Work and Leisure in the Information Age: the Role of Public and Semi-Public Places for Quebec City Wifi Users
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are frequently involved in changes in the relationship of the individual to space and time. Place-based technologies such as the telephone and personal computer allowed access to information and to non-physically co-present others to occur first in the office and then in the home. The homeworkplace dichotomy that was enforced by the Industrial Revolution began to be blurred as the distinction between home and work life started to disappear. With economic production linked to physical capital, the industrial era notion of home and workplace remained associated with distinct places. Space and time were structured according to rational principles and fixed ICTs. In the current postindustrial economy, knowledge as an immaterial capital is becoming the principle unit of production. As knowledge can be produced and exchanged free of overarching spatial and temporal constraints, notions of space and time become more flexible. Mobile technologies such as the cellular phone and the portable computer reinforce these changes by enabling communication and information practices to occur at almost any time and in almost any place. As one of the main tools for information exchange and production, Internet access is a crucial element in increasing mobile technology use. The number of places offering wireless access to the Internet (WiFi hotspots) is on the rise in most cities. Local businesses such as restaurants and cafés aim to attract more patrons while community WiFi groups strive to increase the number of hotspots in an effort to increase free access to information and local resources. This increase in WiFi hotspots in the city provides a growing number of places where ICT-based work and leisure activities can be performed outside the home and traditional workplace. Whereas previous generations of fixed ICTs saw activities migrate from public and semi-public spaces into the home and workplace, mobile technologies create an environment in which activities can be moved back into public and semi-publics spaces. Whether for work or leisure, these places are both chosen by or imposed upon the individual. Technology permits the mediation of this experience. This has a variety of implications for architects and urban planners who try to create meaningful places for informal interaction between strangers. Whereas the industrial era planning principles rationalized the notion of spatial use by separating spaces according to single uses, the current postindustrial context questions this monofunctional logic. Should space be planned for multiple activities and can this space still be meaningful? What does mobile technology use mean for an individualized spatial experience? How can existing places be redesigned to become more desirable? Inspired by these questions, this communication addresses the influence that new information and communication technologies (n-ICT) have on the experience of public and semi-public places. WiFi hotspots are of particular interest in this type of investigation, as they are specific places chosen by individuals who wish to take advantage of the free access to wireless Internet. What factors guide this choice? What types of places are the most often chosen? What is the role of the built environment? Is it a question of proximity to the home or workplace? Of accessibility to public transport or public parking? What is the role of spatial ambiance? Using an Internet questionnaire and semi-directed interviews with WiFi users in Quebec City, this project seeks to respond to these questions. It aims specifically at determining the combinations of urban and architectural qualities that facilitate the use of public and semi-public spaces. This communication will present the theoretical and methodological frameworks of this research project, its pertinent findings and conclude with a discussion of its implications for architecture and urban planning.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".