La construcción internacional de un nuevo modelo de crecimiento urbano

In Nomadic Subjects Braidotti discusses how her condition of being a thinker who has lived in multiple locations informs her mode of writing—and ultimately her process of becoming subject.

The nomad plays with the politics of location based on the languages they deal with. Braidotti states,

“Writing is, for the polyglot, a process of undoing the illusory stability of fixed identities, bursting open the bubble of ontological security that comes from familiarity with one linguistic site.” ³¹ Language, as evidenced by M0P7 and M0P9, deconstructs the fixity and awareness of the body’s position in space; it undoes the seemingly stable condition of being in a location by reconfiguring spatiotemporal relations and allowing one’s embodiment to be relocated and reassembled elsewhere. Of this Braidotti writes, “Our desires are that which evades us, in the very act of propelling us forth, leaving as the only indicator of who we are, the traces of where we have already been, that is to say, of what we have already ceased to be. Identity is a retrospective notion.” The nomad’s identity is characterised as one in which the subject can reconstruct itself ³² by revisiting the places where it has already been—it is able to retrace the steps on life-map.

The figuration of the nomad differs to that of the migrant. The latter is caught in an in-between state, one that is related to missing, nostalgia and longing. As such, the past acts as a burden that lingers onto the present. M0P7 and M0P9 do not speak of their connection to London in a nostalgic manner, as a force that weighs on them in the present. Instead, their connection is rooted on their ability to navigate through their spatial, linguistic and embodied biographies, creating references that link past and present together. Braidotti upholds that “The nomadic style is about transitions and passages without predetermined destinations or lost homelands.” The ³³ fluidity of navigating through multiple and temporally dissimilar embodiments—with their particular situated positions—attest to the nomad’s transitory and fractured nature. The nomad does not reject the notion of borders, but rather contests the nonfixity of boundaries.³⁴

Language is not solely a force resulting from the wording of the Mappiness survey (language, in this sense, pertains to the system of communication used by a particular community or country).

On Mappiness, it is vital to also analyse language as a method of human communication—in this case

—with a technological, non-human; it is a method of communication which is neither graphic nor

Braidot, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. 2nd ed.

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New York: Columbia UP, 2011. 43.

Braidot, Nomadic Subjects, 40.

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Braidot, Nomadic Subjects, 60.

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Braidot, Nomadic Subjects, 66.

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oral. The Mappiness experience begins by a user touching the green ‘How Do You Feel’ button on the main screen. This brings up the ‘Feelings’ screen, where the user is prompted to slide their mood on a scale ranging from ‘Not at all’ to

‘Extremely’—measuring how happy, relaxed and awake they are. The three Mappiness scales—Happy, Relaxed, Awake—do not present any numbers, but instead they display eleven dots placed at equal distances above each scale (see image on right). Seemingly, the screen and scale are designed in a way that users are able to intuitively and effortlessly assess how they feel, and even though each dot above the scaled line subtly implies a number from 0-10, Mappiness breaks away

from traditional rating systems—where people are intended to select a number. Whether this system of sliding a button left and right on a scale is more precise than trying to quantify one’s mood in numerical terms, it is hard to determine, but if Hayles’s theories are applied here, the digital act of sliding one’s mood has different affective properties than doing it numerically.

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-Do you think that the tactile aspect of the scale helps you to asses your mood?

M1P2: I think so, because if I slide too far, it has to feel right. Once I was not in a good mood, but I wasn’t that bad, so I went too far on the left, and I thought, “No, this is too much.” And I went back. It does help, it gives it a length.

-Do you think it’d be more accurate if you just tapped on the screen to put the button where you want it, or do you think that sliding it is better?

M1P2: I think the button sliding is better. I think you can give it a little more thought about where you need to stop.

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-Do you think that the tactile aspect of the scale helps you to asses your mood?

M0P6: Yes. Because if you had a box with just numbers, I feel like that’s harder to assess. Putting yourself as a number is like... it just doesn’t feel actually relevant. I don’t feel like there’s a connection with the number.

M1P0: I understand what you mean, but that’s never occurred to me before. Yeah, I think I feel it more when I’m going from middle down.

Cause when I’m going middle down, I care more, and I’m like “Oh God, I can’t be that down.” That’s when I really think about it, about how down am I actually about this.

-So you care more about precision when it’s a negative reading?

M1P0: Yeah, definitely. [...] If it’s a positive response, in my head, I’m sort of like, “Ah, yeah, happy.” But when you’re talking about it going the other way, I don’t feel like that very often, so I feel like I should get it a little bit more precise. And also, for myself, to try to figure out how down I actually am or if I’m just being really stupid.

