Aeromobilities

Since I’m off on a long distance flight on Sunday I thought I’d give a plug to the Aeromobilities book edited by Saulo Cwerner, Sven Kesselring and John Urry (Routledge, 2009). It brings together a collection of essays that explore the modern airport and air travel in general from a broad social sciences perspective.

Myself and Martin Dodge contributed a chapter on the role of software in governing and regulating how airports operate and in particular how contemporary airports consist of a set of interlinked code/spaces – that is spaces that are dependent on software to function as intended (to check people in, to pass through security, to move baggage from one place to another, to let people into a country, and so on). Our argument is that the transduction of code/space is not deterministic (i.e., software determines in absolute, non-negotiable means everyday practices) or universal (i.e., such determinations occur in all places and at all times in a simple cause-and-effect manner), but rather that the work that software does in the world is emergent, relational, contingent and embodied in nature. Code/space is never consistently created and experienced the same, but rather it is always (collectively) produced by people and code; it is always in a state of becoming, emerging through individual performances and social interactions that are mediated, consciously or unconsciously, in relation to the mutual constitution of code/space.

In other words, software’s ability to do work in the world is always mediated by people – either through a direct interface between passenger or worker, or through gatekeepers who take the outputs of a program, interpret the results, and negotiates with a passenger(s) or fellow worker(s). What this means is that how travelers engage with software and its gatekeepers (the travel agent, check-in, security, immigration staff, and so on) and react through embodied practice varies between people and is contingent on their abilities, experiences, knowledges, and the context in which interactions occur. It is a social and cultural event, not a simple, deterministic exchange or an act of naked governmentality, and it unfolds in multifarious, ever-changing ways.

In this sense, the code/spaces of air travel are of-the-moment and performative. The airport is never repeated exactly twice and never fully predictable or ordered (though that is what systems of management and regulation aspire). If there is a seeming orderly pattern at a broad-level it is because the various parts of the airport assemblage are citationally performed and people and systems are employed to make air travel work in particular ways. The airport is remade as the airport continuously – cleaners clean; security guards patrol; food is prepared, served, cleaned away; planes land, taxi, disgorge passengers and luggage, are cleaned, re-fuelled, serviced, re-boarded and leave; passengers and luggage flow through the various circuits and are helped on their in various ways (by signs and flight information display screens, by printed boarding cards, by audible announcements, by customer service agents). If one spends time in the airport observing what is happening its diverse realities become all to clear. And much of this work in citationally reproduced through people and code doing work together. This becomes very apparent if a software system fails and the space fails to be produced as intended (e.g., the check-in area becomes a waiting room) and passenger flows rupture into flux.

In order to illustrate our arguments we detailed observant participant research that focused on three key sites and practices – checking-in, security screening, and immigration - in a number of airports to illustrate how code/spaces are diversely transduced, contested and negotiated.

What this all means is that every trip through an airport turns into a research expedition and I’ll have my notebook at hand to capture observations and useful nuggets of information! It'll be no different this Sunday.

The largest geopolitical project in living memory

Over the past year I've read a number of novels set either just before or during the second world war including books by Alan Furst, Philip Kerr, John Lawton, Marek Krajewski, Hans Fallada, Carlo Lucarelli and others, along with some straight history books, but I haven't been keeping track of history itself. Today marks the 70th anniversary of the start of the Second World War and Germany's invasion of Poland (The Polish Officer by Furst does a good job of capturing the first few days as Poland desperately tries to put in place the basis for resistance knowing that it is being over-run).

Of course, I haven't pre-prepared a post, but I have been thinking about doing one based on a conversation I had with Martin Dodge last week, so I'm hastily moving it forward. At his Mapping Manchester exhibition we were talking about whether the John Ryland's library had survived the blitz intact and that led onto a discussion about bomb census maps. Martin kindly sent me on a link to a story that discussed them. I'd be really interested to take a look at them in more detail. I always remember the two old ladies who lived next door when I was growing up who used to describe going up Caldy Hill to watch Liverpool and Birkenhead docks being bombed. They were great story-tellers - you felt like you were there watching the cities burn.

The tracing below is from the Christmas raids of Dec 20-22, 1940 on the Merseyside area when 365 people died. It is designed to be overlain on a base map, hence why there are so few roads, etc. shown (much cheaper to keep a clean map and have lots of tracings). A daily tracing would be taken so that the pattern of bombing could be tracked over time.


The tracing shows the area between Bootle and Walton and plots 26 separate incidents in quite a confined area. Each incident is given a number, followed by the size and type of bomb, and the location of any unexploded ordnance. Collectively the maps reveal that by the end of the war Liverpool was the second most bombed UK city after London.

These other maps are of Brighton and Bristol.

