Urban Studies, Vol. 37, No.

10, 1881 – 1892, 2000

Use and Valuation: Information in the City

Kenneth I. Macdonald
[Paper received in Ž nal form, January 2000]

Summary. The aim of the paper is to raise some issues regarding the proper role of manage-
ment and information in the political spaces of the virtual urban world. The spatial density of
successful economic exploitation of the virtual economy suggests that anchoring in ways of life,
modes of behaving, ‘competencies’, may matter. Discussion of historical public space indicates
the importance of structured information for participants, as does re ection on the usage of
information. The overall narrative suggests that for the successful development of an infor-
mation-rich urban polity we need more than ‘smart’ buildings or provision of Internet access.
We need co-ordination between the spatially anchored decision-making structures and the
possibilities of cyber-space. Consideration of recent advances in evolutionary psychology
supports this claim.

To assay any overview of intelligent urban
development or management is to embark
upon a time-speciŽ c task. For, as can be seen
from the contributions in this issue, elec-
tronic information exchange is central to any
narrative of intelligent urban development. It
is a truism that the speed of development,
acquisition and utilisation of the Internet has
taken prognosticators unawares. The very
rapidity of the change may lead us to overes-
timate its impact. It certainly makes predic-
tion difŽ cult.
Recall Humphrey Lyttleton’s rejoinder
when someone asked him where jazz was
going “If I knew where jazz was going I’d
be there already” (Winch, 1958, pp. 93 –
94).
Technological prediction lacks the ‘thinking
makes it so’ possibilities of jazz; but the
difŽ culties of imagining future ways of life
are real, and may even, as Winch argues, be
Kenneth I. Macdonald is at NufŽ eld College, Oxford, OX1 1NF, UK. Fax: 01865 278557. E-mail: kenneth.macdonald@nuf.ox.ac.uk.
logically inescapable. And the technology
itself takes variable time to invent. The Inter-
net has been unexpectedly invasive. ArtiŽ cial
intelligence, on the other hand, has been
unexpectedly delayed, as models of cogni-
tion turned out to be ineffectual (back in
December 1949, ScientiŽ c American was
predicting imminent machine translation).
So this paper does not attempt a snapshot
of the present (for the present will pass), nor
does it attempt any predictive or hortatory
view of the future. It does, by way of starting
the discussion, engage in one limited futuro-
logical speculation (on GPS and mobiles).
But the underlying issue addressed is the
proper concerns of the polity (or urban man-
agement, if you will) with the structure of
digital information. The essay can be seen as
one in applied social theory. It should be
possible to locate—evanescent technology
notwithstanding—some general resolutions
as to how we should handle the political in

0042-0980 Print/1360-063X On-line/00/101881-12 Ó

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2000 The Editors of Urban Studies
1882 KENNETH I. MACDONALD
cyber-space. This essay is a Ž rst stab at an
answer, and begins, after the speculation,
with an attempt to extrapolate from the better
understood areas of economic behaviour and
cyber-space. Time, space and information are
all three intricately connected. Macdonald
(1980) considered the interdependence of
time and information; the present paper fo-
cuses on the interplay of information and
space.
Actors as Constitutive of Information
The innovation (at time of writing) posited—
a small but important one—is the ability of a
mobile phone to know exactly where it is;
the inclusion of GPS technology within the
phone. This is scarcely even extrapolation.
High-end, in-car navigation systems exist,
and GPS plug-ins (and associated carto-
graphic software) are compactly available for
lap-tops. It is not accidental that a major
mobile manufacturer has recently been run-
ning in 1999 an ‘imagine’ advertisement, in
which the late-home businessman uses his
telephone to Ž nd the nearest  orist ( owers
for his wife), and then to initiate an auction
for travel with nearby cabs. Not all of us
inhabit such unexplored, high-density areas,
but we can see the uses (remember the open-
ing lines of those overheard mobile conver-
sations: ‘I am at the station/on the train …’).
A geographically aware device, with access
to neighbourhood data, has point; it is
latched to daily life; it is not just a free-
 oating toy. It could alert you to the presence
of friends or like-minded persons at a social
event. It could put the light on as you ap-
proach home. It could direct you in the mul-
tistorey car park to your car. It could … The
speculations come readily because they con-
nect to daily purposes.
