In the context of the current, rapid proliferation of information technology (or “IT”), many of the spaces in which urban life is lived have become environments formed of both physical and virtual “places.” As increasingly (though unevenly) hybrid spaces made up of complex intersections of unmediated reality and mediated environments, the form and experience of the twenty-first-century city is shaped by media technologies to an unprecedented extent. One particularly notable corollary of this fact is that the design decisions made regarding IT become, even more clearly than was the case with previous technological forms, decisions that impact the makeup of the modern city. In this hybrid space, the forms and uses of IT have the capacity to transform urban life in multiple and far-reaching ways.; At present, much of the debate surrounding the development and deployment of IT is dominated by the techno-utopian discourse of public relations for IT concerns, advertising, the business press, and by professional “futurists.” This dissertation critiques the vision of collective life on offer in this discourse, which I have labeled the “e-topian,” investigating some of its more troubling implications for the survival/development of cities in which we will want to live.; As an alternative to the e-topian vision, this dissertation proposes that “the city,” both as an actually-existing form of collective life, and as a conceptual schema for thinking about collective ways of living, offers a more productive framework for evaluating the development and dissemination of IT. In the body of this dissertation, the criteria that define urban life at its best—i.e., that it be diverse, public-minded, place-based, and festive—provide the foundation for a critique of the hegemonic, e-topian vision of IT, as well as suggesting alternatives for how best to deploy these new technologies in our collective life.
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