Changing Perspectives | William J. Mitchell’s City of Bits

Upon meeting up with our tutor, Dr. Anthony Brand, we pitched the three fields + courtyard scheme to him; discussing our discourse throughout the mid-semester break. While providing feedback, Brand introduced us to William J. Mitchell’s ‘City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn’ and ‘Me + +’; two readings that envision (and in some places accurately predict) the functions of a technologically advanced society.

My group member Ethan volunteered to skim through these texts; evaluating the key points of the text, and their relevance to our project. From this, he concluded that ‘Me + +’ was not so relevant to our design; focussing on Mitchell’s own vision of society and technology. Inversely, ‘City of Bits’ was certainly significant, influencing a pivotal shift in our design direction.

My own notes on City of Bits – ‘City of Bits’ envisions technology evolving into “a separate city from the real space”. Speaking like a narrator, Mitchell explores the many facets in our everyday lives; highlighting the many shifts that occur due to technology. While written in 1995, Mitchell’s text can’t be more relevant today, when entire worlds can be compressed into a computer VIA data; blurring with reality with innovations in Immersive Reality technology.

Regarding general information outlined in ‘City of Bits, Ethan’s blog summarises the points made in the book.

After this, we decided to split off to develop our own perspectives on ‘City of Bits’. We would reunite the following day to mediate on a new design direction. In my case, some topics that interested me in the text are:

- “The Net negates Geometry” – Mitchell identifies the anti-spatial qualities of technology. Take the traditional library format; an entire building filled with information; books. Yet, with the introduction of online databases like the University of Auckland’s catalogue, the entire library is now compressed into a phone; a tablet; laptop; anything that can be carried around. Furthermore, navigating the ‘Net’ is another facet of Mitchell’s anti-spatial vision. By fixing entire databases to a single device, navigation becomes a temporal exercise.

- “More and more of the instruments of human interaction, and of production and consumption, were being dematerialised and cut lose from fixed locations.” – Supplementary to technology’s anti-spatial qualities, our urbanscape is now made more homogenous than ever before; any place can facilitate any function. This facet in some ways jeopardises the physical realm; questioning typologies like libraries through nihilistic means. Yet, I also feel this is impossible; people don’t go to gyms to read books, or libraries to exercise. Thus, an enigma emerges; what is the role of typology in a technologically advanced city?

- “Fragmented Identities” – The internet fractures our identities into social media profiles; game accounts; photos etc. By doing so, people can easily hide and mask their identity; in some cases fabricating new personas separate from themselves. While we can now ‘connect’ more easily than ever before, we are also more distant from one another. It leads me to wonder: To what extent is the internet an effective communication tool?

- “The Net is Asynchronous” – Mitchell predicts the internet as a communicator unbound by time, anywhere. When one sends a message to another, it is still communicated regardless of when and where it is received. Take texts; emails; DMs for example. I could send a message to my family in China, and they would near immediately receive it, yet they can also reply anytime. We are no longer bound temporally.

Reuniting as a group, we each recorded our perspectives on the text; selecting the most important points to discuss and move forward with.

City of Bits Mediation – After listing out each of our key points, Ethan, Noah and I were all thinking along similar lines. We were all against technology as a despatialising element, believing it to defeat the purpose of a Digital Library, in addition to being detrimental to how humans function. Thus, we have fused Ethan’s ‘Divide to Connect’, my ‘Typology = Wellbeing’, and Noah’s Storytelling as Communication, to inform our design moving forward.

Overall, I found Mitchell’s ‘City of Bits’ to be a profound eye-opener. While his thoughts on technology have been floating around in my group’s discourse for some time, this text enlightened us on the true significance of a digital takeover; thus narrowing our design towards a clear goal.