The overlap of social media and architecture in urban space

Here’s a great article from Metropolis Magazine (Here but Not Here, by Andrew Blum) that addresses the yet to be discovered overlap in architecture and social media. This overlap is precisely what my research in China is about -  how the use of cellphones and computers changes people’s interaction with physical, urban space. This is all part of a process I call Digital Urbanism which I explain on the front page of my Digital Urbanisms blog. In my recent work, Sleeping at Internet Cafes: The Next 300 Million Internet Users in China, I talk about how migrant interactions with computers changes the way they appropriate urban space.  I’m blogging about my fieldwork on Bytes of China if you want to stay up to date on my work!  Thanks Kenyatta Cheese for sharing this article. Below are two excerpts that resonated with me - tricia]

The real work of architecture that adapts and reflects this new mediated world is yet to come. A discussion about “social media and architecture” is still more likely to consider how architects can use Facebook—or Architizer—to market their work, rather than how social media changes our experience of it. And a conversation about “technology and architecture” is probably about parametric modeling, not about how the two spaces we inhabit—one physical, one virtual—might be pulled together.

and…

“Public spaces are always going to be sites of negotiation. They are not places, like your laptop screen, where you can do whatever you want,” David Benjamin, of The Living, told me. But what if our screens engaged in that conversation? If our building facades didn’t just communicate information to us (à la the Jumbotron), but we communicated back, communally? After all, what makes cities vital are their color and diversity, the wild mix of scales, even the noise and confusion. This has been the defining sensation of modernity, from the Parisian boulevard to the contemporary aerotropolis. Social media has the potential to amplify this quality, making people feel disoriented and overwhelmed—but also focused and inspired. Great cities have always done both, and architecture’s role has always been to help make sense of it all. It took Mies to show how the lowly industrial I-beam could be transmuted into something as grand and symbolically profound as the columns of a Greek temple. What architect will turn the networked screen into a chapel?