User:Bujatt/Webitics

Webitics - The bit of architecture Our shift towards digital world and why architects should dive into it 2009. 10. 13. 1. Summary In the followings I will describe some ideas on how important is the change we are experiencing now and why I consider future much less predictable as we ever imagined. 2. Coffee, large cities, internet This phenomena I often describe as the coffee-large cities-internet syndrome. In 2003 I joined iWiW, the Hungarian equivalent and preceding of Facebook. After registration I was asked "about myself" to put on my profile page. I wanted to fill in the form to state me being a very social person. It was clear to me, as a happy new member of this community, I shouldn't write something very essential about my individuality but something what reflects my openness and strong connectivity towards my friends, other members of the same social network. In the end I happened to write down my addictions: internet, coffee and cities. I was not sure whether I should declare my internet addiction, might being a negative thing to tell about myself. But I just did it, admittedly. Some years later I realized that these three addictions of mine have something very important in common. They all mean or indicate social platforms just of different size. Coffee is something over you discuss with someone. It is an excuse to meet someone, to slow down in our daily rush and stop for a second. Having a coffee with someone automatically generates a situation which involves some kind of communication. So coffee is not important as a drink, it could be tea or anything else, but as a tool to create such situations. To provoke and define a space for communication. City is a space where large amount of people live within a certain area, usually in a higher density. It is clearly a space where human interaction just happens because high density makes people to meet. In cities the amount of people sharing the same neighborhood reaches a critical mass where they just can't avoid each other. You see hundreds or thousands of people every single day if you live in a city which makes the statistical measures of chance for communication relatively high. Finally, internet is a tool to connect even larger amounts of people together. This network does it much more efficiently than do cities where physical proximity is still an issue. Internet is just another platform for communication, same as coffee and city before, but now growing global in size. This growing size does matter, as I will explain in the followings. 3. Cities particularly About several thousands of years ago the first cities were founded.XXX I think we don't realize the fact how important change this made to the history of humanity. This change affected our history entirely and irreversibly. I would like to highlight that so many things originate from people living in cities. You can think of any field... science, culture, art, historical events, politics. Most of the 'important things' that happened in the last thousands of years happened in or were at least linked to cities. Until recently human history has definitely been characterized and marked by cities. The reason seems simple. People contribute to history, people make art, science and culture happen. So if more people are tied together in one space the more things they make happen. I think this simple reasoning is partially correct but it misses one important aspect, which is the rate between the number of interconnected people and the intensity of their creative activity. 4.  We always lived in exponential times In reference to Did you know? "We are living in exponential times"Did you know? "We are living in exponential times"  video on the progression of information technology, researched by Karl Fisch, Scott McLeod, and Jeff Bronman. XXX The famous scientists, thinkers and artists we remember used to live and work in cities. It is very hard to find exceptions. Why is that? In 2000, 50 percent of the world population still lives outside of cities. *** Why aren't our books at least half filled with amazing achievements of people living in the far countryside? Creativity never comes out of nothing, out of no-context. Creativity is never individual but always contextual. Any new knowledge people give birth to, let it be science, art or culture, builds on the top of others people's knowledge or at least relates to it somehow. And this relation always arises from communication between humans, this link is always based on transmission of information. Twice as many people make do not only make twice as many things but exponentially more. Maybe four times more. This, more or less, explains the importance of 'inventing' cities. City was the big step in history to concentrate a significantly higher amount of people living and working in one area. This rise in the amount of people sharing the same communication space caused an exponential rise in the intensity of communication. This is why the growth of cities boosted an exponentially growing creative activity of humankind which led to achievements in science, technology, art and culture. interpersonal conversations.