Information technology has been seen as
the ‘death of distance’, and there are real
senses in which that is so (particularly in
low-density communities, as witness Mor-
rison’s study in this issue of a pilot im-
plementation of Internet access for
Australian Aboriginal communities). The no-
tion of ‘community without propinquity’
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(Webber, 1964) is deployed by Little else-
where in this issue, and has obvious analy-
tical power. But there is also growing
evidence that
new information technologies actually res-
onate with, and are bound up within, the
active construction of urban places, rather
than making them somehow redundant
(Graham and Marvin, 1999, p. 107).
The City of London constitutes a much-stud-
ied case. Michie (1997) begins his survey
with an account of face-to-face Ž nancial in-
teractions, moves rapidly through the tele-
graph and telephone eras, and then homes in
on the ‘big bang’. Evaluating the impact of
deregulation, he is convinced that institu-
tional location will continue to play an im-
portant role as markets diversify and
compete in terms of costs and specialised
services. He also believes that such develop-
ments will involve a “re-ordering of the ge-
ography of securities markets” (p. 324), but
not, as some have suggested, an end of ge-
ography itself. And various supporting narra-
tives may be adduced.
Remote working from self-sufŽ cient farm-
steads via the Internet cannot replace the
powerhouses of personal interaction which
drives teamwork and creativity. These are
the cornerstones of how professional peo-
ple add value to their work. Besides, you
cannot look into someone’s eyes and see
that they are trustworthy over the Internet
(Fitzpatrick, 1997, p. 9).
Well, perhaps not yet: though a high band-
width video circuit, with sophisticated soft-
ware monitoring stress-overtones in voice
pattern, might be as reliable as eye-ball con-
tact. But one can see what is being meant. In
more articulated vein:
Today’s uncertain and globalising eco-
nomics make trust, constant innovation,
and ‘reciprocity’ increasingly important,
which can only be full forged through
on-going, face-to-face contact (Graham
and Marvin 1999, p. 95).
These are empirical claims (and, for exam-
 USE AND VALUATION
ple, there are many and diverse other poss-
ible mechanisms for the validation of trust—
see Gambetta, 1988). But the pressures of
innovation may be real. Growing  ows of
electronic information may require increased
face-to-face contact to make sense of it all, as
Thrift (1996) has argued with his work on
City of London electronic traders. And the
shifting nature of the economic may play its
part
It is clear that face-to-face interaction has
not died out. Indeed, in some sense it has
become more important, as re exivity (in-
cluding an enhanced ability to see oneself
as others see us) has become built into
economic conduct (Thrift and Olds, 1996,
p. 316).
Or again, the unpublished 1997 work of
Hills, as presented by Graham and Marvin
(1999, p. 97) in a detailed study of ‘infor-
mation districts’ in New York, found that the
raw materials for information technology
Ž rms are the informal networks, high levels
of creativity and skill, tacit knowledge, and
intense and continuous innovation processes
that become possible in an intensely lo-
calised culture, based on face-to-face con-
tacts supported by rich, dense and
interdependent combinations of meeting
places and public spaces. Clustering in cer-
tain ‘information districts’ may support the
informal and on-going innovation networks
and serendipitous contacts that seem central
to the success of small and micro-digital arts
and creative Ž rms.
There are two points to note on these
arguments. First, the ‘intense continuous
innovation’ may act as a pressure to recover
spatial propinquity for some Ž rms, but can-
not stand as a description of all deployments
of information technology. Secondly, the im-
portance of face-to-face interaction is in part
contingent upon other social arrangements
being as they are; and they could be other-
wise. There may be other, more general,
pressures towards the observed propinquity.
Why should regions be interconnected?
Lawson (1999) argues that there is much
merit in extending the competence theory of
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1883
the Ž rm (see, for example, Foss and Knud-
sen, 1996) to the study of regions. The main
beneŽ t of this literature is that it draws atten-
tion to a layered and structured notion of
causality and identiŽ es capabilities and com-
petencies. Lawson’s own discussion of the
Cambridge, UK, high-technology cluster is
interesting, but in fact operates at a lower
level of abstraction. He notes how informal
personal relationships between Ž rms and uni-
versity act to transfer information about po-
tential employees, equipment that can be
borrowed or hired, and so forth. Further,
apart from providing access to an impressive
range of technical skills, the frequent move-
ment of employees between Ž rms, and from
the university to Ž rms, has served to facili-
tate knowledge  ows. This has been so not
only because employees take a ‘once and for
all’ stock of knowledge with them but, by
maintaining (often personal) relationships
with personnel in previous Ž rms or the uni-
versity, an on-going link is established with
‘ready-made’ history, trust and mutual
understanding. At one level, this is an em-
phasis upon a complex network of mainly
informal social relationships (Camagni,
1991), and whilst such informal trades are
important and provide a partial explanation
for the attractions of propinquity, it is a
narrative which sees these pay-offs as conse-
quent upon the pattern of information, not
constitutive of it. But Camagni’s notion of
collective learning, made possible through
the membership of some particular milieu,
may help to move the argument forward.
