Taking Social Software to the Streets
Taking Social Software to the Streets:
1
Not surprisingly, in the English-
language coverage of Lovegety,
the names of the various modes
are translated in a variety of
fashions.
Iwatani
CNN
79
Mobile Cocooning and the (An-)Erotic
City
Alice Crawford
T O begin, a brief flashback: The time1998; the scene
the streets of Tokyo, where devotees of the LovegetyTM
surf through a web of ad-hoc wireless networks that
de- and re-articulate instantaneously as its carriers move through
the physical space of the city. The Lovegety has been programmed
with social data regarding its bearer, including gender (only two
options there), and favorite activities such as karaoke, chat,
movies, friends, or the vague but cheeky Get2.1 The
small, egg-shaped device constantly beams this information in a
radius of approximately 4.5 meters, and when another user
whose Lovegety has been programmed in a compatible mode
comes within this mobile personal area network, each device
flashes and emits a bleeping signal. The potential match will
then be able to triangulate their way toward one another to meet
face-to-face. With Lovegety, electronically mediated infor-
mation-sharing is brought into a roving, real-time database sha-
dowing the physical trajectories of the user and pre-sorting the
strangers on the street for potential matches.
After a flurry of attention in the business press and technol-
ogy pages, and sales estimated at around a half-million devices,
the Lovegety faded from view. Perhaps toting around a device
designated solely to finding dates just felt too desperate in the
end, or perhaps the shallow program modes made the matching
Journal of Urban Technology, Volume 15, Number 3, pages 7997.
Copyright # 2008 by The Society of Urban Technology.
All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.
ISSN: 1063-0732 paper/ISSN: 1466-1853 online
DOI: 10.1080/10630730802677970
80 Journal of Urban Technology/December 2008

function seem rather futile, once the initial thrill of the bleeping
and flashing lights wore off. In any case, the Lovegety was no
longer in the news and no longer for sale by the end of 90s.
However, the concept behind it is now more widespread than
ever. If we jump forward to 2008, we can see that its successors
are proliferating, as the intersection of mobile and Internet tech-
nology has enabled the migration of social software from the
desktop computer to the streets.
In the years since Lovegetys heyday, social networking sites
(SNSs) such as mixi, MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, Cyworlds
mini-hompys, Bebo, and the like have become among the
most-visited and stickiest sites on the Internet, with millions
of regular users worldwide. They have also become a significant
cultural phenomenon, participating in a transformation of social
relations and turning electronic space into a central locale in
which affective connections are made and sustained . The arrival boyd The
Significance. . .
of high-speed data networks on mobile platforms unmoors this
space from the desktop and allows it to be accessed from
nearly anywhere. With remote access to backend servers storing
profiles and running matching algorithms, mobile social soft-
ware (or mososo, for short) transports this brand of mediated soci-
ality into public and third spaces.2 2
By now as familiar in
contemporary theories of urban
While much has been written about the new modes of social- life as to have become somewhat
ity enabled by desktop-based SNS, the translation of SNS into a of a cliche, Oldenbergs notion of
the third place continues to be a
mobile application changes both the context and significance of useful category for understanding
SNS, as mediated social networking moves out of private spaces the variety of social practices and
their relationship to particular
(of the home, dorm room, office, and the like) and into those forms of space. As Oldenberg
third places of informal conviviality that, along with streets, defined it, The third place is a
generic designation for a great
parks, and public squares, provide an escape from private space variety of public places that host
and comprise the context in which urban sociality can take place. the regular, voluntary, informal,
and happily anticipated
For many users, of course, the main point of access to the Internet, gatherings of individuals beyond
and thereby to social networking software, has always been via the realms of home and work
(MacKenzie and Wajcman).
mobile platformsin Japan, for instance, i-mode users have had
mobile Internet access for years. It seems likely, in fact, that the
majority of world-wide users of any form of social networking soft-
ware will, in a short time, have been introduced to the practice via
the mobile phone. So in a sense, those of us who came to SNS via
the desktop-based Internet are now catching up with the access
habits of much of the rest of the world. However, regardless of
whether one comes early or late to this computer-mediated street
party, there are some fundamental design characteristics of
mososo that are worth attending to when thinking about the
increasingly urban and networked lives so many of us now live.
 Taking Social Software to the Streets 81

