1) Mitchell states on p. 84, “Dematerialization delivers us form servitude to places and things- and, indirectly, from domination by those who control places and things. It undermines the regime of physicality. It constructs a new form of power and simultaneously provides a new way to resist power.” This quote brings to mind the old adage of the pen being mightier than the sword, of the informational realm holding more power than the physical realm.

2) When Mitchell declares on p. 90 that, “Code is mobile. Code is everywhere. And code…is the law,” my first thought was of the possibility of coders possessing an increasing amount of power over the various facets of this changing society. Will coders stay mostly hidden behind the scenes, or will they emerge more to the forefront and attempt to make use of their emerging influence?

3) Mitchell’s observation that, “…physical space was acquiring many of the crucial characteristics of cyberspace,” (129) comments interestingly on the debate over the development of “cyberspace”. Might the true emerging cyberspace not be a separate reality by an augmentation to our physical world?

-Will

1.Mitchell says in Ch. 5 that our physical attachments are becoming dematerialized.
I was curious what the answer was to this question: “to what extent should we treat bound books as valuable objects…and to what extent should we just strip out their information content, transfer it to more compact and mobile media, and toss away the carcasses?” (86)

2. What other ways are atoms being scraped off? How does this affect us? “…the world wide web, allowed the remaining atoms to be scraped off.” (86)

3. What is the “electronic twin”(112) of the city? What is the human equivalent?

Holly Groening

1. Most of the talking points include Mitchell's discussion of dematerialized text (p 84-88). Will we always have printed material? Even for the most digitally literate, there seems to be some sort of fascination with books. I personally have declined purchasing an e-book at half price in lieu of the "real thing." Is this just habit, or is there something to books, newspapers, and other printed media?

2. In chapter 6, Mitchell claims that "You can navigate the bricks-and-mortar half ... or, increasingly, you can switch to an electronic twin." (p 112). Are there really two cities - the electronic and the physical - or are they more like different sides of the same coin? Many times, I have used the virtual Austin not only for informational purposes (digital maps and venue reviews) and communication (social networks like Facebook), but also to order items from local stores that I would pick up later. In all of these cases, everything I did in the virtual Austin was intended to help me interact with the physical Austin easier, quicker, or better.

3. GPS and RFID seem to be a mixed blessing. On one hand, I would love a device that would let me connect to the internet to find a location and give me turn by turn instructions on how to get there from where I am now. Being able to wave my hand to purchase goods is tempting, as is tracking my personal items (especially my keys). However, there are increased privacy threats - not necessarily from the government, but from the private sector. Will RFID be a technology that we can "opt-out" of? Is the technology adequate to protect that which is tagged? Do the costs outweigh the benefits? If they do, what can we do to protect ourselves?

Stuart Geiger

1. I too was struck by the idea of dematerialized text (84). Though, my concern was slightly different. I remember the middle school days of taking class trips over to the library and learning the Dewey Decimal system before big research reports. This now seems extremely out-of-date and timely, compared to internet seraches using Nexus Lexus, etc. I wonder if future generations will lose the capacity to cite scholarly sources because it is so easy to run into creditless authors online. Also, will they know how to easily use a dictionary to check spelling?

2. According to The National Academies report on the Library of Congres "digital information was at the center of comtemporary discourse" (88). What is the first reference I check when I need to know something? I "Google it." The internet has become a wealth of knowledge that we can reference at the touch of a button... very different from locating hundreds of books and actually read and discover by ourselves. A response to just about any specific inquiry can be found online.

3. On p. 114, there is talk of how wireless technology is inherently trackable. In the past, where a person came from is a crucial part of his or her identity. This element could remain a mystery, or the person could boast in it and find extreme pride. In a sense, wireless communication's job, in some regard, is to locate a point of origin.

1. I think I share the same concern as Grace Chen on "dematerialization" of text. I remember when I was a kid I would lay down for hours reading my mom's old encyclopedias. Something about the physical knowledge encased in that tangible thing, I guess, evoked some sort of mysticism. Does the ease of access to modern text cheapen its perceived value? It might be just me, but I couldn't imagine plopping my child on my lap with an e-book reader before bedtime. What are the the implications for the perceived value of retained mental education when anything you need to know will be (is?) acessible on the internet? (~p. 84)

2. Also the shedding of atoms in regard to photos, music, movies, etc. What is the value of the art form without a tangible product as an end? It's as if you're creating something (photo, song, home movie) that is already removed to some extent from the physical, non-virtual world.

3. The idea of RFIDs is creepy to me. I can't imagine why people would want to implant such a device. I might sound a little paranoid here, but I think Mitchell is being terribly naive by insinuating that an identity management system that allows you to "control exactly what you want to reveal about yourself, when you reveal it, and where you do so" (120). Lame as it sounds, I really freaked out in a paranoid way when Google Earth came out. That's just a consumer level satellite, I can't imagine what government/military technology is capable of.

