ABSTRACT
Around 1 a.m. on December 20, 2009, a snowball fight erupted in New York City's Times Square (Figure 18.1). A single tweet about the event resulted in a storm of online commentary. One commentator noted with awe that due to the snowball fight, New York had become a new city. The event captured a shared imaginative transformation of the city. The new New York helps us understand the potential poetics of our urban dwelling as a digitally mediated fiction. Unfortunately, contrary to the fiction of the digital in the New York of the snowball fight, ubiquitous computing is too often conflated with reality. If the digital is assumed to model reality, it can offer nothing new to our interpretation of the city which it overlays. The collapse of the real with the digital thus hinders our capacity to truly dwell in our cities differently. How can we understand the digital as a promise of poetic interpretation instead of as a mediated reality?