Social Software Goes Mobile

With the arrival of social software on mobile platforms, particu-

larly the near-ubiquitous mobile phone, it is now possible to medi-
ate social engagement through this technological interface in a
nearly limitless number of spaces. The advantages of this develop-
ment to wireless carriers eager to increase revenue from data traffic
in a flattening market for voice services is clear, and we will likely
see mobile social software promoted heavily in the coming years.
However, the social implications of this technological innovation
are more ambivalent. The current moment is a formative one in
terms of the development of mososo as a social practice, and a
good one at which to question the direction of that development.
The practice of mososo is new enough as to be relatively
unformed as of yet; however, as the literature of the social shaping
Bijker et al. of technology has convincingly argued, the assumptions, meta-
MacKenzie and Wajcman
phors, and expectations of the producers (and marketers) of a tech-
nology are likely to have some influence over the form the
technology and its eventual use will take, if not determining that
use in the final instance. Clearly, the take-up and use of technologies
are diverse and unpredictable to a certain degree, and there are sig-
nificant cultural variations in the ways that new technologies are
integrated into daily life. However, the design of devices and their
interfaces nevertheless have a shaping effect in the same way that,
while different groups will use the city in diverse ways, urban struc-
ture and design still have a formative effect on those uses.
What, then, is the vision of those currently developing and
marketing mososo? While it is certainly not monolithic, there
are certain themes that can be identified. The developers of
MITs Serendipity project, one of the first mobile social soft-
ware applications, describe what they consider the benefits of
mososo as follows:

The explosion of communication technologies has made

long-range interactions between individuals increasingly
easy. Paradoxically this virtual shrinking of the world,
through constant access to contacts across the globe, often
isolates us from those in our immediate vicinity. However,
as mobile phones evolve to break computing free of the desk-
top and firmly root itself in daily life, we have an opportunity
to mediate, mine, and now even augment our current social
reality. We are beginning to see advances in communication
technology that will enable face-to-face connections between
82 Journal of Urban Technology/December 2008

strangers and make a profound impact on our society . . .

Todays social software is not very social. From standard
CRM systems to Friendster.com, these services require
users to be in front of a computer in order to make new
acquaintances. Serendipity embeds these applications directly
into everyday social settings: on the bus, around the water
cooler, in a bar, at a conference (italics added). MIT Media Lab

Attention to the promotional literature for other emerging

mososo applications indicates that, as with Serendipity, the
stated purpose of these applications unanimously support the
notion that pre-sorting groups of strangers into affinity groups is
a social good, and that users experience of urban space will
thereby be improved in some significant fashion.
And there is broad commercial interest in such applications.
Googles acquisition of Dodgeball.com in 2005 heralded an uptick
in competition for the mobile social market, with MySpace, Gonsalves
Friendster, and Facebook looking to mobile platforms to extend
their already established presence in the social software arena,
and competing with newcomers such as Twitter, Loopt, Fring,
Qlique, Meetro, jaiku, and Helios Buddy Beacon. Interest has
only been growing since. At a 2007 intellectual property auction
in Chicago, a mobile social networking patent sold for $2.6
million dollars, one of the biggest recorded bids for intellectual
property during a live auction. With major wireless carriers Privat
looking for ways to boost their sales of data services, and more
handsets coming equipped with location aware capabilities,
mososo is poised to receive a vigorous push. Yuan and Buckman
While the take-anywhere mobile love-finder, the Lovegety,
may not have succeeded in finding a lasting audience, the mobile
phone is, in a sense, becoming the New Lovegety, and its use in
this capacity has the potential to subtly shape social relations along
a number of lines/trajectories. No longer a niche item, Lovegety-
style applications are now lodged in that most ubiquitous of
gadgets, making the present an interesting moment at which to
question how dating or hook-up practices facilitated by mososo
might affect the city as an erotic (or potentially erotic) space.

