| This dissertation explores the notion that texts become a key element in person-environment relations in the contemporary urban context. As we witness the rise of mobile communication and ubiquitous computing, there are more people spending more time using more text to do more things in more places. Texts of the most diverse styles, dimensions, and sources mediate people's relations with the environment and their activities in it. Drawing from observational work carried out in East Harlem/El Barrio in New York City, I consider texts as a type of 'stuff' that we frequently encounter and enter in contact with on our way to encountering and entering in contact with other things in the urban environment. Texts are one of the means whereby the urban environment makes itself usable and available to us. Furthermore, in the contemporary context of technological change, texts become a basic means through which the network society (Castells, 1996, 2001) becomes visible, operable, tractable, and usable in the environment and in daily life. The central argument, then, is that our relationship to texts is being reconfigured by a number of emerging urban dynamics for which texts in turn do important work.;Instead of the view that other media are driving attention away from text, I explore the alternative view that texts gain new relevance as a component of the urban environment and of the emerging network society. I look for the roots of this new relevance in three larger spatial processes: ubiquitous access to information and communication technologies, increased global mobility of populations, goods, and information, and the open, shared and participatory nature of the Internet and wireless communication. Texts are a key part of how the relationships between people, things and environments are re-spatialized in the contemporary context of global mobility and connectivity. In such context, text using becomes a key mode of engagement with environment, self, and others, while texts become a key urban infrastructure, supporting the hooking up of the space of flows and the space of places, and thus supporting the emergence of the network society. |
