I can’t believe I am copyediting the last version of my PhD thesis! So many people have worked and played, participated, contributed, critiqued and otherwise walked along with me. Here’s the “official abstract” – more coming soon once the blog interface is fixed.

Co-productions of Technology, Culture and Policy in North America’s Community Wireless Networking Movement

Alison Powell, July 3, 2008

This thesis investigates the visions and realities of community WiFi’s social and political impact from a communications studies perspective, examining how communication technology and social forms are co-produced and providing a communication studies perspective on the transformation of social visions of technology into technological, social, and policy realities. By following the development of local WiFi projects and the emergence of broader policy-oriented mobilizations, it assesses the real outcomes of socially and politically progressive visions about information and communication technologies (ICTs). The visions of advocates and developers suggest that community WiFi projects can inspire greater local democratic engagement, while the realities suggest a more subtle bridging of influence from community WiFi actors into policy development spheres. The thesis describes local WiFi networks in Montreal and Fredericton, NB, and the North American Community Wireless Networking (CWN) movement as it has unfolded between 2004 and 2007, arguing that its democratic visions of technology and their institutional realities have been integral to the politicization of computing technology over the last four decades. Throughout the thesis, WiFi radio technology, a means of networking computers and connecting them to the internet by using unlicensed radio spectrum, acts as an example of how a technology’s material form is co-produced along with its symbolic social and political significance.

There is a terror in almost being done with a big piece of writing: because when we bring it into the world, it stands or falls on its own value. In my mind, my writing is perfect, complete, lucid. In fact, it is lumpen, awkward, sometimes unrefined.

The Open-source Boyfriend says, “you have to communicate it, and to communicate it you have to write it down. You can’t have someone halfway across the world read what you write and comment on it until it’s written.”

I know he’s right (write?). Release early, release often, they say. But I’m scared that the awful truth is that upon release, I have nothing to say!

I went to the bank today, to cash a cheque. The cheque was written in US dollars which meant that I could not cash it directly: instead, two separate forms had to be filled and sent to the central bank office, where the cheque would be negotiated or sold for US currency. The whole matter would take one to two weeks, and likely involve several levels of bureaucracy for an amount that would buy me one decent pair of shoes. I experienced the same issue when trying to transfer money from Canada to the UK: for personal banking between two countries, paperwork and tax laws multiply to confusion. The thing is, I have three chequing accounts, in three countries. In the past year I have earned money in four different currencies. By all rights I should be one of the “network elites” moving fluidly around in the global space of flows (that’s Manuel Castells – 1996 and 2001). After all, international finance companies are transferring billions of dollars across the world every second in a network of operations constructed from transportation, information, and communication technologies.

But as I (and presumably others in this situation) find, the network flows are not always so easy to navigate at the personal level. Oh yes, we are mobile – but we can be suddenly made immobile by bad weather, human error, mechanical breakdown, passport control, banking imbroglio. I wonder if other frequent travellers find, as I have, that multiplying one’s identity is easier than carrying a continuous self through the flow? So my addresses multiply to minimize transfers overseas, and each jurisdiction is likely unaware of my identity in the other. In many ways, this makes me painfully aware of where I live at any moment (for example, I’m quite incensed about the bad planning for cyclists in West London) and also ferociously interested in what’s going on elsewhere (I read much more Canadian news when living abroad).

Mimi Scheller thinks that mobility and democracy don’t recombine in a network or flow. She argues that things like mobile people and communication devices make up more of a gel, where some movements between public and private are smooth, and others are held in place and space. Public life doesn’t suddenly appear in “official” public space: instead it emerges around and through and alongside people’s movements through all kinds of spaces and in all kinds of places.

I think Scheller’s right about the gel – for individual people, the flows of mobility and capital don’t move smoothly. We keep getting caught in the sticky parts of the gel, where we are reminded of where we are and challenged to make the actions we take as citizens relevant. Castells’ main criticism of the network society is that it isolates the influence of actions in local places. But if what connects us is not a rigid network but a slippery gel, maybe we can determine a way to connect local actions to global events. For those of us with different lives in different places, maybe this means thinking about the connections, not the barriers, between these spaces and places.

As I made a right turn across traffic into a blind alley on my bicycle today, I thought about Douglas Englebart, who I met in Thierry Bardini’s book Bootstrapping: Douglas Englebart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing . Englebart is best-known for building the first on-line computer system and for heading the lab where the first computer mouse was designed. But his more interesting contribution to cybernetics and computing studies was his concept of co-evolution – where engaging with a system changes the way that you think, while simultaneously changing the system itself. This principle suggests that tools don’t just serve useful purpose, they actually enhance human intelligence through the way that they are used.

