The work which I decided to reflex on during this blog is the work of Paolo Cardullo “The right to the smart city” (2019), particularly the first chapter entitled ‘Citizenship, Justice, and the Right to the Smart City’. While I wasn’t too sure what to aspect from this book, I found it extremely interesting and enlightening by the time I had finished my read. The idea of ‘Smart Cities’ is not a strange one to me, however I had never thought of it in such detail until beginning this module. Cardullo’s work only made me even more aware of the differences, dangers and the innovation which can – and have – come from Smart Cities. The issue of ethics stuck out to me: in the UK a lot of our lives are already online through smart phones, email and cloud sharing both in personal and professional working lives, and multiple social media platforms allowing for anyone to post almost every aspect of their lives to the whole world. This seems to be done by many millions of people a day without the thought of the consequences which could happen to the amount of information they give out. This can cause so many ethical problems for researchers of all types: what is and is not allowed to be used, where the line is crossed between public to private. It is clear that this is not yet understood, nor are all the guidelines around ethical online research, and with technology only moving forward it will be interesting to see how these two topics end up changing and shaping both the Smart world which we live in and Smart (online) research.

References

Cardullo, P. (2019) The right to the smart city. Emerald Publishing.

In exploring how processes of digitalisation, global connectivity and urbanisation are coming together, Townsend (2013) comments on the ways in which ‘automatic electromechanical labourers toil at dumb and dirty jobs once done by people’ (p.xi). However, as part of the fourth industrial revolution, the information revolution, it is evident that ‘lately, these dumb contraptions are getting a lot smarter’ (Townsend, 2013, p.xi). Within the modern world we live in today, a synergistic relationship exists between our physical, tangible space and geographical location, and the realm of computational code represented by 1s and 0s. As smart cities are designed to ease problems within congested spaces and make daily processes more efficient (Glover, 2019), this is a relationship which relies on the participation of citizens. Technologies rely upon our information to respond in the ways it is designed to, and no matter how unwittingly, this is data we provide through our activity online and through technological products.

The ‘symbiosis of place and cyberspace’ (Townsend, 2013, p.6) is highly apparent in the case study of Seoul, South Korea, where the redevelopment in the post-war era of 1950s enabled them to modernise and adapt responsively (Glover, 2019). As part of the podcast, Dr. Ellie Cosgrave examines the importance of adaptive, democratic and accountable methods used in order to accommodate individuals within spaces, questioning also how inequality is increased or decreased as a result (Glover, 2019). An impressive 6,000 data sets are available within Seoul, one of which analyses 3 billion phone calls to inform public transport access. This is a prime example of where databases become ‘pervasive’ (Miller, 2011) in digital and physical cultures. While privacy is questioned, the analysis of this data enables city planners and the relevant algorithms to identify the amount of people gathered within certain locales, and to measure the traffic in specific areas. Through this, planners can ensure public transport is effectively placed to ensure greater accessibility to all, thereby promoting social mobility and greener methods of transport. In utilising data in this way, we see that arguably, databases may just be ‘the dominant cultural form of our times’ (Manovich, 2001: 128 in Miller, 2011).

Furthermore, data surrounding public transport benefits users as apps enable consumers to understand when the next bus will leave, its route, and how many seats are available (Glover, 2011). We therefore see a ‘move to media as process‘ as the previously ‘static role viewer [transforms] to a role as active’ based on user participation (Miller, 2011, p.31) that contributes to information on these apps. Consequentially, a more immersive experience transfigures. While this is a convenient and efficient, notably, there is a disparity in relation to how the elderly access such technologies. Miller (2011) explores notions of telepresence, whereby our presence is not merely where we are physically, but our presence in an environment as dictated by communication mediums. For those unable to access the technologies needed to understand bus routes, seating numbers, and other insights afforded by data collection, a sense of isolation can develop as citizens’ lack of presence online negatively impacts their security and sense of person within the real world. Glover (2019) questions this within the podcast, and identifies that even if such marginalisation was addressed, newer technologies will continue to develop. Therefore, there is arguably always going to be a problem of accessibility, though this does not mean that progress offered by smart cities should not be realised.

References:

Glover, F. (2019) ‘The Smart City: Seoul, South Korea, [The Compass], 10 April 2019. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3csz41r (Accessed: 21 February, 2023)

Townsend, A.M., (2013). Smart Cities, New York: W. W. Norton & Company

Miller, V. (2011) Understanding Digital Culture. In: Miller, V. Key Elements of Digital Media. Sage: pp 12-21

Week 2

Reuploaded from discussion board.

