Abstract
The starting point of this book is what Malcolm McCullough describes as the superabundant flood of mediated information that saturates encounters with urban public spaces. Whether that information takes the form of background Muzak, billboards, TV screens, smartphones, large screens or signage, he proposes that its ubiquity poses a serious challenge to us now. We are overloaded by this constant display and flow of information, he says: it makes us distracted, stressed and inattentive. In particular, our experience of what he calls the ‘ambient environment’ is thereby diminished. The first few chapters of the book evidence this claim mostly by referring to the work of neuroscientists, who, McCullough believes, have demonstrated that the human brain ‘cannot be made into just anything’ (p. 63). There are limits to what we can adapt to, and therefore there must also be limits to the overload of mediated information. The second part of the book then proposes a number of tactics by which urban environments can be designed in order to encourage slow, careful, textured, unmediated, pre-cognitive experiences of the materialities of the urban environment. For example, we should assert our right to silence; information should be less pervasive and more focused on specific users; and it should have scale, texture, figuration and long duration.
This book is an elegant stroll through the highways and byways of this argument. The tone of the argument is leisurely, reasonable and erudite. It references a wide range of literatures, from phenomenology to the history of air conditioning, from cognitive science to philosophy, and from environmental history to old-style cultural geography. Indeed, the only literatures it resolutely ignores are those in cultural studies, new media studies and beyond that are exploring what ‘we’ are actually doing with all those screens, signs and images in actual urban spaces. And messy, gritty, noisy, sociable, quiet, smelly city spaces are also oddly absent from this account; it’s all so measured and reasonable and expansive that the book almost begins to feel like overload itself, diminishing the rich diversity of cities and their experiencing.
The final chapter – on ‘governing the ambient’ – is particularly disappointing. The ambient must be experienced in common, asserts McCullough, through consensual and collective participation. The chapter skates very lightly over what this might mean in practice, however, asserting, for example, that being attentive to the ambient is a right that should be owned, and that its denial is a form of theft (p. 263). But contemporary visual culture is full of conflicts over who can look at what sort of image: debates about the representation of gendered, classed, racialized and other differences continue to rage and will not end simply by asserting that paying attention is a right. I am left reflecting that, while the human brain may well have its limits in adapting to new mediations of information, it could also be more effectively deployed than it is here in attempting to understand the new politics to which such mediations are giving birth.