Planetary Urbanization and the New Social Physics

Cities and Social Media in the Age of Planetary Urbanization:

The New Social Physics

Urban Studies 400

January, 2014

As I type out the first lines of this page, it's late May, 2013. Anti-austerity protests are still rolling around Europe in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis -- what most analysts now regard as the Second Great Depression of global capitalism. The urban social theorist Manuel Castells has analyzed the social movements of recent years -- first Iceland, then Tunisia, then Egypt, Spain, and the global mobilization in hundreds of cities during the "Occupy" events of 2011-2012 -- as "networks of outrage and hope." Castells is an urban theorist, but for the last twenty years he has also been a theorist of what he calls the "network society" -- the changing social and spatial dimensions of communications technologies. Castells' central argument is that social networking technologies fundamentally transform urban social movements, and reconfigure the relations between individuals, social groups, and political organizations.

In this seminar, we're going to take a close look at the relations between urbanization and social networking practices. It's only been a few years since the globe has become majority urban: never before in human history have we lived in a truly urban world. The technologies allowing near-instantaneous social networking are also new: never before has it been possible for so many multitudes of people to communicate ... with so many multitudes of other people ... for so many different purposes. What does this all mean? What does it mean when we are living not just in a world of cities, but in a world with planetary networks that reconfigure the possibilities for human communication?

How do we cope with a world of possibilities, of good and bad? You can reach out to an almost infinite number of people in the world, and energetic people who believe in a cause can mobilize crowds of millions to get their voices heard, or raise money for worthy causes ...

... and yet there's never a guarantee that this socially networked urban world is always and inherently good. In the Fall of 2012, a teenager from one of Vancouver's suburbs (Amanda Todd) took her own life after constant and vicious harassment and stalking she endured on Facebook; there are countless other suicides in which social networking seems to play a prominent role. The web is a world of social connection -- but some of this social connection is bringing together people with a lot of hatred and plans for violence of all sorts. Countries are having tense discussions over accusations of hacking and 'cyberwarfare.' The networks that allow people to be friendly and generous are the same networks used to harass, lie, cheat, steal, surveil, and threaten. There's an entirely new code of ethics developing as people try to figure out what's acceptable, and what's not, in an urban world where technologies are changing faster each day. Will you be fired if you say something your boss doesn't like? Can you be jailed for something you write online? Is it acceptable to take photographs of people in public and upload them immediately to photo-sharing sites with the automatic "face-tag" so their names are put on the web instantly? If you have the new "Google Glass" eyeglasses with built-in internet browser, is it acceptable to take photographs of someone you're standing in front of, so that you can look them up while they're talking to you? Is it unethical to do this without first asking? (The New York Times reports that there's a new word for people who do this: "Glassholes.").

The purpose of this seminar is to examine the relations between urbanization, social networking practices, and evolving technologies of information processing now widely described as "Big Data." We will explore the historical roots of contemporary perspectives on information technology, and the mixture of optimistic and pessimistic interpretations of current conditions. One of the key theories we'll use to examine the interplay between today's circumstances and historical ideas is "social physics," a concept introduced more than two centuries ago to connect ideas of scientific innovation in the physical and human realms.

Readings

Manuel Castells, Nadine Schuurman, Alan Turing, Pierre Tielhard de Chardin, Jaron Lanier, Nicholas Carr, Allen J. Scott ... and other authors on the evolving list. The full syllabus is still under development, but will be posted shortly before we meet in January, 2014.

For a single, short article that illustrates the kind of things we'll be reading, see this:

Elvin Wyly (2013). "The City of Cognitive-Cultural Capitalism." City 17(3), 387-394.

Before we meet in the first class, please read this:

Michael Kahn (1971). "The Seminar." Unpublished manuscript. Santa Cruz: Kresge College, University of California - Santa Cruz.

Expectations

This is an advanced, fourth-year seminar. The material is focused on broadly urban themes, but comes from interdisciplinary literatures; therefore, there are no specific course prerequisites. But there are four key prerequisites on how we approach the teaching/learning experience. In this course, you are expected to

1. Attend regularly.

2. Read. A lot.

3. Talk, nicely and constructively, with your colleagues in class.

4. Write. And rewrite. Writing is a form of conversation, and so that requires readers and writers to be willing to rethink together, so that a writer can reconsider and find the best way to convey ideas. Writing is a very special kind of conversation, however: it requires patience, and a sustained attention span that simply cannot be tweeted.