According to Kitchen et al. (2019), ‘the smart city seeks to improve city life through the application of digital technologies to the management and delivery of city services and infrastructures’ (p.2). While they acknowledge the benefits that are brought about by the embedded technologies of day to day city life, they highlight the fact that cities are developed with the aim of enhancing the ‘profit-making capacities of capital’. Therefore, under capitalism, it is often only a small group of ‘elite actors’ who benefit (Kitchen et al. 2019, p.5). Consequentially, smart cities have significant potential to contribute to existing social disparities that will further disadvantage citizens.

Under the ideas of governance and resistance within the digital city, the question surrounding the ethics of surveillance was brought to mind. One of my first considerations, prompted by fictional media series ‘Captured’ (2019, 2020), which follows narratives surrounding conspiracies of false evidence and the use of deepfakes within surveillance footage, was to question potential for the corruption of footage. However, I thought it more important to explore real world experiences and attitudes surrounding the way in which CCTV and facial recognition softwares are being used to monitor city streets. While CCTV can be vital to ensuring the safety of our streets and an important tool in ensuring criminals are held accountable, the ambiguity surrounding ownership of these cameras and the collection of data is cause for concern. Heh and Wainwright (2022) define surveillance as a ‘tactic of control deployed by the state to monitor, quell, and, in some cases, punish dissent’. Given the scope for increasingly sophisticated cameras and tracking tools, we must recognise the ways in which certain social groups may be disproportionately disadvantaged by surveillance.

The Face, 2020

‘Democracy requires safe spaces, or commons, for people to organically and spontaneously convene regardless of their background or position to campaign for their causes, discuss politics, and protest’ (Williams, 2021, p.1), yet the opportunity for protest is diminishing as various policy makers in the UK and elsewhere seek to change rules. ‘Those attending protests around the world have – wittingly or unwittingly – put themselves squarely within the lens of a surveillance state’ (Stokel-Walker, 2020), one which is largely unregulated despite sophisticated use of facial recognition and artificial intelligence. The misuse of camera footage further contributes to this as Williams (2021) explores the way in which the San Diego Police Department used footage from smart streetlights to target Black Lives Matter protesters. ‘When you think about the locations where facial recognition is being deployed, it is disproportionately targeting people of colour’ in addition to ‘most-often poorer, working-class neighbourhoods’(Stokel-Walker, 2020) – historically, marginalised groups in society have been unfairly targeted by authorities and through this, there is an increased likelihood of inequalities being perpetuated even more so. Without clear regulation of surveillance softwares and technologies in relation to their use and the use of data, authorities and private companies may ‘codify and hose those structural societal problems behind the lens of false scientific technological neutrality in a way that legitimises them’ (Johansson, 2021).

Bibliography:

Johansson, E. Face-off: Activists protest AI surveillance – verdict magazine: Issue 9: May 2021 (2021) Verdict Magazine | Issue 9 | May 2021. Available at: https://magazine.verdict.co.uk/verdict_magazine_may21/ai_surveillance (Accessed: February 14, 2023).

Heh, E. and Wainwright, J. (2022) “No privacy, no peace: Urban surveillance and the Movement for Black Lives,” Journal of Race, Ethnicity and the City, 3(2), pp. 121–141. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/26884674.2022.2061392.

Kitchin, R. Cardullo, P. and Di Feliciantonio, C. (2019) “Citizenship, justice, and the right to the smart ity’, The Right to The Smart City, pp.1-24. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1108.978-1-78769-139-120191001

Liberatore, S. (2020) “San Diego police accessed smart streetlights’ camera footage over 35 times to search for evidence of looting and vandalism during Black Lives Matter protests,” Daily Mail, 1 July. Available at: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8479863/San-Diego-police-accessed-smart-streetlights-camera-footage-spy-Black-Lives-Matter-protests.html (Accessed: February 14, 2023).

Morning report: After protests, SDPD turned to streetlight cameras (2022) Voice of San Diego. Available at: https://voiceofsandiego.org/2020/06/30/morning-report-after-protests-sdpd-turned-to-streetlight-cameras/ (Accessed: February 14, 2023).

Stokel-Walker, C. (2020) The lasting effect of digital surveillance at black lives matter protests, The Face. The Face. Available at: https://theface.com/society/black-lives-matter-facial-recognition-digital-surveillance-george-floyd (Accessed: February 14, 2023).