At Ž rst blush, Storper—drawing upon
ideas from the technological trajectories
literature and the technological learning
literature, and arguing that it is untraded
interdependencies that explain the observed
spatial patterns of regional business cluster-
ing, and that these “cannot be easily accom-
modated within transactions-cost based
theories” (Storper, 1995, p. 207)—may again
seem to be pointing to these consequent,
informal transactions. But for him, these un-
traded interdependencies, which cannot be
captured by reference to input – output trans-
actions or contract exchanges, involve
1884 KENNETH I. MACDONALD
technological spillovers, conventions, rules
and languages for developing, communicat-
ing and interpreting knowledge. These latter
act as a basis for the former. Silicon Valley,
for example, shows no sign of weakening as
an agglomeration because “geographically-
constrained untraded interdependencies out-
live geographically-constrained input output
linkages” (Storper, 1995, p. 209).
These rules and languages for developing,
communicating and interpreting knowledge
are what gives the activity its point. They
constitute the reality, within which users
have a purpose in using the information high-
way. Without the language, the ritual, the
artefacts in museums are just physical ob-
jects, perhaps intriguing, but pointless. Only
the use—the culturally deŽ ned use—gives
meaning. And similarly with the information
highway; only if there is some point to our
journey can we be excited by access, and it is
this point and excitement that the immediate
social context provides. The local, tactile
world comes with more immediate structure
(or, perhaps more accurately, with structure
the human animal is pre-programmed to de-
tect—and I return to this below). I would
argue that it is these constitutive, not conse-
quential, meanings that Lawson (despite his
analysis of Cambridge) identiŽ es when he
notes a convergence in the literature
upon a sets of relationships which emerge
from social interaction and exist at a dif-
ferent level to the events, such as prac-
tices, products, that they seek to explain.
And it is precisely these factors that I am
suggesting underlie, or constitute, the re-
gions competencies or capabilities (Law-
son, 1999, p. 160).
This image of actors creating the relevance
of information  ows, and not merely deter-
mined by information  ows, is in part no
more than a shift of emphasis, a difference in
terminology. But it is, I argue, a shift in
emphasis which has strong implications for
how we think about the management of in-
formation in general, and information in the
city in particular.
But before leaving the issue of geographi-
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cal clumping, notice one further explanation,
which Ž ts neatly with this just adumbrated
view of active, generative actors. As Mar-
shall once noted:
Every locality has incidents of its own
which affect in various ways the methods
of arrangement of every class of business
that is carried on in it … The tendency to
variation is the chief cause of [economic]
progress (Marshall 1890/1920, p. 355).
This can be extended:
Though often overlooked, a logical and
interesting consequence of the present de-
velopment towards a global economy is
that the more easily codiŽ able (tradable)
knowledge can be accessed, the more cru-
cial does tacit knowledge become for sus-
taining or enhancing the competitive
position of the Ž rm. If all factors of pro-
duction, all organisational blueprints, all
market information, and all production
technologies were readily available in all
parts of the world at (more or less) the
same price, the market process of compe-
tition between Ž rms would dwindle … one
effect of the ongoing globalisation is that
many previously localised capabilities and
production factors become ubiquities.
What is not ubiquiŽ ed, however, is the
non-tradable/non-codiŽ ed result of knowl-
edge creation—the embedded tacit knowl-
edge—that at a given time can only be
produced in practice. The fundamental ex-
change-inability of this type of knowledge
increases its importance as the internation-
alisation of markets proceeds (Maskel and
Malmberg, 1999, p. 172).
And the implication of this analysis is that
constitutive competencies of regions and as-
sociations can be a designed goal of actors,
not just a by-product of informal exchanges.