Mososo: An Urban Affair

Mososo is geared toward use largely in urban settings, although

there are clearly other locales where it will be taken up. While
 Taking Social Software to the Streets 83

not inherently urban, the context of its use as it appears in

promotional literature, as well as the locales in which it is currently
being developed and adopted are primarily urban spaces. As
Steven Johnson has put it, in an article discussing the uptake of
Dodgeball:

No one will sign up for Dodgeball in a one-Starbucks town.

The ideal environment for Dodgeball is one where there are
dozens of potential hangout spots within a few blocks of
where you and thousands of potential people hang with.
And you only get those sorts of environments in big cities.
The bigger the city, the more likely it is that youll be able
Johnson to find just the right clique. . ..

Clearly, cities and media share a long, and increasingly com-

plexly intertwined history, as Lewis Mumford, Manuel Castells,
Margaret Morse, James Donald, and others have so elegantly
demonstrated, and to think of public spaces apart from the
various media that interpenetrate them and re-constitute their
users has become impossible. Since the invention of the written
word, emerging media have shaped urban life, while the concen-
trated energy and resources of cities have been essential to the
development of new media forms.
Much recent work in media studies and in urban geography
has given attention to the increasing imbrication of media and
space, giving rise to such hybrid conceptions as Couldry and
McCarthys MediaSpace, which they define as a dialectical
concept, encompassing both the kinds of spaces created by the
media, and the effects that existing spatial arrangements have on
Couldry and McCarthy media forms as they materialize in everyday life. While it
would be a mistake to follow Baudrillard and his acolytes into col-
lapsing media representations and the real into a single ontologi-
cal category, we would do well to remember Morses warning
almost twenty years ago (in An Ontology of Everyday Distrac-
tion: The Freeway, the Mall, and Television) against theorizing
in a nostalgic, pre-televisual mode when considering the effect
applications such as mososo might have on the use of public,
urban spaces. In her words:

. . .older concepts of liberation in everyday life based on

escape attempts and figurative practices are no longer
viable in a built environment that is already evidence of
dream-work in the service of particular kinds of commerce,
84 Journal of Urban Technology/December 2008

communication, and exchange. Indeed, older notions of the

public realm and of paramount reality have been largely
undermined, and a return to a pre-televisual world of politics,
the street, or the marketplace is unlikely. Morse

In the post-television era of miniaturized and near-ubiqui-

tous ICTs, Morses description is even more apt.
As more and more mundane activities involve some
mediation via electronic interfaces, the metaphors, forms of inter-
activity, and the multiplicity of other built-in values that interface
design embodies, increasingly play a formative role in our experi-
ence of time, space, identity, community, and sexuality. In both
obvious and subtle ways, the design of technological interfaces
functions as a type of practice-shaping in that the parameters
allowed by the interface work to make some sorts of interactions
simple, others complex, and some not possible at all. Any specu-
lation about creating diverse public urban space in the future will
have to take this into account.

Designing the Interface, Designing Urban Life

In the field of interface/interaction design there is a useful concept

for understanding the structuring qualities of interactive experi-
ence, namely the concept of affordances. The term was intro-
duced by the perceptual psychologist J. J. Gibson to refer to a
feature of an object that implicitly or explicitly enables a particular
action. As the term has been picked up in design circles, affor- J.J. Gibson
dances describe a form of relationship, or interface, between a
technology and its user that structures the utility and experience
of the design. The affordance of buttons is that you push on
them, the affordance of lists of options is that they provide an
obvious range of choices from which to make a selection, the
affordance of a search engine is that you enter a preselected
series of variables and press enter, etc. Clearly, affordances do
not rigidly determine use: the affordance of a doorknob is that
you turn it to open a door. The knobs presence, however, does
not mean that you cannot smash down the door, make it into a surf-
board, and ride it off into the sunset. At the same time, affordances
implicitly and explicitly put certain choices out of reach or, more
subtly, out of mind.
The example of the Lovegety is illustrative here. In its
design, the choices for romantic desires are limited to selections
Taking Social Software to the Streets 85

