A recent Boston Globe article quoted Boston City Councilor John M. Tobin Jr. as saying “[WiFi] promotes community … It gets people out of their dorm rooms, out of hotel rooms, and out in the parks and out in restaurants.” While WiFi may encourage people to bring their laptops out of their homes, dorm rooms or hotel rooms, I don’t know of any evidence demonstrating that this engenders a stronger sense of community in the WiFi-enabled physical spaces to which people bring their laptops. Seems to me that WiFi actually tends to detract from the sense of community in such places: people with laptops nearly always seem more engaged with their virtual communities (via browsing, email, instant messaging) than with the physical community of people with whom they are sharing space. I do believe that the addition of a key shared resource — whether it be a shared display or an active virtual community tied to the physical place (or both) — would promote a sense of community, but [alas] this does not appear to be a dimension that is typically considered in the various plans for wireless metropolitan area networks I’ve seen.
[via telecom-cities]
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2 responses to “WiFi and Community”
Exactly! Remember Anthony Burke’s comments at Intel’s Urban Computing thing? He called this sense of turning perfectly good leisure spaces into workspaces “urban cooling”. I had simply asked why we would want to do something like being together but not being together 😉
http://www.parkbenchtv.org/ – a UK project that has been considering the idea of how WiFi can be used as a community tool. Maybe when people can crawl out of their personal spaces/homes/offices and into the fabric of public social spaces with their laptops, they become part of the familiar stranger scene. As an alternative to isolation, that may not be a bad thing…
And “urban cooling”… well I bet when paper-backs became popular someone was crying wolf about “urban cooling” in public spaces where people were reading their books instead of socializing… The horror…