting insights,
with regard to the matter at hand he powerfully conceptualized individual pedestrian acts
as tactical maneuvers in the ground-level production of space. Indeed, de Certeau insists
on a distinction between the concepts of place and space that neatly parallels his broader
distinction between strategy and tactics.
11
For de Certeau, places are “proper,” stable
locations with defined purposes. Spaces, on the other hand, are “composed of intersections
of mobile elements,” unstable and ever changing sites of social practice. De Certeau
summarizes: “In short, space is a practiced place.”
12
Like Lefebvre before him, but using
slightly different terminology, de Certeau insists that spaces should not be approached as
timeless and unchanging, but as flexible articulations of long- and short-term social uses.
The two thinkers differ in that de Certeau strongly emphasizes the power individuals have to
“write the city” with their actions whereas Lefebvre insists on always holding in tension the
physical use of space with individual mental perceptions and broader social imaginings, but
they are both fundamentally concerned with spaces as emblems of and sites of resistance to
hegemonic social ideals.
Such complex declamations on the importance of spatial concepts have proven highly
influential, as a number of writers practicing what we might call critical cultural studies have
argued over the past three decades that questions of space are imperative to many different
fields of study. One of the most prominent sites of this influence has been in the field of
cultural geography, through David Harvey’s efforts to reconcile urban geographies with
broader questions about the changes in the political economy of contemporary capitalism
and in the establishment of the Los Angeles School of urban studies in the 1980s and
147
1990s, a collaborating yet not affiliated collection of urbanists and geographers who turned
their analytic lens on Los Angeles as both an archetypal and exceptional urban space. As
important – and often controversial – as changing conceptions of space has been in the field
of geography, such thinking has extended further afield. In his contribution to a recent
edited collection on The Spatial Turn , Edwad Soja reflects on how new modes of spatial
thinking have begun to inform the following academic perspectives:
Cultural studies, cultural theory, critical theory, literature, film, history of science,
history, environmental studies, organizational theory, media studies, comparative
education, philosophy, historical sociology, sociological analysis, poetry, Hispanic
literature, religion, theology, Bible studies, planning practice, history and sociology of
education, accounting, philosophy.
13
While each of these disciplines engages concepts of space and place in particular ways, it
is notable that the importance of space as an analytic rubric has pervaded a broad swath of
humanistic inquiry. Moreover, it is no accident that Soja includes cultural studies, cultural
theory, and critical theory at the start of his list, as it is through the ideas advanced by
work associated with these meta-disciplines that many of the more specialized fields have
incorporated spatial concerns. Because so many of these engagements developed at least in
part as a response to the interventions of Lefebvre and subsequent cultural geographers, the
spatial turn has fundamentally been concerned with thinking through engagements of social
space and existing disciplinary modes of inquiry.
Leaving Home
It is in the context of this broad spatial turn that we should understand the interactive
scripted spaces of emergent media. As suggested in chapter two, emergent media quite
powerfully feature material networks that reconfigure physical environments, alter the social
behavior of individuals in those environments, and connect individuals and other entities
through vast infrastructures. At the same times, network infrastructures support the scripting
of media interfaces, which feature their own spatial materiality. When media interfaces are
148
used to interact through networks, the impact on the immediate social space is dramatic,
as individuals find themselves simultaneously navigating virtual trajectories and proximate
socialities. In tracing the complexity of this dual mode of interaction it is helpful to consider
together the detailed historical accounts of scholars concerned with the introduction of
electronic technologies into the home with more conceptual critiques of the dynamics of
social space in a networked society. Working through these two traditions, we will see that
the framework for thinking through issues of mediated privacy and publicity has been altered
by the reconfiguration of nearly all social space as networked media space. Not only are
domestic spatial practices altered by the presence of multiple, overlapping, and interacting
networks, but the very boundaries of privacy have been expanded to function in multiple
dimensions – personal, domestic, communal, regional, national, global – corresponding
to particular network logics and forms of mobility. Whereas questions of privacy have
traditionally been linked to domesticity they must now be considered at multiple levels,
especially in accounting for the cultural geography of network infrastructures and the
circulation of personal metadata.
Although the introduction of media technologies has often been seen as connecting domestic
space to a broader social sphere through the representation of the outside world and via new
modes of communication, it is important to not simply equate domesticity and privacy.
The dangers of such a conflation are twofold. First, treating the terms synonymously allows
for other dimensions of privacy to be downplayed or ignored, a concern that will be more
directly addressed later in this chapter. Second, treating privacy as a binary that can be
flipped on or off by the closing of the front door loses sight of the complexity and fluidity
of domestic spaces and ignores the dynamic relationships between domestic and other social
spaces. In reductive analyses, where privacy is neatly tied to domesticity, it can be lost by
exposing the social space of the home to external engagement or through the intrusion of
149
public issues and concerns made possible by the technologies that provide the windows on
the world.
But we must push beyond these instrumental observations in order to understand how
emergent media technologies function as cultural constructions situated within the broader
forces reshaping social engagements and the built environment. Especially as emergent
media practices occupy increasingly disparate spatial environments it becomes imperative
to sort out these relationships between media, space, and power. Such concerns are not
wholly new, as many media scholars have noted of the broadcast era. Raymond Williams,
for example, famously situated the development of broadcast television within the mediated
cultural condition he characterized as “mobile privatization.”
14
Reflecting on the dispersal
of the population in Western countries into ever-expanding suburbs, and comparing this to
both the industrial concentration and the rural diffusion of the recent past, Williams sees
the broad move from the public sphere to private spaces as the fundamental social condition
underpinning the rise of broadcasting in the middle of the past century. He explains that
the institution of broadcasting grew alongside a number of other changes: the building of
suburban homes, the increase in the function and use of automobiles, and the introduction
and explosion of the consumer durables market. Margaret Morse neatly brings together
these developments in her article “The Ontology of Everyday Distraction,” where she
focuses on the similarities between the television, the freeway, and the mall. Central to her
discussion is the idea that these three developments are not as different as they would appear,
as each of them is characterized by qualities of “nonspace” and “distraction.”
15
For Morse
each of these elements is in some sense about connections between people: the mall as a
new public sphere, the freeway as a physical connector for travelers, and the television as a
stand-in for interactive social relations. Questions of privacy are invoked by both Williams
and Morse, and inherent in both accounts is the challenge to the concept of the home as
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a self-sufficient private space separated from the rest of the world. Building from these
approaches, more nuanced historical explorations of the social and cultural impacts of media
technologies have carefully emphasized the transition of the private space of the home into a
blurred space that increasingly displayed characteristics of both publicity and privacy. In her
account of the introduction of electricity and the telephone into the space of the home, for
example, Carolyn Marvin notes that new communication technologies “lessened the family’s
control over what was admitted within its wall” and “introduced a permeable boundary
at the vital center of class and family.”
16
In a similar vein Lynn Spigel has explored the
introduction of the television into post-war US suburbs. Beginning with a cultural history
of home-based amusements from “Victorian America” through the early broadcast era, her
account emphasizes the developing challenges to “ideological division between public and
private spheres.”
17
As first commercial amusements drew bourgeois Americans out of their
homes and then broadcasting invited them to return, Spigel traces the manner in which
“this interest in bringing the world into the home can be seen as part of a larger historical
process in which the home was designed to incorporate social space.”
18
From these accounts
it is apparent that the actual incorporation of media technologies into the home didn’t
simply reduce individuals’ privacy, but more substantially raised questions about the existing
ideological conceptions of what it meant to think in terms of private and public space.
While this may have initially meant a perceived loss of control over the policing of such
boundaries, it soon meant the carefully managed opening up of certain spaces of the home in
both the designs of homebuilders and the techno-social practices of residents.
Crucially, the mediating of domestic social space also signifies in quite public ways.
Although public attention to domestic practices could be read as a further loss of privacy,
it has generally been understood as demonstrably public behavior. Spigel makes this point
by situating her cultural history of the installation of television into domestic space against
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the emergence of the prefabricated suburban tract home. This emphasis on the specifics
of domestic space is crucial, as she argues that former urban dwellers “secured a position
of meaning in the public sphere through their new-found social identities as private land
owners.”
19
Here, as in other work, Spigel is concerned with modes of mediated spatial
practice which earn distinction for their practitioners: at mid-century it was enough to
procure and maintain a detached home with a prominent television; by the 1960s one
was expected to embrace the privatized mobility offered by portable television sets; in our
networked age, the “conspicuous production” of around-the-clock home-based work is the
marker which signifies smart living.
20
Even as she updates her horizon to the networked era,
Spigel sees contested models of domesticity which nonetheless remain inscribed by familiar
logics:
Indeed the prevailing consumer discourses on new technologies aimed at the white
middle class continue to present tableaus in which domestic subjectivity is presented
through logics of sexual difference and related divisions of public and private space,
even if these logics are updated for a computer age.
21

Most helpful in such analyses are Spigel’s explanations of how questions of gender, class, and
community are socially and politically inscribed into the organization of domestic space and
her demonstration of how this organization responds to the introduction of different media
technologies. Moreover, she is quite clear on how the reconfiguring of mediated domestic
spaces simultaneously alters domestic and broader social relations.
In considering contemporary networked media spaces, however, we need to push our
understanding of privacy questions beyond the home. Such a project involves a careful
negotiation between an emphasis on the material histories of portable media technologies
and an engagement with the techno-social practices associated with the networks and
interfaces of emergent media technologies. As suggested above, Lynn Spigel moved in this
direction with her accounts of the portable television and privatized mobility of the 1960s as
well as the conspicuous production of the information age. In a slightly different direction,
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Anna McCarthy has documented the cultural and spatial implications of televisions used in
non-domestic contexts.
22
For the most part, however, these accounts do not directly consider
the technological specificity of emergent media technologies, particularly how the practice of
mobile media engagements are restructured through the intersections of media interfaces and
networks. The practice of streaming a television show on a laptop while waiting for a flight is
quite different then watching the ambient television available via the CNN Airport Channel.
Downloading a book to a Kindle for a beach read is different than browsing through a
bookstore. Listening to a customized Pandora radio station at a café is a different practice
than listening to the music on offer by the establishment. By engaging in such emergent
techno-spatial practices individuals interactively customize their media consumption, engage
in private experiences even in public spaces, and exchange these privileges for the behavioral
traces these activities transmit to the service providers that support them. Accounting for the
multiplicity and ubiquity of contemporary networks and technologies means on one hand
turning to questions of globalization and the network society, and on the other more directly
considering how contemporary media spaces exceed domestic boundaries.
The Spatializing Effects of Networks
A first step in developing notions of emergent media and space is to hold media historians’
emphasis on blurred domestic environments in tension with the power-full communications
networks described by many network theorists. From a quite different critical perspective
than media historians like Marvin and Spigel, certain critics of globalization have deployed
updated Marxist perspectives to theorize the relationship between private and public spaces.
With different degrees of determination, such theorists have emphasized how globalization
and networked media technologies drive the interconnected nature of domestic spaces,
the severe consequences for un-connected spaces, the globalizing tendencies of digital
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technologies, and the potential for complete breakdown of divisions between private and
public spaces.
A primary conceptual move has been to recast communications networks as integral elements
in a public infrastructure. By emphasizing the material aspects of network creation such
critics have been able to frame questions of network connectivity in explicitly political
terms, connecting individual domestic media spaces to larger policy decisions. Manuel
Castells, perhaps the defining figure of this approach, takes up private/public concerns by
emphasizing the importance of being connected and situating the debate at a global level. As
he sees it, to be connected to the network means one is an inhabitant of the “space of flows”
living “timeless time,” while to be disconnected leaves one rooted in the “space of place”
and plain-old “chronological time.”
23
More directly, he argues that the logic of the network
implies a binary logic of inclusion/exclusion, and that “the social construction of new
dominant forms of space and time develops a meta-network that switches off nonessential
functions, subordinate social groups, and devalued territories.”
24
While he allows that
people don’t actually disappear when they are disconnected, he emphasizes that their
value to the network, and thus to the network society, tends to zero. In this formulation,
absolute private-ness is without value, and openness to the public is the only means of
participating in society. Moreover, Castells insists that the Network Society is global because
“digital networks are global, as they know no boundaries in their capacity to reconfigure
themselves.”
25
Castells’ configuration of public and private spaces thus emphasizes a binary
logic of global connectedness. In his take a space is only private when it is disconnected
from communications networks; this is also clearly presented as an undesirable condition.
Conversely, to be connected is to be public, available, and act on a global scale.
While Castells’ approach emphasizes material concerns, it is itself quite conceptual in nature.
Working within a similar conceptual framework, Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin have
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attempted to give materiality to the “space of flows” in their analysis of urban infrastructures.
In their reading, the local boundaries of global connections are part of a broader and
historical system of differential municipal systems. The consequences of municipal provision
of infrastructural services are generally that they are slow to adapt to changing social
conditions, while privately delivered services exhibit tremendous inequality in the structure
of their networks. With regard to data networks, this means that Wall Street has better –
faster, redundant, reliable, serviced – connections than Main Street, that particular areas
within urban environments are served with new technologies much sooner than others, and
that the terms of provision are often tiered even across identical infrastructures. Complex
negotiations between infrastructural service providers, civic leaders, community groups, and
determined individuals reflect the “struggles and contests over the highly uneven ability to
overcome space-time constraints” that are played out in the politics of network connectivity
and infrastructural unbundling.
26
With a sharp emphasis on the negative consequences of
differential connectivity and access, Graham and Marvin reveal how class and geography
inscribe these disparities. Even when municipalities step in to shore up obvious inequalities,
their involvement generally amounts to the public provision – in public spaces such as
libraries, schools, or government buildings – of services that more privileged residents enjoy
within the relative privacy of their own residences.
It is important to keep in mind, however, that the politics of engaging a communications
infrastructure does not simply end with local or state enacted policies. Networks are socially
as well as physically material constructions, and one’s relationship to network-age questions
of privacy is powerfully influenced by social relations as well as physical connectivity. In
this respect, Graham and Marvin’s emphasis on the social differentiation at work through
network infrastructures owes an (acknowledged) debt to Doreen Massey, who fit such
concerns into her rubric of the power geometry of time-space compression. Addressing
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questions of transportation and mobility, Massey is unwilling to accept the totalizing
accounts of time-space compression (notably that of David Harvey in The Condition of
Postmodernity) that suggests everyone and everything are speeding up in a similar manner.
Massey insists that:
Different social groups have distinct relationships to this anyway differentiated
mobility: some people are more in charge of it than others; some initiate flows and
movement, other don’t; some are more on the receiving-end of it than others; some
are effectively imprisoned by it.
27

Not only does this insistence more directly address the inequalities faced by different
individuals, it offers a more nuanced take on the consequences of one’s position within
the globalized space of flows. While Castells’ binary logic of inclusion/exclusion seems
conceptually sound and has high-level explanatory power, it treats ‘the network’ as if it were
singular and solely technological. Massey’s formulation allows different places to articulate
their local relations with the broader forces of networked connectivity, meaning that distinct
places can be differentially connected through both technologically-enabled and technology-
free social relations. As Massey understands place to be an articulation of social relations,
she recognizes that reorganizations of capital and new technologies of communication mean
that “the social relations which constitute a locality increasingly stretch beyond its borders”
and that “what is at issue is the changing geography of (changing) social relations.”
28
While
Massey advances this conception of place to get away from static and essential formulations,
it also gives us a different and relatively nuanced perspective on notions of the public and
the private. If all places are already inscribed by changing geographies and changing social
relations, the introduction of emergent media technologies into supposedly private space is
merely an extension of an already dynamic and socially networked site. Massey’s theoretical
approach to space and place insists that all places are socially constructed and permeable,
features that are both retained and reconfigured in a networked age, subject to flows of power
as well as flows of information.
156
Read at the extreme, such flows of power have the potential to completely break down
the divisions between private and public spaces. Beyond even the influence of policy
directives and social context, contemporary networks and technologies are manifestations of
broader techno-capitalist forces interested in recasting domestic environments as explicitly
productive as well as reproductive spaces. Within their broader critique of crisis as a
productive force for capital’s hegemony, Eric Alliez and Michael Feher argue that a series of
crises has yielded a new moment in capital in which labor is simultaneously decentralized
in space and incorporated into capital itself. As a more flexible neo-Fordist mode replaces
the characteristic centralization of Fordism, an “increasing confusion of the productive and
reproductive sectors” occurs:
Consequently capital has recently adopted a more supple profile: productive space,
previously concentrated in large factories, tends now to be diffused throughout the
urban fabric, often invading domestic space.
29

In this account, capital’s response to crisis yields an entrepreneurial ethic and more flexible
modes of employment; workers are increasingly addressed as “stakeholders” with interests
aligned directly with capital. These new interests often involve the isolation of labor within
domestic spaces:
This diffusion takes on various concrete forms: an increase of subsidiaries and
subcontracted workshops; a revival of the putting-out system and work in the home
which does away with all distinctions between work place and domestic space. This
invasion of domestic space-time often takes on the glitter of telematics, when a
terminal installed in the workers’ home short-circuits their very act of ‘sovereign
subjection’ by allowing companies to reach them at any moment. At other times,
this invasion adopts a more humble form, as when small additional tasks are carried
out in the home beyond the ‘normal’ workday.
30

While this is a particularly sweeping and high-level theorization, it certainly describes effects
that are quite real. The promises of tele-commuting and the rise of the home office have
not quite lived up to their dotcom-era hype, but the workforce in the US has become more
flexible in the past decade through flex-time programs in corporations, an increase in the
number of project-based consultants, and the massive growth in the temporary employment
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field. Emphasizing broad reconfigurations in the practice of labor, Alliez and Feher further
argue that dramatic changes in the social use of space are predicated on extensions of media
into domestic environments. In making this point, they suggest that this colonization of
domestic space is paralleled by a change in subjectivity, leaving laborers blind to the erosion
of privacy. Of course, privacy is not the only right that is injured in a regime of flexible
accumulation. David Naguib Pellow and Lisa Sun-Hee Park have argued that various
practices, including outsourced and home-based work on toxic computer components in
the Silicon Valley, are tantamount to environmental racism.
31
Their research documents the
familiar stories of workers laboring in unsafe conditions for extended periods of time, and
adds to such accounts the specific health and environmental risks that accrue when industrial
processes leach into domestic spaces. Such a specific account reminds us that there are always
material stakes to questions of public and private space, and that part of the “suppleness”
of capital under a neo-Fordist regime of flexible accumulation resides in its ability to act
differentially.
From these accounts ostensibly concerned with the flows of power in network societies we
can thus glean insights into associated conceptions of privacy in mediated environments.
Where media historians have emphasized the nuanced complications to domestic
environments dealing with the introduction of early media technologies, network theorists
have suggested that contemporary communications networks have impacts that are both
more powerful, and full of power. The provision and maintenance of networks are subject
to state, social, and systemic controls that are not generally negotiable. Instead of thinking
about the individual engagements initiated by autonomous actors leading mediated lifestyles,
these critiques suggest that we must also consider the limitations which structure the
networks that underwrite the freedom to choose in the first place. As network infrastructures
continue to colonize and repurpose everyday spaces, we must also recast our understanding
158
of places as not primarily private or public, but as primarily mediated. As suggested below,
the hybrid nature of networked media spaces upends previous conceptions of privacy
and publicity so significantly that we must update or conception of how social space is
differentiated.
The Rise of Networked Media Space
Changing social, economic, and cultural forces have been articulated along with emergent
media technologies in ways that reframe questions of privacy away from explicitly domestic
contexts. Whereas it made sense for the attempts to outline a cultural logic of broadcast
media to focus on the space of the home, emergent media technologies are in many ways
designed to support increased mobility. In many examples, these technologies are specifically
designed to be assigned to an individual rather than a space. Because privacy has been
conceptualized so frequently alongside notions of domesticity and individuality, the home
seems a natural rhetorical figure for media theorists. From a methodological perspective, the
domestic sphere is often featured in the address of the magazine articles and advertisements
that are the subjects of much textual analysis by Spigel and Marvin. Similarly, the “home
of the future” has become a staple for cultural criticism, further privileging the analysis of
domestic space as the primary site for analysis.
32
While the critiques launched by Spigel
and Marvin carefully understand domestic spaces as being situated within more complex
spatial and social networks, the home still figures in their accounting as the primary
spatial unit. On the other hand, Graham and Marvin are quite concerned about domestic
environments, but they extend their analysis to consider how broader modes of urbanism
are supported by infrastructure networks. Indeed, the efforts of Graham and Marvin to
consider simultaneously the full suite of infrastructure networks as essential aspects of urban
development remind us quite clearly that media technologies are not the sole forces to have
reconfigured the public and private registers of space.
159
Across the urban landscape, emergent media technologies have been articulated with new
building patterns to reconfigure the physical construction of the built environment and the
corresponding social construction of space. If the dominant image of the post-war suburban
landscape was rows upon rows of mass-produced tract houses, the housing phenomenon
that signified the most throughout the 1980s and 1990s was the enormous rise in gated
communities. These neighborhoods, in both urban and suburban environments, literally
erected physical barriers in order to establish another layer of distinction between private and
public space. In a sense, the private space of the home was further isolated within the private
space of the gated neighborhood. Of course, this manner of cocooning can also be advanced
by entertainment and communications technologies that allow for selective contact with
the broader social sphere. Televisions, computers, video game consoles, and related media
technologies can be used as means of viewing or making contact with a broader world or
can be used as means of insulation from the same. As detailed in the following chapters, still
newer forms of urban development planned and built since the turn of the millennium are
predicated in part on network-era emergent media technologies that allow for new forms of
mobility and managed connectivity. As questions of mediated space are articulated alongside
material changes in the built environment of domestic, neighborhood, and urban spaces, the
concept is best engaged through a critical analysis that considers questions of urban planning,
architecture, political economy, and media infrastructures along with approaches more
familiar to media scholars.
A primary step in reorienting our approach to the impact of media in and on space is to
develop conceptual tools that allows for a more expansive notion of the relationships between
media and space. Nick Couldry and Anna McCarthy have moved in this direction, by
offering up the term “MediaSpace” in the introduction to an edited volume of the same
name, as a term that literally (in their concatenation of terms) and conceptually bridges
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the gap between the “allied phenomenon” of Media and Space. They deploy the term as a
dialectical concept “encompassing both the kinds of spaces created by media, and the effects
that existing spatial arrangements have on media forms as they materialize in everyday life.”
33

Moreover, they suggest that the concept might be deployed in at least five registers: media
representations of space; media flows across space and the ensuing reconfiguration of social
space; the study of specific spaces of media production and consumption; the study of the
repercussions of operation of media in space; and the lived entanglements of scale.
34
For
Couldry and McCarthy, MediaSpace has a broad set of applications and can mean varied
things in different contexts. The deployment of the term in such a manner is productive in
that it essentially lays out a sub-inter-discipline that could host an entire field of analyses. At
the same time, their conception is so broad that it is difficult to use with specificity. Let us
then reserve the concatenated term MediaSpace to suggest the many and important registers
of interaction suggested by Couldry and McCarthy.
If MediaSpace is allowed to operate as a conceptual rubric, we might still productively
explore meaningful ways to refer to those specific spatial environments that involve the
operation of media in space. Put most simply, we might use the term “media space” to
describe a specific spatial instance or category, in they same way that we might refer to a
domestic space or a private space. A media space, understood in this manner, is a slice of the
built environment, a physical manifestation in the real world of social space that is tempered
by the operation of media. Indeed, in a chapter within the Couldy and McCarthy volume,
Fiona Allon addresses in passing the possible meanings of “media space” in a study of the
impact of media technologies on Bill Gates’ millennial smart home. From her reading of this
famous domestic environment Allon diagnoses a set of ontological ruptures in the registers
of domesticity and connectivity, shaped by the impacts of global economic changes and the
more pointed interventions of networked media technologies:
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Within this regime of flexible production and flexible accumulation there are new
ways of working (home-work) and new ways of living (connectivity) characterized by
the dissolution of rigid boundaries, between public and private spaces, for example,
but also between markets and economies, and by an emphasis on the productive
potential of speed and mobility (of information, finance capital, labor etc) and by
decentralization and movement (see Harvey 1989; Castells 1997).
35

Here Allon is describing the operation of a smart home that is tightly connected to the
outside world via both infrastructural networks and the networks of capital that have
sought to tap into the productive potential of domestic spaces previously valued for their
reproductive functions. The emphasis here is on the space of the home and the upending
of previous conceptions of privacy and publicity. Like Alliez and Feher, Allon sees in the
mediated dissolution of these boundaries a “…step towards an instrumentation of the home
and everyday life” and understands the “public/private workspace of the smart home” to be
“the site for the exploitation and ordering of bodies.”
36
Building on these analyses, Allon
suggests that the emergent media technologies of the smart home go further still, massively
complicating notions of space that do not attend to the operation of media and the built
environment:
Enabling a range of interactions between the near and the far, frequently in shared
time and without dependency on spatial proximity, digital media technologies are
not only playing a primary role in reconfiguring the spatial orders of social life,
but are also affecting how we directly experience place and territory…Media and
communication networks effectively constitute a new matrix of spatio-temporal
relations which complicates, and overlaps with, existing domains of spatial
experience.
37