for man seeking woman or woman seeking man. The ways in

which the affordances of this device affect its possible usesand
encode its assumptions about proper dating habitsare fairly
obvious. The diversity of sexual identities is here narrowed to a
choice between identifying either as a heterosexual female or a
heterosexual male. More subtle shaping effects take place when
the range of options for selections and actions is broad enough
to give an impression that the full range of choices is available.
The overwhelming list of sites that come up in response to a
simple search on any issue can certainly give the impression
that all the perspectives of the world are there at your fingertips
to explore, but a consideration of the limits that decide what
appears on that list to begin with will have to take into account
forces and factors that most e-topians will gladly overlook,
such as the amount of money funneled into assuring that
certain sites come up earlier in searches than non-paying sites,
or the broader issue of who has the economic and cultural
resources to build and maintain a site in the first place and who
does not.
As interaction with ICT interfaces is incorporated into an
increasing number of daily activities, this type of practice- and
perception-shaping becomes more significant, affecting how we
understand and use the spaces of our everyday lives. The wide-
spread adoption of mobile phones offers a wide array of examples
of this transformative capacityplaying a role in networks of
uptake and use contributing to the changing boundaries between
private and public, changes in patterns of work and leisure, and
the here and yet elsewhere experience of location in which
people are materially in public and yet their focus is deeply
absorbed in a mediated, virtual space of chatting, texting, or
listening to music/watching video clips.

Urban Sociality: Heterogeneity or Homophily?

In the context of mososo, we would do well to ask what happens

when this hybridity provides the setting for the interface
between the affective and the urban. What might the possible out-
comes be when the affordances of social software hit the streets?
An ethical and aesthetic commitment to vital, progressive urban
space leads me to believe that the adoption of new technologies
should be evaluatedat least in partin the context of what we
want life in these spaces to look like. In this regard, my approach
86 Journal of Urban Technology/December 2008

follows in the tradition of urbanists who have held that urban life
at its best (a pragmatic, admittedly messy category not to be con-
fused with the Ideal City) is a useful criterion against which to
evaluate new technologies and practices. Mososo is particularly
interesting with respect to this ideal of urbanity, as it is the
unique role that strangers, or, in psychoanalytic terms, The
Other play in urban life that sets it apart from other modes of con-
viviality. It is also the role of the stranger that sets mobile SNS
apart from SNS practices carried out in private spaces. One does
not generally (perhaps even ideally) expect to encounter strangers
in private spaces, such as the home (or even the office, to some
extent). The unique character of intersubjective relations in
urban space, on the other hand, is constituted by exactly this
variety of encounter.
Jane Jacobs, perhaps the greatest champion of urban life,
argued that cities are set apart by The tolerance, the room for
great differences among neighborsdifferences that often go far
deeper than differences in colorwhich are possible and normal
in intensely urban life, but which are so foreign to suburbs and
pseudosuburbs. In her account, cities are by definition full of Jacobs
strangers, providing opportunities for interpersonal encounters
with the potential to transport us out of ourselves and our accus-
tomed ways of thinking. This requires openness to daily encoun-
ters with people who have not been carefully pre-selected to fit a
particular set of lifestyle parameters. According to Jacobs, it is
the wide choice and rich opportunity of such a way of life that
is the very point of urban life.
This openness to difference should not be confused with a
dour, ethical stance of mere tolerance to be taken by urban
dwellers (and designers). Iris Marion Young, among others, has
emphasized the pleasurable, affective aspects of these encounters.
In Justice and the Politics of Difference, she describes the city as a
productively heterogeneous space in which the subject takes
pleasure in being drawn out of oneself to understand that there
are other meanings, practices, perspectives on the city, and that
one could learn or experience something more and different by
interacting with them. For Young, the urban subject is open to Young
encounters with difference/s that are not only tolerated, but
can be the source of pleasurepleasure she construes as poten-
tially erotic. This attitude might be described as one of hetero- Young
philia, and distinguishes a progressive urban approach to
otherness that sets it apart from the parochial and inward-facing
desire to keep to ones own kind.
 Taking Social Software to the Streets 87