Englebart wanted computers to demand an engagement from the people who used them, so that both would co-evolve, as Bardini says, “to enable new modes of creative thought, communication, and collaboration” (p. 143). But his caveat was that computers were not meant to be easy to use – otherwise the people using them wouldn’t really evolve – and neither would the system. He was inspired by an early cybernetic thinker, J.R. Licklider, who wrote:

“it is worth pausing to ponder how few well-developed skills there are that are both complex and widespread. Almost everyone can get about in three-dimensional space. Almost everyone can speak and understand one of the natural languages – perhaps not grammatically, but fluently. But relatively few people can do anything else that is even remotely comparable in informational complexity and degree of perfection.” (cited in Bardini, p.216)

Englebart hoped to make computing into one of these complex, widespread skills. But his co-evolution project never took off – instead, computers are “user friendly” with purportedly transparent forms of navigation. But on my ride today, as I made a turn that was logically correct but intuitively wrong, I thought about the complexities of navigation as a cognitive activity.

Navigating in a new place requires not just the capacity to move in three-dimensional space, but the acceptance and mastery of a new geography – understood through street signs and direction abstracted from a two-dimensional map, as well as memorized physical landmarks. Because I don’t yet know the circuitous route across London well enough to calmly pedal like a distracted academic thinking about cybernetics, I have to pay attention so I don’t turn intuitively and find myself in the horrific triangular limbo between Marylebone Road, Old Marylebone Road, Marylebone High Street and Old Marylebone High Street.

But according to Englebart, my navigation confusion could be making me smarter. Once I can get across the city without thinking about it, I will have mastered another complex everyday skill – following a route featuring roundabouts, bad signage, and braintwistingly similar corners while not falling off a small metal contraption barging through traffic at 20 km an hour. It’s just that the city won’t be getting any smarter from me riding across it.

Then again, neither will my computer interface. In fact, compared to the process of learning to navigate the city, I have learned almost nothing from navigating the WYSIWYG interface of my Mac. Of course, I am not expecting to be challenged – I have accepted that my computer is meant to be easy to use rather than interesting to use. Even worse, using my computer provides me with very few of the brilliant moments where it, as a tool, becomes “ready at hand” (that’s Heidegger) - where it falls away and leaves me only with the experience of what it makes possible. A ready at hand bicycle lets me look up and marvel at the brilliant winter sunlight on mansions, chimney pots, and medieval churches. In comparison, a tool that is present at hand (still Heidegger) forces me to acknowledge its role as a tool. A bicycle does this when it has a flat tire. The Mac interface does this when it expects me to search through hierarchical files and folders for a document that I know is related to what I am writing, makes me scroll down to read through documents, highlight to cut and paste.

Can Englebart’s vision of co-evolution ever return to the complex everyday use of computer tools? Could we connect to our computers using only our minds, and then shape and learn from the systems we created? Bardini thinks we could, but warns us with the words of Jeff Raskin, an interface designer:

‘I suspect most of us would prefer to use a direct mind to machine (MTM) interface, rather than type and shove a mouse around, but if the interface in which MTM is embedded is full of modal traps, complex navigational puzzles, and a multitude of details to be memorized, the improvement will be marginal and the interface as frustrating as anything now available” (cited in Bardini p. 226).

Faced with the complex navigational puzzle of the four Marylebones I ride past, I’m wondering if we underestimate the extent of the cognitive challenge of just getting where we are going!

So, I’m in London. Waking up in the morning in a house in West London, next to the person next to whom, out of all the people in the world, I most want to be waking up with. Riding my bike in traffic in London, on the left hand side, circling buses and avoiding pedestrians and sometimes looking up at the Regency mansions on the way to the library. Writing in a café in London, listening to accents from the edges of the empire. In these first few weeks in a new place, the differences between where I come from and where I am seem most marked. I don’t know the conventions here – Christmas is Happy, not Merry. Mistletoe is a plant, not a plastic symbol. More beer is drunk than I am used to, and sex is taboo in a way I don’t expect – jokes about it crop up everywhere as if to urgently break the tension.

In these days, at this time, I cannot yet say that I am truly living in London. I am, in some ways, still in transit. Once, someone asked me whether I thought I would spend my life as an “uprooted researcher living in a global city.” That question has followed me since, as I have travelled farther and farther from the place I grew up with, the culture that I could have called my own. But in a way, nomadism is also my culture: from the Polish orphan who landed at Ellis Island and lost his name, to my grandparents fleeing postwar England for the warmth of Africa (and then again for the cold of the Midwest), and of course my parents, driving their tiny cars full of possessions here and there across the continent.

