In response to “Harnessing Residents Electronic Devices Will Yield Truly Smart Cities” featured on Scientific American
“Truly smart—and real—cities are not like an army regiment marching in lockstep to the commander’s orders; they are more like a shifting flock of birds or school of fish, in which individuals respond to subtle social and behavioural cues from their neighbours about which way to move forward.”
“Rather than focusing on the installation and control of network hardware, city governments, technology companies and their urban-planning advisers can exploit a more ground-up approach to creating even smarter cities in which people become the agents of change. With proper technical-support structures, the populace can tackle problems such as energy use, traffic congestion, health care and education more effectively than centralized dictates. And residents of wired cities can use their distributed intelligence to fashion new community activities, as well as a new kind of citizen activism.”
The Speed of Change
New media and networked technologies certainly have the ability to accelerate the process of change, altering the ways in which “we” create sentiment and derive influence. However the article in general seems to make an assumption; the assumption that the majority decision is always the right decision. And while in the case study cited (The Arab Spring) the majority were arguably justified in their actions, is this always the case?
While the current processes by which society generally instigates change can be cumbersome and lengthy (such as physical/political ones), these do grant “us” time to consider carefully the decisions “we” are making and who exactly is making them.
Breaking Down Barriers
While arguably the ability to speed up decision making and instigate social change without barriers is an attractive notion, we must first consider the effects of allowing social change to be controlled by populist decision making processes/structures made increasingly possible by new media technologies; processes that can occur rapidly, without expert consideration and subject to the the whims of sentiment.
Who to trust? The Expert or the Majority?
Should decisions be made by “experts” or should we rely on a model (potentially increasingly autonomous) that reflects the wants of the majority. For example if the interests of the majority (on twitter) were currently reflected in the content of Scientific American then we’d all be reading about:
- #2011was
- #Replacea1Dsongwithsanta
- Dominick The Donkey
- Christmas
- What Makes Santa Beautiful
- Forever Santa
- Tell Santa A Lie
- John Terry
- #ThingsNotToDoAtChristmasParty
Thats not to say these topics aren’t interesting (according to twitter they clearly are to a majority), but perhaps they aren’t the best recipe for positive social change?
Are we every really free from influence?
One must also consider the “overseer”; the one who administers the network, defines it structures and provides us with the framework for decision making and communication. It would be foolhardy to assume that any such network (and its users) are entirely free from influence. Just as naive to assume that those who create and influence popular social networks (Facebook / Twitter) have a diminished ability to influence the very way in which we communicate by making small changes to their systems. While these systems do not necessarily control the decisions we make, they do potentially control the ways in which we make them.
A City Controlled by Sentiment
The potential social impact and influence of technology was clearly miss-understood by regimes impacted as a result of the Arab Spring; allowing citizens to get “one up” on regimes inhibited by cumbersome political decision making processes. Arguably we have witnessed a positive social result in this case, but is this really the way to control a city? A good model to define continual social change? We are only just beginning to understand the role new media technologies had in instigating social change during the Arab Spring, I only fear that as fast as we are able to understand the complexity of what has occurred that the current “powers that be” will be able to listen, learn and adjust to use such “networks” to their own advantage; leveraging considerably more resources and existing power structures. It is true to say that new media has de-centralised the control of many political and social processes, but you only need to look east to see China doing their utmost to ensure it does not overwhelm them.
Has anything fundamentally changed?
The power of the few will likely always have the ability to influence the many; we see this day to day online and via social networks just like we do in everyday life. Core nodes or points of influence online could be likened to Prime Ministers, Presidents and Dictators, each with more influence and resources than the average citizen. So has anything really changed? Or has it just changed in form, got a little more complex and a hell of a lot faster?