<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; "><P class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0px;margin-bottom: 12pt; ">In response to Trebor's post about "situated advocacy," I wanted to share a chapter from my upcoming book called The American Urban Spectator. In this chapter, I explore a concept called "the digital possessive" - ultimately arguing that cities are mapped through personal, and externalized, interfaces. Below is an excerpt, and the full chapter is attached to this post. </P><P class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0px;margin-bottom: 12pt; ">Best,</P><P class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0px;margin-bottom: 12pt; ">Eric</P><P class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 64px;margin-bottom: 12pt; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="ArialMT"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></FONT></P><P class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 64px;margin-bottom: 12pt; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="ArialMT">The digital possessive is the network manifestation of radical empiricism. It can be described in two parts. It is the transformation of relation into observable and lasting objects: in digital networks, relations are material. And it is the ordering of those objects within personal interfaces. For example, at any given moment, a MySpace page is the externalization of the subjectivity of the user (boyd 2006). It is where objects, broadly conceived, are organized into comprehensible experiences. To be clear, this externalization does not replace the experiencing subject; it only extends the processes of experience into networks. </FONT></SPAN><SPAN style=""><O:P></O:P></SPAN></P><P class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 64px;margin-bottom: 12pt; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="ArialMT">Indeed, the need to order relations should be considered a product of modernity, rather than a product of the Internet. As I’ve been describing throughout this book, the impulse to order and possess have been central to urban spectatorship since the end of the 19th century. But thus far, outside of setting crowds at a distance from the individual, urban spectatorship has largely been concerned with ordering and possessing the appearances of the built environment. Digital social media has extended that process to include other individuals. Of course, that impulse is not new either. In 1913, Marcel Proust wrote the following in the first volume of </FONT></SPAN><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial-ItalicMT"><I>Remembrance of Things Past:</I></FONT></SPAN><SPAN style=""><O:P></O:P></SPAN></P><P class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align: none;text-autospace:none"><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="ArialMT">Even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of other people. Even the simple act which we describe as ‘seeing someone we know’ is to some extent an intellectual process. We pack the physical outline of the person we see with all the notions we have already formed about him, and in the total picture of him which we compose in our minds those notions have certainly the principle place (1989, p. 20)</FONT></SPAN></P><P class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 64px;margin-bottom: 12pt; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="ArialMT">Well before the Internet made it possible to plot one’s personal thoughts and physical navigations, the social need to order was apparent. Speaking of a social personality that is comprised of tiny bits of information stored in the minds of the multitude of people we come across, Proust asserts that an objective self is impossible. It does not exist; it is assembled again and again in every context. Thus, ‘seeing someone we know’ is a complex process whereby we aggregate memories and impressions into a singular experience. Imagine if those impressions, for Proust merely relegated to the minds of observers, were externalized and uniformly available. Imagine if one’s private thoughts as well as public actions could compose the impressions on which others relied to assemble your social personality.</FONT></SPAN><SPAN style=""><O:P></O:P></SPAN></P><DIV class="MsoNormal"><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="ArialMT"><SPAN class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </SPAN>Digital social networking is ostensibly transforming the social personality as such. Instead of relying on the whimsy of others, users can manufacture their own data to be ordered by others, and likewise, they can obtain greater control in ordering the data of people and places with which they come into contact. But these external processes require maintenance. As every personal action leaves a data trace, what once was only a fleeting sensation to be immediately experienced by another subject, is now materialized into the network to be ordered by human and machine. From reading to driving to dating, data, even if not always accessed, is always accessible. As a result, the ordering of the “plural world of things in interaction” has become the primary task of network navigation. </FONT></SPAN><O:P></O:P></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="ArialMT"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></FONT></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"><SPAN></SPAN></DIV></BODY></HTML>