But that question came back to me today: not the bit about being uprooted, but the bit about being a researcher. As I clicked off the reading light, packed up my pads and pencils, passed through security, and walked into the central atrium of the British Library (looking like nothing else in its airy magnificence than a cruise ship for the bookish) I felt as if I were travelling from one world to another. From the world of my thoughts, the true site of my research, to the reality of being in London: the cold fog descending, Christmas lights twinkling, and the same buses and taxis to avoid on the long descent down Notting Hill. A strange world, after the deep and commanding one of my thoughts – and more strange for being still unknown. I think this is why researchers, even those who like me are committed to understanding and participating in situated and particular knowledge, need sometimes to travel. When the world outside is strange, the world in your head, the world you are excavating every day through writing, feels familiar, comfortable, and known.

Not last week. Last week I went to a public consultation for the Commission d'agglomeration de Montréal sur le développement économique. They were studying whether to fund an expansion of Ile Sans Fil. In the remarks period, I expressed my support for the plan, as a researcher studying municipal and community wireless.

Then the committee members asked their questions. The mayor of St-Anne-de-Bellevue, on the West Island, started his questions by saying, 'I don't know much about these issues. So I asked a friend to recommend me some reading. He sent me an article by Alison Powell and Leslie Regan Shade."

Then he read the words we wrote, the critical questions we had asked about the sustainability of community wireless networking projects. Sitting in a leather seat in a marble hall, I realized those words had made a difference.

The next day, the mayor of Ste-Anne followed up with me, and we had a long conversation about the role of technology projects in economic development strategies, the expansion of open-source organizational models, and the scalability of wireless networks. At the end of the conversation he thanked me and Leslie for writing the way that we did: clearly, informatively, elegantly.

If I thought it didn't matter what I wrote, how I wrote . . .I've changed my mind. Now, I'm off to bed, because tomorrow, I have to get up and start again.

(International Community Wireless Networking Expert Mimi Gabor was also glimpsed, briefly. Photographs to follow . . .)

This is billed as the CWIRP workshop, but we think it should be the Reunion Tour. I feel privileged to be part of this great group of colleagues and friends. Sure, we are doing work that we feel is changing the way we think about communications, community, and democracy, but we are also building relationships that make arriving in a strange city feel like coming home.

Let's sing that song again, one more time . . . .

Biking home in the golden light this afternoon I passed hundreds of "typical" blocks of flats, engaging in my usual habit of imagining "what would my life be like if I lived somewhere else -- on the Plateau, downtown, in St-Henri . . " I imagined the tiny but important differences from my life at Jean-Talon. A different vegetable market. Fewer Mexican restaurants. Another café with different owners. Would they remember my allongé, collect my forgotten mittens for me?

Next month, I will live in a Victorian row house in West London. From the back window of that house, you can see the planes land at Heathrow, above the rows of chimneys, the thick trees full of birds. The London tourist brochures show images of these white-fronted terrace houses, window boxes full of flowers. The brochures include pictures taken down along the Thames where I run sometimes, past houseboats and waterfront pubs and parks. Beyond what's in the pictures, the river has surprising beauty. The city noise falls away, leaving the sound of rowing skiffs, clinking glasses, and geese. On the far bank, bicycles careen through mud left by high tide, against the backdrop of wild parkland. Even in winter, the trees are green.

By the time I come back to Montreal it will be spring. I have never lived through a winter with no snow, without the bitter cold jab of air in the nose on a February morning. This feeling is never described in a tourist brochure. Neither is the precise quality of light reflected at 4 pm through my office window.

The fact is, we can never know what things, exactly, change our lives. I came to Montreal almost by accident, but living here has given me something I never could have imagined. Paris, too. As I prepare for a new life, in another city, I wonder -- not even daring to imagine -- what surprising beauty I will find.

The distractions are legion: grant applications, art projects, trapeze lessons, newspapers, music, food, friends.

But the idea is still there, turning slowly, gestating. A quote from a fellow researcher I read recently sums it up best: "it is like being married to something. You go to bed with it, you wake up with it".

I am not married to anything but this, not now. But this idea could take up all the space there is. It could, if I don't get it into words.

3rd edition of Artivistic :: [ un.occupied spaces ]

25 to 27 October 2007 :: Montreal

We are infiltrating all levels of society. Artists, activists, academics, architects, bureaucrats, the homeless, anarchists, first nations, immigrants, doctors, geeks, queers, lawyers, teachers, witches, philosophers, clowns. Artivistic does not only provide a platform for political artists and artistic activists, but partakes in the very movements that work for change. In the pursuit of temporary moments of pleasure, we move towards freedom, for resistance is perpetual and oppression, ever-changing.

Building on the 2005 generation, Artivistic in 2007 will continue to ask questions that do not leave us thinking we have resolved the issues. We strongly suggest that you answer one, or all, of our questions with a question of your own.