(Though notice also that we should perhaps
not assume that all successfully innovative
regions engage in such reciprocity. White
(1997) argues that in thriving 19th-century
ShefŽ eld the city’s oligarchic Cutlers Com-
pany, and the harsh policies imposed by mas-
ters and factors, created relationships based
 USE AND VALUATION
on dependency rather than reciprocity; but
even this could support an exchange-inability
argument.)
There is one architectural modality in writ-
ing about the intelligent city:
Constructed spaces will increasingly be
seen as electronically-serviced sites where
bits meet the body—where digital infor-
mation is translated into visual, auditory,
tactile or otherwise sensorily perceptible
form and vice versa. Displays and sensors
for presenting and capturing information
will be as essential as doors (Mitchell,
1995, p. 126).
But on our present narrative, space is not
where ‘bits meet the body’ but where the
meaning, the reason for existence, of these
bits is deŽ ned. The interest is not (pace
Frendreis, 1989) how information affects ur-
ban life, but how life affects information.
Nature of the Public Space
Politically, the Internet and associated tech-
nologies provide ‘public’ spaces. They pro-
vide a facility to give a voice to people who
would otherwise Ž nd difŽ culty in obtaining
that voice (see Grieco, 1996) and as far as
the technology is concerned, that voice is
equal to all other voices. So some claim it is
reasonable to maintain that the Internet does
give access to quieter voices, such as small
or new businesses, organisations in less de-
veloped countries. Virtual cities appear ap-
pealingly democratic. As Graham and
Marvin (1999) observe, nearly all major UK
cities now have a presence on the Internet,
where so-called virtual cities range from
simple tourist promotion and local data-
bases, to sophisticated spaces which attempt
to add coherence to all local activities on
the Internet, to widen local access and skills,
to open up interactive services for local de-
bates and to develop information and com-
munications services, which feed back
positively onto the development of the home
city. Interestingly, the most innovative vir-
tual cities use the analogies of city, ‘spaces’,
‘squares’ and ‘districts’, so that the many
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1885
services they offer relate directly to their
counterparts in physical urban space. The
most sophisticated of these in the UK cur-
rently is Virtual Bristol (http://www.bristol.
digitalcity.org/), supported by a partnership
of the City Council, universities and Hewlett
Packard, launched in April 1997.
But here the spatial metaphors used to
describe these virtual spaces may begin to
mislead. When we associate in physical
space, we give to others information about
our presence, and some information—from
dress and behavioural cues—as to who we
are. We see how many are there. We see how
they are reacting. And we have information
on the shape and interconnections of the
space. And that information colours our re-
sponse to real space.
Take an historical Bristol example. Poole
provides an engaging account of the cultural
representation and use of the two largest
open spaces in early 19th century Bristol: the
scrublands of Brandon Hill and the residen-
tial elegance of Queen Square. In the elec-
tions of 1830
By moving the polling booths to Queen
Square and encouraging its use for public
hustings meetings, the Corporation were
able to answer accusations of their compli-
ance in no-contest electoral pacts, provide
an open, impressive and eminently con-
trollable new location for voting, and chal-
lenge popular associations between
Brandon Hill, liberty and citizenship.
(Poole 1999, p. 48).
And more generally, we know that, by the
mid 19th century, despite the obstructions
often thrown in their way, radical outdoor
meetings could be convened either at
unofŽ cial but tolerated ‘speakers’ corners’ in
urban squares, or, topography permitting, by
a quick march from the town centre to adjac-
ent open moorlands—and see, for example,
Vernon’s (1993, pp. 208 – 213) discussion of
moorland meetings around Oldham. Again,
company and place provided cues to the
participants that are lacking in virtual space.
Even at the level of mere mercantile trans-
actions in virtual space, we lack within-net
1886 KENNETH I. MACDONALD
information. A glance at current software
catalogues—“Shop-In-A-Box allows non-
technical personnel to build a fully functional
website in just a few hours”; “By installing
the award winning Actinic Catalog on your
PC you can open your Web business in less
than an hour”; and so forth—may help to
reinforce a bias not to buy our next books
from untested nufastbook.com. The virtual
marketplace by default supplies fewer cues
than the spatial to the standing of the vendor
and her customers (hence the salience of
conventional advertising of virtual services).
Or consider another aspect of 19th-century
city life, the associational culture. Wirth,
writing in the 1930s, stressed that
urbanites meet each one another in highly
segmental roles … and are thus associated
with a greater number of organised
groups … The contacts of the city may
indeed be face to face, but they are never-
theless impersonal, superŽ cial, transitory
and segmental …
It is largely through the activities of the
voluntary groups, be their objectives econ-
omic, political, educational, religious, rec-
reational, or cultural, that the urbanite
expresses and develops his personality, ac-
quires status, and is able to carry on the
round of activities that constitutes his life
career (Worth, 1938, p. 12).