1 - "Instead of relying on physical transportation systems with their strict speed and capacity limits..." - (Mitchell, 84) - I had a talk about this with one of my advertising professors last year. We were talking about how digital video games have almost reached the peak of technological advancement in audio and video, and how we both agreed that increased bandwidth utilization was the next step.

2 - "It added up to 80 million words, and it was all available to scholars on CD" (Mitchell, 86) - This advancement of technology, the cdrom, did not lead people to go out and burn every book that had been backed up digitally. What was/is it about books that make people want to keep them in our technologically advanced world?

3 - "...electronic tollbooths interrogate transponders in automobiles to charge tolls." - (Mitchell, 118) - What, if anything, is the problem with using RF tags on toll roads to issue "after the fact" speeding tickets?

On page 85, Mitchell discusses the importance of a library in times before books were cheap to produce and readily available. Cities like Alexandria and Venice attracted scholars and became centers for knowledge. With the internet, this information is no longer centralized. How does this affect underdeveloped parts of the world?

What are some pros and cons to the use of RF tags, as discussed on page 118?

On page 120, Mitchell talks about Urban Information Overlays. What are your opinions of places like Las Vegas and Times Square that have become "playgrounds of programmable LEDs?" Do you prefer an environment like that, or a less developed one?

-Mitchell starts talking about how dematerialization has had an effect on the workplace and intellectual community. With more and more scholars or would-be scholars having access to once prized and difficult to obtain material. Does scholarship become subject to more scrutiny? Do the resources or selling points of traditionally prestigious schools (Ivy League, et. al) What about the workplace? If communication and shrinking documents become more and more commonplace, is there a need for a workplace (physically)? Can an office or corporation be completely internet or network based?
-More and more films are being shot digitally (Collateral and Miami Vice are examples) and my personal favorite TV show (Arrested Development) is shot digitally (1080). Film has been the dominant image capturing medium for about 150-175 years, does it go away with the perfection of digital imaging? With digital technology, one can completely altar and shape the image he or she wants. With film, they are limited. Is this a dead medium or will it be a niche artform? Will we be seeing movies that were "shot on the beautiful antique 35 MM".
-When discussing overcoming architectural blocks to GPS and the Cricket system aimed at circumventing that problem, Mitchell talks of the possibilities when traveling through a museum or mall. He does not broach the subject of what, for example, employers might require their employees to carry at all times to keep tabs on them during the work hours (and maybe even outside those work hours). The flip side of the utilization on a personal enrichment scale is one that needs further exploration.

1. On page 100, Mitchell clarifies that "A Web document is not, for example, like a valuable manuscript, such as the Book of Kells, which is permanently stored at a well-known, specific location in Trinity College, Dublin." What is it that makes this physical document valuable, if we can reproduce images of every page, and store electronic data about the material it was made from, its age, and historical relevance?

2. On page 108, Mitchell describes that Uncle Toby's Paradox has dissolved with live web videos. However, his examples are traffic cameras and other stationary cameras in a city. It seems to me that anything worth watching you are not likely to catch spontaneously, and most people will have to rewatch anyway. Without a way to predict what you will want to see, the paradox doesn't really go away.

3. On page 119, Mitchell talks about opening doors with RFID chips. At first I thought it was extremely ridiculous to envision something like this when opening a door is quite easy, why do we need a machine to do it for us? The overall value of this technology doesn't seem that much greater than the physical system of keys and doorknobs we already have in place. What is the point of developing technology just because we can even if there's no giant benefit?

Diana Pruett

1. In Chapter 5, Mitchell discusses the digitalization of money. He states, "As money has emancipated itself from the last vestiges of materiality, sites of accumulation and transfer--once prominent, architecturally celebrated urban elements--have waned into commodified electronic boxes, anonymous server farms, and out-of-sight back offices." Money interfaces like online banking, and the move toward debit cards/pos terminals are of particular interest to me for their deconstruction of the "personal" experience at banks and checkout counters. Last semester, I took an interface design class were I studied the negative effects of this technology. Many people I surveyed about their feelings of "digital money" said that they feel like they have no connection with their cashier anymore, that is, the connection of making small talk at the grocery or with the teller at the bank. This further bolsters the theory that we're all apart of a network, yet we can simultaneously be extremely separated from that network. He sums up chapter 5 with, " The more you deal in dematerialized goods, the less location and distance concern you. and the less visible are the relationships that really matter." Indeed.