This passage is an update on Doreen Massey’s power geometry of time-space compression,
usefully holding in tension familiar modes of spatial practice with new pressures exerted
by multiple and intensive communications networks. Massey was attentive to media
broadcasting and electronic communications in her 1991 essay detailing her concept of
power geometry, and Allon is suggesting here that media and communications networks have
advanced substantially in the span of a decade, at least for those affluent enough to afford
a smart home. Ultimately, as these networked media intersect with domestic architectural
162
and social space, Allon concludes that “we see the rise of new modes of living organized
almost entirely by the reconstitution of ‘private space’ as ‘media space’.”
38
Media space, in
this reading, helps us to understand the manner in which domestic spaces might simply
shed privacy in favor of mediation, a form of connectivity to the world that precludes any
pretensions toward older distinctions of private and public.
Grounded in the theoretical trajectories offered by Doreen Massey, David Harvey, and
Manuel Castells, the term media space describes a kind of telescoping spatiality, articulating
together proximate experience, local connections, and networked global flows in the space
of the home. Domestic media spaces retain a sense of privacy in the sense that physical and
virtual barriers are erected. Locks still make physical entry difficult; passwords and codes
control certain private networks and security systems. Domestic media spaces public retain
a bit of their publicity as they rely on external inputs (of electricity, data, communications
and entertainment streams) for their efficient function, and because they register and
expose domestic behaviors and preferences in order to deliver interactive experiences. And
yet the boundaries of domestic media spaces can no longer be characterized by the simple
binary of private and public because the networked nature of contemporary technologies
simultaneously extends boundaries and introduces the inherent qualities of surveillance and
control associated with media interfaces. Networked interactions within domestic spaces
participate in different system of exchange than in previous eras. Whereas Margaret Morse
could insightfully connect the practices of television viewing, freeway driving, and mall
shopping as part of an extended system of distracted exchange, the feedback loop is now
much tighter. Television viewing and other forms of media consumption can be precisely
measured (and potentially metered) in ways that were not previously possible. Programming
and advertisements can be further targeted based upon this monitoring, and is some
cases, where the advertisements allow for direct response or other interactivity, even these
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marketing forms can be systematically monitored. More generally speaking, the practice of
engaging emergent media interfaces in networked environments, even the networked media
space of the home, situates individuals within systems of interactive exchange. Whereas
mid-century private space was imagined as a semi-permeable safe haven – images and
ideas might sneak in through one-way media devices - contemporary networked media
spaces guarantee a vision of spatial privacy through technologies that inherently sacrifice an
individual’s personal metadata. In other words, the promises of connection and freedom
which drive the incorporation of networked media technologies into the everyday experience
of the household always entail the “surveillance, isolation, and control” that these networks
engender.
39
It is not that the private space of the home has been obliterated, as if everyone
suddenly lived in communal domestic space, but that its boundaries are now subject to the
networked vectors of the media space, ever-changing and uncertain.
The home may be a meaningful locus of media space, but an over-emphasis on domestic
spaces runs the risk of missing the more salient point that contemporary emergent media
technologies are powerfully advancing the practices and notions of mobility that have been
integral aspects of the broad shift in post-war social relations governed by a regime of flexible
accumulation. The mobilities of the twenty-first century build upon earlier cultural logics of
social movement. The immediate post-war era has been notably characterized by Raymond
Williams’ as featuring a move toward mobile privatization, with individuals and families
structuring their social lives around the curious mix of privacy and connectivity offered by
the enclosed pleasures of personal automobiles, single-family homes, suburban communities,
and broadcast media. This structure of feeling was predicated on the economic growth
associated with industrialization, urban agglomeration, and the rise of a consumer culture
that stitched it all together. Lynn Spigel memorably updated Williams’ formulation to
account for a mode of privatized mobility she saw as characteristic of the space age 1960s –
164
an era of air travel, mobile homes, and portable television sets. Spigel carefully emphasizes
that her formulation is not an inversion; the governing logics of mobility and privacy are
still operative, she simply seeks to note a shift of emphasis. Surely the fundamental bases
for these characterizations are still operative half a century later. We might have seen oil
shocks and housing bubbles, but even if the means to fulfill the cultural logics of mobility
and privatization are more difficult to achieve across the Western socioeconomic spectrum,
the ideals resonate not only in the West but also in more recently industrialized countries.
Yet many of the everyday practices and cultural logics underlying this structure of feeling
have changed. Complexly intertwined changes in political (deregulation; privatization),
economic (globalization; the U.S. shift to service economies, creative economies, and flexible
employment), cultural (networked publics; configurable culture), and technological (the
proliferation of media and communications networks; the privatization of the Internet; the
digitization of most forms of entertainment and communications media; the miniaturization
of microprocessors; and a whole host of secondary technological developments) realms has
given rise to new relations of mobility, privacy, and practice of social space.
A first major implication of these collective changes is the reconfiguration of the home as just
one, if often still the most important, locus of connectivity to various flows of information,
entertainment, and exchange. Such forms of connectivity are available through those places
of work that we still refer to as workplaces, but entertainment and communications networks
have quite literally colonized most realms of social space. One only has to look out the
window, visit a coffee shop, or peer into a passing car to see individuals using their mobile
phones, portable computers, and hand-held convergent communications and entertainment
devices to connect to networks. Indeed, much of the cultural longing previously embodied
by the smart house has now been shifted to the smart phone, except rather than singular
prototypes these devices are in the hands of tens of millions of people. As a result, we must
165
extend our concept of the media space to account for the full range of mediated social spaces.
So what turns a space - domestic, public, commercial, natural, or otherwise - into a media
space? We might say that a networked media space is created whenever media networks and
interfaces interact. Such a construction is supple enough to account for the changes in the
social spaces of smart homes, Wi-Fi hotspots, cities and highways with 3G phone networks,
and wired workplaces, yet specific enough to refer to recognizable instances of the mediation
of built environments. The rhetorical decision to emphasize the networked nature of such
media spaces serves to both recognize the salience of the network in the operation of such
spaces and also to draw a distinction between the relative stability of the network against the
mobility of the interface. Networks tend to be present and available in a particular place
regardless of whether or not individuals choose to engage them and are non-particular, in
the sense that any device with the proper credentials can gain access. Interfaces, on the other
hand, are generally personalized and deployed deliberately, either in the moment or because
they have been programmed in advance.
Networked media space, as a catalyzed synthesis of the private/public dialectic, is the
productive paradigm for spatiality in a network society. These social spaces are brought
into existence on a daily basis in millions of different places, in the U.S. and around the
globe. They are clearly social spaces, as they connect individuals in both the immediate
physical environment and through the operative networks. Access to networked media
spaces is managed primarily through protocological scripts, as credentials are often required;
at the same time access is also managed through economic privilege, as the ability to fully
participate in such networked media spaces generally depends on the possession of personal
devices. And it is through these spaces that individuals are incorporated into neo-Fordist
interactive exchanges. It is important, however, to note that networked media space need
not be thought of as a totalizing theoretical construct or statically pervasive phenomenon.
166
Instead, it should be conceived as a flexible techno-spatiality of social relations that can take
on different characteristics depending on which social relations and which technologies are
being articulated. Different registers of private-ness and public-ness are engaged through
such factors as physical propinquity, the mode of communication (broadcast, narrowcast,
interpersonal communication, etc.), the variety and types of networks present, and the social
practices being performed. Thought of in this manner, networked media spaces include
the bubbles of privacy created by the use of a mobile phone in an airport, a laptop in the
park, or the customization of the digital video recorder in the bedroom; at the same time,
each networked engagement involves an ongoing transactional exchange of self for service,
challenging received notions of privacy.
Although smart homes might feature the most sophisticated agglomeration of networks,
networked media spaces are now a feature of more prosaic domestic environments. That
is, a house does not have to be sentient in order to be smart. Any house subject to network
flows – and a substantial number, in the US as well as globally, are subject to some form
of satellite and broadcast flows, even if it is not redundantly connected through wired
and wireless networks – is inscribed in networked media space. That is, networked media
technologies simultaneously create and connect a multitude of networked media spaces.
Indeed the ability to produce a networked media space functions as a marker of distinction
for developers and home dwellers. While the ultimate signifier might be a Gates-level
integrated home automation system, millions of individuals rely on their TiVo’s, wireless
home networks, digital cable connection, and iPhones as much for their ability to impress
friends as for their manipulation of digital media.
As suggested above, perhaps the more important point is that the concept of networked
media space is applicable beyond explicitly domestic spaces. Just as domestic and other
private space becomes media space when networked, emergent portable media technologies
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can allow for instances of media space to be carved out of networked public spaces.
Ultimately, the full assemblage of emergent entertainment and communications media
technologies has the potential to articulate the private and public aspects of most any
space into a networked media space, becoming instantiated whenever personalized media
technologies are used to engage with a relevant network. And as Anne Friedberg and Kazys
Varnalis point out, our daily activities take place across a number of separate media spaces:
We inhabit physical and virtual space in specific ways, to specific ends, employing
different forms of audio, textual, and visual virtual co-presence based on the situation
we find ourselves in: if I am sitting on the bus, please text me on my phone, if I am
in a boring meeting at work, send me an instant message through AIM, if I am in
the car, try calling me on wireless. We turn to the Internet for information when
necessary or turning it off as need be.
40

Yet even as it has become clear that homes, neighborhoods, cities, and regions exhibit
a wide array of mediated spaces and changing social relations, questions of privacy and
publicity have generally been thought through at the level of global flows or at the level
of the domestic space – often in the showcase configurations of smart homes. It is crucial
that we also think at other levels to account for the specificities of regional, corporate, and
community deployments of and interaction with communications infrastructures. Taking
account of the multi-spatiality of networked media spaces also better addresses the real and
imagined mobilities engendered by the ubiquity of network provision. Different networks
allow for different levels of access and discrimination, parameters managed at scales ranging
from the individual to the household to the community and beyond. While the smart home
serves as a concise model for the rise of networked media space, the concept takes on a more
powerful and ominous meaning when considered at larger scales. Beyond the space of the
home, corporations have vastly reconfigured the geographic location and internal design of
their office spaces, retailers have strategically deployed network access throughout their sales
spaces, and the non-places of contemporary transportation have been transformed by the
use of media in social space. As part of this process, many public spaces – notably the coffee
168
shop and the airport – have becomes sites of performative communication where private
tasks are routinely completed through the deployment of a vast array of personal media and
communications technologies.
41
In addition, dozens of cities have rolled out regional and
citywide wireless networks, and hundreds more are considering the possibility.
42
Beyond the
deployment of networks in previously existing spaces is the incorporation of media networks
– and networked media spaces – in adaptive urban reuse and greenfield neighborhood
construction. The provisioning of a top-tier communications network has become a standard
part of the package of medium- and high-end urban development projects, including pre-
installed wired and wireless infrastructures, preferential access to trunk lines, and dedicated
bandwidth reserved for individual housing units, floors, or buildings.
Even as networked media technologies extend and reconfigure both domestic and non-
domestic spaces, media interfaces work to bridge these spaces. In these destabilized and
destabilizing spaces, and across devices which offer different form factors and varying degrees
of functionality and engagement, media interfaces help to orient viewers by providing a
familiar and often customized means of organizing and engaging entertainment media.
This can be as simple as using an iPod or a laptop computer across a variety of spaces, in
which personalized access and networked content overcome the inherent limitations of
the environment. Rather than turning on the TV in a hotel room after a long flight only
to struggle to determine the available channels, navigate time-zone induced changes in
schedules, or just simply figure out how to use an unfamiliar and overloaded remote, the
privileged traveler can simply turn to his or her familiar interface to access a personalized
database of media. It can mean watching a webisode on a mobile phone rather than the
CNN airport channel while waiting for a delayed flight, substituting a personalized media
flow for an ambient one. For participants in a study conducted by the Entertainment
Technology Center at the University of Southern California, this meant huddling with
169
friends around small screens showing movies at the beach, or killing time in line at
Disneyland by catching up on TV shows.
43
While certainly these emergent technologies are a product of television’s various historical
trajectories, these personalized viewing possibilities are more than just an update on the
portable television of the 1960s and go beyond the extension of ambient television into
non-domestic spaces. Whereas McCarthy has described how the physical spaces around
television sets in non-domestic contexts are often arranged or customized to highlight public
screens, the demands of engaging the screens of emergent media technologies tends to divide
space into semi-private bubbles.
44
Individuals using such devices effectively customize their
spatial environments along with their media experiences. The experience of streaming a
television program while waiting for a flight is quite different than staring at the CNN
Airport Channel on the public monitors, as the emergent experience provides a feeling of
control, both literal control through the technological interface and a bit of frisson at one’s
ability to enjoy a personal pleasure in a shared social space. I was personally struck by the
impact of the networked media space created at the Los Angeles Superior Court’s juror
waiting room. Prior to serving on a jury in 2003, I waited in a large room in which most
of the hundred or so potential jurors were more or less engaged with the few mounted
television sets in the room. While waiting for service in 2009 in this same room, the broad
cross-section of the individuals was largely engaged with their own personal media devices;
most used their mobile phones for texting or mobile web surfing, many used their laptops
for communications or entertainment (with a number of people streaming video and using
headphones). The mounted television sets were nearly all kept dark, their cords unplugged
so that individuals could recharge their personal devices. Individuals engage networked
media space in fundamentally different ways than they might have engaged social spaces in
170
the past, and there is a growing cultural expectation that networked media spaces will be
broadly available, from airports and cafés to municipal cores and national parks.
The Cultural Logic of Networked Personalized Mobility
Ultimately, as networked media interfaces extend the logics of personalization and control
into fields of media spaces they threaten to alter viewers’ expectations of and engagements
with the physical nature of their surroundings, while simultaneously laying the foundation
for new spatial imaginaries, including new conceptions of the relationships between space
and identity. Such shifts are enabled by the ideological imperatives that attend emergent
entertainment media technologies. Consumers expect new degrees of flexibility and
malleability from most of their experiences, from mediated automobiles to the physical
nature of their surroundings.
It should be clear that our previous conceptions of domestic, private, or public spaces are not
necessarily annihilated by emergent media technologies, but instead that our well-considered
explorations into the relationships between media and social space must be updated
to account for the complexities introduced by the new mobilities and personalization
afforded by communication networks and emergent technologies, and for the familiarities
and changing epistemologies accompanying the diffusion of the media interface. While
we might begin by specifying the technological imperatives and spatial scales at which
networked media spaces are being created, we will quickly recognize that such changes are
framing a host of questions around the production and monitoring of media audiences
and communities. Who has the means to engage in networked media spaces? What are
the boundaries to networked media spaces and how are they marked? Who ultimately
has authority over networked media spaces and how is this authority exercised? Will
different individuals be treated equally within a networked media space, or will networked
171
technologies allow for new forms of discrimination and self-discrimination? The answers to
these questions, and others like them, will guide our understanding of configurable media
experiences and the spaces that support them.
The effort to answer such questions is in a sense an attempt to diagnose a contemporary
structure of feeling. Keeping in mind the emergent nature of the media under consideration,
the uneven distribution of specific technologies across groups and populations, and
the power relationships that inhere to such broad formulations, we might tentatively
offer an explanation based on the cultural logics of networks, interfaces, mobility, and
personalization. As such a formulation is clearly indebted to both the theoretical constructs
and the specific histories outlined by Williams and Spigel, it seems appropriate to carefully
update their constructions and suggest that the emergent technologies of our contemporary
moment can be described as advancing a form of networked personalized mobility. Whereas
Williams’ mobile privatization diagnosed the implicit tensions between the desire for
privacy and the network flows that exceeded private spaces, this new logic makes explicit
the powerful structuring role of infrastructural networks in general, and communications
networks in particular. Indeed, contemporary mobility is powerfully catalyzed by the
extension and interoperability of communications networks. Again, however, the notion of
mobility at play in our contemporary moment is complex and contradictory. To speak of the
new mobilities of network societies refers to global travel and transport, still-private means
of local movement, and the opening-up of an individual’s worldview through mediated
channels. As documented by Castells and others, these new mobilities do not conform
to the utopian visions of a dispersed population working exclusively from beaches and
mountaintops. Urbanization has intensified; the agglomeration of information industries
around specific urban nodes, for reasons both cultural and infrastructural, suggests that
contemporary mobilities are powerfully negotiated within urban regions. As Alliez and Feher
172
theorized, contemporary mobilities are more often about turning homes, coffee shops, public
parks, and much of the urban environment into meaningful spaces of production. Networks,
then, have long supported modes of mobility. Only the networks are now culturally
visible, finding expression in the media interfaces and portable devices carefully designed to
personalize our networked experience. It is this shift from privatization to personalization
that is perhaps the most radical update to our governing cultural logic. The network-capable
devices that accompany so many of our waking hours bring with them the interfaces that
make us present to the networks. As we personalize our networked experiences – simply by
making phone calls, downloading apps, checking email, or sending a text – we engage in a
complicated exchange of certain registers of privacy for others. Our experience through the
interface is customized and to some extent private, yet these experiences always entail the
exposure of our data and personal metadata, and often take place in spaces that we might
conventionally think of as public.
We can see these logics of networks, personalization, and mobility at work in media, in
space, and in networked media space. This is most apparent when considering contemporary
media, as suggested by the discussions above considering the salient characteristics of
emergent media technologies. From laptop computers to smart phones to digital video
recorders, the efficient function of our emergent media devices are predicated on both
the personalization enabled by media interfaces and the data flows through multiple
communication networks. The role of emergent media in supporting contemporary
modes of mobility is multifaceted, from the constant connectivity enabled by portable
communications devices to the lessening of temporal and spatial constraints through the use
of time- and place-shifting. If the logic of networked personalized mobility rather directly
characterizes contemporary emergent media practices, its description of contemporary spatial
practices is by turns indirect, discrete, and deep. Most noticeable, of course, are the modes of
173
spatial mobility suggested above, in which boundaries of home and work, public and private,
and place and space are blurred. Individuals move through social space with the expectation
that they will be able to regularly – if not constantly – manipulate their media interfaces and
gain access to the information flows of media networks. Especially with devices that offer
multiple protocols for connecting to network flows (e.g. a mobile phone’s ability to connect
to wifi or mobile phone networks; a laptop’s capability for wired or wireless connections),
the expectation is that networked media spaces can be instantiated most anywhere from
Bryant Park to Yellowstone Park. While the actual provisioning of the constant connectivity
is subject to technological limitations, corporate strategies for the prioritization of certain
places over other, civic protectionism, and occasional social restriction, the cultural logic of
networked personalized mobility has yielded a landscape of social space in which homes,
parks, cafes, airports, automobiles, workplaces, and classrooms play host to a dynamic mix of
direct and mediated social practices.
Less obvious, perhaps, are the ways in which the built environment is shaped by the logic of
networked personalized mobility. As suggested in an earlier chapter, we can see the material
traces of our communications networks in occasional glimpses of their infrastructures. From
oft-camouflaged mobile phone towers to massive server farms hosted in far-off warehouses
to entire office buildings dedicated to switching between the various network backbones, the
visible tips of our infrastructural icebergs remind us that networks have materialities of their
own.
45
At a larger scale, Manuel Castells, Saskia Sassen, Richard Florida, and others have
compelling demonstrated how the increased importance of networks has led quite directly to
an increase in the importance of certain urban nodes most integrated into global networked
flows.
46
Rather than witnessing the dispersal of populations to distant-but-connected
environments, we see increased population and commercial densities around specific urban
centers. In addition to these techno-centric spatial rubrics, new modes of architecture and
174
urban planning are tightly integrated into creating and supporting emergent spatial practices.
This can of course be read in the construction and reconstruction of many places designed
to support new forms of mobility and connectivity. Open floor plans and non-hierarchical
office arrangements recognize both the flattening of corporate organizations in a networked
era and flexible work practices in which passwords and portable computers replace more
stable spatial arrangements. Libraries that first replaced card catalogs with computers now
replace stack space with banks of public computers and wifi-enabled gathering spaces. The
Seattle Central Library, for example, which was completed and opened in 2004, was designed
as a monumental public space for the storage and sharing of books, but notably includes
over 400 public computers and free public wifi with space and amenities to accommodate
individuals bringing along their own computing devices.
47
As libraries and bookstores have
integrated café services, cafés have become perhaps the most remarked-upon social spaces
of the network age. From the ubiquitous Starbucks to the neighborhood alternative, cafés
across the country and many parts of the world have embraced both configurable physical
designs and the provisioning of media networks in order to create networked social spaces.
The workplace, civic places, commercial environments, and the space of the home all are
shaped by the cultural logic of networked personalized mobility, allowing individuals to move
between and reorder heterogeneous physical environments while retaining distinct modes of
personalized media experiences.
And yet the spatial implications of this logic go further. At a level between smart homes
and global cities, more visible than mobile phone towers yet not so distant as global
communications satellites, we are constructing and reconstructing our urban environments
and the communities within them in a manner consistent with forms of networked
personalized mobility. As discussed in detail in the case studies that follow, new urban
environments are being constructed and retrofitted in ways that match contemporary
175
desires for personalization, connectivity, and mobility. Such designs often take the directly
infrastructural forms of shared broadband or wireless services, of course, but more powerfully
extend to the inclusion of configurable loft-like living spaces, shared social and media
facilities, local intranets, community-oriented websites, and the cultural integration of living
spaces into a local environment that supports a common mode of living.
Entire neighborhoods and urban areas are linked together by forms of networked
personalized mobility, including: the deliberate deployment of emergent media
infrastructures; a disposition toward modes of living that blend production, reproduction,
and consumption; the inclusion of living environments that emphasize configurability,
flexibility, and an emphasis on shared social space; and the use of mediated social networks
to establish a common cultural vision for the neighborhood. Such new urban forms can
be found in many different configurations, but in each case we find the logic of networked
personalized mobility operating at multiple scales. This deep shift in both the social use
of space and the actual construction of the built environment is not without consequences.
Popular visions of young, productive mobile consumers are the norm in the advertisements
that accompany most emergent media technologies, but this far-reaching cultural logic also
helps us to understand the incorporation of personal mobility within the flexible enclosures
of contemporary capital.
Modulations of Control
In line with popular sentiment, it could be argued that the use of emergent media
technologies broadly enables personal mobility, providing new types of freedom for the
individuals who possess such technologies. This argument emphasizes the ability of
individuals to maintain social contact – voice, text, images – even while on the move, as
they circulate simultaneously in physical and virtual social spaces. In addition, the judicious
176
use of the right technologies allows individuals to untether themselves from the spatial
constraints of a broadcast television schedule, a landline telephone, or a wired connection
to the Internet. Indeed, for those fortunate enough to afford convergent devices and service
plans the everyday felt experience of networked personalized mobility is one of freedom,
especially in spatial terms. Occasional jeremiads lament the multiple demands on our
attention, the dangers of using technologies during certain modes of transport, or the
nagging feeling that one is addicted to a mediated existence, but by and large it seems that
the freedoms granted by emergent media technologies more than account for such minor
concerns. We must keep in mind, however, that such freedoms are part of an exchange;
the use of such emergent media technologies is predicated on an interactive economy in
which users give up a little of themselves in order to reap the benefits of mobility and
personalization.
Indeed, Deleuze seemed to have networked media space in mind when he claimed that
“we’re moving toward control societies that no longer operate by confining people but
through continuous control and instant communication.”
48
As contemporary media spaces
are created through the articulation of mobile phones, the wireless internet, portable media
devices, and various other entertainment and communication media technologies, the
signs of the emergence of a control society seem more prevalent than ever. Moreover, even
as discipline is “released, dispersed and rewoven throughout the social fabric” in societies
of control, networked media spaces represent the “nodal points through which power and
control flow in the network society.”
49
Networked media spaces are thus privileged and
emblematic sites of the control/freedom dialectic that rhetorically governs the manner in
which individuals engage with networks. As Wendy Chun reminds us, freedom and control
are intertwined:
The forms of control the Internet enables are not complete, and the freedom we
experience stems from these controls; the forms of freedom the Internet enables
177
stem from our vulnerabilities, from the fact that we do not entirely control our own
actions.
50
Operating within these relations of freedom-control, networked media spaces are increasingly
created through access explicitly underwritten by surveillance; as suggested in chapter three,
it is not simply that surveillance is an added prerogative of the corporations selling new
technologies but is instead required in most cases for a technology to function at all. Even
as networked media spaces overtake private spaces, their reliance on surveillant technologies
raises crucial questions about the politics of privacy, and how concerns for privacy are
reworked in spatial and mediated environments. To judge by the millions of mobile phone,
commercial Internet, and TiVo users, the tradeoff of privacy for perceived freedom is
worth making. Raiford Guins has noted in his analysis of the emerging primacy of home
entertainment,
“Control occupies the residual structures of the disciplinary society not with
enclosure but with the production of new freedoms as its ends – the production
and construction of new abilities through communications media. In short, new
freedoms are continuous with control. The enabling qualities of freedoms cannot be
divorced from their corresponding function of control.”
51
Guins is correct in arguing that new freedoms characterize the stated promises of the
providers of new media technologies and the lived experience that individuals have with
networked media technologies, but our willingness to accept control as the price for
perceived freedom is predicated on the split registers in which privacy functions. Even
as the rise of networked media spaces dilates the spatial dimensions of privacy, the daily
use of surveillant devices suggests that privacy is also at stake in another dimension. The
provisioning of networked media spaces might maintain the sanctity of our limited-access
domestic environments, but our engagements with these networks necessarily entail the
relinquishment of our personal metadata. We make ourselves trackable, knowable, and
commodifiable when we engage our interfaces to create networked media spaces, accepting
the publicity of the data that defines us and provides insights into our interests, desires, and
178
curiosities. Our cultural concern should not simply be that a few bad actors manage to
steal the identity of some unsuspecting or unsophisticated prey, but instead that our daily
engagements with networked devices yield a never-ending stream of identity and behavioral
data with uses both prosaic and catastrophic. As what we previously considered private and
public spaces are quickly becoming networked media spaces, we will find that privacy and
publicity cease to function as distinct states. Privacy will instead be reconstituted as a set of
controls that we only occasionally update, though they govern the daily actions of our lived
experience.
Ultimately we see that new freedoms – of mobility, personalization, and spatial flexibility
– are consistent with forms of networked personalized mobility, yet inextricably bound up
with forms of social power that suggest a move toward societies of control. As a step beyond
Foucault’s disciplinary societies, it has been argued (by Guins, above, and others) that the
societies of control abandon an emphasis on enclosures in favor of freedoms, as power moves
from visual and bureaucratic realms to modulations of protocol and networks. This type of
conception smartly accounts for the dispersal of control as form of power that infuses the
entire field of social space, as opposed to the monumental institutions of the disciplinary
society. Yet we should resist the temptation to wholly despatialize our conception of power.
Power is still a productive force operating in social space, and most notably in networked
media spaces. In the same gesture, the deliberate conjunction of networks and media
interfaces simultaneously establishes networked media space and completes the circuit that
allows for specific modulations of control. Control may function in a manner less visible
than discipline, but we can point to spaces in which it is operative. Indeed, we create these
spaces, experiencing control as a rush of networked personalized mobility, even as this
engagement exposes us to broader forms of social control.
179
Just as we must retain our spatial conception of power, we should also hold on to the concept
of the enclosure. We can still see the residual traces of the enclosure movement of early
industrial capitalism, and we can also re-conceptualize enclosure as the means through which
capital inscribes networked media spaces into increasingly flexible and dispersed modes of
production. Mark Andrejevic has referred to the digital enclosure as “the creation of an
interactive realm wherein every action and transaction generates information about itself.”
52

