Blog 3: Media Manifold and Democratizing the Smart City


After conducting a project on smart cities last semester in CS353, I've become particularly interested in the topic— specifically how the boosterish and utopian discourse that surrounds the 'smart city' actually masks real urban issues faced by citizenry and instead favours large corporations in influencing urban space and civic/democratic governance. Therefore, in relation to some of the concepts we've been discussing in this course, I think it's interesting to conceptualize the smart city in parallel with Couldry and Hepp's (2016) concept of 'media manifold'.

Couldry and Hepp (2016) refer to the media manifold as "a large universe of variously connected digital media through which we actualize social relations— as a way of capturing the multiple relations to the overall media environment that characterize everyday life in times of deep mediatization" (p. 34). Moreover, the term media manifold "refers to a degree of institutionalized interdependence in everyday practices with media that creates a distinctive type of social complexity" (p. 35).

Relating this back to the smart city, if we are to accept the complexities that smart cities will incorporate into our lives, we ought to ask how will they effect our sociality? Indeed, as Couldry and Hepp (2016) contend, "the social world is not composed of elements whose interactions can be measured and analyzed numerically" (p. 56). Therefore, how do we democratize smart city technologies and governance so that it benefits citizens and not large multinational tech corporations? Do we want to enable corporations to influence and exploit smart city technologies to organize our social lives within the media manifold? Do we really want these corporations surveilling us or mining data (datafication) from our every interaction and transaction?

Perhaps we are living in what Mansell (2012) terms the 'paradox of complexity'— where technologies and information communication technologies (ICTs) are too complex for humans to intervene. However, I believe that accepting Mansell's paradox would be defeatist. Rather, I think it is important and valuable to deconstruct the way we have come to value 'systems' and 'algorithmic' thinking. Or as Chapman (1994) suggests, to unpack how/why technology has become so ubiquitous that we fail to see the line between sociality (humans) and technology.

 Indeed, as Couldry (2016) contends, we ought to construct "new types of normative arguments from new starting-points, forged outside the values of information systems themselves" (p. 36). Of course, how we exactly go about doing this is much too complex to analyze here. However, Bianca Wylie from the Centre for International Governance Innovation does a fantastic job at framing the issues of current smart city discourse and presents some measures that ought to be taken to democratize smart city governance (watch the video at the end). Indeed, some of her recommendations would see us diverge from systems thinking and move towards more humanistic value-based thinking that empowers citizens to democratize smart city technology/governance. 
References:

Chapman, G. (1994). Making sense out of nonsense: Rescuing reality from virtual reality. In G. Bender & T. Druckrey (Eds.), Culture on the brink: Ideologies of technology (pp. 149-156). Seattle, WA: Bay Press.

Couldry, N. (2016). Life with the media manifold: Between freedom and subjection. In L. Kramp et al. (Eds.), Politics, civil society, and participation: Media and communications in a transforming environment (pp. 25-39). Bremen: edition lumière.

Couldry, N. & Hepp, A. (2016) The Mediated Construction of Reality. Cambridge, UK: Polity.


Mansell, R. (2012) Imagining the Internet. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.


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