When Urban Public Places Become “Hybrid Ecologies”

The development of ubiquitous computing ¹ has stimulated a growing interest in the organization of activities, particularly collaborative ones, accomplished in complex ecologies, where a variety of digital resources, often based on different types of network infrastructures, intersect each other and are simultaneously available. This strand of research, centered on computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW), has focused on the way the “seamlessness” or “seamfulness” of actual situations of use can support collaboration, ² and how people are able to creatively combine “assemblies” of artifactual resources and rely upon these in order to support new experiences of sociality adjusted to these complex ecologies. ³ The development of locative media seems to go one step further with respect to the traditional version of ubiquitous computing. Their availability is constitutive of “hybrid ecologies” in which different forms of access to a particular place (e.g., through embodied presence and through various screens and terminals) are somehow articulated. ⁴ This perspective leads to a complete reshaping of our understanding of what was once dubbed “virtual practices” and understood as actions performed online by a de-contextualized user engaging with his networked computer, a kind of practice perhaps best epitomized by online multiplayer games. Recent ethnographic work on the use of games such as that of World of Warcraft in China is pushing toward a reconsideration of how such online games are played: “on screen” collaborative actions and co-present interactions are meshed in a way that can only be understood by taking into account the particular “hybrid cultural ecology” of the Internet café or wang ba. ⁵