JB Jackson Response

In response to JB Jackson’s essays concerning the landscape in its modern state, one cannot fail to recognize the massive changes taking place in communications and information technology since its publication in the mid twentieth century. It is not that the overall conventions have changed themselves, but rather that they have been enhanced through the capacity to link systems that were heretofore logistically separated. Where transportation was a series of individual mechanical systems presented as an array of options for travelling from point to point, these systems are increasingly integrated and form an organically responsive network. Where communication was tied to the notion of “a time and place”, we now are engaged continuously in a suspended dialogue with innumerable contacts to whom we make ourselves constantly available. Taken together, these two developments push us further than ever from the paradigm of cultural boundaries as they are described by Frost’s image of a well-built wall. We travel over and through these walls everyday.

If communication is the most necessary element for strengthening identities, then ours have never been more soundly buttressed. The ability to produce, project and sustain one’s outward identity (or identities) has never been so available to so many individuals in so many ways. The conversations we have range from the exclusive to the universally public, each moment on the spectrum subject to a revised persona, and we don’t have to be present for any of them. While this has not yet replaced the practice of consumerist acquisition of product items that propose our intended persona when we must be present in our relationships or activities, it offers the venue for something suspended that is not reliant on accessories for its support. Rather than Jackson’s highway culture in which one’s identity is illustrated through curb appeal, the information super-high-way projects us into society behind the protection of digital avatars and edited commentary.

Therefore, the public space, apart from the political and ceremonial, is in danger of growing obsolete. What can be considered public or social about a place is defined by the behaviors conducted therein. We no longer require a public meeting to participate publicly. We no longer require a social gathering in order to socialize. It is not to say that these spaces should not or need not be designed into the social and public mechanism, but that the trend toward informality in these conventions is compounded accordingly.

Where the major development in transportation in the last century was the proliferation of the culture of the automobile, the newest compliment to our transportation infrastructure is the means by which the various systems are now being integrated. As well as those nodes of intersection, as described by Charlie Cannon, that conjoin systems of movement at physical points of overlap, the ability for each system to respond to logistical conditions of the others through information sharing is increasing. This not only increases the radius of access to resources, employment, and travel, but also is increasingly and profoundly affecting the means of commerce. Rather than a landscape marked by outlets for consumer options in which the interface is defined by where one enters and exits the parking lot, the new user interface is virtual, hardware non-specific, and no longer relies on an architecture-as-glyph brick and block format for recognition and interaction. Merchants become digital Bedouins able to set up shop anywhere at the beckon call of a search engine. Highly automated shipping systems deliver goods from massive, largely unmanned distribution centers that house the inventories of scores of merchants. Plugging into this system is not dependant on storefront access; we have gone from passing a three quarter ton vehicle from residence to store house to passing electromagnetic impulses wirelessly from one processor to another spanning continents in seconds.

The new paradigm of globalization, in which access is described in measures of time rather than distance, suggests an incoming shift in how we perceive boundaries. The cultural divides that the last two centuries brought boiling to the surface are not altogether disappeared. However, the newer generations will not grow under the ideological contexts these agendas promoted in the past. Distance is no longer a barrier of its own virtue. The concept we now carry of time is metered out in fractions of a second. The new global economy/ecology demands that we take the long view and abandon efforts to isolate ourselves politically, culturally, or ideologically. The philosophical boundaries illustrated in Frost’s poem become logistical obstacles in the context of this new vision of a geopolis, particularly because of the notions brought to rise during his time: that access to the means of promoting one’s self in the social and political environment is the defining quality of liberated and civilized culture, and that this promotion is exercised through the indulgence of expression. In JB Jackson’s time, the newest form of indulgent expression came about in the projection of identity through consumer products. The information age, when communication of data and ideas is at its most accessible and fluid state in human history, brings the projection of identity and the promotion of the idealized self to a level of enterprise no longer dependant on proximity to others, appropriate space, or private holdings beyond the breadth of one’s elbows.