Computational society is still a physical one
As argued by Edward Glaeser, our society as well as our material reality experience a transformation. The role of the city changes from manufacture oriented into consumer oriented as level of income and education grows within the society. As manufacturing moves away from the city cores, or being outsourced to the developing world, consumption becomes a driver for urbanism. Consumption, however, is not limited to goods, amenities and services it also incorporates information, ideas, and knowledge. Moreover, the latter becomes gradually dominant in shaping the society and the city form thus accelerating the transformation of the humanity into its new informational based form. Internet, information technologies, social networks express the computational side of the society. Our lives are divided in two, physical and digital. Information flows that dependent on physical presence and face-to-face communication within an actual physical environment are augmented by the digital space used for information exchange, socio-political cohesion, as well as production of ideas.
Digital space is an evolutionary accelerator of knowledge exchange. Digital platforms more often substitute the physical space for political, social and economic roles. Instead of Greek agoras and Roman forums, we have Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest. The new agoras are space independent bringing the humanity closer together and evolving our ideas and understanding of ever-global reality that ties and gives voice to people and societies that did not have one. These new forums, however, represent a risk of being misused and manipulated by the powers that take a monetary stake in their existence. Algorithms that filter and manage the expanded digital reality of global society and the increased range of audiences within it are beyond our analysis. The emergence of fake news, public data manipulations, mass media politics that exist within this new digital reality exemplify a danger of overabundance of information. The keys to the truth are not in our hands. Manipulation of popular opinions have become easier than ever; be it the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Russian meddling in U.S elections, factory of bots on social media platforms or paid likes on Instagram.
Hopefully, we still exist in real physical world. We still prefer to live in proximity to each other. Cities still stand; people still build physical relationships. The computational society still needs a roof and four walls. If computation can help to understand the inner workings of the society, it might as well help us to build a better physical forum, which apparently has not disappeared from the core of the city but rather has grown to engulf the city in its entirety. The forum is not a point on the map, but rather the connections we make with each other no matter how, via iPhone or by chatting while drinking coffee together.
