Me + +: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City

by William J. Mitchell
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2004
269 pp., Trade, $27.95; Paper, $14.95
ISBN: 0-262-13434-9; ISBN: 0-262-63313-2.

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University

mosher@svsu.edu

I am not familiar with William J. Mitchell's previous books City of Bits and e-topia, but why does this reviewer have a nagging feeling of having read this book before, several times in the past decade? Short paragraphs about the bleeding edge of the technological future are lodged in the immediate flesh of the present, presented for the reader's examination in the oracular and confident manner of those AT&T "You will" commercials of the early 1990s. Has this become the MIT house style? Perhaps author Mitchell springs from Peter Lunenfeld, whose book springs from Gregory Rawlins, whose sprung from Michael Dertouzos, whose sprung from the father of the genre Nicholas Negroponte. One might reverse the order, and like the Book of Genesis, map who "begat" whom.

That stylistic appraisal aside, this book examines numerous instances where networked electronics provide the interface between the individual and the societal world. Mitchell probes networks versus enclosures and boundaries, and their subversion in various centuries by clocks, telegraphy, airwaves carrying ship-to-shore radio and trans-Atlantic wireless in 1902 to the latest gigabytes of wireless broadband. Progress has meant a steady conversion from "granaries to server farms". In a comparison of today's music industry to the nineteenth century ice industry, the shipment of a product is threatened by innovations in decentralized production, generating the product for its user no matter where.

Me + + is at its best when it is talking about technology that has already gripped the populace, and Mitchell is interested in instances where digital bits now affect the relations between physical events in physical space. Most citizens in my mid-Michigan town seem to have a cel phone glued to their ear while wrestling the steering wheels of SUVs and pickup trucks into left turns, or--and this was weird--while standing in the checkout line of a bookstore. MItchell's book encompasses networks as diverse as water distribution,money and ATMs, orbiting satellites, digitized video streams, and the swarm of bicycles in San Francisco's monthly Critial Mass. To discuss the changing nature of distance upon control, he employs post-9/11 examples. The effect on telecommunications of the World Trade Tower and Pentagon attacks, despite network failure at some key points, was smaller than that month's Nimda virus, and the recovery effort was swift. Subsequently AIDS and SARS have impacted the circulation of people, goods and information. Miniaturization has brought consumer electronics essentially into the realm of clothing, and Mitchell discusses wearabilty and the nature of digital devices'' "ambulatory architectures". They are enabled by GPS, GIS, RFID devices for location awareness and indoor tracking, and experiments at Xerox PARC have meant that any ringing phone beside you on the premises is for you, because the system knows exactly were you are.

When Mitchell discusses radio he sounds like Marshall McLuhan, celebrating the intensity of play-by-play sports broadcasts or Orson Welles' updated and localized "War of the Worlds". His erudition and breadth brings up enjoyable historical digressions into James Joyce's Dublin or the signal fires on Tierra del Fuego that work to contextualize his tech examples. One sweep of appropriate cultural examples links the urban cinema of Dziga Vertov, Andy Warhol's film "Empire State Building, Steve Mann's wearable webcam, and the memorable footage of the destruction of the World Trade Center. The desktop computer has brought us email and Web archives--both essential to research--yet has also maintained the idiocies of cartoon character Dilbert's office. In Mitchell's estimation, the Web should house rules and plans--like Palladio's architectural systems--be distributed online and foster "flexible, diverse, human habitats".

As he the optimistically sees technologies' potential for "scaling community" and "ethical intercommunity", in Me + +, William J. Mitchell gives us a swift and readable meditation on networks in a contribution to urbanism that coaxes the reader to seek out his earlier books. He is also a Professor of Architecture and Media Arts and Sciences, a combination that springs from his roles as the Head of Media Arts and Sciences, and the Dean of the School of Architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, After all, the patriarch of this book's august, oracular lineage–Nicholas Negroponte–was an MIT Architecture Professor, too.