I've been fascinated by the Second World War for a while now given it was the largest and most complex geopolitical event in modern history with many civil wars operating inside transnational wars, and political ideology explicitly reshaping territory and lives through violence. I've been trying to collect books that explains what went on different parts of the world, including some that traditionally get looked over (e.g. Aleutian Islands [the only bit of the USA occupied by the Japanese], Malta, Isle of Man, Ireland, etc) so I can have a go at mentally stitching the whole lot together.

I'll perhaps try to do something on Irish neutrality tomorrow. Ireland declared its neutrality on the 2nd Sept, the day before Britain and France declared war. It was a policy that was rigidly maintained right to the end of the war.

Lest we forget ...

Mapping Manchester

I'm heading to the Mapping Manchester exhibition tomorrow evening in the Reading Room in The Rylands Library in Manchester City Centre. It's been put together by Martin Dodge and Chris Perkins of Manchester University. The three of us had a book published earlier in the year, Rethinking Maps. The exhibition runs until January 2010, so if you're in Manchester it might be worth a look.



A selection of the maps can be found on the BBC Manchester website

Rethinking Maps

A copy of my new book, Rethinking Maps, edited with Martin Dodge and Chris Perkins both at the University of Manchester also turned up in the post this week. The book examines the diverse ways in which maps are now produced given new technologies (including GIS, Sat-Nav, LBS, GPS, remote sensing, Web 2.0 applications), and new ways of thinking about the ontological and epistemological bases of cartography.

Traditionally maps are conceived as portraying the truth of spatial relations of the world. In the book, the contributors consider maps as social constructs, as inscriptions, as proscriptions, as actants, as practices (there are no maps only mappings), seeking to re-imagine the theoretical underpinnings of cartography and how it is philosophically constituted. Page proofs of the opening chapter are available here.

At 80 GBP it’s an absolute bargain! We’re now working on a collection for Wiley – The Map Reader - that will bring together some of the most influential articles concerning how to think about maps published over the 70 or 80 years.


(To paraphrase Rene Magritte) Ceci n'est pas une carte - This is not a map. Discuss ...

We're all prosumers now ...

We’re all prosumers now and blogs are a form of what some are calling prosumption – we help produce what we consume …

My plan for most of the summer is to try and complete a book for MIT Press I’m co-writing with Martin Dodge entitled, ‘Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life.’ The book is basically complete bar the final chapter and quite a bit of editing and polishing. For the past week I’ve been trying to get a working, full draft of a chapter concerning how software is changing the nature of consumption and trying to think through and devise a taxonomy of different forms of prosumption. Prosumption is the idea that rather than simply purchase or consume a product, we take a more active role in how a product is delivered and consumed. Below is what I’ve written so far followed by some very brief comments relating to the prosumption of fiction.

Consumers have long been active participants in the production of the services or goods they are consuming – such as self-service in a restaurant or at a petrol pump or as members of an audience or sports event. Such participation has led to the notion of prosumption - that customers prosume rather than simply consume a service (Andrejevic 2007, Ritzer 2007) – they fulfil a vital role or add crucial value in the delivery of a service for which they are paying. In the main, prosumers do this additional work for little or no recompense, either getting enjoyment from the task, or a sense of empowerment, or they save money/time as the cost of the service is reduced and often becomes more flexible in nature (such as checking in to a flight from home). As such, a complex set of factors shape prosumption including ‘choice, coercion, enjoyment, false consciousness, manipulation’ (Ritzer, no date: 27). In return the service provider or retailer receives labour, talent, expertise, opinions, and gains efficiencies and valuable information (Ritzer, no date).

Code has deepened and diversified participation by enabling people to interactive with, customize, and accessorize ever more media and products; to move from being a consumer to a prosumer. The nature and level of contribution to the production of goods, media and services consumed by active participants variously enormously from simple feedback that shapes present and future outcomes to the highly involved production of key resources such as the supply of code to open-source projects. As such, for us, prosumption needs to be unpacked to think through the ways in which software re-shapes the relationship between patrons and what they prosume. Code enables at least six forms of prosumption: feedback, customization, content, architectural, market, and self-service.

Feedback consists of prosumers actively contributing information to producers that then helps shape the product being prosumed. For example, voting on reality television programmes actively shapes which contestants stay in the competition and which ones leave, and ultimately who will win. Such a process provides highly detailed information to producers as to which act(s) will succeed in the marketplace, especially since the voters have already invested capital, time and emotional energy into shaping the product. Feedback used to be largely limited to studio audiences, but automated phone services, texting and online voting now allow feedback from any viewer. As a result, huge numbers of votes can be cast. For example, over sixty five million people voted in the final of American Idol, series 3 (580 million over the series).

Customization allows prosumers to actively shape and configure the product they are buying selecting specification, components, colours, materials and so on. In other words, the product is not simply bought off the shelf but is tailored to meet the needs of prosumer. Such services have long been available, such as tailored clothes, but only to those with the wealth to be able to afford it. Now customization is available to cheap, mass produced goods such as running shoes and computers and peripherals, and can be selected at a distance and previewed through online ordering. For example, the Dell laptop used to write this sentence was custom built to the specifications chosen by one of us rather than simply designed and supplied by Dell.