Acts of consumption, production, and communication in the digital enclosure effectively
commodify themselves, as such gestures produce valuable information that can be (and are
often) filtered, stored, shared, and acted upon. Andrejevic suggests that the digital enclosure
is a virtual rather than spatial phenomenon, but we might more productively consider it
the residual trace of networked media space, as a recorded shadow of the many ephemeral
engagements of interface and network. Illegible itself, the digital enclosure is perhaps
something closer to Lefebvre’s “spaces of representation,” an imaginary landscape of our
whims, diversions, and desires that nonetheless informs the design, practice, and conception
of material space. The ultimate impact of a system of networked media spaces is thus
material and imaginary, finding expression in physical structures, social engagements, and
mental dispositions, articulated together as forms of networked personalized mobility. As the
underlying logic in these techno-spatial changes is rooted in the individuation and implicit
surveillance underwritten by the logic of mass customization, we must remain especially
attentive to the manners in which their emergence is predicated upon social and economic
privileges that reinforce familiar divides.
180
Chapter 4 Endnotes
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a lexander r . g alloway, 3. Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (c ambridge, ma : The
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Kevin l ynch, 4. The Image of the City (c ambridge, ma : mit p ress, 1960), 2-3.
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l ynch, 7. The Image of the City , 118; f or a discussion of situated knowledges see: s andra h arding,
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h araway, “situated Knowledges: The s cience Question in f eminism and the privilege of partial
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l efebvre, The Production of Space (o xford, u K ; c ambridge, ma : blackwell, 1991).
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181
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ibid., 101. 19.
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s pigel, 21. W elcome to the Dreamhouse, 91.
a nna m cc arthy, 22. Ambient T elevision: Visual Culture and Public Space, console-ing passions
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manuel c astells, 23. The Rise of the Network Society , 2nd ed. (o xford ; malden, ma : blackwell, 2000),
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ibid., 477. 24.
manuel c astells, “informationalism, n etworks, and the n etwork s ociety: a Theoretical b lueprint, ” 25.
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s tephen graham and simon m arvin, 26. Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures,
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d oreen b. m assey, 27. Space, Place, and Gender (m inneapolis: u niversity of m innesota press, 1994),
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ibid., 162, 167. 28.
e ric a lliez and m. f eher, “The l uster of c apital, ” 29. Zone 1/2 (1987): 316.
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l ynn s pigel, “Y esterday’s f uture, t omorrow’s h omes, ” in 32. W elcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular
Media and Postwar Suburbs, console-ing passions (d urham, nc : d uke u niversity press, 2001); s pigel,
“d esigning the s mart h ouse”; f iona a llon, “ a n o ntology of e veryday control, ” in Mediaspace: Place,
Scale, and Culture in a Media Age, ed. n ick couldry and a nna m cc arthy (n ew Y ork and l ondon:
r outledge, 2004); d avin h eckman, A Small W orld: Smart Houses and the Dream of the Perfect Day
(d urham, nc : d uke u niversity press, 2008).
n ick couldry and a nna m cc arthy, 33. Mediaspace: Place, Scale, and Culture in a Media Age, comedia
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ibid., 5-8. 34.
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a llon, “ a n o ntology of e veryday control, ” 263. 35.
ibid., 254, 269. 36.
ibid., 256-257. 37.
ibid. 38.
ibid., 271. 39.
Kazys V arnelis and a nne f riedberg, “place: The n etworking of public s pace, ” in 40. Networked Publics,
ed. Kazys V arnelis (c ambridge, ma : The mit p ress, 2008).
s pigel, “d esigning the s mart h ouse, ” 416. 41.
“muniwireless | c itywide wimax, wi- f i, municipal wireless and b roadband n ews, ” http://www. 42.
muniwireless.com/.
Portable Media Player Study 43. (u niversity of s outhern c alifornia: e ntertainment t echnology
center, a ugust 2005).
m ichael bull, “‘t o e ach their own bubble’: m obile s paces of s ound in the c ity, ” in 44. MediaSpace, ed.
n ick couldry and a nna m cc arthy, comedia (n ew Y ork and l ondon: r outledge, 2004), 275-293.
Kazys V arnelis, “introduction: n etwork ecologies, ” in 45. The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies
in Los Angeles, ed. Kazys V arnelis (barcelona and n ew Y ork: a ctar, 2008).
c astells, 46. The Rise of the Network Society ; s askia s assen, The Global City: New Y ork, London, T okyo
(princeton, n.J.: p rinceton u niversity press, 2001); richard f lorida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And
How It’s Transforming W ork, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (n ew Y ork: basic b ooks, 2003).
The s eattle public l ibrary, “ a bout central l ibrary, ” http://www.spl.org/default. 47.
asp?pageid=branch_central_about&branch id=1.
gilles d eleuze, 48. Negotiations, 1972-1990, e uropean perspectives (n ew Y ork: columbia u niversity
press, 1995), 174.
a llon, “ a n o ntology of e veryday control, ” 269. 49.
w endy h ui Kyong c hun, 50. Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics
(c ambridge, ma : The mit p ress, 2008), 3.
r ayford g uins, “n ow Y ou’re l iving, ” 51. T elevision & New Media 2, no. 4 (2001): 354.
mark a ndrejevic, 52. iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era (lawrence, K s : u niversity
press of Kansas, 2007), 2.
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Chapter 5: Scripting the Community in Playa Vista
If you’re looking for balance in your life, look no further.
Playa Vista is more than a new place to live. It is a new community that has the
charm and spirit of a small town woven into the heart of the big city. And it offers
residents all of the conveniences of the digital world with a down-home lifestyle
where you don’t have to drive to take a nice walk, and where you don’t need a town
meeting to get to know your neighbors.
- Playa Vista website
1
Playa Vista, an enormous community currently being constructed on the west side of Los
Angeles, is desperately trying to live up to the high expectations of its own mythology. The
site’s developer, Playa Capital, promises to provide a mode of living that balances neo-
traditional and deeply nostalgic emphases on community and simplicity with contemporary
demands for density, flexible living ratios, and networked connectivity. Pitching an
array of condominiums, lofts, apartments, townhouses, homes, retail shops, dining and
entertainment venues, commercial properties, historic landmarks, and open spaces, the
promotional materials for the multi-phase development billed as “the first new community
to be established on the Westside of Los Angeles in more than 50 years” promise to enhance
the developer’s vision of a live/work/consume lifestyle with a technological infrastructure that
will underwrite and augment a life of productive ease.
2
Call it networked neo-traditionalism,
or digital new urbanism, or the garden city of the future, this city-within-a-city represents
a form of urban growth that pairs the recent urban planning emphasis on traditional
neighborhood design with the technological infrastructure of a digital utopia.
This chapter considers the specific ways in which Playa Vista attempts to articulate a
historically based development philosophy with the contemporary cultural logic of
networked personalized mobility. Along the way it situates the development of Playa
Vista within a broader history of land use at this site, the recent development of new
urbanism as a mode of urban development, a shift toward mass customization in housing
184
construction, and the pointed deployment of technological infrastructure. Playa Vista has
been selected for this analysis primarily because it brings together the threads of emergent
urban design and emergent media technologies, emphasizing both of these elements in its
built environment and in its exemplary marketing materials. While a few high-profile new
urban communities — like Celebration near Orlando, Seaside in the Florida panhandle,
or Kentlands near Washington, DC — have received significant critical attention, these
showcase communities emphasize the tenants of new urbanism but do not prominently
feature advanced technological infrastructures, largely because they were conceived and
developed in the decade before Playa Vista broke ground. As argued below, the conceptual
underpinnings of new urbanism are relevant because they are prominently at work in the
scripted space of Playa Vista and because they are representative of a broader shift in the
cultural perception of how urban environments can and should be developed. On a spatial
level, this chapter considers Playa Vista’s development history and current built environment,
critiquing the community’s shortcomings in this regard. The discussion then turns to the
cultural vision for the development, which pointedly updates the flexible living ratios of
new urbanism with a twenty-first century vision of better living through technology. While
many common considerations of a digital lifestyle emphasize gains in personal efficiency or
the ability to accomplish new tasks, Playa Vista forcefully promises to “provide technology
that would both enrich and simplify your life” as part of an overall script for contemporary
urban living.
3
The developer’s goal is to provide an invisible yet configurable infrastructure
that will support residents’ entertainment and communications needs as they move about
their homes, neighborhoods, and the broader community. At the level of the home, this
means redundant networks and built-in networking infrastructure that can be switched on,
off, or upgraded as needed. At the level of the community, the developer has provided for
wireless extensions of the home-based networks, a protected intranet connecting residents
and providing specialized information, and community-wide seminars on the productive use
185
of the technological infrastructure. The imagined resident of Playa Vista will pause her Time
Warner digital video recorder, press a single button on a home automation remote to turn
off the lights and set the alarm system, and take her laptop to The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf
café, where she can chat with neighbors in person and via the community’s private intranet,
or perhaps just finish watching her television program. (Figure 5.1)
This carefully constructed idea of what it means to live a contemporary life builds on a
broader cultural vision of networked personalized mobility, in this case seamlessly integrated
with a suite of amenities that promise to enhance the quality of residents’ lives. Although
such amenities and technologies are broadly available to individuals with no interest in
buying into a planned community, Playa Vista is unique in that a single developer is
attempting to provide and maintain such infrastructures across the entire community. Playa
Vista extends the scripted space of new urbanism into the technological realm, coordinating
the technological infrastructure and the primary modes of access to that infrastructure.
In making such promises about technology’s ability to both enrich and simplify the lives of its
residents, the marketing of Playa Vista is drawing on deeper traditions linking construction
f igure 5.1: playa Vista’s Vision
“Life on the Westside just got easier.”
Quote and images from PV Website, 4/8/2007
186
of the residential built environment and deployments of entertainment and communications
technologies. As has been noted throughout this project, from the introduction of cinemas
into the urban environment at the turn of the past century, through the allied phenomena of
mass-produced suburbia and broadcast television at mid-century, to more recent evocations
of digital mobility, critical accounts of the relation between media and space have often
focused on the changing relations of public and private space. This chapter considers Playa
Vista as exemplary of the types of networked media spaces discussed in chapter four. Not
only are domestic spatial practices altered by the presence of multiple, overlapping, and
interacting networks, but the very boundaries of privacy have been expanded to function
in multiple dimensions – personal, domestic, communal, regional, national, global –
corresponding to particular network logics and forms of mobility. Whereas questions
of privacy have traditionally been linked to domesticity they must now be considered at
multiple levels, especially in accounting for the cultural geography of network infrastructures
and the circulation of personal metadata. The case of Playa Vista provides crucial insight
into the functioning of networked media spaces because the development is advanced in
its emphasis on and deployment of a technological infrastructure, and also because the
centralized provisioning of such infrastructure across an entire community highlights new
tensions in the boundaries of privacy. Ultimately, Playa Vista demonstrates how networked
media spaces are becoming both commonplace and complex, creating questions of privacy
imbricated with media, space, and the networks that bring them together. Playa Vista is a
salient example of this phenomenon because it quite purposefully brings together the two
threads of emergent urban development and emergent media technologies. The development
is fundamentally scripted by a pointed effort at urban planning and an embrace of network
infrastructures. This script, operating in the service of the broader ideological program of
commodification through mass customization and interactivity, expresses itself in the variety
and flexibility of the spaces on offer as well as through the establishment of networked media
187
spaces at multiple scales. Ultimately Playa Vista is a centrally planned vision of the cultural
logic of networked personalized mobility.
The History of the Land at Playa Vista
There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of
barbarism.
- Walter Benjamin, Theses on History (1968)
Overdetermined in so many ways, Playa Vista has been a punching bag for environmentalists,
the slow-growth movement, Native American organizations, the Los Angeles Unified
School District, scores of community leaders, the current mayor of Los Angeles, and a few
developers hoping that they might someday get in on the action. In the face of all of this
opposition, however, development at Playa Vista has persevered. It is tempting to simply
chalk this up to another victory for the growth machine in Los Angeles, but that would
discount the work of many activists that has led to a number of crucial compromises. The
history of the location currently known as Playa Vista is fascinating in that it has hosted most
every boom industry that has shaped Southern California – from oil to defense to media
production and now land speculation – yet remains distinctly underdeveloped relative to
the surrounding landscape. Among its many uses this land has hosted some high-profile
forays into film production, and the current development plan is inextricably linked to the
culture industries of Los Angeles. Not only has this site repeatedly supported grand visions
for the integration of modern lifestyles with the industrial production of entertainment,
recent design and construction decisively reflects the challenges emergent media industries
pose to hegemony of Hollywood as both an industrial formation and signifier of status in the
cultural imaginary.
This development, covering an area thirty percent larger than New York’s central park, is
situated just south of Marina del Rey, a few miles north of Los Angeles International Airport.
188
(Figure 5.2) It is completely surrounded by land that has been developed for a mix of
purposes – primarily residential – with the most recent development being the construction
of Marina del Rey, the largest man-made small boat harbor in the world, in the 1960s. The
1,087-acre tract stretches inland from the Pacific Ocean for over a mile, and is nestled at
the base of the Westchester Bluffs. The original master plan, which circulated at various
times over the past two decades, called for 13,085 housing units, over five million square
feet of commercial space, nearly 600,000 square feet of retail space, and a 750-room hotel.
4

After two decades of ownership changes, financial meltdowns, legal challenges, and false
starts, the current development now plans 5,846 housing units, more than three million
square feet of commercial space, nearly 200,000 square feet of retail space, and no hotel.
All of this development, nearly half of which has already been constructed, will rest on 460
acres; the remainder of the land will be preserved as wetlands, the majority of which will be
managed by the state. While the developers no longer directly refer to new urbanism when
marketing Playa Vista, the community has been designed with many of the movement’s
principles in mind. Indeed, the most prominent members of the new urban movement,
Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, were brought in for early conceptual meetings
f igure 5.2: playa Vista a erial Views
Left: Playa Vista Project site circa 2003, Image from California Resources Agency
http://resources.ca.gov/ballona_wetlands/ballona_wetlands_aerial.jpg
Right: Playa Vista community map, image from Playa Vista website
189
and the current marketing materials clearly echo the principles of new urbanism.
5
The
Playa Vista development is essentially a high-density model of the new urbanism that has
been strongly inflected with heightened ecological concerns and enhanced with luxurious
amenities – a combination that has been referred to as a “California Hybrid.”
6
The homes,
lofts, condominiums, and apartments are priced to match these specifications – while local
low-income guidelines ensured that a number of subsidized apartments are available and a
few small condos originally sold for around $300,000, the vast majority of the housing is
priced from the upper-six to mid-seven figures, slightly above the median for similarly-sized
domiciles in the area.
The land that is now covered by multistory residences and construction equipment has a long
and complex history, some of which has made it into the development’s marketing materials.
The original visitor’s center offered a number of high-tech displays chronicling the history
and development of Playa Vista, including a dedicated walkway with individual placards
commemorating various aspects of the region’s past. A more detailed history can be found
on the development’s dynamic website:
The developers and residents of Playa Vista are not the first to appreciate this area at
the base of the Westchester Bluffs. The land has a rich and varied history. The first
inhabitants were the Gabrielino Indians and in 1769, European settlers arrived. In
the 1800s it was Rancho La Ballona where herds of cattle grazed. At the turn of the
20th century, it became a large dairy farm.
During World War II, entrepreneur and visionary Howard Hughes created an
aerospace empire here where he designed and built production aircraft, including the
Spruce Goose. At 319 feet, 11 inches, this precursor to today’s jumbo jets still holds
the record for the largest wingspan of any plane ever built. Although built to carry
700 passengers, Hughes piloted this eight-engine wooden flying boat himself on its
maiden and only flight. The Spruce Goose traveled only one mile at a height of 70
feet, but over the next 40 years, Hughes Aircraft went on to develop, build and test
many successful aircraft designs on this site, which included runways for takeoffs and
landings.
By the mid-1990s, Playa Vista converted the former Hughes Aircraft hangars,
including the one that held the Spruce Goose, into Hollywood sound stages. Scenes
from movies such as Titanic, What Women Want, and End of Days have been filmed
on location at Playa Vista.
7
190
Of course, this is clearly the planner’s history, and, as such, should be treated with caution.
Having established this history by visiting the website, reading the glossy brochures, or
dropping by the visitor’s center, one can get a sense for the development’s other historical
influences and reminders by strolling along the already-completed avenues and examining
the architecture. The references blur past: classic craftsman, elegant 1940’s West LA,
French chateau, Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired, contemporary-modern, 1920’s California
Mediterranean, 1920’s Spanish-Colonial revival, Italianate Villa, South of France-inspired
loft-style, and, most noticeably, the Dramatic Art Deco-stylings of the gigantic Metro
complex. The density of this construction is balanced by pockets of green space and
bounded by 60-acres of maintained freshwater marsh. The history that is fixed in the actual
built space of the Playa Vista development is one that begins just over a century ago; the
bulk of its architecture celebrates the glamorous Los Angeles that was originally sold by the
city’s boosters eighty-years ago; the freshwater marsh simulates the wetlands of the past and
acts as a guarantee for the smart growth philosophy upon which the entire development is
rhetorically based.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the official history glosses over a few nagging details that detract
from the carefully honed commercial pitch. For example, the land had a history prior to
the 19
th
century, a fact which unpleasantly intruded upon the development in 2006 when
the remains of some 400 Native Americans were found along one of the spaces set aside as a
stream/drainage ditch at the base of the bluffs. The oldest artifacts uncovered thus far suggest
that the Tongva tribe lived in the region at least 4,600 years ago (some estimates go as high
as 7,000 years). The bodies in the ancient burial ground, called Saa’angna by the Tongva,
mostly date from around 1770 to 1810; remains from as far back as 500 years ago have been
found on the site. Because the Ballona creek and wetlands, of which Playa Vista is a part,
have long been known to have supported Native American communities, the developers
191
signed an agreement with the Tongva band in 1991 that allows them to rebury any unearthed
remains in other portions of the site. This pact was renewed for a second ten-year term in
2001, but the Tongva representatives claim they were not consulted. Moreover, the team
responsible for excavating the site has been so careless and cavalier that Tongva site monitors
have resigned rather than give a semblance of approval to the process. For their part, the
developers have agreed to rebury the bones in another section of the development, send the
artifacts to the University of California – Los Angeles, and build a cultural center on-site to
explain the history of Native American’s on the land to residents and tourists. They have
declined to move the stream/ditch by 200-300 feet, citing the difficulty of securing approval
from the US Army Corps of Engineers and the possibility of finding more remains.
8
Overall,
the developers have made some attempts to honorably deal with the discovery of the burial
grounds, but only to the extent that it does not affect their commercial prospects. Indeed, as
the development of the second phase of Playa Vista was slowed over environmental concerns,
the developer found the time to accelerate the reinterment process, hosting a rededication
ceremony on December 13, 2008.
9
The Tongva, as a non-hegemonic group who at this
point barely register in Playa Vista’s historical framework, have not yet been able to slow let
alone stop the excavation of these grounds. Indeed, their legal standing to do so is quite
shaky, as they are not members of a federally recognized Native American tribe.
10
The discovery and treatment of these remains testify to the millennia of land use prior to
the Spanish, Mexican, and eventually US claim on the land. Even as the recently uncovered
grave sites, along with the previous discovery of village remnants from the Gabrielino Tongva
Indian tribes, have certainly added another layer of ethical and political complication to
a contemporary urban planning project that was already replete with thorny issues, they
also serve as a reminder that this particular piece of land has long supported dreams of
development and use. For the original human settlers of the land, the primary attraction was
192
undoubtedly access to a river, estuary, and the attendant flora and fauna. The body of water
now known as the Ballona Creek has for centuries served as the primary draining element in
the Ballona Watershed, which covers 130 square miles of the Los Angeles basin, including
the portions now known as Hollywood, West Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Culver City, and
much of the City of Los Angeles. (Figure 5.3) In many years prior to 1825 the Los Angeles
River joined up with the Ballona Creek, until a major flood shifted its course to the present
day terminus in Long Beach. As Ballona Creek approached the Pacific Ocean to the west, it
passed through and nourished a network of wetlands and a sizable lagoon. (Figure 5.3)
As the land came to host new populations – Spanish title in 1769, Mexican control in 1822,
US Control in 1848, statehood in 1850 – it was renamed and used for different purposes.
A 14,000 acre allotment known as Rancho La Ballona, defined primarily by the Ballona
Creek and containing the Playa Vista land, was used for grazing cattle and low-intensity
agriculture.
11
Although four families held the original title to the Rancho, by the 1880s
the ownership had been subdivided and Los Angeles was experiencing its first great housing
boom. With the main population centers twenty miles away, it was imagined that land near
the ocean could serve as a pleasure retreat. A railway was completed in 1887 to connect
downtown Los Angeles with a proposed harbor known as Port Ballona; the plans for such
a port were abandoned with the crash of 1888, but the oceanfront land was marketed 15
years later as the seaside resort of Playa del Rey, a name which has stuck to the present day.
Hunting clubs, riding clubs, and even a motor speedway were built and rapidly abandoned.
Development also proceeded at the eastern end of Rancho La Ballona, birthing Culver City
on September 11th, 1913.
It was within the boundaries of the newly-chartered Culver City that Thomas Ince brought
motions pictures to La Ballona Creek. Needing a body of water that could float three
canoes, Ince chose La Ballona over the dry Los Angeles and distant Colorado rivers. Ince
193
subsequently purchased a small portion of Rancho land in September of 1915, allowing
him to shift production away from Inceville – in the hills north of Santa Monica – to studio
facilities near La Ballona Creek. This land, and the adjoining properties subsequently
acquired, were soon deeded to the New York Motion Picture Corporation, then T riangle
Studios, and to Goldwyn Pictures by 1919. Known as the MGM lot through midcentury,
this same property is currently the home of Sony Pictures Entertainment. After Ince sold
out his share of T riangle Studios in 1918, he established the Thomas Ince studios nearby in
Culver City. Also changing hands often, this studio would be named after its owners many
times: Cecil B. Demille, RKO, Desilou, GTG Entertainment, and now Sony. The Kalem
Motion Picture Corporation also established itself on Rancho La Ballona land in the teens,
and the Hal Roach Studios operated in Culver City for over forty years. Distant from the
Clockwise from upper left: La Ballona Creek, 1915 (image from Culver City website);
Port Ballona, 1902 (USC digital archive / CA historical society CHS-10531);
Illustration of Ballona Watershed (LA Country Department of Public Works);
Map of Rancho La Ballona (1902 US Geological Survey Map).
f igure 5.3: The h istory of the land at p laya Vista
194
restrictive zoning of downtown Los Angeles, early movie moguls and hundreds of prominent
filmmakers saw promise in the development of pastureland to support the industrial
production of motion pictures. The establishment of these studios on the land formerly
known as Rancho La Ballona led Culver City to brand itself “the heart of screenland.”
12
At nearly the same time, the Playa Vista region was the site of an oil strike. After the black
gold was discovered in 1929, hundreds of derricks dotted the landscape until the wells
ran dry. (Figure 5.4) As the oil has long since been tapped, Sempra Energy now uses the
depleted oil field to store several billion cubic feet of natural gas.
13
As a result, the Playa Vista
developers have seen fit to install methane mitigation equipment – a high-tech tarp buried
under the buildings – and a series of methane alarms. Even with these solutions in place,
the Los Angeles Unified School district has repeatedly decided not to build new schools in
Playa Vista for fear of another toxic school debacle. Not surprisingly, the derricks no longer
dot the landscape, and the area’s illustrious oil and gas history goes uncelebrated, save the
occasional false methane alarm. Perhaps the developers don’t feel they need to share this bit
of the past with prospective homebuyers, as the slight scent of gas in the air already speaks
volumes.
Although the early studios shot most of their films within the boundaries of their own front-
and backlots, historians of the land under Playa Vista have suggested that the highlands
at the base of the Westchester bluffs and the wetlands closer to the ocean served as the
unofficial backlot for a number of filmmakers. According to a history compiled by the
archeological film Statistical Research Inc., a number of high-profile films took advantage of
the proximity and uniqueness of this site. The stunning cliffs and open space of the wetlands
proved attractive though much of the land was dotted with celery fields and at least 325 oil
wells in the 1930s. Although it has proven difficult to corroborate, in personal interviews
conducted by this research organization with Gail Machado in 1990 it was claimed that a
195
number of scenes from Laurel and Hardy short films were shot along the Ballona Creek on
land now being developed as Playa Vista, as was a scene in John Ford’s adaptation of The
Grapes of Wrath.
14
Perhaps most crucial for the future of the land, in addition to a great deal
of filming at Mines Field – now Los Angeles International (LAX) – Howard Hughes spent
time on and around the bluffs and wetlands during the shooting of Hell’s Angels.
15
Peripheral
to the development of the rationalized studios of Hollywood and Culver City, this land was
a highly differentiated physical environment that suited the occasional needs of filmmakers.
Its fractured ownership, diverse landscape, and frequent flooding protected it from more
rigorous development.
This was not to last. Following major floods in 1934 and 1938, the Ballona Creek was
channelized by the United States Army Core of Engineers. Howard Hughes, looking to
expand a small airplane construction business that had primarily been located around the
airfields in Burbank, purchased the newly-protected highlands bordering Culver City in
1941 to host corporate headquarters and manufacturing facilities. Hughes dedicated the
next forty-years of the land – known then as the Hughes Culver City plant even though it
was technically located on unincorporated Los Angeles County land – to the production
f igure 5.4: playa Vista’s t ransition
Left: Oil Derricks on channelized Ballona Creek
(USC digital archive / CA historical society CHS-41139);
Right: Ballona Creek (Photo by Robert Kinslow)
196
of airplanes, helicopters, and related aviation experiments. (Figure 5.5) By 1954 he had
acquired the remainder of the open land in the area to use for testing – building dozens of
buildings and a 9,300 foot runway, at the time the largest private runway in the world –
and for tax advantage – allowing Japanese farmers to continue working the land in order to
retain agriculture zoning. As noted by the current Playa Vista marketing materials, the most
famous use of this site in the Hughes era is certainly the construction of the HK-1, better
known as the Spruce Goose, still the aircraft with the largest wingspan ever built; this also
necessitated the construction of an enormous wooden hanger – building 15 – to house the
gigantic flying boat. Over the forty years that the Hughes facility was active the company
demolished and reused all of the structures that had previously existed on the land, rerouted
the Centinela creek, paved over portions of the area, and filled in much of the wetlands. At
the same time, the vast majority of the company’s construction was focused on the high
ground at the eastern end of the parcel and much of the land was left undeveloped; this is no
small feat given the massive residential and commercial development that occurred all around
this area of Los Angeles in the post-war period, and seems possible only through Hughes’s
famed wealth and eccentricity. Although this period did not see much media production
it was the site of a great deal of entrepreneurial planning, including media activities both
marginal and critical. The blimp that served to advertise the release of Hughes’ The Outlaw ,
for example, was stored in the large hanger after the Flying Boat had been moved to Long
Beach for its single flight and long-term storage.
16
More crucially, although only a few of
Hughes’ efforts to build planes and helicopters were not business failures, the company was
enormously successful in other areas of the defense industries such as electronics development
and manufacturing and the early development of orbital communications satellites.
Although these products emphasized the destructive and surveillent potential for defense
technologies, they also foreshadowed the role that electronic media would play in the broader
media ecology, and in the future use of the land.
197
The Last Stand: Ballona, Playa Vista, and Dreamworks
The trajectory and scale of the current Playa Vista development were introduced after
Hughes’ death in 1976, even as the site continued to function as an aerospace facility until
1994. After a series of complicated spinoffs and financial transactions involving Hughes’s
executives, his relatives, and the State of California, the surviving Summa Corporation,
representing the financial interests of over 100 claimants on the land, announced plans for a
grand development in 1978, including hotels, office space, a golf course, high-rise buildings,
and a small harbor for pleasure boats. The audacity of this project kicked off a decade-long
battle between Summa Corp and various environmental groups seeking to protect the last
remaining wetland in Southern California. Summa pressed its influence with the city and
the state to get preliminary project approval in 1984 and 800 acres of the land annexed
to the city of Los Angeles in 1985, only to have the project tied up court with a lawsuit
launched by the Friends of the Ballona Wetlands. Eventually, Summa sold its controlling
interests to the local developer Maguire Thomas Partners, who quickly settled the lawsuit
f igure 5.5: h ughes c ulver c ity plant
Hughes airport (from the Alexandria Digital Library at UC Santa Barbara, via Pual Freeman)
198
by setting aside 269 acres of saltwater wetlands, promising to restore this environment as
well as a 59 acre freshwater marsh. While the Friends of Ballona Wetlands celebrated their
concession, other community activist organizations such as the Sierra Club, CALPIRG, the
Surfrider foundation, and Citizens United to Save All of Ballona continued to apply public
and legal pressure to the developers. This effort, along with the developer’s financial needs,
eventually led to the sale of an additional 192 acres to the California T rust for Public Land in
2001, resulting in an overall protection of over 600 acres of wetlands and a nearly 50 percent
reduction in the overall scope of the project from its original vision.
17
Ironically the activist
victory in protecting the wetlands largely provided the financial means the developer needed
to continue the project, netting Playa Capital over $130 million for the sale of the land;
the funds for the purchase, of course, came from public sources. In the end, the economic
exigencies faced by Playa Capital largely coincided with the demands of community activists,
allowing the development to present its latest plan as smaller, greener, and responsive to the
community. The new developers had in 1989 also replaced the massive development plans
created by Summa with a new urbanist proposal for a pedestrian-centered live/work/consume
community, which was approved by the Los Angeles City Council in 1993.
It was into this context that the newly formed Dreamworks SKG sought to build what they
called “the first new studio in Los Angeles in nearly 60 years.”
18
As the remaining aerospace
operations at the site shut down, the new developers began to rent out the remaining
hangers for use as sound stages. Looking for undamaged facilities following the Northridge
earthquake of 1994, Batman Forever, Titanic, and Godzilla were all filmed in large part in
the old Hughes hangers in the 1990s. Dreamworks, founded in October 1994, was by 1995
interested in building its own headquarters and production facilities. From the start, the
company announced that its primary motivation was to build a new “digital studio” based on
the latest computer processing and networking capabilities. Lining up a technology alliance
199
– including IBM, GTE, Silicon Graphics, and Digital Domain – Dreamworks announced in
December of 1995 that they would be a major tenant in a 100-acre studio campus built on
the old Hughes site and a partner in the overall Playa Vista development. Fitting with the
fledgling studio’s early hubris, the $750 million “Entertainment Media Technology” district
would include a eight-acre lake at the center of the executive offices, the largest sound stage
in the world, 15-20 additional sound stages, a model commissary, child care, a fully digitized
post-production facility, and a series of fiber optic networks connecting the campus, the
planned community, and the Internet. (Figure 5.6) The company’s vision was threefold:
to create a studio campus and soundstages designed to handle the demands of twenty-first
century filmmakers; to establish a technological infrastructure unmatched by any studio or
community in the world; and, building on the first two goals, to establish Playa Vista as “the
center for the convergence of entertainment and technology in the next decade.”
19
Dreamworks’ vision for Playa Vista built on the area’s historic association with film
production and paved the way for its future as a technology-saturated community
supporting a new generation of media companies. During the course of negotiations
between Dreamworks, the Playa Vista developers, and the City of Los Angeles, the project
moved forward at record pace, receiving expedited municipal approvals, and attracting
business partners that raised the project’s profile. Even in the face of renewed environmental
concerns – now directed at Dreamworks as well as Playa Vista – the developers moved
forward with portions of the demolition, grading, and infrastructure building necessary for
the entertainment district and the planned community. Dreamworks managed to wrest
economic concessions from the city – discounted water and power fees; favorable zoning;
reduction in business taxes for multimedia firms – the state – funds for transportation
infrastructure – and the developer – a massive discount on the land costs and a loan for
much of the cost; and an option to acquire 9% of Playa Vista. Even as the developer ran out
200
of money and was forced to sell a majority share to a consortium of Wall Street investment
banks, Dreamworks used its attractiveness as an engine of economic growth, its promise of
association with celebrity, and its vision of a techno-centric entertainment industry to turn
Playa Vista into a viable urban planning project.
20
And then it dropped out.
Dreamworks imagined itself as the lynchpin of an extended campus and community in
which emergent media networks and an unparalleled technological infrastructure would
seamlessly bridge work and domestic spaces. The City of Los Angeles hoped that the
digital studio of the future would create jobs, save the environment, rebuild a flagging
regional economy, and provide a model for smart growth in the twenty-first century. The
explicit vision for the technology campus included the ability for networked executives to
perform the work of reviewing dailies and rough cuts not just at the office, but also from
the networked comfort of their own homes, located within the contiguous residential
community. Although Dreamworks pulled out after a half-decade, the planned development
continued, substituting emergent media companies - most notably through the establishment
of a major development studio for Entertainment Arts, the largest producers of video game
software – as the major industrial tenants of the property. Perhaps not coincidentally,
Entertainment Arts Los Angeles (EALA) was formed when EA purchased Dreamworks
f igure 5.6: d reamworks plans for playa Vista
Dreamworks campus model and plan, from Dreamworks materials.
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Interactive in 2000 and became Playa Vista’s marquee corporate tenant when it moved to
the custom-designed Playa Vista Water’s Edge campus in 2004. (Figure 5.7) Attempting to
make up for the loss of Dreamworks, Playa Vista President Steve Soboroff (an ex-Los Angeles
Mayoral Candidate) has celebrated EA for building “the first new studio in Los Angeles since
the 1930s.” Without qualification, a company that specializes in the production of new
media has been described in the same terms as Dreamworks had been a half-decade prior.
Dreamworks was essentially the catalyst to the development as a whole, but its failure to
complete the deal also suggested that the future of Playa Vista might not lie with an update
version of the old studio model, but instead with emergent media enterprises that in many
ways threaten the studios themselves
In terms of the land use at Playa Vista, the EA campus is not an anomaly. With a low
vacancy rate and a great deal of demand for digital media-ready buildings on the West Side
of Los Angeles, Playa Vista has announced that multiple groups of major developers will be
building Silicon Valley-style media campuses on the eastern edge of the Playa Visa property,
on the spot where Dreamworks had previously imagined the future of entertainment.
Tishman Speyer, the major developer and owner of Rockefeller Center, is building a 64-acre
campus of “low-slung buildings,” and Lincoln Property Companies is building another one
f igure 5.7: e mergent m edia c ampuses at playa Vista
Left: Horizon at Playa Vista, future
home to Belkin and Fox Media Interactive
(image via horizonatplayavista.com);
Right: Water’s Edge, home to Entertainment Arts Los Angeles (image via playavista.com)
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million square feet of space for new media use on adjacent properties. (Figure 5.7) With
Yahoo, Google, and Symantec recently purchasing or renting space within the vicinity of
Playa Vista, the developers are betting that the growth in entertainment media no longer lies
with film production, but will instead be found with companies focused on the development,
production, and distribution of video games, web services, and mobile entertainment
products. The technology company Belkin International has signed on to occupy half of the
Tishman space, and Fox Interactive Media, owners of MySpace, plans to consolidate nearly
2,000 employees in 421,000 square feet of office space.
21

