Detailed Theory

How do you represent the identity of a large group of people in which the only commonality they share is the same space?

In the case of bloggers, the space is virtual but the geographical regions they occupy also define them.

Identity is greatly shaped by our interactions with each other in these spaces. A way to visualize this may be to provide the infrastructure for the interactions to take place and then abstract the movement into a map or graph.

An advantage of digital media is the ability to filter and reorganize data in different ways. By sorting the information based on different parameters -- such as time or the individual's age, gender, social class, etc. -- invisible urban flow can be made visible.

Tracking weblogs with a map is not a new idea: Mapblogger is an online tool to map your entries with dots; The World as a Blog and GeoURL do it on a world-wide scale; and New York City, Washington, DC and London, UK each have their own map-based portals based on a blogger's nearest subway stop.

While useful, the dots remain two-dimensional and cannot show the depth of data over time or "electronic volume" (a term coined by artist Kathy Rae Huffman) and the portals do not show the breadth of possible interactions since the locations remain static.

For an explicit evaluation of people in their environment, it would be best to look towards the theories of psychogeography.

Examples of projects include: PDPal which allows the public to attach predefined icons to specific addresses in New York City and the Twin Cities, MN using a portable Palm Pilot (or similar) device; and [murmur] which allows you to access a database of spoken stories regarding neighbourhoods in Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal via a phone number and access code.

How might we convey the psychogeography of Toronto through weblogs? In an urban environment, identity can be found its city skyline. Now, if we were to say that each blog entry could be attached to a physical location and each entry built a "floor" of a building, how does the city skyline shift?

Skylines often point towards who has the most power, so when you allow a networked consciousness to "build the highest building", who then has the most power? Or does it represent power at all?

And if Blog City is built with "event architecture" (a concept articulated by architect Bernard Tschumi) in mind, how will this online form of representation affect how we view -- and use -- the actual physical space in our daily virtual lives?