“Lately, that aggregation has been changing. There has been an invasion of glowing rectangles—ever more computer screens of ever more sizes, in ever more places.1 And not just an invasion of screens but also one of networked objects, sensor fields, positional traces, information shadows, and “big data.” This new era of interface designs is transforming the use of the city. Car and bike share systems for instance, would not have worked as well before now. Also on the rise are do-it-yourself applications and installations to monitor, tag, catalog, or curate everything from local plants to historical images to neighborhood lore. Many of these productions are said to “augment” their immediate surroundings, not just fill them with feeds and pointers to someplace else. Yet however much augmented, the city is also unmediated experience: fixed forms persist underneath all these augmentations and data flows, and for that you might be thankful” (from McCullough, “Ambient Commons. Attention in the Age of Embodied Information, The MIT Press, 2013)
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