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COMMUNITY, LANDSCAPE, & THE BODY

What seems to bring us together in the new landscape is not the sharing of space in the traditional sense but a kind of SODALITY based on shared uses of the street or road, and on shared routines...We can look forward to something like a community held together and achieving identity by the short private road which everyone uses in daily life. (John Brinckerhoff Jackson, A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time)

The ephemeral, artificial community we found in college, where there were elders and we still lived close together, may be the last idealized "community of choice" in our lives. As we get older and become nostalgic, we may tend to hold onto this in our dreams. But a real community never happens by choice or design. And in fact many members of my community live far apart and only meet at long intervals.

I have used the word community...I was interested in establishing, very roughly, the BOUNDARIES of a kind of working class neighborhood...A community of this sort does not derive from any utopian dream or any compact. (Jackson)
 		Mediascape



1996

I started the long essay "New Media: Recognition and Desire", from which this is excerpted, in early 1995, long before I had any direct experience with digital media. I finished it to give to Peter Lunenfeld for mediawork, but it was never presented or published. It raised a lot of questions, suggested directions of inquiry, and was a tribute to a lot of thinkers who had inspired me.

 Architectural and landscape metaphors have been an integral part of new media from the beginning. Interface designs invite the consumer to navigate through virtual hallways and rooms, streets and malls, sometimes entire rendered worlds. An understanding of a subject is reached by exploration of its structure, its depths, dimensions which are initially HIDDEN.

The contemporary way to study the vernacular dwelling is to see it not as an autonomous realm but as a structure which achieves completeness by relating to its environment...A better metaphor for the average house is as the EXTENSION OF THE HAND...It is the hand which reaches out to establish and confirm relationships. (Jackson)

What's interesting to me is not online or virtual communities but the ways in which digital technology will affect our real communities.

What distinguishes vernacular space from territorial space: it belongs to US....Vernacular space is to be shared, not exploited or monopolized. (Jackson)

Can we start talking about a digital vernacular, or vernacular media?