The tumultuous saga of Playa Vista’s development can teach us a lot about the nexus of
urban development, politics, preservation, and public debate. The struggle to develop this
high-profile parcel of land in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the country has
lasted through three developers, at least three major design phases, dozens of public interest
group challenges, a half-dozen mayoral changes, and the rise in influence over development
issues of the city council. The Playa Vista story has largely been presented in the local
media as an example of compromise and smart growth. While the so-called alternative LA
Weekly has maintained a largely critical position and done much to publicize arguments
against development, the Los Angeles Times has generally lauded both the activists struggling
against Playa Vista and the developer for its willingness to alter their plans. The Times has
reported on each of the controversial issues, but the balance of its coverage seems to suggest
that development at Playa Vista is a worthwhile project so long as the developer is willing to
occasionally compromise and work with the city. With few exceptions, the developer, the
city, and the media have presented Playa Vista as a necessary and positive addition to the
Los Angeles region. In the end, half of the difficult-to-develop land has been set aside for
preservation, more than 3,200 homes supporting over 7,000 residents have been built since
2002, commercial developers have built out a set high-tech entertainment and technology
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facilities, and a proposal for an urban village has waffled in and out of courts from 2004 to
2009. Perhaps most notable is that this massive development in Los Angeles was unable to
include a high-profile film studio modeled on production and land use policies of the past,
and is instead supported by commercial tenants that are major players in emergent forms of
entertainment media. As the years of negotiating over Dreamworks involvement suggests,
development of this magnitude is driven by a mix of developer economics, corporate
planning, and, to a surprising degree, cultural signification. Although much of Los Angeles
is a palimpsest of cinematic production, the site now known as Playa Vista reveals the
complex industrial and ideological imperatives that have organized the historic function of
media spaces. From its early origins as the unofficial back lot for film studios in Culver City
through the polymathic purposes of the multi-decade Hughes era, the almost-establishment
of a heroic film studio of the future, and the current function as beacon for emergent media
producers, this malleable parcel of land has participated in the establishment, success,
decline, and now, possibly, the reimagining of Hollywood. Dreamworks may have bailed
out because its principals were financially risk-averse or because they saw the signs of their
eventual demise on the horizon, but its successful bargaining with Playa Vista and the City
of Los Angeles attest to the importance of its vision of a networked, new urban community
seamlessly integrated with the industrial production of culture.
Although Dreamworks is gone, much of this cultural vision remains. What is striking in the
recent saga of Playa Vista is that this prominent example of twenty-first century living has
made a decisive break in favor a model of networked personalized mobility. This cultural
logic is at work in a number of ways at Playa Vista, notably through the inclusion of new
urban design principles, builders’ flexible layouts, and an emphasis on emergent media
technologies. As discussed in detail below, concepts of flexibility and personalization are
built into the spatial and media practices of Playa Vista. The overall development plan is
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designed to support a diversity of architectural styles and a set of residents from a broad, if
relatively high, income spectrum. Individual builders are promoting new construction as
customizable templates for individual choice. And holding on to a bit of its earlier dream,
the in-progress residential development of Playa Vista has embraced emergent media
technologies to an unprecedented degree, providing ‘future-proofed’ fiber-optic wiring to
every home, a high-tech preview center and on-site technology concierge, a community
intranet, and wireless network access throughout the neighborhood and its parks. Many
of the employees at EALA live in the houses and apartments already built at Playa Vista,
and many more are expected to do the same once the latest entertainment media campus
is complete. And the large Hughes hangers – now protected as historical landmarks – still
serve as sound stages for rent. (Figure 5.8) Raleigh Studios, which also manages stages in
Hollywood and Manhattan Beach, has recently hosted productions such as World Trade
Center, Transformers, and Iron man. By designing a neighborhood in which individuals
can select from a variety of housing options, take advantage of a superior technological
infrastructure, and blend their domestic lifestyle with the specific retail and employment
opportunities offered by a desirable set of emergent media production companies, the
developers of Playa Vista are attempting to script a set of networked media spaces in order
to support and incubate a sense of networked personalized mobility. In order to fully
understand both the spatial and media logics at work, it is important to consider the impact
of both new urban ideals and emergent media infrastructures.
Play Vista’s Influences: New Urbanism
Places are fragmentary and inward-turning histories, pasts that others are not allowed
to read, accumulated times that can be unfolded but like stories held in reserve,
remaining in an enigmatic state, symbolizations encysted in the pain or pleasure of
the body.
- Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (1984)
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History is written in the places we live every bit as much as in the texts we read. Ideas,
concepts, and indeed time itself are fixed in spatial formations that simultaneously represent
a vision of our past, the recording of our present, and the prospects for our future. These
propositions come to the fore when great buildings are proposed and constructed; their
salience is confirmed in the blustery struggle over monuments, civic structures, and other
edifices of affirmed cultural signification. That history is integral to the more prosaic
buildings in which we live our daily lives is less examined, but no less true. Our homes,
neighborhoods, and regional formations bear the accumulated triumphs, burdens, and scars
of the past. How we build upon this past reveals a great deal about our contemporary values
and our aspirations for the future.
In the United States, the past half-century has given us no shortage of historically loaded
development patterns, primarily those working through the city/country dialectic to establish
the suburban. The results of such development are, to put it mildly, intense and uneven. In
some cities, recent attempts at urban revitalization seem to be taking root; others seem to
have been wholly abandoned. First-generation suburbs have radically changed in character;
later suburbs are often gated and exclusive. These changes, and their social consequences,
have been studied from many perspectives. Jane Jacobs attacked the urban redevelopment
f igure 5.8: f ilm production at playa Vista
Raleigh Studios Playa Vista, Hughes Hanger 15 (image via raleighstudios.com)
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programs of the 1950s and 1960s in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities ,
suggesting that smaller and more coherent neighborhoods were essential for the healthy
sustenance of city life. Joel Garreau and Robert Fishman, on the other hand, described how
the rise of ‘edge cities’ and ‘technoburbs’ on the periphery of urban regions has begun to de-
center regions that had previously been anchored by urban cores.
22
In an attempt to consider
both the city and its region simultaneously, Mike Davis has made case studies of Los Angeles
and San Diego in recent volumes.
23
These studies, and many others focused on particular
cities or regions, have enumerated and powerfully critiqued the expansion of suburban sprawl
and the dismaying conditions of many urban cities. Few of these critiques, however, have
offered a comprehensive alternative vision for how things might be done differently in the
future. One alternative vision that has gained momentum in the past two decades is known
as the new urbanism.
New Urbanism has gained a great deal of currency among architects, planners, and federal
funding agencies over the past fifteen years, and, as such, its principles are being incorporated
into hundreds of developments across the country, from inner-city revitalizations to exurban
greenfield developments to urban infill projects like Playa Vista. The new urban movement,
which has an official charter and devoted adherents, understands itself as a practical, ethical,
and holistic alternative to suburban sprawl and urban decay. It makes its case through a
critique of the policies and practices that led to urban and suburban decline, and offers an
alternative vision for smart development. This alternative, presented as the only feasible
possibility, is a return to traditional neighborhood design (a phrase that occasionally gets
confused with neotraditionalism, which is more accurately an architectural mode featured
by certain prominent new urban communities; see Figure 5.9), a century-old city planning
movement based on the “City Beautiful” principles of community and livability. In theory,
traditional neighborhood design can be distilled into a call for a mode of master-planning
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that de-privileges the automobile in favor of the individual as the principle design element.
Accordingly, this movement demands that neighborhoods be smaller and denser, streets
be narrower and pedestrian friendly, communal spaces be provided for shared use, and
residential buildings be seamlessly mixed in with commercial and retail. The idea is that
each neighborhood is planned such that it has an identifiable center, public spaces, and
commercial activity both close enough to walk to and sufficient to serve residents’ daily
needs. The script of live/work/consume neighborhood design is intrinsic to new urban
ideology. Beyond neighborhood design, the theoretical articulation of new urbanism also
calls for a holistic approach to regional development, applying the same principles to urban
centers and new communities with respect for the differences between the two.
24
Taken as a
whole, new urbanism offers a powerful critique of baseline planning practices and offers some
compelling solutions. As David Harvey summarizes:
The new urbanism offers something positive as well as nostalgic. It does battle
with conventional wisdoms entrenched in a wide range of institutions (developers,
bankers, governments, transport interests, etc.). In the tradition of Mumford,
it is willing to think about the region as a whole and to pursue a much more
organic, holistic ideal of what cities and regions might be about. The postmodern
penchant for fragmentation is rejected. It attempts intimate and integrated forms of
development that by-pass the rather stultifying conception of the horizontally zoned
and large-platted city. This liberates an interest in the street and civic architecture as
arenas of sociality. It also permits new ways of thinking about the relation between
work and living, and facilitates an ecological dimension to design that goes beyond
superior environmental quality as a consumer good. It pays attention to the thorny
problem of what to do with the profligate energy requirements of the automobile-
based form of urbanization and suburbanization that has predominated in the Unites
States since World War II. Some see it as a truly revolutionary force for urban change
in the United States today.
25
In its own way, new urbanism is a totalizing vision for the remaking of the American
landscape, with clusters of neighborhoods forming cities, which in turn form larger regions.
So far, however, truly adherent communities have been created primarily in suburban areas
and new ‘greenfield’ developments.
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For a movement that champions ecologically-informed, human-scale, community-focused
living, new urbanism has been attacked from many quarters. Many a critique has been
offered based on a dislike of the conformist aesthetics of such communities, a distrust of
centralized planning efforts in general, the explicitly nostalgic appeal of the developmental
logic, or the belief that such developments are an attempt to simulate authentic, organic
urban life. Much of this haranguing is bound up with the analysis of the most prominent
new urban community, Disney-created Celebration, Florida. This particular development
has been the subject of hundreds of newspaper articles and a handful of books, and in many
cases the presence of Disney overshadows a meaningful engagement with new urbanism.
That another early new urban community, Seaside, Florida, was the setting for the big-
brotherly manipulations of The Truman Show certainly has not helped. (Figure 5.9)
Clockwise from upper-left: Kentlands, MD (T wo images from Kentlands Town Crier)
Seaside, FL, frame grab from The Truman Show ..
Celebration, FL (image via globalwebrealestate.com);
f igure 5.9: h igh-profile n ew u rban communities
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In spite of these critiques, new urbanism has become a widespread planning movement.
Growing out of work in the 1980s, the Congress for New Urbanism was founded in 1993
with the not-so-modest mission of completely reforming urban policy in the United States.
The New Urban News lists over 600 new “towns, villages, and neighborhoods” already
completed or in construction across the country, as well as hundreds of small-scale urban
infill projects. Perhaps most impressively, in the mid-1990s the US Department of Housing
and Urban Development (HUD) adopted New Urbanist principles in the Hope VI public
housing program, which has subsequently distributed more than $5.5 billion in funding
for the renovation and rehabilitation of public housing in urban centers.
26
Ultimately, it is
difficult to completely catalog the impact of New Urbanism, as many projects adopt some of
its principles while setting aside others.
In order to get a sense of how new urbanism advances a particular cultural vision of how
people should be living their lives it is first important to understand where the ideas behind
the movement come from. Rather than simply dismiss marquee new urban communities as
evidence of a stultifying cultural nostalgia, we should recognize the movement as a practice
of writing history that reifies a selective, mythical, and bourgeois version of American history.
This critique proceeds along three lines. First, because the epistemological framework of
new urbanism is at its core a transhistorical development philosophy based on principles
derived from a particular historical moment, it elides a broader history and particularly
obscures the local history of the regions in which it operates. Not only is this approach
intellectually limiting and ethically dubious, it also has severe political consequences in
terms of who participates and benefits from new urbanism. In the process of fixing the
past in the present, new urbanism runs the risk of simultaneously re-inscribing and effacing
historical social injustices. Second, this same narrow perspective yields a historically-
specific conception of community and connectedness that is not necessarily progressive in
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nature. The most salient promise of traditional neighborhood design is that its supports
small, self-monitoring communities that promote civic and interpersonal engagement. The
other side of this dialectic is, however, an increase in surveillance and social control, and a
tendency toward boundary-setting, exclusion, and the construction of the other. At the same
time, the process of community formation in newly-built neighborhoods is fundamentally
altered by the inclusion of and emphasis on emergent media technologies, which have the
potential for both community development and increased divisiveness. To avoid enacting a
contemporary history of fragmentation, the celebration of community in new urbanism must
be critically engaged and attentive to its divisive potential. Third, the progressive promise
of new urbanism rests on the false dichotomy of sprawl versus traditional neighborhood
development, a dichotomy that is the result of the narrow historical framework with which
the theory operates. Thus new urbanism completely ignores other options, particularly
utopian options that challenge hegemonic history and social formations by valuing social
justice above other concerns. While social justice is a lot to ask of any development
philosophy, it is appropriate to challenge even progressive systems, particularly when they
make claims in this regard.
New urbanism, like any movement of substance, exists both as a theory and in practice. As a
system of principles, it is supported by the thousand-strong Congress for the New Urbanism,
a collective of architects, urban planners, and citizens concerned with what they see as the
“divestment in central cities, the spread of placeless sprawl, increasing separation by race
and income, environmental degradation, loss of agricultural lands and wilderness, and the
erosion of society’s built heritage as one interrelated community-building challenge.”
27
The
most vocal proponents and successful adherents of this design philosophy are the team of
Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, who have enunciated their vision in multiple
communities, countless projects, and a book, Suburban Nation. As a practice, new urbanism
211
has been applied in many locales, from the Florida communities mentioned above to projects
in Maryland, Wisconsin, California, and Ontario, Canada.
In its very designation new urbanism makes a historical claim. Whether ‘urbanism’ is
amended with ‘new’ or ‘traditionalism’ is modified by ‘neo’, the movement claims to be an
updating of previously established historical developments. Indeed, Duany acknowledges
that “its intellectual underpinnings can be found in the turn-of-the-(twentieth-)century
writings of Ebenezer Howard, Raymond Unwin, Camillo Sitte, Hermann Josef Stubben, and
the other wonderfully unspecialized planners and designers of the progressive era” and in “the
sparkling downtowns of the City Beautiful movement and the elegant suburbs of the teens
and twenties.”
28
To be fair, the philosophy of the new urbanism is aware of earlier traditions
and is buttressed by the contributions of many subsequent thinkers, but the fundamental
design principles are driven by an appreciation of progressive-era urbanism and jazz-age
suburbanism.
This scope of historical thinking manifests itself in the physical development of
neotraditional communities in two ways. First, new urbanism privileges its version of
‘tradition’ and the ‘urban’ at the expense of alternate conceptions of what these terms might
mean. More pointedly, it advances a historically-specific understanding of the urban and
suburban that is associated with upper-middle class whiteness and the use of architecture
for social control over immigrant and other minority communities. It seems hardly ironic
that the first example of the City Beautiful movement was the “White City” at the World’s
Columbian Exposition of 1893. Based on this narrow historical perspective, new urbanism
effectively effaces a broader history, and often obscures the particular history of the regions in
which it operates and of the people who live there. In its planning and typical architecture,
new urbanism offers up selected cultural appeals and regionally-inflected quotations but is
clearly not concerned with critically engaging the past. (This is not to say that new urbanism
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is somehow inherently or intentionally racist or elite; indeed, the theoretical articulation of
the new urbanism is offered as a regional solution explicitly concerned with inequalities that
have been exacerbated by the development policies of the past half-century, and most of the
built new urban communities have included some provision for low-income housing. But
this enlightened stance only extends so far). As David Harvey points out, “the founding
ideology of the new urbanism is both utopian and deeply fraught” because, “in its practical
materialization, the new urbanism builds an image of community and a rhetoric of place-
based civic pride and consciousness for those who do not need it, while abandoning those
that do to their ‘underclass’ fate.”
29
The focus on a specific past yields a movement that
privileges middle-class community at the expense of social justice for those individuals and
families who are less well off.
The second manner in which new urbanism materializes this narrow conception of
history is in its direct mobilization and simultaneous elision of regional histories. This is
particularly true when the theory takes practical shape, as developers selectively highlight
that history they find useful (i.e. profitable) while hiding that history that is either negative
or contradictory. As they are actually constructing physical spaces, planners and developers
who treat the past in this manner not only avoid a critical engagement with history, they
reify their commercially-inflected version of the dominant history in the very buildings and
communities they erect. As an alternative, a critical approach to history forces one to note
complexities and contingencies, and often reveals that a hegemonic historical narrative masks
the manner in which events have been shaped by multiple groups. This broader reckoning
of historical development leaves one more open minded in general, but specifically makes
one more sensitive to the concerns and historical claims of non-hegemonic groups. This
is particularly salient in the case of traditional neighborhood design, because, as discussed
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above, this form of development makes an explicit appeal to a myopic and mythical vision of
small-town, bourgeois, white American history.
Scripting Playa Vista through New Urbanism
We advocate the restructuring of public policy and development practices to support
the following principles: neighborhoods should be diverse in use and population;
communities should be designed for the pedestrian and transit as well as the car;
cities and towns should be shaped by physically defined and universally accessible
public spaces and community institutions; urban places should be framed by
architecture and landscape design that celebrate local history, climate, ecology, and
building practice.
- Charter of the New Urbanism
30
Playa Vista’s new urban pedigree was assured through the inclusion of Andres Duany and
Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk in a planning charrette in 1989. Maguire Thomas Partners had
just taken over from the Hughes-legacy Summa corporation and senior partner Nelson
Rising wanted to rethink the decade-old design of a project that was out of touch with
the realities of growth on the west side of Los Angeles.
31
Along with a number of local
architects and planners, including local figures Stefanos Polyzoides and Elizabeth Moule,
these two principles of the DPZ firm and the Congress for New Urbanism presented a vision
of pedestrian-oriented urban development that would feature density, diversity, and a mix
of residential, commercial, and retail spaces. The plans drawn up after the three-meeting
charrette were approved by the Los Angeles City Council in 1994 and have been a primary
template from which the actual development was constructed since ground was broken
in the late 1990s. Although it chooses not to foreground the term new urbanism and has
backed away from some of the more radical plans to come out of the 1989 charrette, the
current developer of Playa Vista has nonetheless designed the built environment according
to the movement’s principles and prominently features new urban code words in its
marketing materials, suggesting that Playa Vista is a “new community that has the charm
and spirit of a small town,” a “place neighbors can easily become friends,” and a place where
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“neighborhoods thrive next to acres of parks and open space.”
32
Like most adherent new
urban communities, Playa Vista places at least a rhetorical emphasis on the development
of “authentic community” through neighborhoods that are “compact, pedestrian-friendly,
and mixed-use.”
33
While it is easy to imagine how such a script offers the advantages of
decreased commute times, decreased auto emissions, relative independence for non-drivers,
and increased opportunities for socialization, we can also understand this push for mixed
use neighborhoods as consistent with neo-Fordist cultural and economic tendencies toward
that blurring of productive and reproductive time and space. Playa Vista’s invitation to “live,
work, shop, and play” all in one space is a pointed manifestation of the broader cultural
shift toward new ratios of living. New urbanism may, as suggested above, have its roots
in century-old planning philosophies, but its emphasis on the collapse of certain spatial
boundaries is also exemplary of contemporary spatial practices and congruent with the
dedifferentiation of productive, reproductive, and consumptive labor.
Playa Vista’s embrace of new urban principles is relevant to the current study because of
the manner in which new urbanism tends to create scripted spaces through an attempt to
foster a sense of community through the inclusion of diverse housing options and a lifestyle
that integrates elements of production, reproduction, and consumption. The manner in
which this script evinces the ideological imperatives of flexibility, personalization, and mass
customization can be seen at work in the developer’s efforts to ensure a diverse array of
housing types, in the builders’ efforts to offer flexible housing designs, and in the conscious
marketing of a contemporary lifestyle ideal. The analysis that follows mixes together direct
observations from visits to the ongoing build-out of Playa Vista over the past seven years
with a critical analysis of promotional and archival materials. Most of the site visits and
gathering of materials were conducted as a public visitor to this public community, and
when pressed (by brokers and developer representatives) I indicated that I was interested
215
in the development as a whole but not a likely buyer. My visits included dozens of trips as
a pedestrian, a tourist, a visitor to the local playground, and a patron of the public library
and a few established retail stores. I also attended a number of public events (concerts in
the park, grand openings for various buildings, the launch of new parks and preserves) and
public information sessions and community forums about the progress of the development.
In addition to these many casual visits I also formally visited as an academic researcher on
a couple of occasions, during which times I explained my interests and directly interviewed
various members of the Playa Vista development team. My goal in synthesizing these
many visits and a repository of promotional materials is to bring together a pedestrian
mode of analysis with a discourse analysis. As Meaghan Morris argues in “Things to do
with Shopping Malls,” a pedestrian mode of analysis is an intentional mode of observation
that is attentive to the specific design and actual uses of an actually practiced space, as
opposed to a generalized critique of a type of place. This mode of argument insists that the
particularities of different types of spatial environments matter, in no small part because their
discrepancies support distinct spatial practices and alter the agency available to consumers.
More importantly, analyses that critically engage specific spaces can provide unique insight
into the cultural forces at work in such configurations. As Morris suggests, however, this
type of accounting requires a distinct methodology, which she describes as an ambivalent and
pedestrian mode of analysis:
At the very least, a feminist analysis of shopping centers will insist initially upon
ambivalence about its objects rather than astonishment before them. Ambivalence
allows a thinking of relations between contradictory states: it is also a pose, but one
that is perhaps more flexible in its own relation to everyday practices of, say, using
the same shopping centers often, and for different reasons, rather than visiting several
occasionally, but intensely, in order to see the sights. Ambivalence does not eliminate
the moment of everyday discontent – of anger, frustration, sorrow, irritation, hatred,
boredom, fatigue. Feminism is minimally a movement of discontent with ‘the way
things are.’
34
At a high level, Morris’s pedestrian approach simply means a deliberate consideration of
the history and specificity of the object under analysis, in her case a few malls in Australia.
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For her this means that she can walk slowly through such spaces in a mode that is both
open and critical. Metaphorically, it means setting aside sociology, literary criticism, and
immanent criticism as analytic tools, and instead paying more attention to the specific and
changing histories and social relations of the object(s) being considered. She doesn’t go so
far as to say it, but Morris is effectively calling for an analytic mode grounded in situated
knowledges. Following this logic, a partial and reflexive history of the specific space under
consideration produces the most incisive and objective knowledge claims because it does not
pretend they are stable or universal. A situated, pedestrian approach is particularly suited to
the consideration of space because it is flexible enough to change as spaces do, and especially
suited to the present analysis of Playa Vista because the observations have occurred as the
development progressed from brownfield to built environment.
Standing in Concert Park, on the eastern boundary of the first phase of Playa Vista, one
gets a sense that this project is nothing less than the delayed realization of the city’s own
manifest destiny. To the West, the wetlands that guarantee proximity to the Pacific can
barely be glimpsed between the eclectic stylings of Concerto, Avalon, Paraiso, and Villa
d’Este, sub-neighborhoods of already completed four-story condominiums and town homes.
The Northern view is a wall of faux-French Chateaus and Mediterranean Villas. Lining the
park to the south is a large building housing lofts above ground-floor retail: a restaurant,
dry cleaner, cafe, bank, salon, and “homefinding center.”
35
To the east, in the shadow of the
Westchester bluffs rising 200 feet from Playa Vista, is an additional mixed use building with
housing above retail, in this case a health clinic, dentist’s office, upscale pet store, Pinkberry
yogurt store, and a high-end convenience market. Some quiet construction equipment and
building frames can be made out in the middle distance, reminders that the master plan for
Playa Vista includes The Village at Playa Vista, which will someday, after the resolution of
yet another Environmental Impact Report, include a retail-focused town center and another
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2,600 residential units. With the development of the corporate campus at the eastern end
of the Playa Vista tract, this promised “main street” remains the missing piece of the puzzle,
that aspect of development which will fulfill the promise of Playa Vista, the lynchpin of
contemporary manufactured community: neighborhood retail.
Aside from the pervasive feeling of newness on offer at Playa Vista, the most striking visual
feature is the diversity in architectural styles. (Figure 5.10) This stylistic diversity is a
product of a distinct aesthetic framework, the financial reality of large-scale development,
and new urban imperatives, all of which fit within the script of emergent urban space.
From an aesthetic perspective, the developer’s goal has been to provide a broad array of
housing styles in order to attract potential residents with different sensibilities. Early press
releases touted this something-for-everyone approach as both modern and familiar: “Playa
Vista’s large selection of new, luxury Westside residences feature distinctive architecture and
design excellence. Designed by world-renowned architects, and guided by America’s most
innovative planners, the homes at Playa Vista are a blend of traditional and contemporary
styles.”
36
This effort to appeal to a broad range of homebuyers packages brand new homes
in a range of styles, drawing on various local and international architectural histories. The
Capri collection, for example, is a set of single family homes “inspired by 1940s West LA
architecture;” Concerto, The Lofts, Runway Lofts all feature “open floor plans;” The Metro
is “Art Deco;” Matisse and Mondrian are “Imaginative” and painted in eponymous fashion;
Serenade is “classic craftsman,” Villa Savona is “Italianate Villa,” and Villa d’Este is “Early
LA mansion inspired.”
37
(Figure 5.10) A dozen other neighborhoods aesthetically reference
various classical European architectures. Pointedly, the developer refers to these thirty
stylistically distinct constructions as neighborhoods situated within the singular community
of Playa Vista, allowing homeowners to identify with both the overall development (and its
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shared parks and amenities) and with lifestyle-affirming, architecturally-distinct residential
districts.
While the marketing advantages of such an arrangement are clear, this stylistic diversity
also fits neatly within the business arrangements of large-scale contemporary planned
developments. For such modern communities the developer tends to be the landowner
responsible for improving the land, building the infrastructure, and securing municipal
Clockwise from upper-left: The Dorian, Mondrian, Waterstone,
Icon, The Lofts, and The Metro. (images from author, playavista.com)
f igure 5.10: a rchitectural diversity at p laya Vista
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approvals. The actual construction of homes and residences is generally left to builders,
who independently purchase the land from the developer, build upon it, and then sell the
resulting residences to individual homeowners. Developers retain a financial interest in the
development until all of the saleable land has been built upon and purchased by the ultimate
homeowners. In some cases developers continue to stay involved in the management of the
community, public spaces and infrastructures, and amenities; in other cases these functions
are transitioned to a community-managed homeowners association. In the case of Playa
Vista, the Playa Capital corporation, formed after the financial collapse of the previous
owners, Maguire Thomas Partners, has followed this pattern, laying the infrastructure for
the current construction in the late 1990s and early 2000s, subsequently selling portions
of the property for various approved purposes. Of the 1,087 acres, 192 were sold to the
State as part of a deal to protect the local wetlands, sixty-four acres were sold to Tishman
Speyer for commercial development, fifteen acres to Lincoln properties for the Horizon at
Playa Vista commercial complex, six and a half acres to Robert Maguire for the Water’s Edge
facility that now houses Entertainment Arts, and two acres were sold to the Los Angeles
Clippers basketball team for training and practice facilities. The land approved for residential
development in phase I of the Playa Vista development was sold to fifteen separate builders.
These builders are responsible for the construction and sales of the residences on their
properties, subject to a number of construction guidelines established by the Playa Vista
developer.
38
This method of controlled outsourcing is very much in line with the modes of
flexible accumulation associated with a neo-Fordist system, and has parallels in industries
as diverse as Hollywood (distributors package the productions of various production
companies) and the auto industry (carmakers assemble vehicles with components constructed
by specialized firms). As a result of this strategy (as opposed to a system in which the
developer is also the builder or contracts from a single builder), the overall community offers
a wide range of housing types and styles, which fits the developer’s script of being able offer
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something for every type of home buyer. Eventually the builders will have completed their
construction and sold their last properties; at some point Playa Capital will have completed
the sale of all profitable land and will likely cede community management authority to a
community-run organization or a third party. The diverse aesthetics of the community will
remain.
While this approach to community development might well be a product of risk
diversification and corporate specialization, the resultant built environment is more broadly
in line with the goals of new urbanism. One of the core tenets of new urbanism is the
encouragement of diversity through planning, encouraging modes of interaction that were
challenged by the homogenous forms of suburban development that have been dominant
since the middle of the last century. The thirteenth principle of the Charter of the New
Urbanism declares: “Within neighborhoods, a broad range of housing types and price levels
can bring people of diverse ages, races, and incomes into daily interaction, strengthening the
personal and civic bonds essential to an authentic community.”
39
Whether intentionally or
not, Playa Vista follows these dictates in its distribution of housing types and styles. The
overall Playa Vista development includes some rental apartments, studio and one-bedroom
condominiums, larger town houses condominiums, and detached single-family homes.
Again, while the new urbanist goal might be a planned diversity, this nicely dovetails with
the developers goal to offer something-for-everyone so that it might appeal to multiple types
of home buyer. And even though the Playa Vista developer may not be rigidly adherent to
new urban design principles, it clearly recognizes the value in certain tenets and selectively
appropriates those that might prove lucrative.
The builders, most of whom have never been involved in a project of this scale, stuck to
the developer’s script not only in the distinct cladding of their various neighborhoods, but
in many cases in the flexibility of the designs they offer for any particular home. Builders
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targeting the lower-end of the prospective Playa Vista housing market (originally homes
ranging from $300,000 to $500,000) provided flexibility by including a number of different
floorplans for buyers to choose from; builders at the high-end (ranging up to the high
$1,000,000s) encouraged home purchasers to customize their many pre-designed floorplans
with optional space and rooms. This approach to the personalization of the domestic
environments was present from the launch of the community, as evidenced by an early
press release: “The initial phase of Playa Vista incorporates 76 custom-designed residential
floor plans appealing to a variety of lifestyles, mixing the character of early Los Angeles
architecture with modern residential concepts.”
40
Of course the “custom-designed” claim in
the press release is something of an exaggeration; the floorplans were designed specfically for
the new construction at Playa Vista, but it is not the case that the homes at Playa Vista are
custom designed for particular residents in the manner of an architecturally commissioned
home. But neither is it the case that the residences at Playa Vista were built using the mass
production techniques that characterized much suburban development in the post-war
period in places like Levittown, NY or Westchester, abutting Playa Vista in Los Angeles.
41
Instead, the mode deployed by the builders at Playa Vista is best described as mass
customization, where the development as a whole can offer homes within a few dozen
neighborhoods, built by a score of builders, who each offer a range of floorplans. Far from a
mass produced model of housing in which an entire community is made up of three or four
different architectural styles, or in which the same housing style is offered with only cosmetic
exterior difference, the model of development deployed at Playa Vista explicitly provides
such a range of designs that the developer can plausibly claim that they are custom designed
for each resident. And in the case of certain neighborhoods, the developers encourage
homeowners to explicitly select from a variety of optional layouts that can be built to order.
The Matisse neighborhood, for example, includes “flex-rooms” in most of their designs,
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effectively building the open floorplan of a loft into a portion of an otherwise multi-room
dwelling.
42
The builders of the Coronado neighborhood implore buyers to “customize your
home” by substituting between a den or a “living room with media niche,” a choice that
doesn’t have to be made if one opts for the largest floorplan which automatically features
“oversize media niches.”
43
The Icon neighborhood, not coincidentally the most expensive
in Playa Vista, takes this emphasis on customization the furthest, proclaiming “freedom is
all about choice.” This rather limiting vision of freedom is effectively the frontispiece for an
oversized glossy sales brochure in which multiple residence plans are described as flexible,
customizable environments. The grandest layout features optional vestibules, wine cellars,
and external elevators in addition to the opportunity to swap out bedrooms from workrooms,
large offices, or media rooms. (Figure 5.11) It should be noted that the adjustments are not
just finishing touches but are actually reconfigured spatial environments with differently
positioned walls and services. Not to be outdone, a second layout is accompanied by the
claim that “this home is all about possibilities for personalization,” and a third promises “this
home has been designed to meet the different lifestyle needs facing today’s families.” The
brochure closes with the recap that “Icon reveals a whole new quality of personalization.”
And just in case a potential buyer decides that she like the builder but not the community,
she is informed that “Laing Luxury is an exciting concept in home building. It provides an
unprecedented opportunity to own a home that’s highly personalized, without having to
build it yourself.”
44
Beyond these major configurations, of course, every builder is more than
happy to work with homebuyers to customize the interior features and fixtures so that the
final home is actually quite finely specified by the original owner. With dozens of big options
and hundreds of small decisions it would be more surprising than expected if two homes
ended up looking the same.
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In these ways the exterior stylistic diversity of the multi-builder community is matched by
an emphasis on the flexibility of interior environments as well. The resultant community is
essentially a scripted agglomeration of mass customized housing that appeals to homebuyers
of different income levels. The developers of Playa Vista enable this level of flexibility
and customization by distributing residential construction to multiple builders, and by
encouraging those builders to develop stylistically different buildings. Additional elements
of customization, like the offer of a range of floorplans, the ability to swap design elements,
or buyer-selected finishings have less to do with the specificities of Playa Vista than the do
with overall patterns in new home construction. That is to say that Playa Vista is exemplary
in its emphasis on mass customization in home construction, but that the trend toward
this mode of building is taking hold on a broader scale. Moreover, it is not likely that mass
customization is actually the developer’s goal. Indeed, if we can critique Playa Vista as a
scripted space the concept of mass customization is merely the ideological underpinning for a
script that attempts to provide a specific lifestyle experience. The developer of Playa Vista is
actually quite explicit in its overall goals, announcing in nearly all of its promotional material
f igure 5.11: configurable d esign at playa Vista
The customization tool on the website for Icon (http://www.laingluxury.com/icon/)
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and press releases that Playa Vista is intended to be a place “where residents can live, work,
shop and play in their own community.”
45
Indeed this type of mixed-use spatial practice is at
the heart of new urban principles, which explicitly try to re-script individual behavior away
from the car-intensive model supported for decades by sprawling suburban development.
The developers of Playa Vista have long made the provision of a mix of residential, retail,
commercial, and open space a major feature of the development, in order to attract residents
and tenants, of course, but also to get a project of this size through the civic approval process.
In practice, this means that the developers un-ironically tout their proximity to preserved
wetlands, offer more than twenty parks and pocket-parks dedicated to specific lifestyle
interests (dog park, chess park, basketball park, bird-watching park, concert park, fountain
park, plain old parks), feature a health and community center, have successfully lobbied for a
local fire station and public library, have started a farmers market, and have plans for a large
retail village designed to support community needs. The program of Playa Vista’s script is
plain: provide an array of services and amenities designed to support contemporary lifestyles
and to create a sense of community.
Finishing the Script: Live/Work/Consume
One major component of this vision is the establishment of neighborhood retail, in the form
of resident-serving stores and entertainment options that serves community members daily
and attracts the broader metropolitan public on a regular basis. The vision described by
the developer and pictured in the marketing materials is of a vibrant urban neighborhood
thronged with community activity. Yet for a community that already boasts 7,000 residents,
Playa Vista feels surprisingly empty. There are sidewalks along every roadway, a public
library, parks of varying sizes, and an activity center that has been open for years. These
facilities, along with schools and churches, are generally thought to be the neighborhood
spaces that encourage a sense of community. Yet a visit on an average day does not yield
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the bustling urban neighborhood pictured in the brochure. Part of this emptiness surely
has to do with the fact that construction continues at the edges of the development, making
the neighborhood less pleasant and pedestrian-centered than it promises to be in the long
run. Another reason for the ghost-town feel is that much of the architecture has embraced
an inward-facing courtyard concept instead of the street-facing architecture common to
neotraditional new urban neighborhoods like Celebration. (Figure 5.9)
More importantly, however, the first phase of the development included almost no retail
construction. Aside from a small pizza place located among the less expensive apartments
on the north side of Jefferson, the few stores facing the southern and eastern sides of Concert
Park are the only retail options. The more significant plans are reserved for The Village, the
centerpiece of Playa Vista’s phase II. This development, originally scheduled for completion
by 2008, promises an additional 2,600 residential units, a number of parks, 175,000 square
feet of office space, and 150,000 square feet of retail space. As much as anything else this
is the phase of the development which will distinguish Playa Vista from familiar suburban
design, and as such is the promise that dominates much of the promotional material. An
earlier website for the development promised that residents would be able to:
Enjoy a leisurely walk or short tram ride from your front door to charming shops,
coffee houses and neighborhood cafes. The Village at Playa Vista is our proposal
for the next stage of development. Our plans envision restaurants, specialty stores, a
market, dry cleaner, pharmacy - whatever the community needs to flourish - all in a
style and look that blends beautifully with the character of Playa Vista.
46
These descriptions were paired with images of healthy and attractive people shopping at
farmers’ markets, browsing in small boutiques, and enjoying the company of friends in
European-style cafés. Indeed, Playa Vista’s offering of a “re-imagined” lifestyle rests on the
tri-partite claim of open spaces, high-tech homes, and the ability to live, work, and shop
without ever leaving the development. Although the specific configuration of homes and
shops is still in the planning phase, the high-level plan for Phase II was subjected to an
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Environmental Impact Report (EIR) in 2003 and approved by the Los Angeles City Council
in September of 2004. After it was announced in 2006 that Rick Caruso, developer of the
Grove shopping complex in Los Angeles and the Americana at Brand live/work center in
Glendale, CA, would be developing the village at Playa Vista, the California Second District
Court of Appeals overturned a lower court’s ruling that the EIR was conducted appropriately,
effectively freezing construction until the report is amended and the City of Los Angeles
re-approves the Phase II development.
47
Even as executives from Playa Vista argued that the
second phase of the project would solve numerous traffic and roadway improvements that
the city could otherwise not afford, their supporters from the Valley Industry and Commerce
Association filed a position paper in support of the development that more directly states the
importance of Phase II to the overall development at Playa Vista:
The Village completes this community vision. It is the missing piece of the puzzle
that connects the residential areas on the west to the commercial campus on the east.
It provides 2,600 new residential units, a unifying neighborhood retail center, the
completion of an important environmental system that treats storm water and creates
habitat.
48
Without the retail center, Playa Vista would simply remain a neighborhood; with the Village,
it would become a community. The reality of a flexible, live/work/consume lifestyle demands
the introduction of retail spaces in order to support a contemporary communitarian ideal of
conspicuous sociability.
So why is neighborhood retail so important – theoretically, rhetorically, and perhaps even
practically – to the script of new urbanism in general and Playa Vista in particular? The
answer suggested by the promotional literature or the media coverage would seem to suggest
that it is because local retail options would lead to interaction between residents, and this
interaction would lead to a sense of community. This explanation, effectively the party line,
deserves to be interrogated.
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To begin with, we need to have a sense of what is meant by “a sense of community.”
As Andrew Ross notes in his book about Celebration, Florida, a premiere new urban
development:
‘Community’ is one of the most emotionally ubiquitous and versatile touchstones of
American life. As a result, it is one of the more overused words in our daily lexicon,
relentlessly mined for all sort of social, religious, and commercial purposes, and
in most instances no more meaningful than a sugary advertising cliché. Of all the
things that can be acquired in a market civilization, it is supposed to be one of the
most elusive.
49