In the context of mososo, it is also interesting to note that

Young emphasizes the urban subjects mobility: City dwellers
frequently venture beyond. . .familiar enclaves. . . to the more
open public of politics, commerce, and festival, where strangers
Young meet and interact. Urban space is thus unique with respect to
difference and mobility, both of which open up opportunities for
potentially transformative encounters with The Other, the ne
plus ultra of which is the erotic encounter. On this view, urban
life at its best offers a model for potentially liberatory intersubjec-
tive relationships and a spatial setting of unique mobility and
potential.
Clearly, not everyone is as enthusiastic about encounters with
strangers. The endless exposure to The Other in cities has alter-
nately been construed as a source of its danger and a cause for
anxiety. And, as Freud and the entire psychoanalytic corpus
have indicated, the erotic itself is a site of ambivalence and
danger, posing as it does a threat to the coherence of the ego.
Put them together, and the urban and the erotic can be construed
as a menacing combination indeed. As Georg Simmel, one of
the great theorists of urban life rather poetically put it: The
street is full of people: one must take care where one goes. . .every
aspect of human life pullulates throughout their length. . .a sea of
Donald lusts and faces.
Accordingly, there is a counter-movement to the heterophi-
lic, potentially erotic understanding of urban difference that,
rather than being open to the Other, attempts to limit or even
close down opportunities for encounters with difference. New
technological developments, including information and com-
munication technologies are often employed to regulate or sani-
tize the encounters with difference that urban life entails. The
early histories of the telegraph, radio, television, and the Internet
are rife with accounts of how these new electronic miracles will
enable us to manage difference in a safe, mediated form. In the
mid nineteenth century, Professor Alonzo Jackman described
the benefits of transcontinental telegraphy as follows: . . .all
the inhabitants of the earth would be brought into one intellectual
neighborhood and be at the same time perfectly freed from those
contaminations which might under other circumstances be
Spigel 1992 received. While more explicit than usual in its celebration of
the cleansing effects of mediation, Professor Jackmans senti-
ment should be familiar to anyone who has followed the pro-
motional discourse around information technologies in urban
settings.
88 Journal of Urban Technology/December 2008

Mobilizing Homogeneity

With the recent explosion of miniaturized, mobilized information

technologies, urban space has taken on a more strongly mediated
aspect than ever before. A corollary of this development is that we
have an unprecedented number of ways in which to mediate our
experience of the Other, and of the messy, heterogeneous spaces
of the city. The material untidiness of urban living is thus overlaid
with an abstract or smooth space of informational relations for
those who can afford and operate the requisite technologies. In
this approach, technological innovations are deployed to provide
a buffer, or cocoon of familiar connections and sensations
around the individual as she conducts her daily life.
This drive to rework the heterogeneity of everyday life into a
sortable, calculable, surveillable, and ultimately controllable set
of databases and representations recalls de Certeaus critique of
what he called the Concept City, that abstracted, gods eye
view of urban space in which the city becomes safely homogen-
ized and sanitized of discomfiting deviations from the expected,
purified of all the physical, mental and political pollutions that
would compromise it. When this homogenizing mode of ICT de Certeau
deployment goes hand in hand with tendencies toward urban hom-
ogenization and control in architecture and planning (tendencies
Mike Davis has convincingly laid out in City of Quartz and that
others have argued elsewhere), the prognosis for a meaningfully
heterogeneous urban experience are clearly under threat. While
it seems highly unlikely that any drive to homogenize urban
space would ever meet with complete success, it is reasonable
to question that drive and to be wary of the inroads made in
that direction.
Of course, none of this is to claim that a widespread uptake of
mososo would be an entirely dire affair. Clearly, there are a variety
of interesting, progressive purposes that can be served by social
software, from facilitating social activism (see for example Rhein-
golds Smart Mobs for some promising if somewhat utopian sug- Morse
gestions, the use of Facebook by young Egyptian protestors, or the
TXTmob project, for example), to creating new contexts for colla-
borative artistic practices, to the crucial work of maintaining ties
of family and already-existing networks of friendship under con-
ditions of high mobility, migration, and time-pressure (see danah
boyds work on social software for much useful insight here). boyd
boyd and Ellison
And we have also seen that there are many contexts in which
mediated sociality can have a liberatory effect in its ability to
 Taking Social Software to the Streets 89

