Emerging is a parallel map for a navigation of economy. This is the preferred image of representation of the Armory Square neighborhood in downtown Syracuse: Live, Work, Play. The Armory Square web site illustrates these 3 tangents through a rotation of a few generic/placeless images. How then does one measure character of place?
the dynamism of the sound mapping juxtaposed to this 'generic' activity based website of the city is clearly at odds. what is interesting is that there must be a population that the city is marketing to with its website. so i think that it's 'genericism' might just be as valid to one community of users as the sound mapping we find as a valid way to map the character.
ReplyDeleteso is it a conversation now that social media outlets like facbook/four square, or sound mapping are more effective at describing a character of a city than a generic website sponsored by the city?
Perhaps the generic quality of the website is an attempt to actually avoid zeroing in on any type of user in efforts to keep an open, undiscriminating, spectrum of potential residents/visitors/users/etc (whether this is a successful attempt or not is debatable).
ReplyDeleteI think what my original post falls short of discussing, and instead begins to just suggest, is that in our initial data collected from the social medias/networking apps we found that they were actually perpetuating the generic character of the neighborhood through their biases to the economic characteristics of the site. When people are constantly "checking-in"/tweeting from bars, restaurants, starbucks, clothing stores - the consuming character is that which emerges.
I think it becomes a question of pushing these technologies to measure/map a site in a different scope. Or, as we began to do with the sound mapping, what other approaches all together might be used to capture character? Or can they be used to inform each other or even be fused?