Might it not be the case that in fact the sprawl of data helps us understand the specific goal of public gathering? For all the talk of virtual communities, most of the information allows us to gather to us objects or knowledge without being part of a social network that has the kind of deep dimensionality of most casual gatherings. As a result, we value the experience of a restaurant, the spectacle of shopping, the fetish of art or the communal experience of a concert all the more. The notion of public space was invented to justify the artificial open space reserved in the middle class city for such gatherings, and in our age that space seems to have sprawled as well, coming together into dense nodes of what Lars Lerup has called "stims" or points of stimulation that pop up in the "dross" of sprawl.

This is the kind of distribution, which creates, for better or worse, a Starbucks in a Barnes & Noble in a shopping mall outside of Des Moines I enjoyed recently, that I find just as interesting as much as a direct result of recent developments in communication technology as the more nebulous spaces of quasi-science fiction.

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– Aaron Betsky