reroute around barriers of tradition and family control or to cross

bridges of loneliness and isolation (see Maroons work on women
and mobile sociality in urban Morocco, Horst and Miller on
practices in the Jamaican context, Solis on romantic texting in the
Philippines, Humphries and Barker or Barendregt on the ambiva-
lent reaction to these qualities of mobile sociality in Indonesia, or
the plethora of articles written about bluetoothing in Saudi
romantic life).
Regardless of the many significant local variations in mobile
social practices, the characteristic that concerns us here is, if not
universal, then widely distributed: namely, the tendency for
mobile social networking to strengthen connections between indi-
viduals who already know one another, and to bridge along
friend-of-friend and affinity networks. It is in this regard that
any widespread uptake of mososo as currently configured might
yet be problematic when understood in the context of an ideal of
urban life. As the developers of MITs Serendipity project put it,
MIT Media Lab Technology takes the Chance out of Chance Encounter: con-
necting mobile and/or location-aware devices to remote servers
capable of comparing user profiles and locations, mososo delivers
matches in real-time and real, co-located space. And theres the
rubsocial software at this point is all about matches: about
finding sameness in a sea of otherness and connecting like with
likeor the friend of like with like. Where the erotic and our
relationship to difference are already ambivalent affairs, mososo
seems poised to further marginalize difference from the experience
of urban space.
It is not irrelevant, in this context, that so much profile-build-
ing in social software takes the form of elaborating a constellation
of media/commodities one has an affinity for: favorite movies,
television shows, sports teams, bands, lifestyle-affiliations, and
the like. These types of entries are simple to quantify and sort
in databases, where less tangible, qualitative characteristics are
much more elusive to this sort of processing. Accordingly, the
nature of affinity is defined in large part as sharing similarly
shaped constellations of commodity likes and dislikes. To my
knowledge, there is no available option in which a user can
choose Opposites Attract and, in fact, this would seem fairly
absurd in the context of finding matches that social software
defines as the practice of discovering sexual (or even friendly)
counterparts.
One can imagine a small deviation from strict pattern
matching, in which collaborative filtering might be introduced
90 Journal of Urban Technology/December 2008

into match-making, and users might be able to see a list analo-

gous to what one currently sees on sites such as Amazonif
you liked Nigel, you may also like Fred! But even here, the
law of similarity still rules, and the parameters of the interface
work to foster a practice of social connection-making that empha-
sizes homogenization along affinity group lines. And in fact,
this is rather how much of social network software works.
Rather than seeking like-minded strangers, most users spend
time within the networks of friends of friends, facilitating a
pronouncedly homophilic mode of sociality (homophily
being a sociological term for the tendency to affiliate with
those with whom you are similar. Among others, Lee Humphries
interesting study of Dodgeballs early adapters supplies strong
evidence for this tendency in mososo users). As Jennifer Thom-
Santelli aptly put it in her critique of current mobile social soft-
ware design:

When users announce their location using Dodgeball or

arrange a meetup using Mixd, the selective aspects of the
chosen recipients of these broadcasts encourages homophily
to the point that serendipitous interactions are only really
possible with those who probably have similar interests as
you, at locations that have been pre-approved by those who
are just like you. Thom-Santelli

Where Thom-Santelli is largely concerned with mososos

possible contribution to the commodification and gentrification
of urban space, my own (closely related) concern focuses on
what impact mososo-centered interactions might have on intersub-
jective relationships in these spaces.
Add mobility to a technologically-enabled cultural obses-
sion with dialing in more and more precise affinity groups (Man-
chester United fans who like to watch Johnny Darko and read
Murakami and listen to Arcade Fire), and profile-matching
homphily takes to the streets, papering over the heterogeneous
spaces of difference with an abstracted, homogenized space of
sameness. The mobility of urban subjectivity that might offer
opportunities to bring us out of ourselves and expand in unex-
pected directions becomes a mobility directed toward discovering
what is most like ourselves in others. Bringing social software to
mobile platforms facilitates the practice of pattern matching in
public and third spaces.
 Taking Social Software to the Streets 91

