The Rhetoric of Mobility
A pithy post about mobility, meanderings and [murmur] via enviro-blog, WorldChanging:
“With so much attention given to the size and reach of our carbon footprints, it’s easy to forget that somewhere in there we live complex lives that inscribe more than waste in our wake. In the Seventies, French academic Michel de Certeau’s essay “Walking in the City” proposed that city dwellers compose a “rhetoric of walking” as they go about their daily lives. Institutions (or “strategies”) regulate our movement with streets, paths, and laws. Countering that are the “practices” employed by individuals – shortcuts, roundabout paths, meanderings – that define and individualize our presence within these spaces. De Certeau couldn’t have anticipated how advances in technology would allow for previously private moments to occur in public – receiving news of a birth via BlackBerry while on the subway, getting stood up over text message on your way to the restaurant, arguing with your loved one on the phone while standing at the corner of Somewhere and On Your Way. Our travel creates narratives and our cities are invisibly marked with unseen poems and lyric fragments that tell countless tales of love, loss and everything in between.”
November 6th, 2006 at 2:42 am
your post made me think of the murmur project:
http://murmurtoronto.ca/
This is an audio community mapping project. Stories have been submitted, so that in the participating cities, on various corners you can call into a phone number and hear stories about moments in other’s lives that occured at that particular place.
Actually, it’s sort of a reverse use of technology than what you are talking about. While technology makes private exchanges public as you suggest, in this project, technology allows other walkers to engage with other’s private moments through technology.