Descriptions of 1820s associational culture
have something of the  avour of the diversity
of the Internet; pluralism was created
through the tolerance of a range of societies
concerned with the same topic. Thus, in
Leeds, the Baptists were joined by the British
and Foreign Bible Society, the Church Pas-
toral Aid Society, the Domestic Missionary
Society (Unitarian), the Home Missionary
Society, the London Missionary Society, the
Religious Tract Society and the Methodist
Missionary Society.
The civil society of Leeds became a vast
‘supermarket’ offering a range of products
in search of subscribers (Morris, 1998,
p. 299).
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But as Morris goes on to show, these soci-
eties sought to co-ordinate the activities of
individuals who often knew each other but
had imperfect knowledge of each other. The
societies were designed to use knowledge as
a means of changing social relationships in
some way. This could involve the trivial
(such as organising a  ower show to improve
gardening) or major ambitions (such as edu-
cating working-class children or bringing
slavery to an end). Central to these activities
was the creation and exchange of infor-
mation, but structured around tasks and
goals. Morton’s study of 19th century Edin-
burgh concludes that
Civil society is sustained through com-
munication and association, but it suc-
ceeds because of self-administration from
the municipality. Hence paving, lighting
and rating must sit alongside enfranchise-
ment and citizenship-right in our under-
standing of how civil society worked in
practice (Morton, 1998, p. 366).
Of course, success was partial. Gorsky,
again on Bristol, stresses that
the problems of establishing whether
friendly societies generated social capi-
tal … evidence for apathy, membership
lapses, club dissolution … points to a pe-
riphery of members whose engagement
was less complete (Gorsky, 1998, p. 321).
But the task-centred nature of the infor-
mation use is a recurrent theme. And the
historical analysis could be extended. Ar-
guably, a hitherto insufŽ ciently recognised
aspect of the medieval urban guilds is their
role in bringing together representatives of
the diverse social elements of the medieval
town. For example, Rosser (1997) reviews
the strategic use of fraternity membership by
a variety of townspeople seeking access to
Ž nancial credit, to primary materials, to hired
labour or to the market.
Unaided, the virtual ‘places’ of association
on the Internet lack the interactional and
informational resonance of these spatial
forms. As with 19th century conscious civic
 USE AND VALUATION
planning, we may need to consider inter-
vening. Warren is right to warn that the
benign projections [about telecommunica-
tions and the future of cities] give little
indication that there are signiŽ cant policy
issues which should be on the public
agenda (Warren, 1989, p. 344).
Information and the Polity
The historical examples give some  avour of
the ways in which the polity (either at local
or national level) came to address issues
about the organisation of physical space. So
far, collectively we have given little attention
to the involvement of the polity in cyber-
space.
Or, more precisely, the attention has fo-
cused on the surface: on policing (for por-
nography or sedition, both variously
deŽ nable); on access (Newt Gringrich’s ‘lap-
tops to the ghettos’ rallying cry in 1995;
Blair’s Internet for schools). Although ‘sur-
face’, these matter. Corrigan and Joyce (this
issue, p. 1774) note that in future ICT could
create virtual public meetings so that
“attendance at meetings, whether community
or ward political meetings, re ects the poli-
tics of the past”. That may help to address
the concerns of gender difference in access
opportunity for physical political meetings
(Lister, 1993). But as Graham and Marvin
tartly, and correctly, observe
Home access to the Internet, with its pre-
requisites of skills, electricity, hardware,
software, telephone, modem, Internet ac-
count, and cash for on-line and telephone
charges is unlikely to be a priority for
socioeconomic groups facing poverty,
debt, and problems paying for essential
bills (Graham and Marvin, 1999, p. 99).
If we are not to recreate inequalities, these
issues of access require the attention of the
polity; so, although ‘surface’, they are ‘im-
portant’.
Yet they are ‘surface’ because they con-
centrate upon the external attributes of the
technology, not what people do with and
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1887
through it. The import of the literature on the
constitutive competencies of regions, exam-
ined above, was that economic information
gains meaning and use from a context and
culture that support such meanings. This is
equally so in the political. There is need to
consider the ways in which the political in-
formation on the Internet is attended to and
incorporated.
