Desire, consumption and representation: From the physical to the virtual and back.

The Homo extendus extends and enhances everyday experiences with the help of a prosthetic that has become essential to its sense of self. George Simmel in his essay The Metropolis and the Mental Life describes how due to constant stimuli and a fast pace, the individual in the new bustling metropolitan city had to create a bubble of individuality, indifference and rationality to protect himself (7). In our times, the smartphone with its entertainment and personalization capabilities has become an individualized sanctuary from the complicated bustling world. The individual can choose what networks to connect with and what images and videos he sees, in a highly curated experienced, while functioning as a shield from undesirable stimuli. The prosthetic is a medium of communication, representation and production and is always carried around in public and private space. The experience of the city is not solely rested anymore on the information that lies in physical space but is significantly aided by the virtual layer of data that overlays physical space. Walking while engaging with the smartphone introduces a new augmented experience of the city.

Google Maps is widely used today to help people navigate and organize their routes. Google’s public mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. In a sense, Google Maps is a deep mapping of the city, an attempt for virtual maps to mirror as much as possible the physical world. Google Maps collects data from all sorts of sources like satellites, a squad of vehicles that take 360 photos and a number of partners that submit detailed vector data (Keeley). Additionally to that Google collects real time data by accessing the location of the users of the app and at the same time allows users and Local Guides to contribute with subjective data like images and reviews on their maps (Keeley). The Homo extendus uses and contributes to the deep mapping of the city, as it navigates space. When using applications like Google Maps to navigate in a foreign terrain, people willingly submit their GPS Location to Google and at the same time allow the algorithms to recommend a route for them. A global corporation like Google initiates how the public moves in the city and defines the choices of the Homo extendus.

People navigate in urban space while collecting and applying information in a feedback loop, from the virtual world to the physical and back. As the experience of the city has been influenced by the emergence of screens in the public sphere, physical space and representational space develop a reciprocal relationship mediated by the smartphone. Since spatial awareness has been extended with the use of smartphones, the way we navigate and experience the city is greatly influenced by data banks and algorithms distributed on the web. As bodies and bodily movements mutate to engage with new media technologies (fig.3), the city starts to transform, affected not only by the spatial representations that circulate in the media but also by the user’s new relationship to the urban texture. The hybrid multilayered urban experience that is accessible via the smarphone produces new experiences of the city. The practice of production and consumption of mediated representations of the city affects the social space of the city.