JB Jackson rewrite: Gregariousness in the Technological Landscape

An individual’s search for identity has developed to be more concrete than ever within the framework of the internet. A century ago we defined ourselves in terms of our environment, and forty years ago JB Jackson identified an inclination to manipulate our environment to help identify ourselves. Identity now has become in large part the appropriation and reinterpretation of the identities of others on the internet. There is a mass of images, words, and music on the internet that is now available to be copied, pasted, edited and rebroadcast into the world as what makes up you.

In Jackson’s description of the highway as the new social landscape in 1966 he points to the loud self-identifying architecture that lines these thoroughfares. This vivid self-image-making of businesses and institutions has now become possible on a personal level on the internet. Imagine being able to build your own billboard or neon-sign-adorned business along RT 95 telling all who pass who you are and what you stand for. With the growth of the information highway, we are capable of this level of self broadcasting within a vast communication network that can support it.

Of course the computer (or internet-ready device) is the object that allows us into this new social landscape. But the object must also be supported by an internet connection. While we don’t need to get in a vehicle and drive to see and socialize within the new identities constructed, we do need the infrastructure that allows the information to travel to us. By bringing broadband to spaces both public and private, this socialization can be supported more continuously. And perhaps the most socially opportune space is one which provides for both internet and physical interaction. The social possibilities of bringing together like minds in physical space with even more like minds in digital space are more expansive than ever. To have a space of permanence able to communicate with the infinite space of transience may be the new goal.

Jackson proposed that the idea of boundaries may have been coming back into favor in The Public Landscape. The internet has certainly made this so. Places of safety and commonality are often times made possible by the boundaries they hold within the internet. Memberships, subscriptions, and passwords signal to us that we are entering a place shared by people with common interests to ours. Within the boundaries of these definitions we are more likely to find what we are looking for, whether it be a new recipe, a recommended film, or a bank account balance.

If the structure of the internet can more easily allow us to define and locate ourselves, we may begin to be able to tie it back to the physical structure in which we operate. Moving forward we should work toward using the social structures of the internet to support the social spaces we inhabit physically.