Is Public Space Still Public Without Users?
(1) Lets face it, everyone becomes disillusioned with their life at some point. Disappointment with one’s situation and status is inevitable in the same way that costs will always rise and the last good day-old pastry will be sold by your barista before you can make it to the coffee shop. (I have nothing but love for my boys at Dunn Brothers, but the scone I am eating right now is not very tasty)
At the moment I find myself desperately searching for possible social interactions… but am finding only a great deal of empty space. Perhaps it is the city I live in. Maybe it is our age of digital interaction, but I find it overwhelmingly difficult to create new connections.
Does anyone else have this ailment? Has it always been this difficult to establish new lines of communication with the people surrounding me?
Should Public Space Be Hidden Away?
(2) For Walter Lippman the idea of “public” was the ultimate fiction. Human beings are embedded with the false knowledge that we can come together to form a cosmopolitan, diverse, and knowable body of individuals that can determine its own course of action. He posits that “public” is a fantasy meant to make us believe that we are cells in an greater organism and, as such, we can determine the “will of the people”.
Lippman divides all members of a society into two types of people: agents and bystanders. Agents act freely, make “executive decisions on the basis of their own opinions. Bystanders are not agents of freewill. They are the background spectators to life’s events.
For Lippman, the “public” is the bystander – “a deaf spectator in the back row”.
There Is Always Evidence...
(3) Who are we?
Lippman admits that the border between agent and bystander is permeable. We move across it daily. The agents of one action are the bystanders of another and so on and so forth…
He posits that individuals are usually just spectators in life because of their perpetual self-interest and focus on private affairs.
I agree with this statement. How can there really be private life if there is no public life? I can spend the entire day in “public space” and never even grunt in communication with another individual. Eye contact seems to be a rarity when spectators are spectator to other spectators.
(4) Who am I?
By taking photographs of the absence of spaces for real public interaction, am I a bystander? An agent? For these photographs to matter, do I have to alter the vacuums and deserted plazas? Does making a visual notation of the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life’s objects indicate that there might be a larger, unknowable, body of individuals out there?