I just finished reading Jeff Rice's essay, 21st Century Graffiti: Detroit Tagging. In it, he attempts to draw a parallel between new media sociality and urban revitalization - specifically tagging and Detroit. While his ultimate conclusion about the potential for socially-driven new media networks as a tool to reshape an urban environment on more democratic, organic modes, he comes to this resolution through a few assumptions about the relation between archival/network space and physical space.

The root of this faulty connection is rooted in the equation of place and space. I agree with the idea that a folksonomic network results in an implied space, yet this space is definitively non-physical: existing as the aggregation of links and nodes of several varieties. This space is also constructed significantly as determined by time and more affective modes of production. The input of time into the production of this space is discussed in this entry at the P2P Foundation:

"...the duration, episode, and rhythm of our interactions with others is radically lightened by social technologies, faciliated by a medium that has no 'there' there, presented but not with a deep presence. It’s a strange thing, this discontinuous time of media. Things happen, but are not tied together, perhaps because we have such difficulty negotiating our availability and thus presence to others. Interruptions occur so frequently they become a continuity in and of themselves."

The result is a space that is exists conceptually - yet with very non-conceptual consequence - not physically. It is an affective space, it is an archival space, it is a network space.

Rice jumps from space to place - the latter taken to mean something as tangible as a cafe or park - in an attempt to redraw the idea of the city on the terms of a swarming media network:

"Folksonomy involves a new media organization of space through the meeting of differently arranged, open schemes. Just as the urban city contributed to a sense of public-ness or folk-ness through communal gathering, the café, public squares, stadiums, and other places, folksonomy generates a digital sense of connectedness. It does so, however, not through fixed place but through the open encounter of place in terms of digital, social interaction."

This is much like saying that del.icio.us, the application, is the result of the folksonomy rather than its enabler. The "gathering" that he speaks of is what makes cafes, squares, and stadiums into spaces, not the physical edifice.

Despite this leap, Rice's suggestion that the concept of a digitally networked folksonomy being used to collectively plan urban renewal is a fascinating one. He essentially proposes something similar to GeoTagThings, a geographically based tagging system through which residents could speak to the significance of a particular place and subsequent efforts at renewal can act as informed by these tags. Though he writes specifcally about Detroit, I can't help but connect this to the urban planning issue in my area: the proposed Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn. The Forest City Ratner plan envisions a series of sky-scrapers and an arena for the Nets just above the Prospect Heights neighborhood. The overwhelming sentiment in the borough is against this sort of development. I can't help but think what the results would be if a folksonomic approach were taken to Brooklyn, how different areas would be tagged and what this would mean for development. While much of what is now Atlantic Yards is bleak there is surely a social/archival network there that could be reified by such a system.

This idea of reifying otherwise implied networks surrounding physical, non-networked, places is what is most interesting about Rice's essay.