I've recently been looking at the book, City of Bits: Space, Place, and Infobahn. I particularly like the term "Electronic Agoras" he talk's about in this book. This is something I feel has massive relevenance to my research as it touches on the social effects of wireless technologies and how traditionally your social peers depended upon where you go in a physical place, however wireless technologies I feel is erasing this need and information is available from everywhere you go, from the cafe to the shopping mall and even the plane.
Taken from William J. Mitchells Introduction to the book City of Bits:
"Traditonally you needed to go someplace to do this sort of thing - to the agora, the forum, the piazza, the cafe, the bar, the pub, Main Street, the mall, the beach, the gym, the bathhouse, the college dining hall, the common room, the office, or the club - and where you went pegged your peer group, your social position, and your role. It also framed expectations about how your should represent yourself by your clothing, body language, speech, and behaviour and about the interactions that were to take place. Each familiar species of public place had its actors, costumes, and scripts. But the worldwide computer network - electronic agora - subverts, displaces, and radically redefines our notions of gathering place, community and urban life. The Net has a fundamentally different physical structure , and it operates under quite different rules from those that organize the action in the public places of traditional cities. It will play as crucial a role in twenty-first-century urbanity as the centrally located, spatially bounded, architecturally celebrated agora did (according to Aristotle's Politics) in the life of the Greek polis and in prototypical urban diagrams like that so lucidly traced out by the Milesians on their Ionian rock.
Taken from William J. Mitchells Introduction to the book City of Bits:
"Traditonally you needed to go someplace to do this sort of thing - to the agora, the forum, the piazza, the cafe, the bar, the pub, Main Street, the mall, the beach, the gym, the bathhouse, the college dining hall, the common room, the office, or the club - and where you went pegged your peer group, your social position, and your role. It also framed expectations about how your should represent yourself by your clothing, body language, speech, and behaviour and about the interactions that were to take place. Each familiar species of public place had its actors, costumes, and scripts. But the worldwide computer network - electronic agora - subverts, displaces, and radically redefines our notions of gathering place, community and urban life. The Net has a fundamentally different physical structure , and it operates under quite different rules from those that organize the action in the public places of traditional cities. It will play as crucial a role in twenty-first-century urbanity as the centrally located, spatially bounded, architecturally celebrated agora did (according to Aristotle's Politics) in the life of the Greek polis and in prototypical urban diagrams like that so lucidly traced out by the Milesians on their Ionian rock.
(William. J. Mitchell, 2000)
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