Ross suggests that community is as elusive as it is desirable, the goal of every planner seeking
to distance her neighborhood from urban decay or suburban banality. The elusiveness of
community is practical, conceptual, and rhetorical. Without enforcing the discipline of
definition on such a mutable signifier, it is worth noting that the word connotes sociality,
commonality, and activity. As a process, community is what happens when people of similar
interest or disposition come together to dynamically share an experience. That the term
is more often used as a noun suggests that these qualities are desirable, worthy of being
quantified and claimed. ‘Town’, ‘village’, or ‘city’ would certainly be enough to describe
various types of spaces; ‘citizens’, ‘residents’, or simply ‘people’ would cover their denizens.
Nonetheless, we have cities and residents that strive for something greater, the creation of
community. Even if we can set aside a debate over the possible meanings of community,
we still have the problem of recognizing it in the physical world. This is the challenge that
vexes city planners and administrators, the promise that becomes “sugary advertising cliché,”
and the perceived void that new urban adherents have embraced across the country. If club
memberships, attendance at religious functions, and PTA participation have indeed declined
in the past fifty years, as argued by Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone, any situation allowing
for public interaction seems to hold out hope for the discovery of community.
50
The role
retail plays in new urban neighborhoods is so important because it makes visible a notion of
community in a society that is desperate for such reassurances.
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Because new urban communities feature higher densities, emphasize public spaces, and
include neighborhood-serving retail establishments, they seem likely to succeed, at least
compared to a standard suburban development, in bringing and potentially binding the
members of the planned neighborhood closer together. As Ross notes, “underlying all
New Urbanist efforts is the bedrock belief that the design of a physical environment has a
fundamental impact upon social behavior.”
51
Although this argument is usually advanced
in favor of street layout and home design, it applies equally to the decision to include retail
establishments in close proximity to homes. On the one hand, the idea is that the stores
and services will be sufficient to serve residents’ needs, decreasing the amount of time spent
traveling outside of the neighborhood and increasing the chances of bumping into their
neighbors. On the other hand, these establishments are generally centrally located, providing
a locatable center to a neighborhood development. Whereas neighborhood retail in the
familiar suburban model means strip malls and grocery stores on main roads serving multiple
neighborhoods, new urban planning calls for neighborhood-specific retail within walking
distance of most homes.
What is ultimately at stake is whether these neighborhoods will form progressive and diverse
or regressive and exclusive communities. In the case of Playa Vista, as in so many of the
marquee new urban developments, the cost of entry into the neighborhood is so great that
it will be quite difficult for the demographics of the actual community to match those of the
brochure. While all real estate prices can only be understood with regard to the dynamics of
their local market, it is telling that the least expensive homes (outside of a small number set
aside to meet local low-income housing provisions) in Playa Vista originally sold for nearly
$400,000, with the bulk of homes offered in the $600,000 to $800,000 range.
52
Even with
some studio apartments available for rental, the presence of middle and upper-middle class
households will far exceed less affluent households for the foreseeable future in Playa Vista.
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Moreover, if Playa Vista home prices appreciate in a manner similar to other neotraditional
communities the opportunities for economic diversity will shrink even further. Recognizing
these as the economic realities, the risk is that the community will become homogeneous and
exclusive.
On top of concerns regarding exclusivity, the role of retail in the formation of community
also forces us to confront questions about what our society values. If the establishment of
community and the practice of networked personalized mobility is really predicated on access
to pleasant retail and the sociality that entails, it suggests that the logic of consumerism
has co-opted the concept of community, a cultural attribute often thought free of the
market. Of course, this question does not just apply to new urban communities, or the
small towns that serve as their inspiration – Greenwich Village, Georgetown, and even
Venice, right next door to Playa Vista, are highly desirable communities largely because
they offer neighborhood retail that generates foot traffic, sociability, and community. Just
because their planning took place in the past does not get them off the hook with regard
to the critique of consumerist community. Instead of thinking of community as a process
that organically develops over time, considering the role of retail forces one to consider the
possibility that community may have simply become another thing that can be purchased.
Complicating matters further, we should hold onto the possibility that consumerism as a
basis for community is not all bad. Even as churches, clubs, and PTAs – which always had
demonstrable economic functions – were primarily thought of as providing community
without a price tag, they always came with a cost. It is just that the cost generally came in
terms of patriarchal organization and other exclusionary practices. These forces might not
be completely escaped within consumerist community, as capital can serve to mask cultural
inequalities, but at least the specific parochialisms of past communities might be avoided.
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Clearly, thinking about neighborhood retail under the sign of community is meaningful,
complex, and fraught with contradiction.
Setting aside the term community, we can still think about why neighborhood retail means
so much in the context of new urbanism. For example, the reconfiguration of neighborhood
design to include local stores and services challenges the stark divide between private and
public spaces that characterizes the majority of post-war development in the United States.
Just as new urbanism as a whole is a challenge to conventional suburban development,
neighborhood-centered stores are a response to sprawling retail environments. In this regard,
the two trends that have dominated in the past decade have been the rise of the big-box,
or category-killer, retail store, and the simultaneous trend toward shopper-tainment, or
shopping malls that promise spectacles and activities in addition to shopping. While each
of these trends deserves their own specific analyses, we can at least state with confidence
that they are rarely, if ever, located within neighborhoods. Indeed, their very economic
underpinnings rely on drawing customers from all across a given region. While these trends
surely create new and possibly vital public spaces, they also serve to emphasize the divide
between public and private that characterized the earlier post-war era.
New urbanism attacks this type of suburban sprawl from many perspectives, but perhaps
no more directly than through its emphasis on neighborhood retail. This is not simply a
reconfiguration of space; it is a challenge to the dominant regimes of public and private.
Private space is not abolished, of course, but the line is blurred. While public space can still
be accessed via a trip to the mall, it can also be reached via a stroll through the neighborhood.
The “self-sufficient family home,” discussed by Raymond Williams and Mararet Morse in
their discussions of distraction and mobile privatization, becomes less isolated when it is
located in close proximity to attractive public spaces.
53
At the extreme, stores and services
in the neighborhood can even be thought of as extensions of the home, with coffee shops,
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cleaners, and grocery stores serving daily needs. If and when this is true, a whole series of
cultural critiques must be revisited, including those that interrogate the gendered nature
of the private home, for example. Much of the critique of typical suburban development
has been bound up with notions of isolation, and particularly gendered forms of isolation,
and these notions might be thrown into flux in a community that intentionally fosters both
an increased use of non-domestic space and supports the dedifferentiation of the spaces of
labor. One of the most serious questions that new urbanism has not yet answered is whether
its tenets of thoughtful spatial planning are sufficient to challenge the ingrained practices of
gendered spaces; given the historical precedents upon which it is based, one wonders if the
movement’s adherents even hope to effect this type of change.
New urbanism has been treated to many different critiques over the past decade, and most
have coalesced around the difficulty of evaluating the concept of community or simply
stopped at an aesthetic or psychoanalytic diagnosis of nostalgia. While each these approaches
tell us something about new urbanism, they fall into the trap of reducing spaces to places and
thus failing to account for the differences among developments. One of the major factors
that distinguishes these planned communities from one another is their approach to the
inclusion of neighborhood retail and services, factors that have been largely neglected in most
cultural critiques of new urbanism. Directly tackling this question, a pedestrian approach
to Playa Vista reveals the importance of these shopping spaces to the myth of identity
being offered – even sold – to the residents. Actually walking through the development –
literalizing the pedestrian analytic – provides a glimpse of how an unfinished new urban
neighborhood simply recapitulates that car-centric mode of living it is so vigorously
attempting to overthrow. In an empty park, surrounded in all directions by luxury homes,
it is the otherwise pedestrian – that is, banal – ongoing construction that signals what the
residents already know. Playa Vista is incomplete and not delivering on its promises, and will
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remain so unless the developers actually deliver meaningfully on their promise to build space
for and attract community-serving retail. The catch-22 of the current legal proscription on
phase II construction is that Playa Vista has no chance of delivering a pedestrian-intensive
community without the retail component, and yet there are no assurances that the planned
urban village will radically transform established car-centric lifestyles. Perhaps the better
question is what else should be demanded of the new development besides cutting down on
car trips. This retail district will need to be suited to the residents’ needs in order to bring
the vision of community to fruition, of course, but it should also consider broader social
goals. Because the concept of community promised to every resident of Playa Vista is based
on neighborhood retail, it will be a shame if franchises and chain stores are systematically
favored over entrepreneurial members of the community, if the establishments are so high-
end that they effectively price out less affluent community members, if the establishments
are not welcoming to broader members of the regional community, or if the people working
in the stores do not earn enough to live in the community. If those goals can be met, then
Playa Vista will truly be offering an alternative the community can support.
Scripting Playa Vista: Networked Media Community
Playa Vista is more than a new place to live. It is a new community that has the
charm and spirit of a small town woven into the heart of the big city. And it offers
residents all of the conveniences of the digital world with a down-home lifestyle
where you don’t have to drive to take a nice walk, and where you don’t need a town
meeting to get to know your neighbors.
54
Although the plans for Playa Vista went through massive changes over its thirty-year (and
counting) planning history, the development powerfully retained two key elements of
its vision. The first, as discussed above, is the overriding legacy of its dalliance with the
concepts of new urbanism, such that built environment and the discourse around the overall
development work hard to script a vision of a cultural lifestyle built on new ratios of living,
working, and consuming. The second key element retained by the developers of Playa
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Vista, which is in many ways related to the cultural vision advanced by new urbanism, is
an overriding focus on a robust technological infrastructure and the emphasis on the place
of emergent media in realizing this cultural vision. The concept is directly a result of the
four-year period in which Dreamworks was considering/committing as a partner in the
development of an integrated entertainment campus and residential community. At the
apex of its involvement Dreamworks was to become a major partner in the overall project
of Playa Vista and over the years had a great deal of input into the type of community that
would ultimately be built. As suggested above, the Dreamworks vision, which was in many
ways the vision of Steven Spielberg, was of a motion picture production studio that was
designed for the digital demands of the twenty-first century. Not only would the commercial
campus be designed around contemporary needs (larger sound stages, room to maneuver
big rigs), but the campus would also be connected via a fiber optic infrastructure with the
residences, so that constantly-available creatives and executives could do their work just as
effectively from home as they could from the office. As described by a former Dreamworks
executive, the vision was a blend of the sylvan and the high-tech: “Playa vista would be a
state-of-the-art world in which you walk from your beautiful condo with its beautiful lake
view to a campus on a lake surrounding by creative, thriving businesses, and everything
looks pretty and wonderful.”
55
Although Dreamworks dropped out of the project before
this forward-looking infrastructure was in place, the ideas and ideals of a technologically-
supported lifestyle and community development remained at the forefront of the new
vision for Playa Vista. In a meaningful sense this vision for Playa Vista is an attempt to
script and commodify the networked personalized mobility as a lifestyle. Or, more to the
point, Playa Vista demonstrates how the cultural logic of networked personalized mobility
is equally concerned with spatial practices and media practices, and powerfully blends
them together. The developer of Playa Vista recognized in the late 1990s that it had the
opportunity to centrally plan for a future in which individuals would demand the ability to
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flexibly move between networked media spaces. Perhaps more importantly for the developer,
grafting a high-tech infrastructure onto a aesthetically and materially diverse community
served as a bridge that rhetorically leveled the playing field for residents, suggesting that
every home buyer, regardless of home style, size, or customization, would have unparalleled
network connectivity. Crucial to this vision, and part of what set Playa Vista apart from
other developments, is the manner in which a single developer has so much power over the
types of networked media spaces being created, from setting the guidelines for the type of
infrastructure that will connect each domicile to operating the explicitly public aspects of
various networks.
In line with this overall vision Playa Vista has created an impressive communications
and media infrastructure. Because they were converting a brownfield, the developer had
the opportunity to start from scratch rather than graft new technologies onto an old
infrastructure. After tearing up the old Hughes runways and grading the property to be
developed, the entire infrastructure (water, gas, electricity, and telecommunications) were
buried underground. While this is a best practice in terms of installing a robust, secure
communications infrastructure, the careful hiding of communications infrastructure also
signifies quite clearly that this is a thoughtfully planned, high-end neighborhood where the
architecture is to be seen, not the wires. Every neighborhood, consisting of a single large
building or a set of related buildings, is internally wired to support the latest communications
and home entertainment options and is externally connected via multiple broadband
sources, including a future-proofed suite of coaxial, power-line, and fiber-optic wiring.
56