Content prosumption refers to users actively supplying the substantive material for the service they are prosuming. For example, prosumers of social networking sites, such as Facebook or blogs, actively contribute material about themselves and their lives and or write comments in relation to other people or provide remixed content (such as new mixes of songs). Content is not supplied by service provider itself; their contribution is the infrastructure that enables prosumption. Similarly, information sites such as Wikipedia are both passively consumed (e.g. an individual reading an entry) and actively prosumed (e.g. adding, editing and updating entries). Commercial or proprietary sites also enable prosumption such as the adding of reviews to products on Amazon.com or submitting videos, photos, stories to news and entertainment websites. Such is the utility of user-generated content that companies now often run competitions for advert and product ideas taking advantage of free creativity and labour.

Architectural prosumption concerns the active contribution of prosumers to informational architecture that supports an activity or service. The mostly widely practised example is that of open source programming where scores of programmers work collectively to produce a software product that they themselves use. Linux, for example, is collectively produced by volunteer contributors who then use the operating system they have added to. Other examples include mash-ups that enable different capta to be spliced together to create new applications.

Market prosumption relates to the creation of online marketplaces to buy and sell goods. The goods on sale and their details are supplied by the users of the site. For example, ebay and craigslist enables people to sell a product and others to bid on the sale; to take an active part in the marketplace. In other words, the process is interactive with respect to selling and buying.

Self-service prosumption refers to the increasing use of self-service kiosks and online processes that enable a person to access goods or services autonomously. Here, individuals do the labour that was formerly done by others. For example, using an ATM machine to withdraw money rather than using a clerk in a bank, or buying a train ticket using a self-service kiosk rather than from a ticket agent, or using a self-service check-out rather one that is staffed. This transfer saves the supplier significant staffing costs, for example, a grocery store generally aims for one cashier to oversee four self-service registers, thus reducing staffing need by 75 percent whilst serving the same number of purchasers (Dean 2008). In some cases, such as checking oneself onto a flight either online or at a self-service kiosk, failure to act as a prosumer can lead to punitive penalties – for example, failure to self check-in online with RyanAir, Europe’s largest carrier, results in a €40 additional fee.

These six forms of prosumption are significantly altering the relations between producer and consumer, leading to efficiencies and savings for producers and empowering (or encumbering) consumers. Over time, these forms of prosumption – and one assumes new forms as new technologies and innovations are rolled out – will be become increasingly common. That is not to say, however, that such a rollout will be a simple process. As Walker and Johnson (2006, cited in Dean 2008) note, there are several factors that influence the extent to which people are prepared to become prosumers including:

• personal capacity (ability and self-belief that they can use the prosumption technology successfully);
• perceived risk (extent to which a user believes the technology is reliable and personal information is secure);
• relative advantage (extent to which prosumption is believed to be more convenient, faster, efficient, and productive than the traditional mode of consumption); and
• preference for personal contact (the degree to which the consumer prefers human interaction over interaction with technology).

As Dean (2008: 228) reports, these factors in turn are affected by a person’s:

• optimism (the belief that technology offers increased control, flexibility and efficiency in daily life),
• innovativeness (the degree to which the consumer is a pioneer and thought leader),
• discomfort (perceiving a lack of control over technology); and
• insecurity (a distrust of technology and skepticism of its ability to work properly).

What this means is that people will vary in the extent to which they embrace the practices of prosumption, and that any company who adopts such a model of delivery will inevitably be circumscribing its market until unsure and sceptical consumers become convinced of its merits (or they are forced to do so by the company offering no alternatives) or gain access to suitable technology such as a home PC. In both cases, age and class are important factors given their relationship to educational competence and likelihood of convenient access. In other words, prosumption will be subject to the same digital divides that have dogged internet adoption and usage.

Anyway, I’m sure that text will mutate a little with some further reflection and editing, but the concept seems to have some utility. I’ve no idea at the minute how the notion of prosumption will pan out with respect to publishing beyond readers being able to post reviews on retail website such as Amazon, or take part in online forums about books, or write comments in relation to blogs like this, but it’ll be interesting to see the ways and extent to which readers move from being consumers to prosumers of books.

Andrejevic, M. (2007). iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas

Dean, D.H. (2008) Shopper age and the use of self-service technologies. Managing Service Quality, 18(3): 225-238

Ritzer, G. (no date) Production, Consumption … Prosumption? http://www.georgeritzer.com/docs/The%20Short%20Life%20and%20Imminent%20Death%20of.pdf

Walker, R.H. and Johnson, L.W. (2006), “Why consumers use and do not use technology-enabled services”, Journal of Services Marketing 20(2): 125-35.