Taking the Chance Out of Chance Encounter with Mobile

Cocooning

Walking down any city street in the developed world (and, increas-
ingly, any street in any city in the world) it has become impossible
not to notice an increase in the number of ones fellow urbanites
who are absorbed in some type of mobile interface or another.
With mososo, even the impulse to meet new people in these
spaces can be mediated through a mobile interfaceone, which
promises to pre-select f2f encounters that are guaranteed not
to lead one outside ones already existing affinity group. Where
earlier, desktop-based SNS was associated with home-based
cocooning, mososo enables a variety of mobile cocooning, or
Spigel 2005 privatized mobility in Lynn Spigels useful turn of phrase. On
this model, urban space becomes, rather than a space of difference,
a comfy echo-chamber of our own (commodified) profiles and
those of our familiars. As Lee Humphries notes in her study of
users of Dodgeball:

Dodgeball is primarily connecting Dodgeball users to one

another and not to the general urban public, thus leading to
a kind of social molecularization. Even when my informants
did meet new people through Dodgeball, these people were
fairly demographically similar. While urban areas are
diverse environments, Dodgeball may contribute to an illu-
sion of looser sociality despite reinforcing homophilous
tendencies.

In fact, this reinforcing of homophilic tendencies is often

explicitly touted in the promotional materials for mososo appli-
cations. For example, the benefits of using Citysense, a recently
developed service providing real-time mapping of social activity
in San Francisco, is described by its parent company (Sense
Networks) as follows:

When a user is out at night, Citysense learns their preferred

tribe distribution from time spent in these places. When
that user visits another city, they see hotspots recommended
on the basis of this distribution and combined with overall
activity information.

Users who go to rock clubs see rock club hotspots, users

who frequent hip-hop clubs see hip-hop hotspots, and those
92 Journal of Urban Technology/December 2008

who go to both see both. The question where is everybody

like me right now? is thus answered for these userseven
in a city theyve never visited before.

How does the erotic encounter fare in this environment?

Poorly, I would say: moving through the city focused on ones inter-
face to an abstract/informational space, relying on the data manip-
ulations of backend servers and filtering software to preselect f2f
encounters with people like me is rather profoundly anerotic.
This does not, of course, mean these encounters are asexual,
as clearly these technologies are rather keenly focused on facilitat-
ing dating and sexual encounters. However, seeking sexual
encounters with those most like oneself is, one could argue (and
I do) an exercise in primary narcissism, which is sexual, but not
erotic, at least certainly not in the sense of Iris Youngs very
adult account of the erotic charge that can be found in a city full
of strangers. When sexual connection is defined as an encounter
of like with like, the chances of being transported outside of
oneself, of a sort of ex-stasis of emotion and connection that
might cause a real break with the familiar flow of everyday life
become slim indeed. As currently configured, the affordances of
mososo put homophilic encounters at the top of the menu, while
providing an illusion of openness to the rich variety of urban
experience. The transformation of self and of intersubjective
relations that a more heterophilic orientation would offer is
not even on the menu.
To illustrate what a fully mososo-enabled night on the town
might look/feel like, consider the following, rather breathless
account of the benefits of mososo from a popular tech blog:

Imagine a traveler who is cruising down a road trying to

decide which night club to try out. If people registered with
an affinity tracking service, then a traveler could choose a
club or restaurant whose currently present patrons fit some
desired demographic profile. For bar scenes one of the diffi-
cult challenges will be the development of image processing
software that can analyze the image of a person you havent
even seen yet to decide whether you might find that person
attractive. You could just drive through downtown and be
told where to stop. . .. Parker

