Page - 39 - in >mcs_lab> - Mobile Culture Studies, Volume 1/2020

Mobile Culture Studies | >mcs_lab> 1 (2020) Johanna Menhard | Entanglements on and with the street 39 First, it raises questions about what is public in urban public spaces: When I thought about the city and its public areas, its places, corners, streets, crossings, and multiple paths traversing the city like the veins of an organism, I felt I could observe this space, because it is willing to fully present itself in the built, social, and representational dimension. But thinking in terms of the concept of assemblage, I realized quickly that there is no end to space, that the entanglements with the city’s public areas lead me to multiple elements which are not observable, not graspable, not tangible, but still affect the creation of urban space. These could be the inner selves of people on the street or thoughtscapes of a city like Andrew Irving contemplates in The Lives of Other Citizens,62 or the absent bodies, the dead present in memories of others,63 or the personal memories of first love or intimate encounters in public areas of a city,64 or all the other memories, information, messages, notifications, images, sounds, cartographies and connections that accompany people on the street, and that shape the feeling of being embedded in the world. Like Adriana de Souza e Silva and Jordan Frith suggest, the smartphone should be conceptualized as an interface for public spaces: “When we experience a place, we do so through our body, which acts as a layer between a place and our perception of it. We also develop techniques to filter the information around us, further interfacing our experiences. Nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in pub- lic spaces and urban areas.”65 Furthermore, they argue that the boundaries between public and private spaces have always been permeable. Therefore, mobile technologies do not radically change how people behave in public, but increase the range of personal and private activities and become an intrinsic part of public space.66 The use of mobile interfaces in public space, like urban streets, could be seen as a constant part of urban sociability.67 And as Timo Kaerlein points out in his book on smartphones as Nahkörpertechnologien, the users of smartphones could be seen less as dis- tracted than tendentially more connected with multiple networks and information about their surroundings through their smartphone.68 Urban space might be shaped more by the mediated connections themselves with and beyond the local and temporary. People are not simply dis- tracted or inattentive, rather they orient themselves to something which creates and shapes the space they experience. Second, it raises questions about the methodological approach to the street and urban space in general. In studying European Ethnology and exploring and observing these human-smart- phone-intra-actions on and with the street, I would consider myself to be doing ethnography. “But what is ethnography?”, asks Dara Culhane in A Different Kind of Ethnography, and 62 See Andrew Irving: The Lives of Other Citizens. Taking a Journey into New York’s Thoughtscape. In: Anthro- vision 4 (2016) 2, pp. 1-15. 63 See Andrew Irving: New York Stories. Narrating the Neighbourhood. In: ethnos 2015, pp. 1-21. 64 See the inter-active mapping project “Queering the Map”. Online available: https://www.queeringthemap.com/ 65 Adriana de Souza e Silva/Jordan Frith: Mobile interfaces in public spaces. Locational privacy, control and urban sociability. New York: Routledge 2012, p. 26. 66 Ibid., p. 186. 67 Ibid., p. 198. 68 Timo Kaerlein: Smartphones als digitale Nahkörpertechnologien. Zur Kybernetisierung des Alltags (=Digitale Gesellschaft 21). Bielefeld: transcript 2018, p. 187.