ALBERTO PEPE

Reinventing airspace: spectatorship, fluidity, intimacy at PEK T3

Author: Alberto Pepe Gentile

Title: Reinventing airspace: spectatorship, fluidity, intimacy at PEK T3

Venue: ACE: Journal of Architecture, City & Environment. Year IV, Issue 10. Pages 9-19. 2009.

Abstract: In this article, I explore the contemporary practice of air travel conceptualizing airports as socio-technical mobilities. Drawing both from the notion of “space” posited by Michel de Certeau and that of “non-place” by Marc Augé, I argue that the supermodern nature of air travel has generated forms of crisis that have embedded themselves in the architecture and the modus operandi of contemporary airports. Airports are necessarily located in a physical and tangible sense, yet their function is so tightly coupled with transience, mobility and spectatorship, that they bring anthropological accounts of “place” to unprecedented extremes. In this article, I analyze three tensions that are inherently bound to the contemporary practice of air travel and that present themselves as symbiotic phenomena: spectatorship/solitude, fluidity/control, intimacy/sameness. I explore the presence and interplay of these tensions in the spatial (spectatorship), technological (fluidity) and physical (intimacy) arrangements of the recently completed Terminal 3 at Beijing’s International Airport.

epistemological deliverance

or: how to disable the News Feed on the Facebook

The Facebook recently unveiled a new home page design. One of the new features* is the real time stream:

The stream lets you know what’s happening right now in your world by showing you everything your friends and other connections, such as celebrities, athletes and politicians, are sharing. **

But what if you don’t want to know “what’s happening right now in your world”? Luckily, the new version of the Facebook allows you (the user) to control fairly well what information about your friends goes into the stream and, importantly, what friends it comes from:

When you’re reading the stream to keep up with friends, you’ll see everything that’s happening. Of course, you may be more interested in certain friends. **

Yes, of course. But I am not going to tell the Facebook which friends I “may be more interested in”, especially because this (choosing friends) reminds me of Zizek’s account of love: a structure of imbalance. Following this line of thought, to ensure equality and balance, one has two options: a) to be updated on (i.e. to know about) ALL their friends or b) NONE of them. I chose the latter. I embarked on a social epistemology experiment and decided to (ab?)use this new feature of the Facebook, thus hiding all my friends from my news feed. Result (after some 400 clicks):

* Is this really new? Didn’t they call it “Live feed” in the previous version?

** Parts in Italic are from the Facebook Blog

Lazy webs

My friend Karen Van Godtsenhoven asked me some questions about the semantic web (and how it is related to laziness), for the latest issue of The Word Magazine. To read the article, go to the online issue (January-February 2009). The article is on pages 44-47. Alternatively you can download a PDF of the article. You can also find The Word in print, in Belgium and in good bookstores worldwide.

Review: “Revisiting the Age of Enlightenment from a Collective Decision Making Systems Perspective”

This week, I had the pleasure to read a manuscript titled “Revisiting the Age of Enlightenment from a Collective Decision Making Systems Perspective”, recently authored by my friends and colleagues Marko A. Rodriguez and Jennifer H. Watkins at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The authors present agent-based simulations of two collective decision making systems that can be used for societal-scale governance.

Rodriguez and Watkins reiterate that from a statistical viewpoint, optimal decision making is best approximated by ensuring the appropriate conditions realized by the Condorcet jury theorem. The theorem provides a theoretical basis for democracy; it states that a group of decision makers will achieve the optimal decision provided that the group is large enough (i.e. the size of the population tends toward infinity) and that the probability of each decision maker choosing the best of two options is larger than 0.5. Thus, the two conditions for a successful outcome of Condorcet’s jury theorem are population size and individual knowledge to make a decision. Rodriguez and Watkins suggest a means to achieve these conditions by: (i) approximating the largest possible population via a dynamically distributed democratic system that propagates voting
“power” to active voters in a trust-based social network; and (ii) delegating different decisions to specific groups of decision makers via the implementation of an incentive decision market model, on the basis that different decision makers possess different types of knowledge that are most useful to make different decisions. Simulation data presented in the paper show both a smaller average error and a higher proportion of correct decisions made when dynamically distributed democracy and incentive market are used, as opposed to direct democracy and incentive-free market, respectively.

The overarching thesis of the paper is that present day governments do not make appropriate use of the technological advances of the Information Age to develop modern governance and decision making systems: “many of today’s government structures are remnants of the technological constraints of the eighteenth century”. A critique is necessary: was this level of democracy the original intent of the
thinkers of the Age of Enlightenment? One might consider the social, cultural, economic, racial and gender-based barriers that existed in the eighteenth century to argue that it wasn’t solely the technological (as well as the logistical) impediment that prevented the implementation of more direct types of democracy in governance systems; rather, many Enlightenment thinkers may well have preferred governance to remain an activity of the (albeit broadened) elite classes, technological limitations notwithstanding.

Yet, perhaps the question of the Enlightenment thinkers’ original intent is beside the point. If it is our intent to achieve more optimal decisions through a decision making system involving universal suffrage, the fact is that the technologies currently relied upon by our governments to achieve this goal are unnecessarily burdened by the limitations of the past, both perceptual, and technological.

For this reason, Rodriguez’s and Watkins’ paper is important and necessary, both to advance research in e-governance and to increase awareness in the general public. The embrace and implementation of the technology offered by web-based social networks, recommendation algorithms, and collective decision making systems, should be a
crucial priority for the development of future governance systems, and as technological advances continue apace, these issues will only become more important.

Note. An excerpt of this post appears on the Collective Decision Making Systems Blog. Many thanks to Chris Starr for reading the paper and providing his comments from a socio-political perspective.