The Association of Internet Researchers conference theme “Re-thinking community, re-thinking place” proved apt in Copenhagen October 15 – 18, with scores of papers and powerful keynotes reflecting in different ways on the complementarity of online and offline community. While once we might have considered space to be losing importance, as digital media freed us from the constraints of geography, the real world turns out to be crucial after all. The social web is reinforcing ideas of the territorial grounding of identity and the permeability of online and offline interactions. The Suburban Crossings project in Fairfield, Western Sydney, asks “How do maps work? What do they mean? What is ‘home’? What makes a place special? ...Welcome to Suburban Crossings, a project about migration, maps, home, territory and settlement”. This project uses social media to reclaim space through digital images with narrative authored by community members uploaded to maps using Flickr. In this way residents can re-animate community in a kind of democratic ‘place-making’ of their own, reinterpreting other people’s maps, “moving across territories, mapping different stories”.
Inspiring conference keynote, Professor of Human Geography Steve Graham, considers “technophiliac dreams” of technological omniscience to be cause for critical reflection on the politics of place. Urban surveillance is practically militarised “anticipatory risk management” in which everything has to be justified in advance of its presence for the purpose of control. I couldn’t help but agree as I submitted several times in two weeks to the dehumanising processes of airport border control in which the unpacking of identity is highly ritualised (such as, in the UK, through checking 53 variables for each person in transit) to locate, track, position, anticipate and know the (potential) enemy. Urban activism offers a challenge to the logic of militarised, corporate and commercial spaces, through participation in urban visualisations such as the Greenwich emotion map, the Murmur project in Kensington, Toronto, and the North 118 West project.