While one would hope that this was an attempt at reductio ad

absurdum, this is in fact, only a slight exaggeration of the standard
Taking Social Software to the Streets 93

argument for mososos benefits as a matchmaking tool. However

unlikely such a whole-hearted embrace of multiply mediated soci-
ality might be, it cannot be denied that the general tendency of
mososo applications is currently toward pre-sorting and affinity-
group matching. Consider in this context, the number of places
in which mobile sociality has already begun to flourish: in cafes,
bars, at bus-stops, outside lecture halls, on public transportation,
on park benches, and even while walking down the street,
people can be found peering into their mobile screens, busily
engaged with people they already know, and, generally, ignoring
those they do not, even to the point of blundering into them on
the sidewalk. A common argument is that people have always
engaged in practices geared toward creating a cocoon of privacy
around them in public places: reading a book or newspaper is
often cited as an example. However, while it may be socially
acceptable to attempt to engage a stranger in conversation about
reading material written for consumption by a public audience
(Oh, I loved that book, or Have you seen how the Dodgers
are doing. . .?), it is never considered appropriate to approach a
stranger and ask who they are texting and what its about.
Mobile engagement of this sort is so clearly about (among other
things) occupying a cocoon of private space while in public, that
the mobile can function in many cases as, in Stephen Bayleys
memorable phrase when describing Walkman use in a previous
era, a sod-you machine, effectively closing off interaction with
anyone not already on ones contacts list. Working both to repel
stranger encounters and to facilitate homophilic encounters, the
mobile cocoon of mososo works, both subtly and not-so-subtly,
to pare down opportunities for heterophilic intersubjective
relations.
One doesnt have to care especially about the sanitizing of
the erotic per se to find this troubling. Remember that the erotic
is only one facet of the openness to difference and The other
that urban life at its best has to offer. However, if the heterophilic,
erotic encounter, as the pinnacle of encounters with otherness is
marginalized by the parameters of mososo technologies, the impli-
cations for more platonic engagements with difference are also
troubling. When social interactions seem to be trending toward
an increasing reliance on interfaces which are designed around
the assumption that finding sameness is the goal of sociality, an
infantile narcissism threatens to replace the kind of mature, adven-
turous, curious intersubjective relationships embedded in the ideal
of urban life set out in the rich tradition of progressive and radical
94 Journal of Urban Technology/December 2008

urban theorists such as Jacobs, Young, De Certeau, Doreen

Massey, the Situationists, Mike Davis, David Harvey, Jacqueline
Rose, and Henri Lefebvre.
While these dedicated urbanists clearly do not form a unified
tradition, they do have this in common: for all of them, hetero-
geneous urban environments are understood to provide an experi-
ence of individual and collective life that, while never necessarily
productive of solidarity across all groups, certainly functions to
push at the horizons of what is taken for granted as how life is
and, at its best, to push beyond that, thus providing the conditions
of possibility for alliances, coalition, or solidarity across differ-
ences of class, race, sexuality, lifestyle, and others, as well as
stretching the boundaries of ones own subjective understanding
of how one might live. True heterogeneity is not always fun,
erotic, or celebratory, and should not be confused with a touristic
fascination with the Other. At its best, sharing space with differ-
ence on the public, impersonal level involves allowing a place for
everyone who makes space for others. In this respect, the dictum to
share space refuses celebrate diversitys willfully naive inability
to discriminate between forms of diversity that are openly hostile
to difference in others and those which are able to live alongside
other ways of life. Heterophilic urban relations do not require
any hugging, let alone sexual contact. They do, however, require
openness to (again, mostly mundane) daily encounters with
people who have not been carefully pre-selected to fit a particular
set of lifestyle-affiliation parameters. In the words of Jane Jacobs,
it is the wide choice and rich opportunity of such a way of life
that is the very point of urban life. Jacobs
To critique existing mososo applications for their narcissistic
and homophilic affordances does not imply a technologically
deterministic view of what mobile social software might mean
in the context of urban life. The use of mososo does not guarantee
that one will limit ones encounters to electronically facilitated
matchmaking and social engagements in public space. Clearly, it
is the context and spirit in which technologies are used that deter-
mine their social meaning in the final instance. As William Gibson
has famously put it, The Street finds its own uses for things. Gibson 1989
However, the increasingly pervasive nature of mobile interfaces
that provide easy-action affordances for homophilic social
sorting should be the subject of lively critical debate amongst
those who value a vibrant, diverse mode of urban life.
Taking Social Software to the Streets 95

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