“Cities have always been communication systems, based on the interface between individual and communal identities and shared social representations. It is their ability to organize this interface materially in forms, in rhythms, in collective experience and communicable perception that makes cities producers of sociability, and integrators of otherwise destructive creativity.”
The City as Interface, How New Media Are Changing the City – Chapter 1 – de Waal 2014
The group is gearing up to present our partner dialogue to our class. It’s been stimulating to discuss within our group, and with Matt over at Microsoft on what is the best way to present the Microsoft Civic Tech initiative, and encourage the class to get their hands into a class activity that involves them considering a shared social problem that technology can help to address. In thinking over how to best do this, I started to consider parts of a whole, and the holistic nature of civic tech not only as an initiative, but also in the way it carries out what it actually does. This can also be considered a complex system, where systems theory is applicable (me and my Public Interactives research colleague had a very interesting chat about this) but I feel like technological systems are apolitical. A technological system in and of itself is a mechanism that functions as a layer independent of ideology. For me, an applied technology, for instance an algorithm or a router, is not in and of itself a tool of ideology. How they could be employed on the other hand, becomes very political. It got me thinking less of systems and more of a cognitive phenomenon. I thought of something that media studies students are very familiar with in terms of being trained to communicate messages through various media. Gestalt. The reason why I think Gestalt theory has particular use in describing how Civic Tech works in the wild is because, where humans are geared to sort through various sources of information in order to assign a meaning to each, they also are capable, through this process, in identifying a general underlying ideology that underpins the information they are receiving. It is a perceptive process. Looking at Civic Tech as a series of seemingly non-contiguous parts that formulate a responsive and comprehensible (and tangible) whole is compelling to me, because, while someone may not immediately identify a shape that a tree’s branches make in the wild, they will, eventually given time and consideration, be able to find a letter from the alphabet, or a symbol of something. The implicit messages and shapes behind what drives a Civic Tech initiative may not be immediately clear to those who arent keeping a close eye on politics, technology and advocacy, economics, privacy, and other factors that shape why the initiative is even happening in the first place. But, once the pieces are placed together, a shape does occur. But the process requires user perception and a tangible, virtual, or embodied result, in the same way that Gestalt works in organizing chaos into meaning.
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