THE LEISURE COMMONS A SPATIAL HISTORY OF WEB 2.0 SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY SERIES, ROUTLEDGE/TAYLOR & FRANCIS PREFACE FOREWORD: Prof. Arjun Appadurai CHAPTER 1: Introduction The leisure commons Spatial, historical and transnational focus Novelty and limitations of the study Outline of chapters CHAPTER 2: Metaphor as Method: Conceptualizing the Internet through Spatial Metaphors The virtue of the metaphor o Rhetoric as a cognitive and policy tool o Mapping real and virtual geographies Spatial Metaphors of the Internet o Wild Wild Web to the Electronic Ghetto o Analogies of the online navigator o Urban Commons, Digital Commons and the Leisure Commons CHAPTER 3: Protest Parks: Digital Activism and the Public Leisure Sphere Digital leisure networks as the new political sphere Comparing new and old public leisure territories o An ideological and symbolic landscape o Creative and playful protest CHAPTER 4: Walled Gardens: Online Privacy, Leisure Architectures and Public Values Digital architectures of privacy Fortified enclaves of the past and present o Democracy behind walls o Gardens in modern security parks Gendered gardens, postcolonial parks and the public gaze Playgrounds and public socialization of the youth Community gardens and joint governance CHAPTER 5: Corporate Parks: Usurping Leisure Terrains for Digital Labor Blurring the labor and leisure terrain o The historical struggle for leisure in the labor landscape o Constant busyness: exploitation or liberation? Work culture and playbor geographies o Hobby Farming and Free labor o Factory Gardens, social visionaries and emotional labor Corporate incubators and networking hubs o Technopoles, converging ecosystems and open innovation o Work cafés, sociality and entrepreneurship CHAPTER 6: Fantasy Parks: Consumption of Virtual Worlds of Amusement The coming of age of mass culture Theme parks, brand empires, and digital cultures o The disneyfication of fantasy space o Amusement on the go: from flâneur to phoneur CHAPTER 7: Global Cities, Global Parks: Globalizing of Virtual Leisure Networks The city and the park Globalization of the urban and the digital commons o The Global City, command centers and corporate networks o Transnational public spheres, the global-rural and the cultural metropolis Globalization of the digital leisure commons CHAPTER 8: Conclusion: From Parks to Green Infrastructures Bibliography BOOK ENDORSEMENTS Foreword by Arjun Appadurai, Paulette Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University Excerpt: “Arora offers us another invitation, which is a refreshing departure from the breathlessness of many studies of the new technologies, and that is the chance to slow down, to pause, to contemplate our surroundings, to smell a possibly political rose. That she finds this potential in the very heart of digitality is one of the many surprises of this thoughtful and wide-ranging book.” Saskia Sassen, Columbia University and author of Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy: Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology, Columbia University Co- Chair Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University “This is a brilliant navigation of worlds that are not usually brought in conversation: digital space and thick situated struggles engaged in claim-making in the urban sphere. Payal Arora has deep knowledge and experience of both these worlds. Out of this encounter comes a concept the author deploys in diverse ways to mark digital space: the leisure commons.” Zizi Papacharissi, Professor and Head of Communications, University of Illinois at Chicago “In this engaging volume, Arora applies the rich metaphor of the public park to explicate the many ways in which net-based technologies facilitate, but also converge activities of a social, political, cultural and economic nature. Technology as architecture invites, amplifies, but also conceals or discourages. It disrupts and it sustains our daily endeavors into sociality, work, play and fantasy. Arora uses the metaphor of public parks to tell the story of how digital media support us through our daily lives. Through lively writing and layers of intriguing analogies, she compels the reader to think with her, as she explores what technology does to space. Arora lays out an intriguing vision of online environments as technology supported meta-parks that facilitate not just limitless connection, but, better living.” Paul C. Adams, Associate Professor of Geography and Director of Urban Studies, University of Texas at Austin “Payal Arora offers the insight that social media are the latest chapter in a long history of spaces including city parks, walled gardens, office parks, fantasy theme parks and other semi-public, leisure-oriented environments. By framing new technological trends in terms of a “leisure commons,” her work fills a gap that remained between the spatial metaphors that have proven helpful to make sense of new technologies, and a nuanced realization of how thoroughly leisure practices have permeated daily life.” PREFACE The idea for this book emerged way back during my doctoral