There is an element of tactility, of being able to physically feel one’s finger sliding across the screen and deciding when to stop, rather than rationalising it quantitatively and tapping a number.

The absence of numerical characters within the scale also help the user to visually calibrate how they best feel their mood can be represented. For instance, in a numerical survey ranging from zero to ten the numbers ‘4’ and ‘5’ would be located next to each other; choosing either one is a matter of preference and even arbitrariness. However, seeing a visible scale where the dots that replace the ‘4’

and ‘5’ have a measured, physical distance from each other—while also allowing the user to virtually and tactually feel this separation—gives the user a sense of numerical gradation to find a ‘language’ to express their mood.

The manner in which people interact with their objects and surroundings plays an integral part in the construction of perception and affection. By allowing the user to actually feel the movement of placing the button at different points of the scale, tactility plays a part in how users look within themselves and translate those emotions onto the interface. This allows them to think slightly more profoundly of what language to use when assessing their emotions; the act of sliding the scale is the key movement in which emotional introspection of a physical body overlaps with digital subjectivity. It becomes important to discuss how this pursuit to find a language that represents an emotional state onto a digital interface as accurately as possible is appropriated by each Participant.

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-How do you assess your mood on Mappiness?

M1P1: It’s totally instinctive but again, as I’m doing it I’m always like

“Ughhh, I don’t know, it’s about there.” I don’t know how to go into myself

and know how much on a scale. Also, I wonder if they’ve really looked into psychology or psychotherapy. If you go to a psychotherapist, they wouldn’t say, “Tell me on a scale how happy you are.” There must be more subtle ways which have been developed through the history of psychotherapy to garner people’s sense of satisfaction without asking that really basic question. Like I think maybe it might say, “pick a colour.” I’m not sure what they are, but there must be something out there which has been developed before, which offers a more effective way of asking the question.

However insightful a psychotherapeutic approach to registering people’s moods might be, as M1P1 suggests, it would fail to prompt users to actually think about their mood on their own;

Mappiness users would become more passive. Similarly, while certain Participants claim that their answers come instinctively, for others coming up with a ‘language’ to assess their emotions can be complicated.

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-How do you assess your mood on Mappiness?

M0P3: Do you use ebay? When you leave feedback, you’ve got the five buttons, so you can rate the postage from good to bad. And I always do it in the middle, unless it was particularly cheap. I always start in the middle—the middle is normal. If I’m in a good mood, it’ll go up, if it’s in a bad mood, it’ll go down. I don’t know if that make sense, but i have to start in the middle and work my way up.

M0P6: That was difficult, because when you’re starting out, you don’t really know how you feel all the time. Then you have hindsight and you’re like, “Maybe I wasn’t as stressed as I felt at the time.” I think it would even out over time because you’d get used to the app, your moods and recognising what your mood is, so you become more balanced as you go along.

-And how did you know when to move the button slightly more to the right or to the left?

M0P6: I’d think think back to previous ones, and I’d think, “If I was stressed then, I’m not as I stressed out as I was back then”.

-Do you quantify your mood in terms of a number?

M0P6: Not really. I just knew that 10 was the highest, and zero’s the lowest, so I had that idea of quantity in my head, but between I didn’t really think of numbers. I wouldn’t say “my mood’s a six.”

-So it was more visual?

M0P6: More visual, yeah.

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-Did you ever see the scale numerically?

M1P3: Yeah, it’s 1-10 on a sliding scale. I also think that the tendency for me to see it is 1 being bad and 10 being good. If I’m in a really low mood, that’s bad. That also prompted me to reflect about where I was.

The formulation of a language and system for self-evaluation was challenging for Participants mostly in the beginning of their Mappiness experience, but over time, they learn how to rate their mood more efficiently due to familiarity with the software and with their individual, introspective rating systems. Even though the scales are purposefully left without numbers, some Participants expressed that they visualised it numerically, while others never thought of it in those terms; the same information was displayed for every user, but each user perceived a method of reading, understanding and quantifying their mood. Discussing the limitations of practicing emotional exchanges with non-human others, Turkle writes, “If you practice sharing ‘feelings’ with robot

‘creatures,’ you become accustomed to the reduced ‘emotional’ range that machines can offer.” This ³⁵ certainly can be the case of Mappiness, as a survey with a carefully designed system of measurement (the three scales). The scales can be problematic in the sense that they can be grossly reductive, reducing all the complexities of the human condition to three sliding scales that range from 0-10.

However, by limiting the range of options on the interface, participants are able to formulate new ways to communicate with a non-human other.

Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. USA: Basic,

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2011. 125.