INSTITUTIONAL FORMS & URBAN LOGICS

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The Tradition of Home 

 
“The living room must provide space for one or two easy chairs, a set-tee, a television set, small tables, and places suitable for a reasonable quantity of other possessions such as a sewing box, toy box, radiogram and bookcase. In planning how the furniture might be arranged, the designer should envisage that it will often be pushed back against the walls to give clear space, and this should be allowed for… A family home should be planned with an inside space to keep a pram or a pushchair.” The Parker Morris Report, 19611

Breaking the peripheral 

Social life in the 21st century is heavily dependent on life lived on social media. Th e convergence of social media that is progressively mobile, instantaneous and popular with the current urban space has brought about a constitutive frame for an exclusive and new social experience, changing the nature of traditional media and its roles in the traditional ways of life (McQuire, 2008).

As compared to traditional media, “devices such as telephone and television were mainly fixed. Located in either the office or the home, they were in fact essential to the arrangement of the distinct boundary in a domestic dwelling”.2 Instead of treating social media as something detached from the city – the channel that ‘embodies’ urban phenomena by turning it into an image – spatial experience of modern social life emerges through a complex process of correlation between architecture and urban territories, social practices and media feedback. The contemporary city is a media-architecture complex resulting from an increase in spatialized media platforms and the invention of a crossbreed of spatial ensembles. In deference to Lefebvre’s sense of binding aff ect and cognition to space, Mcquire (2008) argues that social media has changed the dynamics in the production of contemporary urban spaces. 3

Uncanny 

Social media is not about the delivery or the making of an existing network visible. Rather, being social in the context of social media simply means the “construction of connections within the boundaries of adaptive algorithmic architecture”. 4 Th e network grows, evolves and becomes, blurring the lines between the dynamics of space. Lucy Küng, a research associate at the Reuters Institute suggests that with an “interminable technological progression, the cross between a once distinguished sectors and overwhelming transformations on the engagement with content has led to dynamism, complexity and uncertainty in regards to the dynamics of a family”.5

In Freud’s essay ‘Th e Uncanny’ published in 1919, he studied the derivation of the German word ‘unheimlich’, which directly translates to English as ‘uncanny’, while in fact is depicted as ‘unhomely’. For Freud, the feeling of uncanny wasn’t caused by the strange or unfamiliar. Instead it came about when the known and familiar was made strange. Uncanniness is a dysfunctional domesticity, with the restitution of the familiar in a superfi cially unfamiliar way.6

The intrusion of everyday life by social media is evident, widespread, and bound to increase. Images, institutions, social networks, thoughts, acts of communication, emotions, and speech – social media – are no longer associated with clearly established, stable entities and contexts.7 Th e uncertainty in how social media is an inherent part of our daily lives, as Virilio (1995:99) points out, “Th e technology question is inseparable from the question of where technology occurs”. Implanted directly into the heart of domestic space, devices such as the telephone, radio, television and computer punch right through the physical threshold of the private residence. It is no longer defi ned by the passage of material bodies; access to a residence increasingly depends upon the activation of an electrical circuit. Th e home is conceived as an interactive node permanently on-line to vast information fl ows, radically altering the division and dynamics of public and private space. 8

The rapid growth of new media and the emergence of social media over the last decade have changed its dynamics in terms of accessibility – access at home or workplace has succumbed to mobile forms of public access. It is a refl ection of conversations happening throughout the day, whether at the supermarket, a bar, the train, the water cooler, the playground, or at home.

De Territorialization 

One result is the intense de-territorialization (the loss of one’s home). Ortega y Gasset in his classic work Meditación de la Técnica (1939) stated that “technology is an amazing prosthetic machine that allows us to live in the world; it is our mechanism for evolution”. What can be seen and experienced within its walls are no longer contained by its limits, the convergence between social space and cellular space transforms the connection between place and experience, familiar and foreign, self and stranger.

The growth of social media has crippled traditional ways of life, giving new life to traditions. It has destabilized the convention of space – domestic dwelling and its subjectivity – eradicated it from its origins and immersed in a cultural diaspora, where the origin of identity is no longer associated to particular locales.

The domestic space is not just an instinctual backdrop for the activity of daily life. It is an active participant that frames, resources, and attests to the activity of family life (Flichy, 1995). “A particular dining room, kitchen, or bedroom each provides a material context that incorporates certain routine performances and shapes its execution”¬¬. Th e architecture of the home, the accumulation and arrangement of technologies within that architecture is essential to construct a framework for the routine ordering of the everyday, and its capacity to make sense of the complexities of the everyday (potential for subjectivity). As encultured beings, these subjectivities are also intersubjective, that is the signifi cance of the arrangement of the domestic space is both performative and legible.9

The role media institutions can play, and ought to play, is the cultivation of an autonomy and responsible way of life.10 With the boundaries between human perception and technological vision blurred, we have to reconsider the space of consciousness, as the models of autonomy and interior subjectivity which have dominated modernity becomes difficult to reconcile with our everyday experience.

Suspended between the growth of social media and the intermittent threat of alienation, there is a serious need to examine what it actually means today to be ‘at home’. Does ‘home’ still relate to a specifi c location, site or territory – or rather, to a particular perception of condition, of social belonging? If the domestic space of our current homes is the convergence of both the social and cellular space, how might we defi ne the peripheral of our homes in the future, in relation to the present?