As a kid, my brothers and I would walk to the park up the hill to play with the other kids from the neighborhood. It was a place to meet new kids and see what type of people I lived next too. As I’ve gotten older, the space between my house and school, or my house and anywhere for that matter, is mediated by my car. With my air conditioning, I don’t even breathe the air from outside. My life as a kid seemed much more public, riding my bike to my friends house, taking the bus from school, picnics at the park. Now, my life is largely experienced from my bed where I have easy access to the Internet.
While it would seem logical to use this blog to explore the public space outside of the enclosed areas I am so used to living in, instead I want to explore public spaces that do not occupy physical areas but rather digital “space.” A place that I can experience, as I said before, from the comfort of my bed. Going to Los Angeles parks, outdoor movie screenings or festivals, taking the bus home, talking to strangers on the street are activities that are mostly foreign to me and I also imagine that such things are also foreign to others like me who have grown accustomed to the convenience of the Internet and the level of accessibility it allows users.
I have spent time outside of Los Angeles in other cities where one of my favorite things to do was take the bus or subway, get off somewhere interesting, and then walk around for a few hours. Los Angeles is not structured like most cities, so I wonder if the sprawled urban environment of Los Angeles is what contributes to my (and possibly other’s) engagement with people and culture through the web rather than through physical experiences.
Such engagement has various implications, most of which are probably too sophisticated for me to even understand but, for example, various critics have set forth the idea that the Internet distills participants according to their specific interests, a similar segregative (I made this word up) quality seen in sprawled out urban environments like Los Angeles. I want to try to answer the questions I set forth at the beginning of this post but in the context of the Internet and the type of engagement/interaction/participation that occurs there.
Where do public places exist in Los Angeles? I suppose that would be parks and café’s and the like (I think that was killing two birds with one stone since I also just answered the forms public places take place…) To add another dimension to this issue of public space, does the Internet count in this discussion of public space? This blog will treat it that way. And finally, maybe the most important question, who is going to these places? That is, who is participating and engaging with the Internet. I would imagine that would include most people living in a modern society, however by “who” I mean what types of people and for what purpose.
In many ways, this post is the first step to answering these questions as it is a sign of a person (me) actively participating and engaging in this digital public space for the purpose of satisfying my curiosity… and fulfilling a writing requirement for school. I hope this turns out to be interesting.
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