1. Introduction:
What will you expect to see new and fast-growing social spectacle in globalized cities? Wi-Fi may be the answer. Wi-Fi has been developed fast in the first decade of 21th century. World’s metropolitans have their Wi-Fi infrastructure plans, and private and commercial Wi-Fi access points also distributes everywhere in the cities. To depict this globalized Wi-Fi era, this project chooses online website as the main media to present the Wi-Fi spectacle for global audience. The code-translated colours are important medium to visualize Wi-Fi, because the colours cross the boundary of human beings and machine by its code-based natures and human’s vision.
2. Places:
Andrew Feenberg (1991) “discusses both how the labor process, science, and technology are constituted as forms of domination of nature and human beings, and how they could be democratically transformed as part of a program of radical social transformation.” Definitely, Wi-Fi is the noticeable technology involved with radical social transformation. Wi-Fi access points are ubiquitous in London, including personal houses, companies, schools, riverside, museums, trains and train stations. We are moving around different places and Wi-Fi networks. Wi-Fi network provide a hybrid place of real world and cyberspace, as Paul Routledge ‘s place “is still a central dimension of social movements. This because “they forge an associational politics” that is constituent of “a diverse, contested coalition of place-specific social movements”. In these “convergence spaces” conflict is prosecuted on a “variety of multi-scalar terrains that include both material places and virtual spaces.” Is the convergence of struggles in these material and virtual spaces the real constituent force of commons?” The competition of open Wi-Fi social movement, municipal Wi-Fi and commercial Wi-Fi is the obvious political struggle. Wi-Fi networks are not peaceful and technological places, because these places are full of economy, politics, space, privacy issues.
Wi-Fi networks are multiple spaces in modern cities, and one person maybe living in one more Wi-Fi networks. Wi-Fi networks are still expanding and renewing in private or public places. Never completed Wi-Fi networks are similar with Marc Ague’s “non-places”. Augé has coined “non-place” to describe the “place” which is about overabundance of event, spatial overabundance, the individualization of references and he has called that this is the traits of supermodernity. Modernity is to construct the collective identity by the space, history and other monuments, and supermodernity is about the overabundance of space and time which make individual become a special reference. The former emphasizes the specified time and space, and the latter focus on the specified individual experience.