As suggested in chapter two, Playa Vista was ahead of the curve with their installation of
such a robust infrastructure, a practice that has become much more common in recent
years. From this infrastructural base and a rigid set of developer guidelines, the individual
builders of each neighborhood offer homebuyers further customization options. Playa Vista
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initially supported these efforts with a high-tech preview center, an in-home technology
concierge tasked with encouraging and supporting personal technological development, and
exclusive deals for residents arranged with specific technology providers, such as Linksys,
CompUSA, and Time Warner, for whom Playa Vista is a beta-community. At a minimum
each new domicile has access to digital cable and wired high-speed Internet connections from
multiple rooms. Builders, assisted by the technology concierge and the resident technology
companies, offer additional options such as wireless Internet, multi-room audio wiring,
complete home entertainment centers, and various degrees of security and home automation
technologies. (Figure 5.12) Again, this studied effort to provide robust connectivity while
carefully hiding the materiality of the networks that support this connectivity further shifts
the experience of new media to the interface. Residents of Playa Vista do not even need to
call a service provider to get the technology installed when they move in, they simply need to
plug in a cable. And even this can be taken care of by a technology concierge, who spends a
few hours with each new homeowner literally networking their emergent media technologies.
While most new residents simply choose to take advantage of the basic technology packages,
approximately 20% choose to “upgrade” their connectivity, capitalizing the cost of new
technology and network connections along with their houses – and, of course, paying them
off over the length of the mortgage. Most of these upgrades are a few thousand dollars worth
of home theatre equipment and built-in wiring, but in a few cases the technology upgrades
have been worth $80-100,000, including substantial home automation in approximately 3%
of the homes.
57
The developer chose to deploy and promote a robust infrastructure because it was confident
that it would increase the overall value of the investment, allowing them to charge developers
higher fees. At the same time, the planners recognized that all of this household technology
might work against their overall pitch of a technologically enhanced community experience,
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as it primarily works to keep people inside and mediate their connections with the outside
world. In order to counterbalance this the developers also worked to make sure that all
residents are connected through a local intranet, by offering regular technology training
classes at the community center, and by providing wireless Internet access in its parks,
community centers, and retail areas. While all of this goes on behind the scenes, the
community also maintains its affiliation with dominant and emergent media corporations
by hosting the regional headquarters of the Entertainment Arts video game corporation,
the massive airplane hangers that have become favorite soundstages for Hollywood films
Clockwise from upper-left:
Play Vista Visitor’s Center;
First-generation Playa Vista website;
Sample Structured Wiring Center;
Playalink community website;
Visitor’s center.
(Images and screen grabs by author)
f igure 5.12: t echnology at playa Vista
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(including James Cameron’s Titanic, Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center, Michael Bay’s
Transformers, and Jon Favreau’s Iron Man), a training complex for the Los Angeles Clippers
basketball team, and multiple sets of commercial buildings explicitly designed to attract new
media companies like Belkin and Fox Interactive Media.
58
The initial goal of this technological infrastructure may have been to support the massive
studio and expected employee residences planned by Dreamworks, but this vision was really
just an articulated concept of how people would be living in a networked society. When
this deal fell apart, the technological vision was scaled back from of its original flights of
fancy, such as a full gigabit fiber-network in every home, but, in an effort to increase its
marketability and establish a distinct community, Playa Vista retained the core principles
of the Dreamworks vision. Although an infrastructure of this magnitude is relatively
more expensive than a standard infrastructure, the Playa Vista developer recognized that
it would likely be less expensive in the long run to place dark fiber in the ground before
any above-ground construction occurred.
59
It also thought that such a measure would
allow for the marketing of a differentiated real-estate product at the height of the dot-com
boom.
60
Indeed, the earliest incarnations of the community’s marketing materials featured
the technological angle quite prominently, repeatedly pointing out that the lifestyle on offer
incorporated a distinct conception of technology, one that was integrally tied into flexible
ratios of living. In the original community information brochures, circa 2003, a section
titled “Work/Life. Redefined” claimed that
Playa Vista even makes it easier for you to work from wherever you want. Our
builders pre-wire each residence for high-speed Internet access and home networking
capabilities. And many floor plans include designated office space. No more
working out of a converted closet. And with wireless (wi-fi) networking planned
for many parks and public spaces in Playa Vista, you really can work anywhere.
What’s more, if you’re employed at a nearby Westside business center or educational
institution such as Sony Pictures Studios, Howard Hughes Center or Loyal
Marymount University, chances are you’ll cut your commuting time considerably.
61
238
And in one of the dedicated sections, titled “Technology. Reinterpreted,” the specifics of the
technology that will support a contemporary networked lifestyle are elaborated:
With true broadband connectivity provided by Comcast, you’ll have access to over
250 TV channels, digital cable, video-on-demand, high-speed Internet connections
and digital phone service. In cooperation with Linksys, Playa Vista homes will
have CAT-5 wiring which facilitates networking capabilities for linking computers,
printers and other devices throughout your home. And CompUSA is serving
as our on-site connectivity concierge. Operating out of the Playa Vista Design
Center, CompUSA’s Digital Living team will meet with homebuyers to help the m
understand, customize, and use the technology and entertainment systems already
built into their homes. We also plan to add wireless (wi-fi) capability to selected
parks and public spaces at Playa Vista. So you can take your laptop and email your
latest screenplay draft from under a tree.
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In addition to this quite direct evocation of the type of lifestyle expected of Playa Vista
residents - “email your latest screenplay draft from under a tree” - the developer sought
to lure potential homebuyers into the community with a high-tech preview center, which
won “top national and regional honors in two prestigious real estate awards competitions”
in 2002. This 6,000 square foot center was located adjacent to the Water’s Edge complex
housing the Entertainment Arts Corporation and a set of rental apartments designed
to satisfy much of the local low-income housing requirements. It featured an array of
information beyond that provided by most developers, including a number of photographs,
information presented through brochures and press clippings, a series of outdoor monuments
reviewing the history of the land at Playa Vista, multiple staff members, and a large three
dimensional model of the community. In addition to these details, the preview center used
technology to lure potential buyers, and informed potential buyers about the technology
on offer. The center felt quite technology focused, as it featured “video presentations,
interactive computer kiosks with information on each of the 13 residential developments
planned thus far, and creative displays featuring the innovative technology, open space,
environmental protection and sustainable design initiatives taking place at Playa Vista.”
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Notably, sections of the preview center were reserved for cutaway displays demonstrating
what a structured wiring panel would look like inside someone’s home, detailed explanations
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as to how routers and alternative audio arrangements could be made in each home, and even
a wing of the facility that featured a mocked-up living room with the technological bells and
whistles installed. Although the preview center was designed to sell the overall vision of a
contemporary urban lifestyle and thus provided information on open space, neighborhood
retail, sustainability, and architecture, it heavily emphasized a vision of better living through
technology. Largely because it was spurred on by the needs of Dreamworks in the 1990s,
Playa Vista was among the first developers to find a way to commodify the cultural shift
toward a model of networked personalized mobility.
Almost a decade after the original infrastructural groundbreaking, the community’s
technological infrastructure is now expected to support and stimulate old-fashioned face-
to-face community formation as well as enhance the quality of individuals’ daily lives.
Quite tellingly, executives at Playa Vista feel that they need to offer this type of technology
suite just to stay competitive with contemporary development trends, which have changed
dramatically in this regard over the past five years.
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Whereas Playa Vista was nearly alone
in their inclusion of a fiber optic infrastructure and structured wiring in each residence in
the early part of the 2000s, over 50% of new homes built since 2003 include structured
wiring. In the dozen new urban communities I visited during the course of research into
this project, Playa Vista stood right at the cutting edge; all of the developments that had
been substantially started prior to the turn of the millennium featured standard wiring
packages, and all of the developments that broke ground after Playa Vista included multi-
room structured wiring in all of their homes. Equally notable is that no other community
has emphasized technology to the extent the Playa Vista has. This is in part because the
technology was too futuristic for the early communities and largely expected of the later
ones, but also because Playa Vista derives part of its identity from its location in Los
Angeles and its near-partnership with Dreamworks. As a result, Playa Vista’s engagement
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with and articulation of a lifestyle scripted around the logic of networked personalized
mobility is unique. Indeed, as Playa Vista has updated its marketing materials in recent
years it has begun to slightly downplay the emphasis on superior technology, recognizing
that the broader cultural embrace of networked personalized mobility has rendered such
infrastructure an expected, not exceptional amenity. The Playa Vista executive in charge
of the infrastructure confirms that residents now consider such technology a crucial and
expected amenity; most simply praise the cheap digital cable.
65
With its multiple physical networks connecting each home, wireless service in non-domestic
spaces, community intranet, and emphasis on commercial media production, Playa Vista
is replete with networked media spaces and illustrates how such a concept can function at
multiple scales. When purchasing a new residence, homeowners meet with a technology
concierge who helps them to select a home entertainment and communications package.
Beyond being configurable at the level of hardware purchased, each homeowner can either
take advantage of the default digital cable and high-speed Internet package provided as part
of their community dues or choose to upgrade to higher-speed networks (direct fiber or
carrier-line signals) that lie installed but dormant.
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Every room in the residences at Playa
Vista contain structured wiring panels which include multiple ethernet and coaxial jacks,
and ethernet cable is pre-wired to specific locations that allow for IP-based automation of
thermostats, security systems, lighting, and appliances such as refrigerators, washers, and
dedicated surveillance cameras. Indeed the deployment of this infrastructure is carefully
detailed in the “Structured Wiring Guidelines” section of the “Playa Vista Residential and
Mixed Use Design Guidelines.” This document, a twenty-one-page set of instructions that
each builder at Playa Vista is required to follow, notably presents the rationale for consistent
and persistent structured wiring as well as detailed specifications on how it should be
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deployed. The first section, “Why Is Pre-Wiring Important?” provides an overview of what
media convergence is:
The remarkable convergence of television, telephone, satellites, and the personal
computer has created a dynamic new world of interactive communications. Playa
Vista intends to empower its homes, offices, retail outlets, schools, healthcare and
public facilities with an advanced digital broadband telecommunications network.
In addition to cable television and local telephony services, the infrastructure should
provide high bandwidth network facilities including high speed data connectivity,
video teleconferencing, video telephony, and interactive multimedia services such
as movies-on-demand, distance learning, remote diagnostics healthcare and energy
information services.
67
It explains why structured wiring is important:
Advanced wiring allows for such options as viewing VCR, DVD or security camera
images in multiple locations; reliance on a centralized computer or printer for the
family (rather than on individual computers or printers); distribution of television
and audio signals to any room; and access to the myriad applications that will soon
be available to residents and businesses within Playa Vista and beyond.
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And lays out the business case for this investment:
Realistically, in today’s residential market, every new home built without an internal
network is obsolete and represents a missed opportunity. Proper in-home wiring
systems are just as important as plumbing or electrical systems in today’s world.
High-capacity, high-quality coaxial cable, data cabling and telephone wiring will
not only accommodate today’s home systems but also help to assure forward
compatibility in them. The cost of installation to fulfill these capabilities post-
construction is enormous. Because the cost for advanced pre-wiring is a relative low
price to pay to embrace the future and marketing of a high-tech home, Playa Vista
and its Builders can differentiate this community from the competition through the
products and services available via the Community Network.
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Each residence thus comes with a pre-wired, configurable infrastructure that supports the
establishment of customizable local area networks. Additional space is set aside within each
home for a central distribution unit that serves as the home’s media center; this cabinet also
contains the equipment necessary for wireless home networking and space for a residential
gateway that can interface directly with Playa Vista’s fiber optic infrastructure. Similarly, each
building or cluster of homes also contains a telecommunications equipment room which
contains the devices that interface between the development’s fiber-optic networks and each
individual residence; Playa Vista itself is only a quarter mile away from a communications
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switching station and is connected via substantial runs of dark fiber intended to allow for
future connectivity.
70
Because it has deployed such a robust infrastructure, set mandatory guidelines for its
builders, and marketed the overall development as a high-tech, live/work/consume
community, Playa Vista has carefully authored a script for how people might enjoy a mode
of networked personalized mobility. By centralizing portions of the communications
infrastructure, managing the physical networks that run below the entire community, and
striking arrangements with specific communications service providers, Playa Vista has a
great deal of control over the networks that support media spaces within the community.
While the developer clearly foresaw future homeowners’ potential communications needs
and designed a flexible system to support this vision, it has also taken actions that effectively
script consumer behavior. The decision to include the fees for cable and data services into
the monthly homeowners fee, for example, has led to a situation in which residents all
receive cable television instead of satellite (or terrestrial broadcast). The developer did not
have to outlaw satellite dishes or write down a specific rule forbidding satellite service, it
simply bundled services together in a manner that made satellite service unreasonable. In a
similar sense, the networked media spaces in Playa Vista have also been explicitly designed
to extend beyond the domestic sphere, encouraging residents to move within the confines of
the community without sacrificing their privileged connectivity. The developer also currently
manages wireless services available in certain public spaces, although it does have some
competition from retailers (like Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf) and services (like the public library)
that offer additional forms of connectivity.
While it is easy to get lost in the technical details of Playa Vista’s networks and media
spaces, such arrangements raise important questions about the boundaries of privacy at
work in these arrangements. Along with all of the master-planning that has gone into home
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building and community design, Playa Vista is also the master-planner behind the creation
of networked media spaces across the development. The developer ensures and delimits the
nature and scope of the possible media spaces in the community by selecting technology
partners with specific capabilities, by managing the ongoing maintenance and expansion of
the technology platforms, and by issuing structured wiring guidelines and other construction
mandates. The arrangement with Time Warner (originally Comcast) for digital cable,
internet access, and voice services, for example, both proscribes the type of networks that
individuals engage with (no DSL customers and few Satellite users) and also creates distinct
relationships between individual residents, their neighbors using the same networks and
bandwidth, and the community as a whole. These types of limitations are perhaps clearer
when considering the complex reconfiguration of public and private space offered at the level
of the community. On the one hand, Playa Vista’s marketing materials extensively promote
the open, non-gated nature of the community, the publicly accessible streets and parks, and
the developers labored efforts to support local schools, ecological environments, and civic
services. On the other hand, the electronic networks are explicitly private; the community
intranet requires a homeowner code and the wireless hot-spots are restricted to ‘known’
devices registered previously by residents. Similarly, the Playa Vista television channel is
only available to homes connected via the Playa Vista infrastructure. The physical spaces
offer a semblance of public access, but privacy is more complicated in the networked media
spaces, as some paths are bounded off, sealed at the level of the community. In this manner
the public-ness of Playa Vista is quite visible while the private-ness of Playa Vista is much
more difficult to see. New urban plans in general call for a rethinking of private space, by
shrinking lot size, eliminating setbacks, placing dwellings in close proximity, and providing
community amenities (parks, retail, activity centers) that encourage extra-domestic forms
of sociality. But this challenge to privacy is confused at Playa Vista through the embrace of
emergent media technologies that work to reintroduce new, illegible barriers. The registers
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of publicity and privacy are in flux, as they modulate across domestic, community, and
virtual spaces. Moreover, market research conducted by the developer found that integrated
home security systems were the most important technological feature for the majority of
respondents, suggesting a corresponding desire for technologically-enhanced privacy at the
level of the domicile.
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In this manner, domestic space carries some privacy guarantees while surrendering others.
Community guards, security systems, and surveillance cameras protect homes against
physical intrusion. When viewed as networked media spaces, however, these same spaces
are shared with other residents, the developers, service providers such as Time Warner and
Comp USA, and, in some cases, the general public. Because the developer manages and
maintains the technological infrastructure (and is indeed paid to do so through community
dues) it has access to the information that flows through such networks. While anyone
who chooses to use a commercial communications service provider necessarily surrenders
some aspects of privacy, the residents of Playa Vista add an extra party to the situation. The
developer’s role is not unlike that of any major University that bundles telecommunications
services for its students, with the associated potential for involvement, liabilities, disclaimers,
and limitations. Given the broad take-up of the broadband media infrastructure at Playa
Vista, it appears that residents are not particularly concerned about the potential for such
infringement on their privacy. Indeed, the developer has even been able to take advantage
of this apathy for digital privacy – so many residents leave their own wireless signals
unsecured that there has been little pressure on the developer to complete the roll-out of the
community-wide wireless network.
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Moreover, the underlying urban design philosophy and the award-winning marketing of the
Playa Vista development advance a clear vision of a live/work/consume lifestyle that is nearly
directly in line with techno-capitalist critique of Alliez and Feher. Not only are the standard
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connectivity packages touted as sufficient for home-based electronic workers, the developer
also makes available a technology concierge to help likely tele-commuters customize and
upgrade the telecommunications packages that support their productivity. Indeed, the ability
to live and work in the same community – or even the same home – is one of the chief
lures for prospective residents. Many residents are perfectly willing to surrender the privacy
of their domestic space to demands of labor, and are willing to pay a premium to avoid a
commute. Communities like Playa Vista that emphasize and commodify these new ratios of
living put into relief the pressures toward the dedifferentiation of the spaces of productive,
reproductive, and consumptive labor that are distributed broadly, if unevenly across the neo-
Fordist manifestation of capital. The live/work concept on offer here is almost explicitly one
tailored toward the information worker, and is thus inextricably bound with the developer’s
emphasis on technology. Many new urbanist manifestations allow for some ground floor
retail and office space beneath a row of townhouses, but at this point Playa Vista’s use of
space suggests that live/work simply means working through a network.
Beyond the domestic boundaries, it is clear that Playa Vista’s networked media spaces
are every bit as much about exclusion as they are about inclusion. As they are intended
to function as both marketing lure and community enhancer, this should probably not
be all that surprising. As David Harvey reminds us: “The spirit of community has long
been held as an antidote to threats of social disorder, class war and revolutionary violence.
Well-founded communities often exclude, define themselves against others, erect all
sorts of keep-out signs (if not tangible walls), internalize surveillance, social controls, and
repression.”
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While the promise of traditional neighborhood design is that it supports
self-monitoring communities that promote civic and interpersonal engagement, the other
side of this dialectic is an increase in surveillance and social control, and a tendency toward
boundary-setting, exclusion, and the construction of the ‘other.’ This process of community
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formation in newly-built neighborhoods is fundamentally altered by the inclusion of and
emphasis on emergent media technologies, which have the potential for both community
development and increased divisiveness. As discussed in chapter four, Spigel and Allon noted
a distasteful solipsism in their analyses of Bill Gates’ smart house. Spigel suggest that “the
home of tomorrow is an insular design that fails to imagine a future for the community,”
and Allon notes that “networked media infrastructures, such as those supplying smart
houses, are configured in highly selective and unequal ways, distributed along, and actually
reinforcing, the already existing spatial divisions within the social architecture of places in
the urban landscape.”
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Such disparities take on new and nuanced meanings when extended
over the networked media space of the neighborhood or the community. The concept of
the networked media space still accurately describes the inscription of the individual homes
within Playa Vista, but the developer’s centrally controlled infrastructure and provision of
community-wide networks allows for multiple, overlapping, and intersecting networked
media spaces.
This extension is important, as the Playa Vista example give us a sense of the flexibility of
the networked media space in its dilations of public and private space. Not limited to an
articulation of a private home and a public, singular, surveillant network, media spaces work
at multiple scales in the community, also linking together specific homes, in controlled
arrangements, following programmed protocols. The modulations of control working
through the omnipresent networks inscribe domestic and community space, but also work
along vectors of community membership that are ultimately governed by the entry and
maintenance fees set by the developer. But whereas the fences, guards and doormen in gated
communities clearly signal their intentions, these new, digital enclosures set boundaries not
so easily seen.
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The Scripted Community: Interactivity as Exclusivity
Playa Vista powerfully demonstrates the function and intertwining of emergent spatial
and media practices. From the first glance it is quite clearly a scripted space, designed
to entice and awe visitors and potential homebuyers. The external flourishes, of themed
parks and scrubbed sidewalks and playful architecture, are clearly designed to convey a
sense of purpose. The promotional materials make it clear that the purpose is to provide
residents with a fully integrated lifestyle experience, one that is flexible, open to resident
customization, and completely up-to-date with the imperatives of emergent media practices.
Indeed the signal contribution of Playa Vista to the study of scripted spaces is that it so
pointedly articulates the major tenets of new urban design with modes of networked
personalized mobility into its vision of contemporary urban living. Playa Vista offers the
promise of a “re-imagined” urban living; what it effectively offers is an urban experience that
has been imagined in advance for its future residents. It is expected that residents will take
advantage of the multiple broadband infrastructures supporting networked media spaces at
different scales, just as it is assumed that sophisticated homebuyers will recognize the need
for dedicated green spaces and thoughtful neighborhood retail. The ideological principles
of flexibility and mass customization guide both the creation of this specific form of urban
space and the media practices that take place within them. A single developer at Playa Vista
was ultimately responsible for the program that drives this scripted experience, laying out in
documents the rules that were to be followed in the creation of both the built environment
and the technological infrastructure connecting it all together. And this centralized
script is experienced alternately through the media interfaces of residents’ devices and the
spatial interfaces of their customized homes. Perhaps this is what it now meant to offer
“a whole new way of life.” In order to commodify something as complex and customized
as networked personalized mobility the developer of Playa Vista pitched a “Vision” of a
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community of people living balanced lives, an “Architecture” that invited choice, a “Lifestyle”
that combines small-community living with an twenty-first century emphasis on networked
personalized mobility, a rehabilitated “Environment,” and the benefits of twenty-first century
technological “Innovation.”
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And, of course, the images in the brochure that articulates
this script suggest that this “whole new way of life” is being enjoyed by a community of
individuals as diverse as Los Angeles itself.
What remains to be seen is if this community can live up to the promise of diversity inherent
in the new urban charter and the visual suggestion of the Playa Vista developers. Of course
the developer includes the standard equal opportunity language – which in and of itself
represents a dramatic shift from mid-century modes of suburban development – and follows
the Benetton model of including a diversity of skin colors in their promotional materials.
And indeed the developer includes a number of efforts to demonstrate its desire to be a good
partner in the broader west side community, including adopting local schools, hosting public
events, establishing a jobs program, and funding civic improvements to ease traffic flows.
While the developer might well have good intentions, each of these activities also serves to
meet approval requirements or to court public opinion in the face of legal hurdles. So in
addition to evaluating Playa Vista’s effort to script this space, we should also be attentive
to the regressive potential that attends this manner of centralized scripting. As suggested
above, just as the past can be re-imagined and re-inscribed in the built environment of
neotraditional neighborhoods, the process of connectedness and community formation – so
vaunted in the promotional literature – is also historically contingent. Because traditional
neighborhood design borrows its principles from an era in which community implied
segregation and social control, we should be wary of community as a goal and of the ability
of developments like Playa Vista to provide it. David Harvey, writing about new urbanism
in general, diagnoses the challenge as one of scale:
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The presumption here is that neighborhoods are in some sense ‘intrinsic,’ that the
proper form of cities is some ‘structure of neighborhoods,’ that ‘neighborhood’ is
equivalent to ‘community’ and ‘community’ is what most Americans want and
need (whether they know it or not). It is further presumed that action at the scale
defined by this new urbanism is effective and sufficient to solve problems that exist
at all other scales. The nostalgic and spatially limited strain of the utopian dream
resurfaces.
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This emphasis on scale is particularly relevant in the case of Playa Vista, as its emphasis
on technology and the provision of networked media spaces layers yet another set of
scale questions on top of the spatial questions Harvey is considering. Surely an accessible
community with public green spaces, retail stores, and civic buildings is a more socially just
form of development than a gated community, and Playa Vista should at least be lauded
on that count. But new questions arise. What have we gained if the visible barriers have
receded (pace the disciplinary society) only to be replaced by the modulations of high
housing prices and secured network connections (pace the societies of control)? What does
it mean for a single developer like Playa Vista to have such a central role in the scripting of
such a large swath of urban space? In some ways having this material example allows us to
point to a protagonist in this particular scripted space, like one has in analyzing Disneyland
or a mall. But we shouldn’t be too quick to hold up Playa Capital as the driving force in
the scripting of this emergent urban space, as it is in some ways just a manifestation of the
broader forces guiding the re-scripting of urban space in general. The current developer of
Playa Vista simply had the good fortune to take control of the property just as Dreamworks
was articulating a vision of a lifestyle that updated the new ratios of living encouraged by
new urbanism with ideals of networked personalized mobility. And Dreamworks itself was
merely distilling the possibilities that were culturally up for discussion in the late 1990s, as
the productive potential of mass customization and connected living were just taking hold.
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Chapter 5 Endnotes
“playaVista.com, ” http://playavista.com/. 1.
ibid. 2.
ibid. 3.
d ana c uff, 4. The Provisional City (c ambridge, ma : mit p ress, 2002).
c uff, The p rovisional c ity, 328; william f ulton, “green light for playa vista, ” 5. Planning 59, no. 11
(n ovember 1993): 31.
“tnd s vs. the “c alifornia hybrid” , ” 6. New Urban News (s eptember 2002), http://www.
newurbannews.com/c alifornia%20h ybrid.html.
“playaVista.com.” 7.
J. william gibson and c hester King, “skeletons in p laya Vista’s c loset, ” 8. Los Angeles Times, June 20,
2004; n ick madigan, “d eveloper u nearths burial ground and s tirs u p a nger a mong indians, ” New
Y ork Times, June 2, 2004.
g ary w alker, “n ative a merican reburial ceremony at playa Vista d ec. 13, ” 9. The Argonaut , d ecember
11, 2008, http://www.argonautnewspaper.com/articles/2008/12/11/news_-_features/top_stories/1pv.
txt.
madigan, “d eveloper u nearths burial ground and s tirs u p a nger a mong indians.” 10.
w . w . r obinson, 11. Culver City, California: A Calendar of Events: in which is Included, Also, the Story
of Palms and Playa Del Rey T ogether with Rancho La Ballona and Rancho Rincon de Los Bueyes. (t itle
g uarantee and t rust co., 1939).
Julie l ugo cerra, 12. Culver City (a rcadia publishing, 2004).
James s terngold, “ a l ittle piece of l os a ngeles is a wide open b attleground, ” 13. New Y ork Times,
a ugust 18, 2001.
Jeffrey h a ltschul et al., 14. Playa Vista Archaeological and Historical Project Research Design, s tatistical
research technical series 29 (t ucson, a riz: s tatistical r esearch, 1991), 90.
ibid., 62. 15.
ibid., 94. 16.
t rust for public land, “s tate a cquires h istoric ballona w etlands property, ” d ecember 19, 2003, 17.
http://resources.ca.gov/ballona_wetlands/ballona_w etlands_purchase_press_r elease.pdf.
d ream w orks s tudios, “press r elease, ” d ecember 13, 1995. 18.
ibid. 19.
playa c apital, funded primarily by g oldman s achs, m organ s tanley, and u nion labor l ife 20.
insurance was formed to take control of the development when maguire Thomas defaulted on payments
in 1998.
251
h elga g endell, “marina a ffairs committee hears p laya Vista update; details of new walking 21.
tour brochure, ” The Argonaut , s eptember 25, 2008, http://www.argonautnewspaper.com/
articles/2008/09/25/news_-_features/playa_vista/pv1.txt.
Joel g arreau, 22. Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (n ew Y ork: d oubleday, 1991); r obert f ishman,
Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (n ew Y ork: basic b ooks, 1987).
m ike d avis, 23. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (l ondon ; n ew Y ork: V erso,
1990); m ike d avis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (n ew Y ork: m etropolitan
b ooks, 1998); m ike d avis, Kelly mayhew, and Jim m iller, Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego T ourists
Never See (n ew Y ork: n ew press, 2005).
a ndres d uany, e lizabeth plater-Zyberk, and Jeff s peck, 24. Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and
the Decline of the American Dream (n ew Y ork: n orth point press, 2000).
d avid h arvey, 25. Spaces of Hope (b erkeley: u niversity of c alifornia press, 2000), 169.
a ndrew r oss, 26. The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Property V alues in Disney’s
New T own (n ew Y ork: ballantine b ooks, 1999), 74.
d uany, plater-Zyberk, and s peck, 27. Suburban Nation, 256.
ibid., 263. 28.
h arvey, 29. Spaces of Hope, 170.
congress for the n ew u rbanism, “c harter of the n ew u rbanism, ” 1996, http://www.cnu.org/ 30.
charter.
martha groves and r oger Vincent, “in a land of sprawl, urban village grows, ” 31. The Record (b ergen
county, n J), n ovember 28, 2003.
“playaVista.com.” 32.
congress for the n ew u rbanism, “c harter of the n ew u rbanism.” 33.
m eaghan m orris, “Things to do with shopping centers, ” in 34. T oo Soon T oo Late (bloomington:
indiana u niversity press, 1998), 69.
“playaVista.com.” 35.
playa Vista, “pla Ya V ist a home fairs dra w 10,000 a ttendees ; 76 percent 36.
elect to continue participa tion in pre -sale acti Vities , ” July 17, 2002, http://
playavista.com/about/news/release.php?id=16.
“playaVista.com.” 37.
d erek f raychineaud, “personal communications, ” a pril 4, 2007. 38.
congress for the n ew u rbanism, “c harter of the n ew u rbanism.” 39.
playa Vista, “pla Ya V ist a 90094: the westside’ s newest address , ” a ugust 27, 40.
2002, http://playavista.com/about/news/release.php?id=14.
252
f or more on the mass production of homes in w estchester see: greg h ise, 41. Magnetic Los Angeles:
Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis (baltimore: Johns h opkins u niversity press, 1997); for
more on l evittown see: h erbert J. g ans, The Levittowners; W ays of Life and Politics in a New Suburban
Community (n ew Y ork,: pantheon b ooks, 1967).
l ee h omes, “matisse n eighborhood brochure.” 42.
w armington h omes, “coronado n eighborhood brochure.” 43.
laing l uxury h omes, “icon at playa Vista n eighborhood brochure.” 44.
“playaVista.com.” 45.
ibid. 46.
patrick m cd onald, “playa Vista Quicksand, ” 47. LA W eekly, s eptember 20, 2007, http://www.
laweekly.com/2007-09-20/news/playa-vista-quicksand/.
V alley industry and commerce association, “p osition paper on playa Vista phase 2 - the Village.” 48.
r oss, The celebration c hronicles, 218-219. 49.
r obert d . putnam, 50. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (n ew Y ork:
simon & s chuster, 2000).
r oss, 51. The Celebration Chronicles , 78.
“playa Vista price f inder.” 52.
r aymond williams, 53. T elevision: T echnology and Cultural Form, Routledge classics (n ew Y ork and
l ondon: r outledge, 2003).
“playaVista.com.” 54.
a former d reamworks executive quoted in: Jill s tewart, “d reamJerks: s teven s pielberg and h is 55.
billionaire partners w ould bulldoze e .t . to g et the playa Vista m egadevelopment built on l .a .’s last
s urviving w etlands. but o utraged c itizens may t opple These giants, ” New Times Los Angeles, June 3,
1999.
f raychineaud, “personal communications.” 56.
ibid. 57.
r oger Vincent, “f ox interactive gets consolidation space, ” 58. Los Angeles Times, July 1, 2008; r oger
Vincent, “n ew office complex rising in p laya Vista; t ech firm b elkin will be a major tenant in the
$1.2-billion project, ” Los Angeles Times, June 27, 2008.
m ike h ogan, “m ove into the h ouse of the f uture, ” 59. PCW orld.com (n ovember 28, 2003), http://
pcworld.about.com/news/n ov282003id113080.htm.
f raychineaud, “personal communications.” 60.
“playa Vista community b rochure, ” 2003. 61.
253
ibid. 62.
playa Vista, “pla Ya V ist a recei Ves prestigious a w ards for innoV a ti Ve 63.
Visitor center , ” march 11, 2002, http://www.playavista.com/about/news/release.php?id=19.
s teve Zurier, “f ull-f ledged wireless communities b eing r olled o ut, ” 64. Builder Magazine, January
20, 2004, http://www.builderonline.com/technology/full-fledged-wireless-communities-being-rolled-
out.aspx.
f raychineaud, “personal communications.” 65.
ibid. 66.
playa Vista, “playa Vista r esidential and m ixed u se d esign g uidelines, s ection 9-1, ” u pdated 7, 67.
2004.
ibid. 68.
ibid. 69.
f raychineaud, “personal communications”; h ogan, “m ove into the h ouse of the f uture.” 70.
f raychineaud, “personal communications.” 71.
ibid. 72.
h arvey, 73. Spaces of Hope, 170.
l ynn s pigel, 74. W elcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs, Console-ing passions
(d urham, nc : d uke u niversity press, 2001), 385; f iona a llon, “ a n o ntology of e veryday control, ” in
Mediaspace: Place, Scale, and Culture in a Media Age, ed. n ick couldry and a nna m cc arthy (n ew Y ork
and l ondon: r outledge, 2004), 271.
“playa Vista community b rochure.” 75.
h arvey, 76. Spaces of Hope, 171.
254
Chapter 6: Distributing the Script
The relationship between emergent media technologies and emergent urban spaces is
complex, multiple, and uneven. It is quite clear that people use space differently than they
have in the past, and that some of these new spatial practices are pointedly tied to emergent
media technologies. In privileged realms such as air travel, it sometimes feels like the travel
is an excuse for people to show off their mobile phones, iPods, portable DVD players, sub-
compact laptops, noise cancelling headphones, and electronic book readers. This association
is so strong that many of these devices even include an airplane mode designed to suppress
the receiving function and just allow media playback or communication drafting. In the
airport, this means that people spend an inordinate amount of time chatting on their
phones, working on their laptops, or getting a head start on the movie they plan to finish
on the plane. Once aboard, this usually registers as many individuals engaging in their
own personalized media experiences rather than watching a collectively screened film. Of
course, it should be noted that these media practices do not eliminate the possibility of
other practices. Plenty of passengers still watch the CNN Airport channel and the airline-
supplied movie. Lots of people bring along books, magazines, and newspapers to pass
the time. These continued practices underscore the emergent nature of contemporary
media and spatial practices. It is not the case that every member of society is interested in
personalized electronic media experiences, and the conspicuous use of such technologies in
shared social space raises the suspicion that at least part of the pleasure of such engagements
are tied up with their cultural signification. And yet these emergent practices of media
and space do reach much further than a Wi-Fi enabled flight. T ry the more local end of
the transit spectrum and one see buses and subways full of people busily thumbing their
phones or dozing with white earbuds in place. There are likely to be fantastic differences
at stake in these distinct spaces, with notable variations in the specific types, models, and
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quantity of technology on display (and these devices might well operate on tiered or pre-paid
service plans), but they are practices consistent with the broader cultural logic of networked
personalized mobility. Add in pedestrians on mobile communication devices, SUVs with
passenger controlled DVD players and game systems, and consumer GPS navigators and
it becomes apparent that a broad practice of contemporary mobility is tightly bound with
emergent media technologies. And this is just the most conspicuous way that emergent
media and mobility are linked. Aside from these visible displays, emergent media can also
support mobility by freeing individuals from place-based constraints. In this sense a digital
video recorder or an on-demand archive allows an individual to enjoy programming of their
choosing without having to be home at a certain time, allowing that person to go other
places. Mobile communications devices allow individuals be contactable without being
restricted to a specific place with a landline connection. Certain forms of computer-based
work can be done in disparate locations, freeing some individuals from the discipline of the
office – and inviting in discipline of a new sort. So in addition to an active mode of techno-
mobility in which technology is explicitly engaged, another mode supports mobility by
lessening spatial constraints. In all of these examples and countless more technology plays
a role in the development of new spatial practices. Because spatial practices are also always
social practices and social practices have political consequences it is tempting to focus a
critique of the spatial impact of emergent media technologies on direct questions of access,
sociability, cultural production, and economic impact. All of these are important questions
and have been taken up in interesting ways by a variety of critics.
Although this project has touched on these issues in passing, the goal has been to understand
the more fundamental relationships between emergent media technologies and emergent
spatial practices, how they participate in and are driven by broader changes in systems of
culture and power. As a result, an effort has been made to understand both the visible
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manifestations of these emergent phenomenon and the unseen factors that structure
these experiences. First and foremost, this means that we must think spatially in order to
understand the cultural work of emergent media. This means accounting for the various
materialities that support everyday media experiences. As detailed in chapters two and three,
these materialities take a variety of forms, including the non-place of the media interface, the
hidden but ubiquitous space of media infrastructures, and the protocols and code that keep
the system humming. In this accounting TiVo menus and iPhone screens are the seductive
spaces that draw in users, encourage interaction, and distract attention from the vast
architecture that supports distributed engagements. As much as it is important to recognize
the complex and widespread materiality of network infrastructures, and while it is useful to
insist upon the spatiality of the usually overlooked media interfaces, the synthesis of these
elements yields still more. The engagement of interfaces in the presence of networks yields
culturally visible changes to the practice of social space. Everyday spaces simply function
differently when individuals use their media devices to exist in proximate and virtual social
spaces at the same time. Just as sociality works in split registers in these networked media
spaces, so too does privacy. The physical environment of the networked media space blends
together qualities of public and private space, supporting hybrid modes of behavior. And
the mediated environment of these spaces does the same, as media interfaces simultaneously
emphasize a user’s ability to personalize media experiences and allow for the detailed
monitoring of these choices.
In addition to producing network media spaces, the articulation of media interfaces and
infrastructures also supports the incorporation of individuals into contemporary circuits
of capital exchange. Media interfaces are designed for interactivity. Their promise is
that they allow us to exert some control over flows of information, programming, and
communication. We interact with media interfaces in order to personalize a television
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stream, customize a playlist, or take a phone call in the car. Our desires and behaviors
are dutifully registered with each click, as these preferences must be processed in order to
better tailor the experience. In a local sense, this simply means that our experience at the
interface is doubly pleasurable; not only do we get a customized media experience, but we
also get the sense that we participated in this process. Of course, interactivity is inherently
a process of engagement, and in this case is also doubly productive. In addition to the
provision of customized experiences this interactivity produces feedback. This feedback
is used immediately to deliver the experience, and, if stored, can be used to further refine
future experiences. Indeed, if we abstract a bit from the one-on-one process of a single user
engaging a single interface we might construct a picture of millions of users simultaneously
experiencing their own pleasures and providing useful data for the service providers that
support these experiences.
In this sense the media interface can be thought of as the experiential end of a neo-Fordist
interactive scripted space. These interfaces are spatial environments so compelling that
they screen out the complexity that delivers the experience. More to the point, they are
compelling precisely because they are interactive, because they incorporate our desires into
the space itself. The script of these spaces rests with the networks that structure them. The
possibilities and limitations of network infrastructures, protocol, and code do the work
of turning interactivity into datea and subsequently generating media experiences from
this data. This script is not produced by a single entity or government, but is rather more
broadly produced by a vast array of individuals and institutions, working in complement
to perpetuate a system that promises both profit and pleasure. These scripted spaces, and
the emergent media interfaces and devices that host them, are a tangible representation
of broader shifts in the constitution of economic and social power in favor of productive
systems of control designed to flexibly and responsively incorporate users and user desire.
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Although many have noted the role that networks play in these neo-Fordist processes,
framing emergent media technologies with the rubric of interactive scripted spaces
foregrounds the roles played by infrastructure, code, and interface. The former factors
drive the script, and the interface encourages the exchange. And the very sensations of
customization and control that make media interfaces engaging are, not surprisingly, the
ideological underpinnings of an entire system designed to systematically commodify user
desire into mass customized experiences.
And because these ideological forces are part of a broader shift in cultural and economic
relations they also reveal further affinities between emergent media and emergent urbanism.
The feedback mechanisms are not as direct, as interactivity functions more indirectly in an
explicitly spatial context, but the fundamental factors are the same. The ideological strictures
of mass customization work through the script of urban planning in order to produce specific
spatial experiences. The previous example of Playa Vista suggested that vast forces similarly
structure this script, even if it seems to have a singular protagonist. In the case of Playa
Vista it is tempting to single out Playa Capital as the entity that churned up the land and
coordinated all of the construction, but the deeper history insists that we must also factor
in Howard Hughes, Dreamworks, planners associated with new urbanism, local and state
politicians, local and regional environmental groups, corporate tenants, and, of course the
thousands of residents that enjoy the community. Even with all of these players tugging
at the development over the course of three decades, the community, although not yet
completed, feels scripted, the result of a comprehensive vision. Yet even as the space exhibits
a pointed cohesiveness, it nonetheless bears the traces of the larger program in its emphasis
on customization and community. The wide array of architectural styles, floor plans, and
(past a certain threshold) price levels reflect a will toward diversity. While explicitly not
custom built, many of the dwellings themselves emphasize the configurability of their
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spaces as a feature in touch with contemporary sensibilities. If the logic of customization
is apparent in the built environment, the logic of interactivity finds its outlet in the studied
emphasis on creating a connected community. This desire to foster interaction is inherent
to the vision of Playa Vista, and the various elements of new urbanist thinking that supports
the community are geared toward encouraging individuals to socialize and interact with their
neighbors.
What sets Playa Vista apart is the manner in which it adds a technological layer to this
scripted space. Built out of the ashes of Dreamworks’ vision, this twenty-first century
community features a network infrastructure built before the buildings themselves broke
ground. In addition to the coordinated provision of advanced network infrastructure,
Playa Vista continues to push the community toward being an interactive scripted space by
providing a separate community website for residents, by holding training sessions, by luring
emergent media firms (in the hopes of completing the high-tech live/work/consume vision),
and by explicitly requesting feedback through community surveys, public meetings, and
online polls. Above all, Playa Vista provides an example of how networked media spaces can
function at multiple scales and how these spaces work both with and against expectations for
the social use of space.
Beyond Playa Vista
Clearly Playa Vista is exceptional in the way it brings together the cultural visions of new
urbanism and emergent media, but it is not alone in its participation in a broader movement
toward the establishment of interactive scripted spaces at the level of a community. Most
master-planned developments latch onto a subset of these ideas and make that their
rhetorical selling point. The town of New Daleville in southeastern Pennsylvania, for
example, is a small new urbanist-inspired community that pitches itself as “country village”
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designed to host a specific type of community. The marketing brochure promises: “Welcome
back to a time when there were White Picket Fences, Front Porches, Parks, and Neighbors
became Friends…”
1
This community differs from Playa Vista in that the developer chose to
work with a single builder to construct all of the homes, so the vision on offer plays down
the elements of customization and choice in favor of community and interactivity. This
community, well out into Pennsylvania horse country, might not prominently promote a
vision of techno-mediated living, but it has internalized the importance of structured wiring,
providing advanced cable and television prewiring in the homes. The New Town of Prospect,
a bit north of Denver in Colorado, similarly embraces the function of community, but does
so with an explicit reference to the principles of new urbanism and a mélange of architectural
styles. (Figure 6.1) Unlike New Dalesville’s arrangement of exclusively single-family homes,
Prospect follows the new urbanist principle of including “detached houses, townhouses,
courtyard houses, apartments, and live/work lofts.”
2
Beyond these various housing types,
Photos by Jennie Chamberlain
f igure 6.1: prospect n ew t own near l ongmont, co
261
Prospect embraces the logic of customization through a range of architectural styles and
design flourishes including homes and buildings that look like urban lofts, California
craftsmans, prairie style homes, French country homes, and modernist experiments. It
might seem that this embrace would make for a disorienting eclecticism, but it manages to
appeal as thoughtful diversity. Prospect does not feature an exceptional focus on technology,
perhaps because the first phase of development commenced in the mid-1990s. Other
new communities in Colorado’s front range, such as Stapleton in Denver or Belmar in
Lakewood, began construction in recent years and do indeed feature a robust technological
infrastructure, if not quite the vision of Playa Vista.
Each of these developments can to some extent be addressed through the rubric of interactive
scripted spaces, in no small part because they have generally been brought to fruition under
the guide of a centralized developer. Each case has its specific local history of planners and
players involved in the process, and each development is ultimately a negotiation between
developer, builder, and community, but all of the above examples still feature a single
developer responsible for packaging and marketing the community as a whole. Yet the
broader scripting of space and the vision of techno-mediated lifestyle has impacts that go
beyond master planned communities. The general principles of emergent media technologies
underwriting forms of mobility hold in many different contexts, often for different reasons.
One could, for example, explain the trend toward developing exurban communities as at
least partially supported by the provision of robust infrastructures, and in some cases by
infrastructures superior to those available in suburbs from an earlier generation. Robert
Fishman has used the term technoburb to describe a stand-alone community located
at some distance from an urban core that nonetheless remains connected via advanced
telecommunications systems.
3
This vision, along with others such as Joel Garreau’s Edge
City, emphasizes the role of networks in supporting the establishment of industries and the
262
provision of jobs. Of course many things have changed over the two decades since these
concepts were advanced, not the least of which is the scale and importance of domestic
media infrastructures. In any case, these exurban communities often include their own
forms of networked media space, primarily centered around domestic spaces but also offered
through many of the national restaurants and cafés that open as soon as there are residents
in the homes. Such communities are rarely master planned in the manner of the previous
examples and tend to recapitulate the development patterns of previous suburban efforts, but
their development depends at least in part on individuals’ expectations that their mobility
will be supported by emergent media technologies.
In the other direction, a number of urban centers in the United States have seen some
development trends over the past decade that implicitly and explicitly participate in a techno-
mediated reconstruction of the built environment. San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood
is probably the most noted of these efforts, as Internet companies large and small entered
the neighborhood in the late 1990s and pushed/priced out many of the residents, a mix
of artists and lower-wage workers, who had chosen to live in the neighborhood for its low
rents and alternative ethos. The neighborhood was attractive to emergent media companies
because it was less expensive than other parts of the Bay Area, but also because it signaled
an alternative corporate sensibility that the upstart industry was eager to embrace. SoMa
has had its ups and downs over the past decade, but it still features a number of prominent
emergent media companies and thousands of residents who work in technology businesses
and choose to live in and around SoMa because it supports a viable live/work/consume
lifestyle. The Pearl district in Portland has similarly been developed over the past decade as a
live/work/consume area where old warehouses have been converted into residential and retail
environments. Like San Franscisco’s SoMa, the revitalized Pearl district leaned heavily on the
discursive proposition that this new urban space would support a new form of urban living
263
that emphasized neighborhood opportunities to circulate, socialize and engage in cultural
activities. As a result, the Pearl district has cultivated a notable collection of art galleries,
clubs, cafés, and urban parks designed to support socialization and community development.
Moreover, in both of these examples the process of redevelopment has emphasized the
construction of relatively dense, transit-oriented communities featuring configurable spaces.
The marketing of unfinished condominiums as urban lofts might well be a studied effort to
package the built environment of gentrification for relatively well-off urban adventurers, but
the emphasis on configurable spaces also reflects the broader cultural script of customization.
Eclectic, diverse, and configurable spatial environment hold a specific cultural value, as
evidenced by the many creative class gentrifications of urban areas in the past two decades.
These efforts, often referred to as urban revitalization, are driven by many of the same new
urbanist principles that underscore the earlier examples of planned communities. They
emphasize diverse and configurable domestic spaces; their designs foster pedestrian mobility
and support transit instead of automobiles; and they loosely package an overall lifestyle
built on the principle that one’s neighborhood should be able to locally support regular
patterns of living, working, and consuming. In distinct opposition to the spatial separation
of productive and reproductive labor that characterized an earlier generation of suburbs,
new urbanist planned communities and recent efforts toward urban revitalization share an
emphasis on the dedifferentiation of spatial practice. These efforts are reflected in dwellings
that are marketed for their live/work possibilities, in the inclusion of retail and cultural
venues below or alongside residential space, and in a general move toward socialization
outside of the home. In short, these two seemingly different efforts – one centrally planned,
the other more distributed; one constructed anew outside the urban core, the other adapting
existing urban space with some new construction – are working with related versions of the
same cultural script. These two approaches reflect the broad imperatives of customization
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and interactivity, and project a vision of urban living that is bound up with the mobilities
associated with emergent media technologies.
Though these analogous new urban practices have not yet become the dominant forms of
urban development in the United States, they are broadly at work in many cities across the
country and find expression in many parts of the world. Certain areas seem to be more
willing to experiment with these efforts than others. Metropolitan Denver, for example,
features a linked set of urban centers undergoing some processes of revitalization and
at least a dozen new urbanist communities are being constructed along the front range.
The Washington, DC area features a similar mix of experimentation at the core and the
periphery, and Florida is noted for hosting the highest profile new urbanist experiments. The
Portland area has become famous for its progressive planning practices, both inside the firm
city boundaries and through experimentation with new urbanist ideas in transit-oriented
communities nearby. And even Los Angeles, the paragon of decentralized development
and the subject of so many critiques, is experimenting in both directions. The development
in Playa Vista represents the greatest experiment in centralized urban planning, and this is
matched with ongoing urban revitalization efforts in the Hollywood and downtown districts.
In the Hollywood area over the past decade a mix of small and large scale developments
have been built up along the newly established transit line, bringing a bit of gentrification
to a neighborhood that had been known for a gritty mix of tourist attractions and urban
squalor. Like the revitalization in SoMa, these efforts include converting old buildings
into condominiums and lofts, mixing residential and retail uses, and emphasizing the
suitability of the neighborhood for people desiring a certain urban lifestyle. The marketing
for the Madrone lofts, built by the same builders as the upscale Icon homes at Playa Vista,
makes this explicit in their promotional materials, not only insisting that “You are where
you live” and that their dwellings are “only for the creative class,” but dramatizing these
265
claims with renderings of modern lofts replacing a person’s neck and head.
4
(Figure 6.2)
The revitalization of Hollywood is certainly a case of distributed development, featuring
investment and encouragement from the City of Los Angeles (interested in a vibrant
community, but also in an enhanced tax base and staving off succession); high-profile
companies like Disney, Whole Foods, and the W Hotel chain; many developers and builders;
and a contentious local community. But the revitalization of Hollywood is relatively low
profile compared to the determined efforts to rework parts of downtown Los Angeles.
Scripting the City: Downtown Los Angeles
Downtown Los Angeles is currently going through one of its periodic and transformative
booms. The current round of development traces its roots to a series of planning decisions
made in the late 1980s and 1990s, including a citywide proposition limiting density, a
f igure 6.2: madrone l ofts by John lainge l uxury
Postcard Images by John Lainge Luxury
266
general plan framework emphasizing mixed use transit oriented design, the establishment
of neighborhood councils to better represent citizen interests, and, most notably, the
Downtown Adaptive Reuse Ordinance which directed the conversion of older buildings into
apartments and live/work units. The phrases used to describe development since 1999 –
“renaissance,” “transformation,” “revitalization,” “hottest residential real-estate market on the
west coast,” “boutique city living” – refer in part to the scale of the changes and in part to the
very idea that Downtown Los Angeles could be considered an attractive place to live and visit
at all hours of the day.
5
Downtown has been a major business center for a century, but since
the 1960s has been home to fewer than 20,000 residents, not including a sizable homeless
population (currently about 4,000 people).
6
With the exception of some condominiums
built in the Bunker Hill district in the 1980s, these residents were primarily low-income and
working-class, living in various types of affordable housing. In the past decade, however,
the construction of more than 8,000 new condominium and rental units – with another
9,000 under construction or permitted – has boosted the downtown resident population
nearly 50%.
7
At the same time, two massive multi-billion-dollar cultural and entertainment
projects are bookending the residential construction and providing a broader sense that this
development boom will provide the full range of social opportunities necessary to change
the central city district from a work-hours region into a vibrant and diverse community of
residents and visitors. (Figure 6.3)
The physical redevelopment of downtown Los Angeles is substantial, and much of it
corresponds to the interactive scripting of space described above. Like the gentrifications
in San Francisco and Portland, the process started with a mix of artists and at-home craft
workers occupying deindustrialized urban spaces alongside an existing population of
low-wage, low-visibility residents who already practiced a model of living, working, and
consuming in a dense urban setting, but in a less privileged register of capital. Acting as
267
almost a proof-of-concept for a future wave of live/work/consume development, these
early residential populations challenged popular notions that downtown Los Angeles was
BUNKER
HILL
CIVIC
CENTER
FINANCIAL
CORE
SPORTS &
ENTERTAINMENT
DISTRICT
SOUTH PARK
CCE
SOUTH
MARKETS
f igure 6.3: d owntown l os a ngeles plan
Central City plan map from Central City Community Plan, a part
of the General Plan of the City of Los Angeles, 4/21/2005
268
a completely derelict, unlivable space. Indeed, while previous attempts to revitalize the
downtown in 1980s only managed to dot a strip of the city with office-hours developments,
a relatively lively collection of ethnic markets, independent textile retailers, and civic
services provided for a mode of urbanism that, while resolutely organized by capital, did
not participate in the wave of branded and chain retail and services that characterized
the consumerist economy of late twentieth century. Even as the City of Los Angeles
was desperately pushing to land Dreamworks on the west side of town, civic leaders
were simultaneously pushing for a new round of investment downtown. This push for a
contemporary downtown urbanism was reflected in a desire for both cultural destinations
and a population of well-to-do residents that would signify the safeness and vibrancy of a
city that had suffered through serious economic and image problems throughout the 1980s
and 1990s. The cultural embellishments were to take the form of concert halls, public parks,
and entertainment districts that would attract regional and destination visitors. The living
spaces were to take advantage of the existing building stock, modified from piece-work
industrial purposes into flexible dwelling units. The actual development was encouraged
by tax breaks but was taken on by a hodge-podge of developers working at quite different
scales. The earliest efforts followed the plan of adaptive reuse, which subsequently led to a
wave of new construction as well, with cranes dotting the LA skyline for much of the first
decade of the twenty-first century. Nearly all of these buildings were marketed as flexible
urban space, usually around some use of the term loft, including the neologism soft loft,
which is essentially just a luxury condominium with slightly fewer walls.
8
In addition to
dozens of adaptive reuse buildings with explicitly open floor planes, many new or adaptive
reuse buildings promised similar configurable living environments. Beyond branding these
developments as lofts or loft-style buildings, the new buildings downtown tend to provide
a host of emergent media features, including high-speed wired connections, Wi-Fi available
in lobbies and community spaces, and networked entertainment rooms that served as an
269
extension of individual living spaces. The Pacific Electric Lofts, for example, boast of 150
floor plans and list high-speed Internet, wireless coverage in common areas, and satellite
television as their top amenities.
9
The Luma South building, a newly constructed tower,
includes a primer on soft lofts on their web site and repeatedly notes its extensive pre-wiring
and data panels.
10
The residences in these buildings were no longer the rough industrial
spaces of the old urban core, but were specifically designed to softly simulate those spaces
with enough accoutrements, including a technological infrastructure, to allow these spaces
to fit a more contemporary script. Just as in the examples from other cities presented earlier,
this overall emphasis on dedifferentiated urban spaces with a special focus on mobility and
cultural activity is reflective of the ideological forces scripting emergent urban spaces. The
cultural vision of a twenty-first century urban mobility is predicated in some respects on
the suite of technological infrastructure that allows individuals to physically move about the
city while still connected to their social networks, supports time-shifting and asynchronous
communications tied to specific times and places, and allows them to access entertainment
and communications streams from a variety of urban networked media spaces. The
interweaving of media and space to the point where they are inextricably bound means that
people can practice space differently.
But these changes to the built environment are not the entire story. Right alongside this
physical development is the discursive construction of “Downtown Los Angeles” that
proceeds apace, and in some cases ahead, of the re-construction of the built environment in
downtown Los Angeles. In particular, networked publics follow, celebrate, and dispute the
establishment of a revitalized city core, emphasizing both the possibilities and limitations
engendered through the distributed construction of an urban environment in the popular
imaginary. Even as major and specialty periodicals covered this development boom, a more
dynamic, sustained, and contentious account can be found on the websites, weblogs, and
270
listservs dedicated to downtown living. A record of the visual imaginary can be found on
the websites of loft developers, park planners, and business district representatives, including
renderings of planned buildings, interactive mappings of downtown districts, dynamic
property valuation models, and construction images. In other spaces, prominent and
everyday stakeholders share concerns, voice opinions, and engage in sustained discussions
regarding the current and potential changes to the built environment and social dynamic.
Taken together, this distributed networked media environment opened up the process of
constructing downtown in the popular imagination, providing crucial public perspectives
extending beyond the boundaries of traditional boosterism. Ultimately, however, this
expansion of public engagement in the process of urban development is predicated on the
marginalization and proxy representation of certain voices, crucial considerations in the
revitalization of an area populated by residents likely to be displaced and discouraged in the
new downtown.
In some ways this is simply a mediated extension of an increasingly inclusionary development
process in the City of Los Angeles. The paradigmatic “growth machine,” Los Angeles has
since the late 19th century relied on an exuberant boosterism on the part of developers,
builders, political figures, and local media.
11
After the physical development of the city
filled out the LA basin, the nearby valleys, adjacent counties, and finally pushed over the
mountains into the desert, the growth machine started to falter over the past few decades.
12

