• Kanishka Sikri deposited An Ecological Understanding of Digital Environments on Humanities Commons 3 years, 7 months ago

    Digital environments are emerging as quasi-public spaces, but they are heavily programmed spaces and a part of a long history of enclosing the commons with psychic and social consequences. In Pacifism as a Map Dr. Ursula Franklin’s piece “Silence and the Notion of the Commons” guides us through the way Quaker meetings and other forms of silence allow the unprogrammed and unprogrammable to emerge, as a pre‐requisite for public space and civil society (Franklin, 2006, p. 157-168). Visual and acoustic silence here is a space of resistance, a space to think, an assertion of an interior introspective space that cannot be privatized. In this way, silence is a pre-requisite for civil society. What follows is a text by Marcin Kedzior and a series of drawings by Will Fu. These visual representations imagine Wikipedia, Instagram, Facebook, and massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) as architectural spaces. Drawing and mapping social media platforms as architectural spaces creates new perspectives on them, and allows us to see them as part of a larger historical process of enclosed and controlled public spaces, private dreams, and the historical.