Williams, R. (2021) Whose Streets? Our Streets (Tech Edition). rep. Harvard Kennedy School. Available at: https://www.belfercenter.org/sites/default/files/2021-08/WhoseStreets.pdf (Accessed: January 14, 2023)

This week’s topic is mobile phone games, but in this blog post the usual case study of Pokemon Go has been replaced. At the time of writing this, in England, bumping into people in the street while being distracted playing Pokemon Go would be highly inappropriate. However our mobile phones are playing along in a huge collaborative endeavour. They are providing location-data which we see displayed, as a population, in televised government briefings (Figure 1) in a way that feels like a game score board. The rules of the game are to be seen (digitally, by providing location-data) in the right location ie residential is good and transit stations bad.

Figure 1: Mobility slide for UK Government briefing on 23 May 2020 (Gov.UK, 2020). Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/slides-and-datasets-to-accompany-coronavirus-press-conferences

The next step in the gamification of daily life is to move from population level surveillance to player level, through a contact-tracing app. Schechner and Strasburg (2020) provide a good explanation of current international debates on some governments’ centralised vs Google/Apple’s decentralised approaches, with the Bluetooth and location services options illustrated in a video-game style animation (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Tracking apps explained using video game style animation (Schechner and Strasburg, 2020). Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-google-start-to-win-over-europe-to-their-virus-tracking-technology-11589716800

Contact-tracing apps are based on mobile phones exchanging a key or token with other mobile phones within a certain proximity to each other. This transfer could be understood as a “co-surveillance mechanism” which de souza e Silva and Sutko (2009:15) refer to in the context of “mobile location-aware games” (Ibid, p2). The contact-tracing apps fits their definition of such games (pp. 3-4) as “(1) they use the city space as the game board, and (2) they use mobile devices as interfaces for game play”. They are “pervasive games” that “never stop and may intertwine with the player’s ordinary life”. They are a form of “Location-based mobile games (LBMGs)” whose “distinct characteristic […] is that they use mobile technologies with location awareness […] as the game interface”.

The question to end on is what is the role of the human player? The mobile devices are communicating with each other, but they need to be carried by their human users as they move through the urban space. The game’s purpose is to warn players when they may have been infected, and therefore need to isolate to break the virus’ chain of transmission. The reward for participating could be understood using Foth et al’s (2016:15-16) idea of “citizens at play” and their “civic capital” which they define as “a measure of a citizen’s actual and potential impact on contributing, participating and engaging in the civic surrounds”.

Contact-tracing app users are ‘citizens at play’.

References

Foth, M., Hudson-Smith, A., and Gifford, D. (2016). Smart cities, social capital, and citizens at play: A critique and a way forward. In Olleros, F. X. & Zhegu, M. (Eds.) Research Handbook on Digital Transformations. Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham, United Kingdom, pp. 203-221.

Gov.UK (2020). Slides, datasets and transcripts to accompany coronavirus press conferences. Coronavirus (COVID-19) | Guidance and support. Available at https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/slides-and-datasets-to-accompany-coronavirus-press-conferences

Schechner, S. and Strasburg. J. (2020). Apple, Google Start to Win Over Europe to Their Virus-Tracking Technology. Wall Street Journal (Online); New York, N.Y. Updated 20 May 2020. Available at https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-google-start-to-win-over-europe-to-their-virus-tracking-technology-11589716800

de Souza e Silva, A. and Sutko, D. M. (2009). Digital cityscapes: merging digital and urban playspaces. Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York. pp. 1-17.

When the society is developed, there is a growth in mobility system. According to Elliott & Urry (2010), in today’s society, people are connected with each other not only through constant mobility and face-to-face encounters, but also via travelling messages and objects. The societies can cope with distance thanks to different processes, two of which are virtual travel and communicative travel via letters, texts or telephones. This is how the society deals with social-distancing solution due to COVID-19 pandemic. The disease forces people to cut down on face-to-face interaction as much as possible to halt the spread. “The investment of affect into virtual objects (eg Facebook, Skype, etc) comprises a part of a “containment of anxiety’, which comes to the fore in conditions of complex mobile and digital life” (Elliott & Urry, 2010, p.21). Thanks to technology, people can deal with the social-distancing campaign.

