Institute For The Future

Interview with William Mitchell

As part of the "end of cyberspace" Ten Year Forecast piece, Anthony Townsend and I interviewed William Mitchell on 10 November 2005. This is an edited transcript of the interview.

Interviewer: I want to begin with a question about why the idea of cyberspace as a place seems so compelling. As Geoffrey Nunberg observed, "the language we use to talk about the Internet is always uniquely spatial." Why has that been so appealing?

William Mitchell: I think Geoff Nunberg is absolutely right on this. It's very clear that the spatial metaphors are very compelling. I think the spatial metaphors are inseparable from metaphors of navigation. The very initial conception of the Web was very much a navigational conception. When we talk about cyberspace of course we've got to wonder what we're actually talking about, and there were earlier forms of it before the Web of course. But the World Wide Web is really explicitly built on navigational metaphors and ideas of origin and destination and movement from an origin to a destination.

So I think it's absolutely inevitable that the spatial metaphors have come out that way. Nobody really used those metaphors in quite the same way before the Web in the earlier incarnation of cyberspace.

Interviewer: In your latest book, Me++: The Extended Self in the Networked City, you wrote, "the trial separation of bits and atoms is now over." What's driving that breakdown?

William Mitchell: Well, there's a pretty straightforward technological driver: computational capability and networking capability getting embedded in just about everything these days. It used to be that there were these things called computers that created the sense that when you entered into the world of the computer through the screen, you were entering into some sort of disembodied realm of bits. We have cell phones in our hands and our automobiles are full of digital control devices.

So the world is becoming permeated with loads of information so the realms of come back together again. This is in some ways an elementary point. It's a very fundamental point. It's a huge difference from a few years ago.

Interviewer: Are there places where you think you can see most clearly what the elimination of this boundary is going to mean?

William Mitchell: I think it happens in all sorts of dimensions, but let me give you a couple of very concrete examples that are kind of representative.

One of the things that has been most striking to me over the last couple of years is the way that my teaching has changed as a result of students have wireless laptop computers in the classroom. What happens is the moment I mention anything in a seminar situation some student immediately Googles it and injects the result back into the conversation. You get a very different and extremely interesting and exciting dynamic in the classroom.

And what's interesting about it is precisely this combination of the fact that it is a face-to-face social setting -- and that's one essential element in the situation -- and it's a physical place. It's a classroom, a very specific place. But then injected into that in a very fluid way are these flows of bits, and the combination is what's really important. The unique dynamic that emerges is both from the fact that it's a seminar, which is a particular kind of social setting, and from the fact that now you've overlaid digital connectivity on that. That's very typically the kind of thing that's happening.

So what you're getting there is a new kind of functionality, a new thing happening, that the classroom itself couldn't support—nor could the old idea of sitting at your personal computer and surfing cyberspace.

Interviewer: This also sounds rather different from the experience of teaching a class in a computer lab.

William Mitchell: Absolutely. What gets really interesting is this injection of digital information into different kinds of social and physical settings and then the kinds of synergies that result between the settings and the flow of information.

Another really compelling example that I just came across the other day is in medical education. I was talking to somebody in the field of medical information. He was telling me that in teaching clinical procedure now they use PDAs and iPods that have videos of the various procedures. If somebody is about to perform a procedure they actually dash out of the operating theater, crib it on their iPods and then go back in and carve somebody up!

This combination of the right kind of digital information with a very particular kind of setting and task is exactly the same sort of thing that I was talking about. It's very different from the old idea of sitting in front of a PC and surfing the Web.

Interviewer: There were a number of other kinds of boundaries-- between public and private life or bodies and technologies, for example. Can you maybe think out loud for a moment about what the layering of connectivity might mean for those the developments in those areas?

William Mitchell: Of course, there are good things and bad things and very interesting things to sort out. One of the things that architects have understood for a long time is the hierarchy of physical space from public space to private space. If you just take an ordinary dwelling, the street outside is public space, and then the porch or the stoop is semi-public space. The living room is a little bit more private, and the bedrooms and bathrooms are a very private space. You have this whole hierarchy that everybody understands, and people modify their behavior very clearly based on that understanding. The law recognizes very clearly differences between what you can do in public space versus private space.

When you start introducing electronic surveillance in this space, you have spaces that you think are private that are actually not private and spaces that are public where people are actually engaging in very private forms of behavior, like intimate conversations on their cell phones. You're getting these overlays of functionality delivered by physical space and functionality delivered by electronics and bits. But unlike in the classroom or hospital, where you're getting a kind of synergy because of the overlay, in these cases you're getting blurring and confusion and uncertainty and anxiety.

Interviewer: One of the ironies of our last few years has been a shift from declaring that place is not going to matter any longer, to a situation where you have cities offering wireless connectivity in an effort to make themselves attractive. The question I have is, In the future, is place going to still matter? If we get to a point where we have fully immersive virtually reality that is entirely realistic is there a point at where the technology actually render place irrelevant?

William Mitchell: Well, fully immersive virtual reality is an extreme, obviously. That's on some kind of spectrum and at the other end of the spectrum is something like having a phone on your ear, where the physical reality is mostly still dominating.

But even with fully immersive virtual reality, if you walk into the wall, you walk into the wall. Physicality will come back and get you! You can never fool Mother Nature, even in the most fully immersive kind of situation. It's a spectrum, and of course we construct situations where we allocate our attention and functionality we're dealing with in some mix between what's supplied by cyberspace, if you like, and what's being supplied by the surrounding physical space.

But I would argue that place never becomes irrelevant because it's always there. Your body is always someplace, no matter what you're doing. And you do care. It does matter. At the very least, it's a matter of physical comfort and pleasure and ease and gracefulness of being there. So for example, if you can do office work anywhere, then places that are pleasant and fun to be in again have much more value than places that are not. Place really actually matters more now, I'd argue: if you can work anywhere, the value of high-value places really becomes evident.

And then we have all of these other things that we've been talking about where there's powerful synergy between the qualities of the place and what happens with digital information, like the digitally-mediated classroom I was talking about and the digitally-mediated operating theater. You know, the operating theater matters! You're going to do operations in an operating theater. Place is going to matter! You're not going to do it in the street! The overlay of digital information in the example I just gave shows very vividly how it can really change things.

So I think place always matters, and I would argue that it matters even more when you start getting these overlays.

Interviewer: It struck me, while reading about the new Stata Center at MIT, that a lot of effort was spent creating spaces that will promote serendipitous collisions between different groups of people or facilitate collaborative work.

William Mitchell: That was very explicit. And one of the important things about the Stata Center is that it explicitly takes advantage of the fact that a lot of work is mobilized. It understands that people are carrying around their laptops, everything is wirelessly connected, and you can sit down anywhere and work. So it provides a huge amount of unassigned space that can be appropriate in ad-hoc ways as needed for particular purposes. The whole point of that is the space has variety so you can find a quiet space when you need it, or you can find a more public space when you need it. Serendipity really depends on that. You don't get much serendipity if people are all sitting locked in their private offices staring at their computer screens!

So the idea is to make a kind of ecosystem of diverse spaces where people are just encouraged to sort of grab a workspace wherever they may need it -- grab a working cluster, cluster around a white board, cluster around a café table, etc. And they can do it without losing connectivity.

Interviewer: So while ten years ago we would have talked about the power these technologies have to allow us to all kind of disperse, it sounds like the interesting thing now is that these technologies allow us to congregate.

William Mitchell: It depends what you want to do. One little slightly technical digression here to set this up. In architecture, in making the layout of a building, adjacency is a scarce resource. You can never satisfy all of the adjacency requirements that exist. Everybody would like to be next to the coffee machine and simultaneously next to the best view and simultaneously next to the people they work with. That's impossible.

When you introduce wireless connectivity, though, you eliminate a bunch of requirements for adjacency. You no longer have to be adjacent to a network jack in order to have connectivity, or adjacent to paper files in order to do your work. You can take them, sit down anywhere, and work. What happens then is that adjacency demands that had previously been latent and unsatisfiable have now become satisfiable, so they take over, and reclustering begins to emerge. It's this process I've talked about in a number of my books, fragmentation and recombination. You get new patterns of clustering.

So it depends on what the imperative is in the situation. If there's been a kind of latent demand for clustering, socializing, serendipity, getting together, all of that kind of stuff, if you loosen up the old adjacency constraints people are going to satisfy those demands. If people are working in loud environments and they'd really like to be working in the garden or in the sunshine or something, then that's what's going to happen. It's a much more complex effect than people used to see. It's in many ways like a chemical reaction -- you break some bonds and then some new bonds form and you get a new pattern and you get a new compound.

Interviewer: It sounds as if architects are moving beyond treating computer networks as just another service, like plumbing or HVAC. Are there computer people who are coming at this from the other direction, and saying that there may be interesting things that you can do either in computer science research or equipment design given the relaxation of some of these requirements or latencies?

William Mitchell: They're starting to. I think the whole line of work on location-specific services and that kind of thing is probably related to this. I mean, frankly some of it is very crude and naïve -- like the idea that you walk past a store and it starts advertising on your PDA or something. Frankly, I don't see that being a big thing! But people are starting to come at it from that point of view: the whole embedded computing community is beginning to think that way.

So people are coming at it from both sides. Architects are coming at it from the point of view that environments are becoming more and more intelligent and connectivity is becoming more and more ubiquitous. That changes demands for space, and it changes behavior. And then as computation becomes more mobile, more ubiquitous, and more embedded in everything, then the computer people are beginning to become much more sensitive to space and place and social context and all of that. I think everybody has gone way beyond the whole idea that if something was mobile then it enables anything to happen anywhere.

Interviewer: Let's say twenty years from now we could get to the point where you can mix smart dust into paint and you've got large-scale displays that you can put up pretty much anywhere. What other kinds of latent demands do you think might emerge?

William Mitchell: Let me mention several. I think we are seeing a very clear movement towards much more flexible and nomadic occupation of space -- of architectural space, of urban space. So that's one thing.

A second thing that's really a little bit paradoxical on the surface but very interesting is as digital technology becomes really good -- becomes really small, really reliable, really capable, and really ubiquitous -- it can disappear. It disappears into your pocket. It disappears into the woodwork. So a telephone that used to be a fairly obtrusiv"