Digital Detroit: Rhetoric and Space in the Age of the Network

1. Networks, Place, and Rhetoric

15 1 Networks, Place, and Rhetoric This is how space begins, with words only, signs traced on the blank page. —Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Places Navigation ADecember 15, 2005, Saturday Night Live prerecorded skit entitled “Lazy Sunday” featured comics Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg as urban New Yorkers who rap about their day in the city and subsequent decision to see the film The Chronicles of Narnia.1 At one point in the sketch, the comics must figure out the best route to the movie theater. They debate which online service is best. “I prefer MapQuest!” “That’s a good one, too.” “Google Maps is the best.” “True dat.” “Double true!” In this brief exchange, the characters emphasize the role mapping services such as MapQuest and Google Maps play in the navigation of online and physical spaces. While the characters explore how to navigate New York City, they could be discussing any major metropolitan area in the world. Cities often consist of complicated routes, well-worn paths of travel, and sudden surprises when traveling through them. “It must be granted that there is some value in mystification, labyrinth, or surprise in the environment,” Kevin Lynch writes about urban navigation (5). Urban residents, Lynch argues, make sense of such routes via the “‘public image,’ the common mental pictures carried by large numbers of a city’s inhabitants: areas of agreement which might be expected to Networks, Place, and Rhetoric 16 appear in the interaction of a single physical reality, a common culture, and a basic physiological nature” (7). The public image today, as the SNL characters demonstrate, is the online map, for it establishes the commonality of space for city residents. “There seems to be a public image of any given city which is the overlap of many individual images. Or perhaps there is a series of public images, each held by some significant number of citizens” (Lynch 46). Online maps, via their complex database setups, bring together various public images and present them as a form of navigation. One public image—the city I live in—contests with the mapping services’ public image—the collection of information gathered and assembled in one space. “To choose which theater to go to,” Denis Wood writes about maps and city navigation, “much less how to get there, we have to organize all the relevant bits of information into some kind of structure” (15). The online map alters our sense of spatial structure by transforming space into digital information, and, in turn, by making digital information public imagery. Even with the rise of the digital sphere’s influence on navigation, the shaping of the public image, as Lynch also notes, is a physical activity. It results from the intricate ways navigators and the geographies they navigate interact in specific, physical locations. The SNL characters, for instance, must forge some sort of bodily relationship with New York itself in order to fashion a route to the movie theater via the online service (they walk its streets, visit its stores, work in its buildings). The relationship between physical interaction and space has been predominant from early seafaring peoples to modern urban dwellers. “The very fact that skilled navigation arose in what would seem to be perceptually difficult environments indicates the influence of [the shape of the physical world]” (Lynch 133). In the highly congested and very physical modern city, discovering how to avoid popular (and thus, over-trafficked) routes in favor of speedier routes has, as well, become a skill. The question is no longer “Where do we want to go today?” but rather, “How quickly can we get to where we want to go with minimum obstacles and interruptions, with minimum hassle and obstruction?” Indeed, a request to the computer servers that house MapQuest or Google Maps will produce a result in less than a second. The distance between the user and the map interface is barely recognizable. Even with that point, speed is not the only dominant aspect of communicative practices in the digital age, as Paul Virilio has famously stated. “We had to wait for the fusion/confusion of information and data processing to obtain the fusion/confusion of the secret of speed,” Virilio writes (Art of the Motor 33). Massive computer servers may produce speed, Networks, Place, and Rhetoric 17 but the speed of navigation is no longer a secret of fusing and confusing routes or even...