Elliott and Urry (2010) suggest that one of the future scenarios is the emergence of hypermobility, which means there will be a significant development in mobile lives thanks to new transportation and communication practices. Telepresencing will become ubiquitous as it allows interactions to occur across different areas effortlessly. This concurs with the situation in the Covid-19 pandemic. Obviously, people still have a high demand of meeting each other in person as meeting online never replaces real-life interaction, but the dangerous level of the disease does not allow people to easily make any face-to-face appointments. Therefore, technology will be developed to meet people’s demand. For example, tele-immersion environments enable users to work or interact with each other in a shared and simulated environments. According to Elliott and Urry (2010:150), “the shock of climate change may tip societies into these kinds of digital network and a post-car future”.

References

Elliott, A., & Urry, J. (2010). Mobile lives. Routledge.

“Drones” is the term that some experts refrain from using as it connotes the meaning of killing from distance in the war of western areas. In this case we want to regard “drones” as “a new dimension of real-time surveillance information in the contemporary city on a more general level” (Jensen, 2016, p.68). However, the ethical problems associated with drone technology do not disappear thanks to our effort to domesticate or naturalize the term in the peaceful era. In other places, Foucault (2003) suggests that this can be considered western government’s techniques and their testing in foreign areas, which is then brought back to domestic areas. There are many political and ethical issues related to drone technologies as there are some controversies around civil rights and privacy when drones are utilized in public. Obviously, using drones as surveillance can save a huge amount of money and can serve humanitarian purposes, like providing assistance in disaster zones. Nevertheless, when thinking about the situations where drones are officially used for city surveillance, there are some cautions arising. To create the flying path for drones, we need to organize and control the air traffic like what we do with airplanes. This can cause some issues, one of which is safety as drones can crash each other. Another concern is privacy. Although NoFly-Zone company has brought about the system that can make the drones not fly to restricted areas, the system can be hacked, as a drone is just a flying computer (Goodman, 2013). The case study of Mitchell Sipus (2014) has explored the three-dimension understanding of urban areas. Specifically, it is necessary to perceive cities in both two-dimension and three-dimension ways, as the volumes and voids in-between the buildings require planners to imagine the space. The appearance of drone surveillance activates a rethinking of urban areas and mobile circumstances.

References

Foucault, M., & Ewald, F. (2003). ” Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976 (Vol. 1). Macmillan.

Goodman, M. (2013). A view from the unfriendly skies: How criminals are using drones. TED. com.

Jensen, O. B. (2016). Drone city-power, design and aerial mobility in the age of” smart cities”. Geographica Helvetica, 71(2), 67.

Sipus, M. (2014). Zoning and Urban land use planning for drones, available at: http://www.thehumanitarianspace.com/2014/08/ zoning-and-urban-land-use-planning-for.html

I’ve interviewed my friend about his experience when playing Pokemon Go. He said that “When playing this game, I naturally do more exercise by walking around and be more aware of my surrounding. Sometimes, thanks to Pokemon Go, I know the places in my area that I haven’t noticed before”. Foth and Gifford (2016)

(Foth, Hudson-Smith, Gifford, 2016: P.20)

(Foth, Hudson-Smith, Gifford, 2016: P.20) believe that Preliminal games aims to promote a platform that make players more motivated to reconnect with their surroundings and activate their exploration about the parts of environment where they may not have visited. This kind of game brings about some supplementary factors via associating the city’s streets with environment built virtually, which allows players to have new experiences when discovering these spaces. Importantly, the places are not replaced by the new ones. Instead, it just augment the space so that the users can experience something new in their existing surrounding. Thanks to their interaction with the locations in reality, the player appreciate their landscape more.

My friend also shared that the time restriction in the game makes him more engaged and try hard to gain the items in the limited period of time. According to Foth and Gifford (2016), this use of constraint make the game more engaging and challenging. They conclude the benefits of this game is that it not only helps players to do exercise and connect with the social space, but also helps local enterprises to have more customers thanks to the boosted footfall.

However, my friend said that sometimes he was too focused on playing the game and therefore neglected his real social interaction. “Pokémon GO recalls issues relating to mobility, sociability, spatiality, and surveillance that are characteristic of many previous hybrid reality games and mobile location-based applications.” This concurs with the belief of Hjorth (2017, P.5), who suggests that Pokemon GO can be used to allow players to avoid engagement with other people in public places. Furthermore, there are also some dangers in terms of information about location. This can enables the robbers to know exactly the location of people to commit the crime.

