The Hybrid Space of Networked Tribes


'Marco Susani Marco Susani

More than ten years ago, when the first virtual communities emerged and the internet was accessible only from computers, the idea of a future “society without form” emerged. That is to say, in somebody’s opinion the shapeless shape of the net, where every node could be connected with any other node, was anticipating a future society where everybody could be connected with everybody else, and where everybody indeed would have connected with anybody else. Such a society would have lost any spatial character and would have happened in that shapeless digital space, isolated from the “real” physical space. It was not a surprise that the emerging interaction paradigm of the period was the one of immersive “virtual reality,” and in everyday life this was translated into the more prosaic idea that if you were sitting in front of your computer you were in fact isolated from “real” life.

Things today are going in a different direction, and the explosive combination of growing tribal social structures—a social innovation-and the diffusion of wireless mobile media—a technical innovation—are anticipating a society that is not “without form”, but is just a society with a different form from the past. In fact, a major difference between the old scenario of virtual communities and the emerging tribal networks is the spatial grounding of the latter: wireless mobile media are related to an interaction (interaction between humans and other humans, as
well as interactions between humans and content) that is strongly localized. Being mobile doesn’t mean being agnostic of place, and having interactions anywhere, no matter where you are; on the contrary, mobility is strongly contextualized, and it means providing interactions because you’re in that place.

Location-based content and services provide contextual access to information relevant to your position. Proximity communication provides connections with people that are around you in that moment.
So, this mobile society would not be a society without form, but a society where the sense of place, which architects have called in the past genius loci, would be even stronger, a society where social “densities” (increased flows of relationships) would have some connection to the physical location. The form of this society would not be the one of the shapeless network, but the one of these social densities.

Such a society, however, would not at all be as static and solid as the old civis, where walls and buildings and piazzas were the sole physical definitions of the sense of place. In such a mobile society, the sense of place would be defined by the immaterial flows of information that exist over a physical place: the genius loci would be floating “in the ether” as much as “grounded” in the place. The hybrid-physical and digital, material and immaterial, tangible and evanescent-spatial nature of these places is the real original character of the society inhabited by the networked tribes. This I would define as an aural society.

Aural communities of the first type: of humans and humans

If we define as aura the hybrid, fluid space that surrounds a human and contains her/his flows of information, relationships, and communication, then each human lives in a series of auras of different scale, size and shape. Each human shares different auras with different communities. And, finally, these auras encounter and interfere with auras that belong to other humans, and other auras that emanate from physical spaces. For some years with my colleague Federico Casalegno I’ve tried to imagine-to visualize-the different forms of some of these auras. And I’ve tried to classify their sizes in relation to the size of the communities that “inhabit” these auras. We ended up with a kind of “Atlas” that defines multiple social spaces that cover a wide range between the one-to-one social space of the typical telephone communication and the one-to-many form of the conventional broadcast.

The result is a picture of a possible world populated by different types of communities, a vision of intangible social spaces defined by fluid, dynamic auras, an aural society that has the potential to disrupt many of the rules of the obsolete mass-media society that still is the reference model for many social interpretations.
A few key aspects of this aural society seem particular interesting:

1. The wide range of possibilities offered by the few-to-few and any-to-many communication patterns enabled by wireless mobile media are the core of a potential peer-to-peer networked society that is very different from the mass media, broadcast society. Blogging, photblogging, streetblogging, and podcasting are the first emerging patterns that may evolve into a drastically different way to structure communication, authoring and content sharing.

2. The social “depth” of the communication flows inside the auras is also defined by the variety of the communication formats enabled by wireless media. The sms revolution confirmed that, instead than replicating the face-to-face connection, new communication formats could give leverage to narratives different from face-to-face. Following that phenomenon, a variety of innovative communication formats and narratives (chat, chat-by-pictures, traces, shared experiences, etc) are at the core of new types of collaborative environments that cement the tribal communities.

3. Communication and content access are definitely more and more integrated, and virtually indistinguishable. While in the past we had both the possibility to communicate and share content, but we were doing this separately, the integration of the two—a kind of annotated content sharing—is an original aspect of present interactive media, and the particular shape this could take with wireless mobile media could catalyze unpredictable innovative community building.

4. The interaction with, and within, the auras is very different from conventional interaction with a personal computer. The real innovation of the interaction with mobile wireless devices is not in what one sees on the screen (still often a miniature replica of the GUI on a PC), but in the hand-held nature of the interaction (gestures, relation with the body and its movements), in the interaction with space and location (point-and-click to the physical space, location based interaction), and in the social “services” that support the interaction (personalized filtering, presence and status, profiling and recommending engines).
Even more interesting than the description of the various auras is the understanding of the mechanisms of dynamic interaction between auras. In fact, using the auras as the socio-spatial reference for the definition of communities, and for the interpretation of their social dynamics, suggests a very different way of looking at sociology and media studies. The model of social interpretation that would work better, in fact, would be a kind of “meteorology” of the auras: an observation able to manage dynamic, immaterial, fluid, unpredictable flows that nevertheless follow some complex rules.