Homeowner groups, environmental camps, and social justice organizations have pressed
their cases with developers, politicians, and in the courts, and have been able to slow or stop
a series of major developments. Such negotiations factor prominently in the development
of the LA Live project, a $2.5 billion development anchoring the south end of the central
city area. (Figure 6.4) Currently under construction, this project is conceived as a major
element in a “sports and entertainment district,” adding a major concert venue, a museum,
271
restaurants, movie theatres, a high-end hotel, and premium high-rise residences to an area
already featuring the Los Angeles Convention Center and the Staples Center arena. Both the
Staples Center, which opened in 1999, and LA Live, partially operating now and scheduled
for completion in 2010, are owned and operated by AEG, a subsidiary of the Anschutz
Company. The development of the Staples Center in the 1990s followed established
patterns, with billionaire real estate and entertainment developers successfully lobbying
f igure 6.4: la l ive d evelopment
LA Live renderings from LALive website.
272
the city for financial support and approvals. Although there was some public outcry, the
process was fast-tracked and the stadium was built in 18 months. When the developers
pushed for LA Live, however, they were successfully pressured by a coalition of twenty-
nine local community groups – known as the Figueroa Corridor Coalition for Economic
Justice – to include local hiring, living wages, affordable housing, and local community
development concessions.
13
While the coalition gained some tangible benefits – in return
for giving assent to the project – their input was restricted to issues of economic justice and
the mitigation of impact on the neighborhood, not on the scale, design, or elements of the
massive development. Along the same lines, while these negotiations represent a significant
achievement for a small group of residents and activists, they did not include broader
downtown or regional perspectives.
The problems of breadth and scope of input were addressed to some extent during the
planning phase of the Grand Avenue project, which would anchor the north end of the
central city area. The initial announcement of the $3 billion project, which would include
a Frank Gehry-designed ultra-high-end hotel, high-rise residences, retail spaces, and a 16-
acre public park, was presented as if it were a gift from the Grand Avenue Commission to
the residents of the city. (Figure 6.5) Before the project could complete the regular steps of
receiving approval at City Council meetings with minimal public input, the Norman Lear
Center at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication
announced the Grand Intervention, a call for increased public participation in the design of
this uniquely important greenspace project. The Grand Intervention demanded multiple
community workshops on park design and provided a web-based infrastructure to broaden
the participation beyond individuals who could directly attend the workshops. This project
was successful in convening and webcasting workshops, distributing digital files of materials,
and launching a design competition that fielded more than 300 designs for models of what
273
Grand Avenue Project images from website
f igure 6.5: grand a venue project
Sample submissions from
Grand Intervention website
f igure 6.6: grand i ntervention
274
the civic park should include. (Figure 6.6) Perhaps most crucially, this organization leveraged
its institutional status and its sway with local media to pressure the developers to seriously
consider this additional design input. While the park project has not yet broken ground,
this example shows how a mediated engagement with the development process can include
voices outside the familiar constituencies of sponsors, developers, and political leaders. And
by facilitating information sharing as well as a design competition the Grand Intervention
pushed public input well beyond “commenting” and opened up further aspects of the
planning process to public participation.
Rendering the City through Discourse and Imagery
The decentralized approaches offered by these examples effectively extend and redefine
community input, yet the spatial imaginary of what downtown Los Angeles might become
is more radically challenged by the distributed nature of online discourses surrounding the
construction of residences and residential lifestyles. Each of the projects discussed so far are
massive, multi-billion dollar entertainment and cultural “destination” projects designed to
attract visitors to downtown and to provide a signal to the region and the world that Los
Angeles is not just a collection of cities without a center. In order for downtown to truly
become a thriving urban center, however, current civic leaders believe it must also become
a 24-hour environment with the type of integrated residential, retail, and commercial
environments more commonly associated with New York and San Francisco. Leaving
aside for the moment the fact that downtown Los Angeles has always been a 24-hour zone
for some constituencies – and thus recognizing the classed, raced, and ethnically-charged
nature of the current “revitalization” – it is the discourse around downtown as a lifestyle that
has exceeded traditional boundaries. This discourse is inextricably bound with emergent
media technologies, in part because it is through blogs, listservs, and social networks that
this discourse circulates, and in part because an entire suite of emergent media technologies
275
enables the digital lifestyles that are imagined. The distributed and mediated nature of this
discourse impacts both the development process and the cultural ideal of living in downtown
Los Angeles.
To begin with, nearly all of the venues for considering downtown living base some of
their appeal in providing renderings of what the future of downtown will look like. This
is certainly true for developers, who often launch elaborate web sites before their projects
break ground or receive approvals. Such sites are launched in part because developers are
looking to pre-sell properties before construction is finished, but also because an early public
presence might attract additional investors or put pressure on the city to speed approvals.
Park Fifth, for example, is the grandest residential project underway and, with a hotel and
condos in 43- and 76-story towers, is touted as becoming the tallest residential building west
of Chicago when completed. (Figure 6.7) Still clearing final regulatory hurdles – and the
current housing slump – Park Fifth exists as a series of planning documents, a few media
notices, and, notably, as a set of models and renderings. These renderings grace an otherwise
empty website, and have found their way into a network of sites focused on development in
Los Angeles, such as Curbed LA and blogdowntown. As these sites act as the knowledge hubs
and gossip sites for regional real estate development they serve to connect a public far beyond
downtown borders to conversations regarding downtown development. The extent of such
connections can be seen in the lively comments associated with each post and, in the case of
Park Fifth, a note sent from a French reader of the site regarding the Park Fifth project.
Nearly every project conceived or under construction downtown has some sort of web
presence; indeed, the lack of renderings on a web site is frequently speculated upon in
online forums as evidence that a project has been derailed or is likely to never come to
fruition. This signifying function is certainly understood by the development community,
as they try to direct online conversations by seeding the web with renderings and directly
276
engaging certain sites. At the same time, bloggers and development tracking sites rely on
these images for content and to increase their status as professional and connected arbiters
of information. As such, early mentions of potential projects are often accompanied by
requests for members of the website community to discover and submit renderings. In this
way these sites become social networks connecting real estate industry insiders, concerned
local residents, and a broader networked pubic interested in issues of urban development
and design. Of course, renderings circulate so frequently not simply because they provide
information or proof of project status, but because renderings and models quite easily allow
for the projection of viewer desire in their tidiness and emphasis on style. (Figure 6.8)
Renderings introduce aesthetics in an often-seductive manner and they encourage viewers to
consider a development as a singular element rather than part of a broader integrated whole.
Attempts to capture a more holistic and synthetic view of downtown development inevitably
f igure 6.7: park f ifth in d owntown l os a ngeles
Park Fifth rendering and model from web site, www.parkfifth.com/
277
err in the other direction, resulting in exceedingly long lists of projects under development or
representational mapping systems so large they are difficult to effectively navigate.
As important as renderings, models, and maps are to the distributed networks tracking
downtown development, participants in these geo-social networks often rely on dialogue to
actively contest downtown plans and events. In this struggle over meaning, these networked
Renderings, clockwise from upper left:
LAUSC HS #9; LAPD HQ;
Maguire Tower; 8th and Grand;
1027 Wilshire
(images from their websites)
f igure 6.8: d owntown l os a ngeles d evelopment r enderings
278
publics fight to privilege their own interpretations and to police the boundaries of what
downtown living should be. Examples of this are legion, and usually involve rather juvenile
sniping over differences in architectural style or class-bound conceptions of how development
should proceed, but occasionally such debates flare up around issues of significant import.
One such site for discussion in the newdowntown listserv. This service, operating as a Yahoo
group since 2000, is the self-proclaimed “resident network revitalizing downtown Los
Angeles.”
14
The online service counts over 2,000 members, and operates in conjunction
with monthly meetings and a neighborhood watch group. A typical post on the service will
note an upcoming event, the results of a neighborhood council meeting, or the launch of a
new business. Take, for example, the launch announcement for Metropolis books: “Hello
all, My husband and I just opened an independent bookstore in Downtown at 440 S. Main
St. The store is called Metropolis Books, please come and visit our store. Thanks, Julie Anne
Swayze.”
15
Julie posts regularly on the newdowntown service to announce book signings,
sales, and special events. On July 21, 2007, however, Metropolis books became a flashpoint
for discussion of the type of community downtown is becoming. Vachelle McFarland, a self-
identified black male resident of downtown since 2003, submitted a posting to newdowntown
entitled “Metropolis Books Practices Racial Discrimination.” In his post, Vachelle describes
his first visit to Metropolis books on the night of the release of the final Harry Potter book,
and details his complaint with the store:
After Dance Downtown I made my way to Metropolis and entered the store in a
friendly mood and made gestures at polite greetings to one and all. Immediately
I was proffered a cold shoulder by all four inhabitants who eyed me suspiciously
and surreptitiously. As I said before, I have become accustomed to the actions of
downtown’s newest former semi-suburban residents and the NIMBYistic prejudices
they harbor. I ignored them as they ignored me and proceeded to quietly peruse the
contents of the store.
And Later:
As the only black non-worker in the store I was asked to remove myself from the
front of the store and stand in the back (of the bus – oh, excuse me – the store).
279
Finally:
When I politely questioned this action a black 6’5” security guard was called in to
force me out of the store with a veiled threat of violence.
Vachelle concludes:
This is a social blight on the area that is sanctioned and even encouraged by the
powers-that-be in the business/political arena who seek to make Downtown the
“whitest” area in Los Angeles, (with the exception of Brentwood/BelAir).
16
Vachelle’s post and call for boycotting Metropolis set off of a firestorm of debate on
newdowntown, addressing both the specific incident and the broader context of racial
tensions stemming from recent gentrification. The responses ran the gamut from attacks on
Vachelle for being “off-putting,” “defensive,” and for throwing a “public temper tantrum,” to
support for his publicly airing issues that resonated with other members of downtown and
newdowntown. Notably, the most impassioned posts came from Julie, the store owner, and
from community boosters. These posts invariably pointed out that Julie and her Husband
were black, that the store stocks “a large selection of books written by black authors - and
books that would be of particular interest to the black community - which are two very
different things,”
17
and that Vachelle should address both his own behavior and his racial
attitudes. Interestingly, most of the posters noted their own positionality, indicating their
ethnic backgrounds, sexual orientation, and experience with diversity and discrimination
downtown. While most posts pushed for some recognition of downtown diversity
and reconciliation, Vachelle responded with an unapologetic post considering complex
interactions of class and race, as well as a direct statement regarding the online discussions:
Since I last posted I’ve received numerous personal communications from both blacks
and whites. Most (not all) of the whites support the owners and most (not all) of the
blacks have related similar experiences as mine with Metropolis Books. That’s quite a
racial disparity and it confirms the aforementioned assertions I’ve made.
Exhausted by the differences in interpretation of events at the bookstore and the
broader issues of downtown diversity, the online community dropped the issue
and moved on to standard discussions of art walks and offerings at the new Ralph’s
market. While not explicitly stated, posts questioning the appropriateness of
discussing such an issue in a public forum suggest that some parties may have
280
also dropped the discussion in the interest of projecting an image of multicultural
harmony rather than contentious debate.
18

