Everyday Wi-Fi Public

As I begin to write this I have just ended a Skype video call with my mother who is connected wirelessly to the internet from a desk she is reading at in the Burlington Public Library in Ontario, Canada. For much of this year it has been somewhat of a morning ritual to visit here, my favourite café on campus to enjoy a coffee (or three) whilst catching up with others before I venture into my department for the day. Of course, I do not just mean ‘others’ in a physically co-present sense (although that is still a large part of the reason why I visit the café), rather, friends, family and colleagues whom opportunistically happen to be online at the same time. You see, I am also connected wirelessly to the internet thanks to campus-wide Wi-Fi coverage. At the same time that I was speaking with Mom I flicked between browser tabs, simultaneously engaged in conversation with a fellow doctoral student on Facebook Chat and two additional popups flashed open blinking orange indicating two more of my friends were speaking to me through Gmail’s integrated chat feature.

It shouldn’t be discounted either, the face-to-face interactions that were also taking place as they so frequently do. Serendipitous encounters with strangers are common-place in this café with its long shared concrete outdoor tables. I jump up to hand a fellow patron their jacket that was accidentally left draped over a chair. I’m also consciously listening over my shoulder to the next table where a man is complaining to his friend about a flatmate who is up all night making noise. On this particular morning, much to my surprise, Harry, the café’s owner comes out to greet me with a Christmas card and gift to thank me for my custom over the years. Our Skype call is finished short because at Mom’s end it seems that other users of the public library trying to do their work were being disturbed by her chatter. As I clicked the large circular red button to terminate the video call, a colleague I’d been expecting arrives at my table for our meeting.

I do not wish to imply that the above experience is anything other than mundane in today’s urban environment. However, it does serve to place my experience firmly into the category of Wi-Fi users that Hampton and Gupta (2008) have termed ‘placemakers’ in a recent article I’ve been reading. Through their study of Wi-Fi use in public (and semi-public) spaces, Hampton and Gupta (2008: 836) contend that when considering the widespread availability of publicly accessible Wi-Fi one is inevitably faced with to two contrasting (though not mutually exclusive) viewpoints:

1)     That publicly accessible Wi-Fi will encourage greater participation in public spaces and in turn lead to more diversified and enriched social networks

2)     Or, Wi-Fi use will follow the existing trend of mobile phone users to facilitate “private cocoons of interaction that benefit existing close ties”

The thing I’m struggling with in the context of my project you see, is that even the appropration of space for private means – ‘networked individualism’ (Wellman), still represents to me affect, performed in a particulare space. How are we enacting the world? well, I dunno, but even private ‘cocoons’ of internet use is an engagement of public space. No?

anyways. things to think about as I leave this desk for a summer break.

Not that I deserve a summer break, but the time has come, and everyone else will disappear, at least for a while.

Next post will be a little more personal I think – keepin’ it research related here for the sake of tags/categories – something I’ve never been good at.