2. I thought Mitchell's use of "B.D." Before Dematerilization and "A.D." for After Dematerialization was interesting. I think the parallel between the birth and evolution of technology and the birth and death of Christ is an interesting concept.

3. I was kind of lost with the viedo talk in Chapter 6. I'm wondering how it fits in to the rest of the book...am I missing a huge concept?

Chapter 5 -

With the loss of physical value of money, what type of affect will this have on our economic system? How far will people allow their money to be digital? Will banks with ultimate security end up being the most successful?

Will all these changes to the physical increase the life time of our pyhysial products or make them easier to lose in cyber-space? for instance, will my photos always be on facebook?

Chapter 6

With all the writing of CGM (consumer-generated media)how will we maintain and verify credibility? How will companies such as NYT generate sizable profit to maintain a credible media source from their online properties?

Chapter 7

As the writer speaks of physical orienation being important for urban info overlays, when will digital orientation develop and how long will it take for time to become important in the digital sense? Will time ever be the controlling factor of digital orientation? is time the only scarce resource we have left? if things don't happen in real-time for digital users, will they care? Is sports the only thing we want in real-time?

1. Mitchell uses B.D. (Before Dematerialization) and A.D. (After Dematerialization) in the same context as A.D. and B.C. are used. It's interesting how technology has made such a tremendous impact on the world that he compares it to the birth and death of Christ.

2. Although dematerialization has lead to things being stored and used digitally, it has still caused society to become material in a different way. We want the material objects that allow for this digital technology.

3. RFID tags have the potential to be very beneficial to society, but at what point do we know when we're going to far? Is the definition of privacy being redefined?

Chap 5: As Mitchell points out, human art was once relegated to the walls of caves. Perhaps a particularly prideful artist painted a deer on a rock and carried it around in order to display her talents, but it was still on a rock. The same could be said of early writing; it either remained on the walls of temples or on enormous tablets until smaller clay cuneiform became commonplace and the Egyptians introduced papyrus to the world. Art eventually came on canvas that was easily rolled up and transported. Today, all of this - from the entire known canon of an obscure ancient religion to the works of Klimt can be accessed from a six-inch hand-held device. How long before all museums and places of worshiop are virtual? In the final lines of Chapter 5, Mitchell states, "The more you deal in dematerialized goods, the less location and distance concern you. And the less visible are the relationships that matter." Which leads to Chap. 6...

Chap 6: Anyone can access almost any information at anytime from anywhere in real time. A man can walk down the street in Houston, TX and be talking to his girlfriend in Zurich for the semester and be completely oblivious to the woman getting mugged right next to him. At the same time, anyone with the know how knows exactly where he is and just how dirty he's talking to his woman.

Chap 7: The privacy issues that all of this raises aside, I'd like to address the issues of mnemotechnics specifically. Aristotle was not a fan of writing for many reasons: if you are reading a book and have a question, the book cannot answer it for you the second you have it, it made people lazy and, being seperate from the mind, was therefore artificial and not as lofty as thought itself. With the advent of writing, philosophers and rhetoricians no longer had to bother with the mental acrobatics of building and memorizing a mansion full of bric-a-brac and the thoughts they were meant to symbolize. Now they could just read it. A friend of mine jokes that her laptop is her brain. For more and more people this is becoming increasingly true. But if we are able to implant "wet-ware" memory into our own brains, does it matter? Aristotle would be flipping the &*^(*%! out.

- Trevor Wallace

Trevor Wallace,
t_rev2323@yahoo.com

1) Chapter 5, pg. 101- "The more you deal in dematerialized goods, the less location and distance concern you. And the less visible are the relationships that really matter." This quote summarizes the entire chapter. Mitchell sates that the availability of being able to share across networks, such things as text and music, the less importance we place on physical objects. It seems that we are in a virtual relationship now, whether we know it or not.
2) Chapter 6, pg. 112- "To find something out, or to get something done in a city, you now have a choice. You can navigate the bricks-and-mortar half in the time-honored way, or increasingly, you can switch to its electronic twin." This quote describes the ever-increasing impact of electronic technology in our world today. No longer do we have to find out about a city, etc. physically, we can now use mass electronic communication to find out all we want to know at the touch of our fingertips.
3) Chapter 7, pg. 118- "We are rapidly approaching the point where anything might respond instantly to a wireless query about its identity, current location, or some other property." Mitchell states that the use of RF tags would come to give its users "unwanted surveillance." Would it be worthwhile for us to use these tags, but at the same time, lose our right to privacy?