While these examples show a movement from a primarily top-down planning and persuasion
model to something more open and distributed, they also clearly privilege those who manage
to get a seat at the digital table. Even as downtown’s resident population has increased by
nearly 50% since 1999, the majority of residences are still affordable housing units populated
by individuals for whom the expense of regular Internet access may be too great. Moreover,
the central city area is also home to a number of single-room-occupancy hotels, shelters, and
street tents that house the city’s homeless and occasionally-homeless populations. Unlike the
luxe lofts and high rise buildings being constructed nearby, these less glamorous facilities are
not appointed with the latest wireless networks and emergent media technologies.
Perhaps the greatest challenge facing residents, civic leaders, and developers is coming up
with meaningful and respectful means for approaching the homeless situation downtown,
so it is appropriately a central concern of the distributed development networks. Of the
approximately 70,000 homeless individuals in the County of Los Angeles, an estimated
5,000-7,000 can be found downtown, even after years of crackdown and clearance by the
city and the police department.
19
The raw numbers of homeless individuals, the conditions
of their living situation, and the civic response to the dilemma are regularly documented
on the social networks and websites already discussed, as well as on a series of blogs
dedicated to homeless advocacy. These blogs primarily feature the thoughts and concerns
of individuals who are professional advocates, but occasionally feature guest commentary
by affected individuals. Attempting to participate in the discussion in a contemporary
manner, the LAPD even hosts a blog dedicated to addressing the homeless situation from
the perspective of an active police officer. The situation has also been documented by a local
custom mapmaking company, which has used LAPD data and GIS technology to document
the downtown homeless population. (Figure 6.9) Like the renderings discussed above,
281
this aestheticized representation of the homeless situation has circulated across many other
blogs and sites, including the high-profile blog run (in his spare time) by the mapmaker.
Although these sites tend not to provide data beyond that available through traditional media
outlets, they do provide advocates a networked platform to share their daily challenges and
achievements, hold civic leaders accountable, and occasionally make direct appeals to draw
readers of such sites out into the streets for awareness-raising Skid Row walks.
Downtown Los Angeles Homeless Population Heat Map, constructed
by Cartifact based on data from LAPD Central Division
f igure 6.9: d owntown l os a ngeles h omeless population h eat maps
282
While we can point to the ways in which the decentralization and distribution of this
discourse is more open and democratic than the standard planning process, we must also
continue to ask questions about who is creating this spatial imaginary. In some cases the
transparent protocols of blogging and social networking lead participants to be relatively
open about their positionality, in other cases it is clear that developers, planners, and real
estate brokers often participate in such discussions without sharing their status. Or, getting
directly to the heart of the matter, we should ask which values are being privileged in such
distributed models of discourse. For all the faults of the centralized planning systems it
was generally clear who stood to gain from development; now such incentives are not so
apparent. Instead of the discursive construction of downtown Los Angeles, perhaps we are
seeing the simultaneous construction of a “discursive Downtown Los Angeles,” separate and
not equal to the actual downtown community. After all, the distributed media networks
under consideration here are also part of a broader digital lifestyle that allows the newest
residents to experience downtown living from the sanctuary of their networked bubbles.
Perhaps it is easier to project fantasies of stylized streetscapes and frictionless multiculturalism
when downtown living is mediated by virtual and physical concierges.
All of this is to say that contemporary interactive scripted spaces are not simply lived
experiences, but are also mediated experiences. The discursive construction of the urban
environment is quite real, and directly impacts the lived experience of current and potential
residents. This is certainly true of high-profile, high-stakes developments like those taking
place in downtown Los Angeles, but it true to some extent for most any large urban
development. It is no longer simply the case that developers work behind closed doors with
city planners to get approvals and get building, as part of the logic driving the scripting of
emergent spaces is bound up with the interactivity invited by emergent media technologies.
New urban developments are not just constructed out of concrete, steel, and glass, but
283
also out of the contentious discussions that take place in virtual and non-virtual spaces.
This insight is not meant to discount the very real work performed by local neighborhood
councils or those individuals dedicated enough to participate in the official and unofficial
civic forums dedicated to urban development, but it is meant to suggest that the mediated
discussion of urban development is quite real and quite important. This dissertation has
argued at many points for the consideration of new spatialities predicated on emergent
media technologies, and has argued holistically for a broad cultural and economic logic that
drives the scripting of space and media, but it also advances the proposition that material
constructions are in some ways merely manifestations of the broader cultural logic of
networked personalized mobility. This is to say the real changes to the built environment
are important, and advancements in emergent media technologies have a great impact, but
that in many cases these developments lead less to material changes and more to conceptual
changes, to changes in the ways that people imagine they could be living their lives. So we
might well recount the many new urban communities and urban gentrification projects
that have taken hold, and we might consider the merits of a host of networked media
technologies, but even these accountings would not fully account for the cultural impact
that the mere possibility of these developments induce. We do not just live in emergent
networked media spaces, we do not simply play out scripts, but we rather construct in our
cultural imagination an image of what our modernity might look like.
284
Chapter 6 Endnotes
r yan h omes, “n ew d aleville community b rochure.” 1.
“The p rospect s tory, ” prospect n ew t own w ebsite, http://www.prospectnewtown.com/story.html. 2.
r obert f ishman, 3. Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (n ew Y ork: basic b ooks, 1987).
John laing h omes, “madrone n eighborhood brochure.” 4.
Quinn Kiet, “The n ew m igration to d owntown l os a ngeles - is u rban l iving cool again?, ” 5.
TrojanDLA’s Blog, f ebruary 26, 2008, http://www.realestatewebmasters.com/blogs/trojandla/4502/
show/; william b ooth, “ a ngelenos’ n ew r efrain: ‘i l ove (d owntown) l .a .’ , ” W ashington Post,
s eptember 30, 2007, sec. a .
“d owntown l os a ngeles f act sheet” (d owntown l os a ngeles business improvment district, 6.
Quarter 4, 2007), http://www.downtownla.com/frame.asp?mainpage=pdfs/econ_residential/
f actsa ndf igures_92304.pdf.
ibid. 7.
barbara Thornburg, “Y ou c all This a l oft?, ” 8. The Los Angeles Times , march 12, 2006, http://www.
latimes.com/features/magazine/west/la-tm-loftevolution11mar12,1,3239275.story?coll=la-headlines-
west&ctrack=1&cset=true.
“pacific e lectric l ofts website, ” http://www.pelofts.com/. 9.
“l uma s outh website, ” http://www.luma-south.com/splash.php. 10.
h arvey m olotch, “The c ity as a growth m achine, ” 11. The American Journal of Sociology (1976).
william b. f ulton, 12. The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles
(baltimore: Johns h opkins u niversity press, 2001).
J. l ynn l unsford, “s taples center p lan r equired to provide community s ervices, ” 13. W all Street
Journal, June 1, 2002.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/newdowntown/ 14.
ibid., post 12931. 15.
ibid., post 13982. 16.
ibid., post 13989. 17.
ibid. post 14004. 18.
l os a ngeles h omeless s ervices a uthority, 2007 greater l os a ngeles h omeless count, 2007, 19.
http://www.lahsa.org/2007homelesscountreport.asp.
285
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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

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Asset Metadata

Creator Chamberlain, Daniel David (author)

Core Title Emergent media technologies and the production of new urban spaces

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema-Television (Critical Studies)

Publication Date 07/25/2009

Defense Date 06/17/2009

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag interfaces,media interfaces,media spaces,network infrastructure,networked media spaces,networked personalized mobility,new urbanism,OAI-PMH Harvest,Playa Vista,scripted spaces,surveillance

Place Name Los Angeles (city or populated place), Playa Vista (city or populated place)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor McPherson, Tara (committee chair), Anderson, Steven F. (committee member), Ethington, Philip J. (committee member)

Creator Email daniel.chamberlain@gmail.com,daniel.chamberlain@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2388

Unique identifier UC1284680

Identifier etd-Chamberlain-3060 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-575282 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2388 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Chamberlain-3060.pdf

Dmrecord 575282

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Chamberlain, Daniel David

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu