Neighbornodes: The Boulevards of the World Wide Web by risa
John Geraci’s Neighbornode project began in a “Wireless Public Space” class at Tisch. It’s just one of many cool endeavors by Geraci, more of which can be found on his site: http://www.subfuzz.com/
While reading up on and around the folks and ideas involved in Neighbornodes I discovered this excellent piece of pragmatic argumentation on Salon.com:
“The post-information age will remove the limitations of geography,” wrote Nicholas Negroponte, in “Being Digital.” “Digital living will depend less and less on being in a specific place at a specific time.” In “Pandemonium,” Lars Lerup, dean of the architecture school at Rice University, proclaimed: “the bandwidth has replaced the boulevard.”
Actually, it didn’t. Virtual reality as a substitute for reality? That kind of thinking is, well, so very yesterday. With a new generation of wireless devices, GPS locators, and ubiquitious networking, future-gazers claim, digital space will simply add another dimension to physical space, especially as technology continues to penetrate what sociologist Ray Oldenberg has famously described as “third places”: the communal public spaces where people interact with friends or strangers.
And with this desire to add dimension to our interaction in ‘real’ spaces, and to extend and enable those interactions over time, Geraci embarked on the Neighbornode:
Neigbornode was developed because the Internet, while really good at connecting people half-way around the world, is really bad at connecting people who live across the street from each other (or a block from each other, or two blocks from each other). This can be liberating on one hand, but there are still lots of advantages to be gained by sharing information locally and opening lines of communication with others in your immediate area. The Internet for the most part has not cashed in on these advantages. Neighbornode addresses this issue by creating spaces for people in the same area to communicate easily with one another via the Internet, and by then building these separate spaces into a network, so that information can travel between locales as residents of those areas see fit. In this way, Neighbornode bridges the gap between the Internet and the neighborhood.
It’s also a good way for people who don’t know each other to organize and chip in to get a joint wireless connection.
In a way, innovations like this add a little of what Harold Adams Innis would call time-binding media to the space-binding power of the Internet. By time-binding I mean how all those small interactions we have with our neighbors that seem to float away and gain no importance over time would be able to accumulate on a safe, shared forum space. In another way the Neighbornode project participates in a larger process of open sourceing not our software but our own perspectives and lives. Slowly at first, I imagine, but then more quickly as the network of neighbors grows, we’d see our selves linked to each other by our conversations, concerns and interests in a shared place across time and this collective identity might allow us to collaborate in new ways.
But if you start one, don’t think too much about my excited rhetoric and then be disapointed if the idea doesn’t seem to catch on in your ‘hood. I know from building this website that these kinds of things grow in waves.
And a recent blurb in Popular Science has apparently given the Neighbornode project its own new life, with lots of new signups. To read an excerpt, including the How To….
Free Neighborhood Wi-Fi
The Fourth Street hotspot is part of a communal wireless project
called Neighbornode, started by then New York University grad student
John Geraci as a way to add a community-building aspect to the common
practice of using a neighbor’s Wi-Fi network to get online. Anyone
with a broadband connection can start a Neighbornode. When someone
uses the node to access the Web, he is first directed to a home page
with a message board, classified section and photo page to help
locals recognize one another. (You can use a second router to
maintain a private and secure Wi-Fi network for your home.) New York
City currently has 18 such hotspots, and eight other nodes have
appeared in such remote areas as Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, and
Mayaguez, Puerto Rico. Launch a node in your ‘hood with the steps below.Make your own Neighbornode
Some ISPs consider sharing your Internet connection to be a violation
of your terms of service, so give yours a call before setting up a
community hotspot. Also, typical Wi-Fi range is about 150 feet, so if
you have a big block, consider using an external antenna, such as
those available from Radiolabs (from $100; radiolabs.com) to boost
your signal up to 300 feet. Or check out wireless.gumph.org to build
your own.
[1] Purchase a Linksys WRT54G or WRT54GS Wireless Broadband Router
(around $60 in most stores), and set it up according to the Linksys
instructions.[2] E-mail doityourself @neighbornode.net to request the special
Neighbornode firmware.[3] Access your router setup by typing “192.168.1.1″ into the address
line of your browser (leave the username blank and type “admin” for
the password).[4] Navigate to the Administration tab and click “Upgrade Firmware.”
Browse to the location where you saved the Neighbornode firmware, and
click “Upgrade.”[5] Connect to the network and configure the Neighbornode as
prompted. Now let your neighbors know it’s there!
Does this sound a little beyond your ken or current tech. abilities? No shame there, just seek yourself out a geeky friend with a little time on her or his hands; or if you don’t have one of those I reccomend getting in touch with the folks at Neighbornode themselves, because I bet they’re helpful. And if that doesn’t appeal to you, or if it doesn’t pan out, contact the sweet folks at Touchbasic who are always looking for interesting tech-y, art-y collaborations.
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