The City As Classroom vs. The City As Advertising Platform
On May 2nd, 2016 I had the pleasure of speaking to York University Libraries as part of their Library Futures Series. This is what I said.
The title of my talk today is The City as Classroom vs. The City as Advertising Platform. Despite what the title suggests, I will be talking about libraries and a possible future that libraries could pursue in the present.
More precisely, my talk is about in situ discovery — or, in other words, it’s about discovering information that is enabled by being in a particular place. For most of our history, librarianship has been concerned with enabling information access, discovery and use inside of the library building. Today I would like us to consider how we might support information discovery outside of our buildings and out of our sight.
I’ve divided this talk into three parts:
- The City as Playground
- The City as Billboard
- The City as Library
The ideas that I’m discussing today largely come from the work that I started during my sabbatical in 2014. The City As Classroom is the title of Marshall McLuhan’s last co-authored book. When I submitted the title of this talk a couple of weeks ago, I did so when I still thought I was going to lend some of McLuhan’s ideas to this topic but as I started writing I uncovered a particular connection that I thought might prove useful to explore with you today.
But in order to make this potential connection, I need to explain something a little esoteric before we can really get started.
And that is why I am starting this talk with an exploration of Alternative Reality Games.
In 2004, several people known to love games received an usual and unsolicited parcel in the mail. The package was a jar of honey that contained a number of scrabble tiles. The people who received the tiles knew that the letters were some of sort of clue but they didn’t know what the clues were for or who had sent them. Eventually someone took the letters, arranged them into words, and then tried to see they corresponded to an address on the Internet. And that’s how they found the ilovebees.co website.