References:

Foth, M., Hudson-Smith, A. & Gifford, D., 2016. Smart cities, social capital, and citizens at play: A critique and a way forward. In Research Handbook on Digital Transformations. Cheltenham,: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 203–221.

Hjorth, L. & Richardson, I., 2017. Pokémon GO : Mobile media play, place-making, and the digital wayfarer. Mobile Media & Communication, 5(1), pp.3–14.

Elliot and Urry (2010) start their book ‘Mobile Lives’ by defining a broad scope for mobility as an “ever-increasing movement of people, things, capital, information and ideas around the globe”. They state that “the argument of the book is that … the increasing mobilization of the world … affects the ways in which lives are lived, experienced and understood” (ix-xi).

Elliot and Urry look at the “complex interplay between mobile lives and mobility systems”. Mobility systems are defined as being “from the car system to air travel, from networked computers to mobile phones”. Of particular interest (to me) is how these systems change people’s lives. Elliot and Urry observe that:

“Life ‘on the move’ is the kind of life in which the capacity to be ‘elsewhere’ at a different time from others is central. … Such mobile lives demand flexibility, adaptability, reflexivity — to be ready for the unexpected, to embrace novelty”.

Ten years after Elliot and Urry published their book, the world is experiencing the Covid-19 pandemic. In early April 2020 it was reported that “half of the world’s population” were subject to “compulsory or recommended confinements, curfews and quarantines in more than 90 countries or territories” (Sandford, 2020). Elliot and Urry’s future scenarios, such as a “a worldwide reconfiguration of economy and society around ‘local sustain-ability’ (2010:142) no longer appears as extreme and improbable as it would have pre-Covid-19.

Local sustainability (Elliot and Urry, 2010: 142-147) is presented as a Utopian vision, with a “’Happy Planet Index’”, but it presumes that there is only a physical existence and no other forms of communication. The ‘digital network’ scenario (Ibid. 147-150) is an alternative but not considered as complementing ‘local sustainability’. In current times, the size (distance) of individual’s physical circle has contracted at the same time as an increase in mobility via digital communication devices and platforms. For example, MPs are now participating from home in Parliament (figure 1) or Cabinet (figure 2) sessions, and in this way they have demonstrated new combinations of physical and network mobility.

Figure 1: BBC image of UK Parliament’s PMQ session operating with MPs participating via screens. Source: ‘Prime Minister’s Questions goes ‘virtual’’ on 22 April 2020 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-politics-52390054/coronavirus-prime-minister-s-questions-goes-virtual [accessed 2 May 2020]

Figure 2: Tweet by UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson about the first digital Cabinet meeting (31 March 2020). Source: https://twitter.com/borisjohnson/status/1244985949534199808 [accessed 2 May 2020]

MPs are obviously not the only people working from home, with the Office of National Statistics (ONS, 2020) reporting an increase of home working from 12% to 49% for adults in employment. If this number is reflected across the country, there will be a lot of people questioning why they need to return to time consuming, expensive and polluting commutes post-Covid-19, if they can work just as well (or better) from home. Some aspects of Elliot and Urry’s ‘local sustainability’ scenario may yet become a possible future.

References

Elliot, A., & Urry, J. (2010). Mobile Lives. Oxford: Routledge

ONS (2020) quoted in UK Government briefing 1 May 2020. Available from https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/882862/2020-05-01_COVID-19_Press_Conference_Slides.pdf

Sandford, A. (2020). Coronavirus: Half of humanity now on lockdown as 90 countries call for confinement. Euronews. 3 April. Available at https://www.euronews.com/2020/04/02/coronavirus-in-europe-spain-s-death-toll-hits-10-000-after-record-950-new-deaths-in-24-hou [accessed 2 May 2020]

The government guidelines during the COVID-19 pandemic has changed almost everything about our lives. Staying inside our homes has altered the way we experience the space around us, and the nature of the space between us and other people. Our ability to be mobile, encouraged by the growing technology of smart-enabled devices, has ended abruptly and so how we use these features has also made an about-turn.

Many of the readings for the literature review explore and make judgements of how these devices enable us to interact with the spaces and infrastructure outside of our homes. Applications such as Actionbound, bus and transport apps, Pokémon GO! – all feature in the changing landscapes that are Smart Cities, changing the way we experience the space around us, increasing our mobility as people and even how, as consumers and citizens, we interact with businesses, corporations and local councils.