1) Text has gone from something we have to go to visit to something that comes to us. While this has increased our accessability to these documents, one has to wonder whether or not this is actually beneficial to us culturally. Does something being so easily reached by so many undermine its value? Does it make the text less valuable to us or not?
(Mitchell, 84)

2) Mitchell mentions that the constant replaying of a variety of scenes from 9/11 appeared to distort the present time, making one unable to tell if it was current or not. However, in this day and age, how could this be possible? Mitchell himself mentions that television stations flipped back and forth between real-time images and replayed ones, and I simply do not understand how a person could not differentiate.
(Mitchell, 111)

3) Chapter seven of this book reminded me of how we discussed the difference (or lack thereof) between reality and virtual reality. With all these gizmos and gadgets all around us, one has to wonder whether we're actually ever separated from it, let alone completely disconnected.

~Grace

1. Mitchell mentions the chilling possibilities of surveillance in an increasingly digital age. Simultaneously, though, money is increasingly a "consensual hallucination"-- a running tabulation of who has what without any corresponding physical materials. Some cyberpunk writers (I'm thinking of Neal Stephenson in particular) predict that with increasingly electronic money, it will be harder for governments to collect taxes and thus governments as we know them will be marginalized. So, if not governments, who will do the surveilling? Cell phone companies perhaps?

2. As personal media bubbles become ubiquitous, and as the technology used to construct them sheds more and more atoms, I wonder if they will become less obtrusive and perhaps even invisible? Think about it-- people could be walking around in undetectable (to the naked eye at least) auditory and visual spheres, effectively altering their consciousness as they see fit. This strikes me in a way as being not so different from drug use. How likely is this? How will this shape social interaction in the future?

3. In the chapter on "Mnemotechnics", Mitchell explores the displacement and obsolescence of physical space as its functions are increasingly subsumed by cyberspace. How far could this replacement go, and to what extent do physical space and cyberspace function as a gestalt, rather than in opposition to one another? How is this poised to change as the relationship becomes fuzzier? More concretely, will there be a time when books, CDs, and movies as we know them will cease to become physical property altogether, or will the physical forms retain a place in our hearts as they seem to do now?

Ajai Raj

1. Chapter 5: Pg. 84. "This challenges the very idea of a fixed workplace. Dematerialization delivers us from servitude to places and things- and, indirectly, from domination by those who control places and things" I think he is describing the way that people have been allowed to move out of the traditional realm of the business world, due to technology people are no longer bound by the traditional cubicle business environments. The advancement of the internet, laptops, and blackberrys have allowed people to work away from the office environment with a greater degree of freedom and flexibility.

2.Chapter 6: Pg. 106."Electronic signals had demonstrated that they could construct the most outlandish of beliefs and provoke people to act instantly on those beliefs." This quote describes the reactions people had when hearing "The War of the Worlds" over the radio and how seriously the public reacted. Especially in the beginning of mass electronic communication the public's reverence for this new technology caused them to believe and act on the information they received from it. It is just another example of how emerging technology can affect people's behavior.

3. Chapter 7: Pg. 119. "Ubiquitous transponders and RFID tags have the potential to replace other forms of identifying and descriptive information that people and products carry..." After this quote he goes on to describe a very interesting new niche in technology, and the ramifications that may become of it. These tags and transponders have the potential to change the way that we live our lives and do business.

1. Chapter 5, page 87: “Suddenly, geographic location wasn’t what counted; what really mattered was ready access to a site in cyberspace.” I think this sums up what Mitchell is describing in this chapter. No longer do we need the physical, but we need the virtual. While planning my graduation trip, I came upon what Mitchell is describing. At the touch of my fingertips over the internet, I could search a vast collection of photographs and databases of where I would like to travel. You could even have up-to-date photographs. This ‘shredding of atoms’ is so evident today that most of us don’t even notice.

2. Chapter 5: I was thinking about what Mitchell meant by saying there is a ‘shredding of atoms’ and how it applies to my life. Before I got to the section about photography, that’s what I thought about most. At my house, there is a large collection of photo albums. And at a certain point in my life, there are no more physical photographs. The albums just stop. It is because we have a digital camera and all of our photographs and albums are stored on our computers. By uploading your albums to the internet, you safe guard your photos and memories from things like fire or burglary (or physical problems). However, pictures can be destroyed on-line, if a server crashes, or a worm or virus invades a server (virtual problems). The shredding of atoms still comes with its problems.

3. Chapter 6: When Mitchell describes the consequences of ‘The War of the Worlds’ being read over the radio, it was hard to believe people actually believed that. I had a totally opposite reaction to 9/11. When I saw the live footage of the World Trade Centers, I didn’t believe it was happening. I knew there was enough technology out there that could alter our reality. And that seemed like a more viable option than what really occurred. I was in disbelief that it was actually occurring. I also had a blurring of reality and virtual reality like the people felt when hearing that broadcast over the radio.

- Mackenzie Nye