How do we feel in a modern city?

For a long time, people thought of space as a kind of container. Let’s say a city is such a large container where your apartment, car, kindergarten, where you take your child, and so on are placed. The city was for man a home, a refuge, a closed system. But today our understanding of space is changing. First of all, because the rigid division into virtual and real disappears, space becomes open. Here’s a typical situation today: you run a company that works remotely and arrange a Skype conference without leaving your home. At the same time, you yourself are in New York, your employees are in Thailand, the conference is held in Russian, and it is not at all clear where the system that ensures your communication is located. What space are we talking about here? On the territory of which country are virtual Moscow and New York in the computer game Second Life? According to the laws of which country does, say, a casino operate there, in which players lose real money? It turns out that today places, people, signs and social relations no longer exist separately – all this becomes such an intertwined network, a heterogeneous network of relations.

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• Make the city yours

Part of what is happening is what XNUMXth-century urbanists feared most: deterritorialization. The boundaries of our home are blurring, we ourselves are no longer quite physical bodies (McQuire, in a sense, can be called Pelevin from media theory, with the difference that he does not fantasize, but gives a full-fledged theoretical analysis). The most important change that McQuire notes in this media turn is the endless dominance of images, signs over real things. You walk around the city, take a selfie in front of a beautiful building and post it on Instagram. What happens next? The images you post on social media double and triple the real spaces behind them. And at some point, the images of the city begin to dominate the city itself. A picture, a media presentation becomes a greater entity than its original, primary source.

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• I’m bad at navigating

What happens to the city is what Freud calls “spooky” – something familiar, close and routine turns out to be completely different from what it was before. McQuire talks about the idea of ​​Bill Gates, who ordered screens instead of walls for his house (however, the project could not be realized then). And he asks: what changes at the moment when the wall (the usual support) suddenly becomes changeable and can, thanks to the image, expand the space or, conversely, cause bouts of claustrophobia? What will happen if huge screens are placed on city squares (the author is currently studying this issue at the University of Melbourne). Of course, they will absolutely change the way the city feels and how people think about where they are. A city oversaturated with signs, images and other visual semantics ceases to be a cozy home. How does a person feel in this space? McQuire does not give unequivocal answers: he is not a humanist, but a media theorist. But if you take this book seriously and imbued with the ideas of the author, you will, of course, ask yourself many questions: how do I change the city in which I live with my actions? How has Google Earth changed our perception of space? What has changed in the practice of urban life the fact that last year more than half of Internet users accessed it from mobile devices? All these changes are forcing us – both the sociologists of the city and its inhabitants – to think about our living space and our own identity in a completely different way.

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• Alexander Ilichevsky “Sunset City”