During the ‘lockdown’, applications such as Zoom, Skype, Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp and House Party have increased in popularity as people are relying on internet and telecom connected devices and saved contacts to interact with those outside of the household.

To focus this assignment, I am going to interview some users of the House Party app, as it has seen a dramatic rise in use. I am using it instead of Zoom as I want to focus on socialising outside of work rather than working from home. I want to ask:

1. Are there certain features about the app which makes it preferable to other video calling apps?

This question aims to explore the following:

• How the user interface is different from other video calling apps
• How the app is designed to foster activities beyond video calls
• How the app feels to use, and how this changes how the user feels

There will also be a short semiotic and linguistic analysis of the app’s user interface to explore these concepts further.

2. Do you feel closer to your friends and family when using the app?

This question aims to explore the following:

• How the feeling of space between users is increased or decreased when using the app
• Does the user ‘notice’ that they are using an app, or does it blend seamlessly into their conversation
• To what extent does the app mimic a ‘real’ house party?

The final point will also reference the UX and linguistics of the app itself, but these questions are designed to explore how effective the app is at closing that space between friends and family members.

3. What do you feel about the immediate space around you[r body] when using the app?

• This is a more direct question asking the user to think explicitly about the space around them, which they may not have done previously
• Hopefully this will encourage the user to talk more about the difference between their mobility pre-lockdown and how it has changed during lockdown (although the question may be re-worded to address this, or another question added)

These questions will have overlapping answers and themes and I expect the questions to change before I ask them, they are not currently set in stone.

I want the conclusion to give some evidence as to how the themes explored previously in the literature review, about the expansion of our mobility, the alteration of space around us by digital technologies and ‘smart cities’ is being turned on its head by the measures implemented during the pandemic. I want to challenge some of the pre-conceived notions of concepts such as net locality and the embedding of technologies, but also expand on some of their uses in ways which writers and academics would previously not have considered.

This week’s example comes from the news that Barclays boss Jes Staley is rethinking the “long term location strategy” of the bank’s offices. (BBC News, 2020)

Since the Government guidelines around social distancing, around 70,000 Barclays employees are working from home, doing jobs which were once undertaken in large communal buildings in London and other major cities. Staley told reporters that the bank was now being run by staff working “from their kitchens” which has led him to re-evaluate how much office space was really needed.

Staley said that “the notion of putting 7,000 people in a building may be a thing of the past.”

Elliot and Urry, writing a decade ago, already began to foresee some of the large-scale societal changes that would occur from individuals using more digital technologies and increasing mobility in their daily lives. Their example is of Simone, who travels as part of her job, and is reliant on miniaturised internet-enabled devices to access information quickly and frequently when in different locations. (6: 2010) The thousands of people, including Barclays employees, who have set up themselves to work from home is an example of this mobility happening on a larger scale; with the change being from communal office to various employee households, rather than individuals moving across urban environments.

Elliot and Urry have made some predictions about what the future looks like based on our current lifestyles, many of which are like Simone’s. The first is Perpetual Motion, a “hyper” mobile society who are “always on” i.e. devices switched on, connected to the internet or location enabled. (141: 2010) Devices are used to manage personal finances, tenuous and distant social relationships and privately-owned companies are leading the way in an ever-expanding transport market. The line between ‘work’ and ‘not work’ is blurred, fluid, and stress has reached epidemic levels. Using the example of the Barclays employees, households are reliant on ubiquitous technologies embedded in every room for work, study, and play, with the line between work and play no longer blurred but completely saturated within one another. Staley’s phrase, “from their kitchens” provides unsettling imagery of families perpetually connected to their devices with none of the perks of international travel, or even seeing friends and family members.

Scenario three; Digital Networks, plays a bigger role then maybe the authors anticipated. (147: 2010) Transport is pre-defined and integrated into larger networks run by smart-enabled devices. In person meetings are rare, even discouraged, save for video conferencing which is sold on its similarity to human interaction. This third scenario plays out after carbon becomes scarce, and in return for a comfortable life, individuals’ privacy is traded and instead of personal freedom are sold security products. Elliot and Urry’s predictions are based on a future ravaged by global warming and a scarcity of natural resources but, given the hindsight we have now, is it possible to visualise a future shaped in this way by a global pandemic?

BBC News. ‘Barclays boss: Big offices may be a thing of the past’ <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52467965> accessed 29/04/2020

Elliot, A. & Urry, J. 2010. Mobile Lives Oxford, Routledge