The Photograph, Wi-Fi and I

Is it really nearing a month since last post? Fortunately a lot has happened in that time. I’m now settled in Toronto with a nice place downtown to call my own, and I’m in the process of finding work to pay the rent – it’s turning out to be harder than I initially thought! Seems that Twitter isn’t the large expansive wealth of opportunities for interesting work I had hoped it might be – this far at least (that’s my fingers crossed).

One thing I have been doing however, is exploring the Wi-Fi. I love Wi-Fi (perhaps this love exists because of my hatred of 3G data charges, but still, everything only exists in opposition to something else right?). I love being outside, I love my big fat battery that lets me be outside forever and ever, and most of all, Toronto just so happens to be turning it on for summer lately! Wireless Toronto have a growing number of networks across the city in public and publicly accessible spaces and I’ve begun to hang out in a few of them in an attempt to better understand the ways that these spaces are being used.

While I’ve yet to analyse the usage statistics of these networks (I now have some access to them – thanks Gabe!), just being in the space (physically) alongside other users presents in itself interesting possibilities to consider in the studying the use of open wireless networks. By open networks I should clarify that for the purpose of my research I am interested and free and openly accessible Wi-Fi in all its shapes and forms. Why?  Because ‘public’ seems to be found in online space, I think it’s important to consider ways the online spaces may (or not) be given the opportunity to reveal themselves from the traditional material public space – streets, parks, plazas, cafes etc. New possibilities for performances in urban space. The affordances of Wi-Fi?

In previous/current research of public Wi-Fi, users have been identified and observed by researchers as participants in a particular space. People would be identified as laptop users and observed in their social interactions. These observations are often complimented by network statistics which might suggest what users on the network are spending their time doing (public activities? private?). Other studies have used surveys of Wi-Fi users to explore what activities they conduct online at hotspots and asked users whether Wi-Fi was more likely to attract them to particular public spaces etc. This is all useful information, but I feel as though Bruno (Latour) or Nigel (Thrift) and their friends would encourage me to avoid separating the users of the network from the spaces they inhabit; the flows of data from the laptops and iPhones.

In this project I am asking how we may be beginning to know ourselves and our worlds differently by virtue of Wi-Fi. I’m looking to go beyond the mere representation of a network of users commnicating in whichever ways from within public/private space. The very nature of public and private space can hardly be defined….let alone the intersection of digital flows and physical/material space. Inseparable. How does one capture the affordances and possibilities of the moment? Present it in a report? I’m still struggling with that. Latour (Reassembling the Social, 2005) has equipped me with some tools and some idea, but I feel as though the photograph can add some additional value here.

At the recent AAG conference, i was reminded through the work of photographer Richard Wentworth that nothing is static. The photograph is an engagement with fluid, unstable, changing spaces. I like that. At the conference, Paul Halliday spoke of pictures from nowhere. Photos of nothing!? His long-term project photographing people and public spaces in London: “These images do not ‘represent’ the city – an utterly pointless and impossible task – rather, they evoke a subjective rendering of that which I have felt compelled to respond to visually” (from www.paulhalliday.org). 

Such a concept is attractive to me, a researcher attempting to make sense of spaces that are multiple, contingent, often invisible, and constantly changing. How do you present a study of Wi-Fi and the negotiation of the urban public? You can’t. Well, maybe you can, but in the form of snippets of information. By telling a story and acknowledging that you too are a part of the network you seek to portray. Photographs can’t tell an entire story….but they might help trace a network of actors. Provide an alternate means of accessing spaces that pure observation or interviews cannot.