< what is indigenous ? >

< what is natural space ? >

< what is (there) to occupy ? >

Artivistic is an international transdisciplinary three-day gathering on the interPlay between art, information and activism. Artivistic emerges out of the proposition that not only artists talk about art, academics about theory, and activists about activism. Founded in 2004, the event aims to promote transdisciplinary and intercultural dialogue on activist art beyond critique, to create and facilitate a human network of diverse peoples, and to inspire, proliferate, activate.

Today, I suspended myself completely upside down, ten feet up in the air, above the trapeze bar. It felt easy.

I would like to apply my coach's teaching method -- the rigourous, methodical repetition of incrementally more difficult tasks -- to my professional life. I'm beginning to analyse the data I'm using for the thesis, while planning and conducting more new more data collection. Why? Partly to make up for data lost due to technical mishaps and plain stupidity, but also because I am learning a lot about methodology by listening, reading, and writing down what I have already done. In new research situations I can then modify my approach, building on the last movement.

I rushed through the end of my workout today. Nothing looked good, and I almost lost my balance. Coach shook her head: "We have to do things slowly when we are in a hurry."

I feel in a hurry to finish this thesis, to embark on the next adventure. But it's clear that I have to learn, up in the ropes and down here, to do things more slowly.

After four years the CRACIN project, that multi-tentacled beast of a research project that has employed me, frustrated me, inspired me, guided me, and provided me with the framework for my research with Ile Sans Fil has wrapped up. I said goodbye to many colleagues and friends who I am sure I will see, but whose official connection with me will soon become more tenuous.

A few pieces of sushi, hugs all around, and I am home in my office realizing that this desk, this window, and this pile of files will be my world for the next year or so, as I finish the thesis. Four years ago, I remember the feeling of stepping out of my small world into a much larger one. Suitcase in hand, I travelled to Ottawa to meet a group of academics who have since shaped my approach to collaboration, research (and good food and drink).

The suitcase has travelled many kilometres since then, and so have my thoughts. As I begin to focus them to create a work that bears my own name, the tentacles of the "beast" that was this project remain. The people and practices I encountered over the past four years have shaped and will continue to shape my work. Thank you, to everyone. And now, to write.

The official announcement:

Today marks an important day in the net neutrality debate in Canada. With the launch of www.whatisnetneutrality.ca (WiNN), Canadians have a valuable resource with which to educate themselves about this emerging concept.

Thanks for your time,
Neil Barratt
Michael Lenczner
Alison Powell

This week I read an article by Sherry Turkle, the first psychologist of the online world.

She writes about being tethered, about how the online "second self" she proposed in the 1990s is now becoming something else: itself. It is not that we have an online life that is separate or secondary to our "real" life, but instead we have a life in which we are connected to bots, profiles, avatars, search engines. What is the embodiment of life when we have no time for reflection, when turning off our devices is psychological torture because we invest in them the power to make us feel? I feel this torture myself when the icon next to someone I love indicates his absence. Maya, has written about projecting her anger on to one of these icons -- the double absence of her lover all the more poignant in its embodiment in a small green circle.

With all of this mediation, how do we determine how we are alive? In her article, Turkle wonders about our evocation of "aliveness," in the age of robotics. What does it mean that something is alive? That it can interact? Or is there something more fundamental to life itself? Is it important to have live endangered animals in zoos as opposed to animatronic ones?

Aliveness becomes more poignant in a world with fewer different live things to encounter. Endgame an article in Harper's magazine about the disappearing wilderness, discusses the "shrinking wilderness". Edward Hoagland is an elderly man living in the woods in Vermont. With slight melancholy, he enumerates the animals with whom he shared his space, describing their interactions with each other and with him. He then criticizes contemporary environmental movements of becoming meaninglessly abstract: instead of talking about saving wild spaces that people have experienced or animals like the ones he lives with every day, they now talk about carbon offsetting, wind production, climate change management. Even saving nature is becoming disembodied - a task for the connected and digital and not for the settled and rustic.

Hoagland and Turkle both evoke a world with no mystery - a world where everything is known, every path travelled (even the tourist trail to Antarctica). There is a distress in both of their articles that the authors cannot fully communicate. The distress of the connections having pulled so far (away from place, ecology, human connection, or thoughtful reflection) that they are impossibly shallow. The depth and extent of this distress is probably unknowable, and it shapes, I think, our present experience of the world.

The question becomes one of alleviating distress. We each find our solution: my good friend delighted in telling me that particle physicists have encountered the limits of the scientific method. She felt solace in the fact that science could disprove the basis of its own existence. Other friends go hiking, feeling their bones settle as they climb rocks and breathe mountain air. In the midst of travel, disembodied love, and a professional interest in the role of technology, I am hoping to find the place, the experience, the compromise that will tell me - I AM ALIVE.