years in 2005. While strolling through Riverside Park in New York City, it came to me how seemingly unregulated a park space seemed to be and yet, people organized themselves within these leisure terrains in a myriad of ways. True to a typical doctoral student, I deviated from my doctoral thesis by writing a paper on ‘Online social sites as virtual parks: An investigation into leisure online and offline’ (this was later published in the Information Society Journal). I presented this as part of a panel on space/place with Katalin Kabat-Ryan, Aaron Chia Yuan Hung, Maureen Matarese and Jennifer Bloom for the American Education Research Association Conference in 2006. I found that by drawing parallels between the space of Web 2.0 and urban parks, it inspired friends, family and colleagues to participate in this discussion. Through the disarming metaphor of public parks, it made the web familiar to those who were not traditionally inclined to talk about new media. Before I knew it, I was engaging in conversations on how the Speakers Corner in Hyde Park resembled online protest space, how it was not a coincidence that ‘walled gardens’ is used as a metaphor for the privatization of the web and that amusement parks had much in common with implicit branding within digital gaming sites. I was encouraged through challenging conversations with Todd Gitlin and Robert McClintock from Columbia University, pushing me to situate these playful ideas on virtual parks through a more rigorous academic approach. My discussion with Arjun Appadurai opened up further parallels of equating the flâneur to the digital user as she browses leisurely through the web. In fact, I am particularly grateful to Professor Appadurai for his sustained mentorship and support over the years as I embarked on taking this topic seriously and plunged into the writing of this book. In 2012, I was fortunate to have received a generous grant for this book project through the Erasmus University Rotterdam Fellowship in the amount of 135,000 euros. I am thankful to Filip Vermeylen for his thoughtful feedback in the writing of this grant. This grant has allowed me to immerse myself in this topic wholeheartedly and participate in conferences across disciplines, for which I will always be grateful. I found that to realize this parallel, I needed to delve into unfamiliar disciplines such as geography, history and law. While indeed daunting to get out of the familiar terrain of communication studies, it has been exciting to encounter rich conversations in multiple fields, reinforcing interdisciplinary studies as a must for innovative thinking. Over the last three years, I have presented on this subject at twenty conferences across disciplines including at the American Sociological Association, European Sociological Association, International Communication Association, Society for Social Studies of Science, Amsterdam Privacy Conference, IIS World Congress, International Association for Media and Communication Research, and the Technology, Knowledge and Society Conference. I am deeply indebted to the numerous reviewers and audiences at these conferences for their feedback and thought-provoking comments and suggestions. It has been heartening to see this project gain traction over the years. This has manifested in invitations to speak at various prestigious events including the Frontiers of New Media Symposium at the University of Utah, the Labor, Knowledge and Leisure in Postindustrial Society conference in Moscow and, the NSF and Cornell University sponsored symposium on Rethinking the Culture of Busyness and IT in Seattle. These opportunities have undoubtedly enriched my argument. By now, it is evident that all intellectual endeavors are deeply contingent on a nurturing professional and personal environment. This book is no different. I find myself fortunate to have an extremely supportive department chair and role model – Susanne Janssen. She has time and again gone out of her way to enable me in this journey. The faculty and the university at large have been deeply accommodating to my needs and interests and has undoubtedly made this pursuit easier for me. Yahya Kamalipour has been a wonderful support in this project and in general has been there for me over the years as a mentor and a friend. Saskia Sassen, Julie Cohen, Helen Nissenbaum, Paul Adams, Zizi Papacharissi, Lori Kendall, Martin Dodge, Dan Hunter, Jonathan Taylor, and Manual Castells among others have been truly inspirational in the writing of this book. It needs to be noted that without the strong editorial support of Janelle Ward who was the first to read the entire text and edit it closely, this would have been a weaker manuscript. I am fortunate that as an editor and close friend, she has given the text a stronger backbone and rigor. In this line, I am thankful to the Routledge editor Max Novick for his prompt responses to my ongoing queries through these three years and for his overall professionalism in this process. Additionally, I am thankful to my research assistant Jessica Verboom, a true asset to any academic engaged in such a scholarly pursuit.