Discussion: A City *Fun* Will Always Remember
In-Case-You-Missed-It — YOW-SF August 7, 2018
Thanks to all who came to the Speculative Futures Ottawa discussion, A City *Fun* Will Always Remember.
What defines fun? What defines boredom?
With new technologies shaping how we experience experiences, record experiences, and share experiences, what is the future of a fun city? More importantly, what defines a city when borders shift and boundaries blur with new intersections of social values and our cravings for instant gratification?
Canada150 was a hit success for tourists, suburbanites, and urbanites following and spotting each planned public spectacles as performances take over the city’s public spaces. The public spectacles such as La Machine and Kontinuum are constructions of temporary environments that are picture-worthy. Today, we are still able to re-live these moments through Instagram posts.
Fast-forward to 2018, Canada151, life catches up, and people start looking for something new to share instantly. Replaced by the memorable public events, are the latest most Instagrammable coffee shops, restaurants, and selfies at summer festivals. We will always remember the public spectacles we had, and will attempt to bring the moments back so we can be reminded of the fun we used to have. As time progresses, the events are refined, polished, perfected to make sure no uncertainties can jeopardize the moment that is carefully designed for a narrowly defined purpose — public spectacles that are like the aisles of a supermarket filled with products that are variants of the same thing with different packagings.
When “new” turn into “normal” is exactly when “fun” becomes “boredom”. We just expect it to happen. There’s no more anticipation. Fun didn’t forget about Ottawa, we just got used to it.
Ottawa’s fun was created for the spectators: moments that are picture-perfect. The city has become influencer-wannabe, projecting images and curated sets of unique experiences to others through self-promotion. Most importantly, the public spectacles makes the ordinary people think that “fun” can only be achieved by someone with more power and social mobility, and all that’s left is to enjoy what has been created by others and share the moment from one screen to another.
“If you experience something — record it. If you record something — upload it. If you upload something — share it.”
The fun of being in the city has boiled down to images on screens — content for clicks, likes, and follows, while the experiences are reduced to “I was here” and “wish you were here”.
On the other hand, the gap between the recorded experience and reality is diminishing. What does it mean to experience a city when technology can virtually transport anyone to anywhere desired? We can be here while simultaneously be elsewhere.
With Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality technologies, we record and reconstruct reality in higher fidelity and greater details. The fun in Ottawa will soon be irrelevant to the geographical boundaries. It is about being somewhere through instant sharing of experiences. When an experience becomes just another type of content, technology will once again be digging into our insecurities — even the best versions of ourselves are less than picture-perfect — the same old fear. Are we ready for the increasingly edited and manufactured versions of our living moments to be projected onto screens of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality?
What is next for our desire to live an “image-perfect” life?
Shifting borders and diminishing boundaries of a city — hyperlocal geopolitics and hyperlocal futures
A city’s relationship with itself and its multiple identities transcending space and time have shaped the way we understand Ottawa. We are blessed with communities with rich histories constantly mediating our shared reality. Somehow in the growth of our city, we have lost touch with the hyperlocal relationships within a place. As digital and physical boundaries are drawn to divide places into disconnected enclaves, we have lost empathy towards the people we share this place with along with the touch-points were interface with distinct cultures and values each one of us represents.
A City Fun Will Never Forget is Never Finished.
We live in a time where a few clicks on Amazon have replaced a drive to Walmart. It takes less to get to the end goal — it is efficient. Technology mediates our interactions with others, humans and otherwise. While technology companies like Amazon (and before that, the invention of malls to replace street-level stores) has taken more inconveniences out of our lives, the in-between spaces in a city and human roles in society we consider as community touch-points are challenged as part of the progress. We are moving from having a fixed point-of-contact to the gig economy, and now the opportunity to professionalize the act of “filling the gaps” as talents become less reliant on pre-defined roles in a workplace. As people move in and out of their roles and jobs, they fill other people’s gaps while their gaps get filled by others.
The city “fun” will remember is a place where we get to reclaiming the in-between-state. In a constant work-in-progress, the events and happenings are changing touch-points linked by our relationships with each other. We long to be a part of each other’s lives as a community, where our shared experiences are raw, unedited, and authentic. We want to explore a place as it is changing over time and perhaps being part of the projected image viewed by spectators even if we are imperfect. We want to make “making memories” less of an unachievable task and more of something we can build from our own communities.
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