An example: democracy in small groups
works because it is easy to ‘collect the
voices’. So, it is tempting—and we all suc-
cumb—to see the Internet, making both
‘voice’ and information readily available, as
an extension of democracy. But it would be
na¨õ ve to assume that, because the technology
enables access to information, the infor-
mation is sought or deployed. As a member
of a small group, simply through the lived
experience of the group, I will have views on
the issues the group confronts—not all, but
most. In the case of the polity, matters be-
come different. The implications of the infor-
mation (and its bounds) are more
indeterminate—it is easy to misperceive
causality. And information imposes a cost,
attention.
There is a famous dictum of T. H. Green
to the effect that the state ought not to do for
an individual what the individual could do
for itself (so states provide for defence, since
the individual action will not bring about
nuclear deterrence, but collective childcare
after the fashion of kibbutzim is contra-
indicated). But it is worth noting that the
obverse of Green’s position is not absurd: the
individual ought not to waste her time doing
things the state could do for her. Leave the
state (ourselves at work) to worry about pen-
sions and health care and such, freeing our
‘real’ lives to focus on more interesting inter-
personal, creative matters. So political infor-
mation of itself is not conducive to political
action. The individual in the intelligent city
could opt out of active political participation,
and delegate voting to a programmed ‘in-
telligent agent’, which might simply
‘track’—after the fashion of portfolio man-
agement—some indicator. (I used to have a
colleague who was invaluable, to me,
1888 KENNETH I. MACDONALD
in meetings. He was careful, diligent in prep-
aration, well-informed, honest—and pos-
sessed of attitudes which I did not share; so,
whenever confronted with an issue whose
ramiŽ cations were beyond my comprehen-
sion, I simply listened to his voice and voted
otherwise.)
Participation in the polity, as in the infor-
mation technology economy, requires more
than simple ‘death of distance’ information. It
requires, in Lawson’s phrase, “sets of rela-
tionships which emerge from social interac-
tion and exist at a different level to the
events … that they seek to explain”. And
providing this is not easy, but nor is it much
addressed. A potent bedrock stipulative
deŽ nition of governance is that of Aristotle in
the Nicomachean Ethics (the Ross wording):
legislators make the citizens good by form-
ing habits in them, and this is the wish of
every legislator, and those who do not
effect it miss their mark, and it is in this that
a good constitution differs from a bad one
(Book IIi (1103b).
Merely providing information misses the
mark.
We know that information is not a neutral
datum, but something that is translated by,
and engenders, the moral perceptions of ac-
tors. In 18th-century Scotland, adoption of
one scientiŽ c advance—inoculation against
smallpox—was, at Ž rst sight surprisingly,
most readily accepted not in the centre but in
the sparsely populated periphery. This can be
accounted for
in [urban] areas, where the disease came
round so frequently that its killing effect
was almost entirely conŽ ned to chil-
dren … adults had a strong religious ob-
jection to interfering with God’s will
by incurring smallpox artiŽ cially …
[Whereas] in parts of the Highlands and
Hebrides and Northern Isles, smallpox ap-
peared only occasionally, at intervals of
about thirty years, with devastating effects
among adults as well as among children
(Flinn, 1977, pp. 291– 292).
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It may be that Flinn’s explanation is weaker
than some alternatives (for example, the
clergy, instrumental in inoculation, were
more attended to on periphery), but its form—
tying moral perception to context and knowl-
edge, is surely correct. A later analysis, May
(1997), shows the importance of reconstruct-
ing different inoculators’ objectives and em-
phasises the role of dissenting physicians in
promoting large-scale inoculation pro-
grammes in Chester, London, Liverpool and
Leeds. Financed by private subscription and
motivated by a philanthropic concern for hu-
manity and a mercantilist interest in increas-
ing the nation’s population and production,
these schemes aimed to eradicate, not just to
control, the disease.
Information—on the science of inocula-
tion, or whatever—is not a neutral ‘given’. So
a serious political usage of the technology—if
it is to become more than single-issue inter-
est-group mobilisation (as it was, very effec-
tively, in the case of Steel, Morris and
McDonalds)—may require more overt inter-
vention by the polity. The structure of debate
must latch on to active life if it is to engage
participation. For example, in the UK, where
nationally negotiated pay structures are now
being replaced by local pay bargaining, the
health, local government and public service
workers’ union UNISON uses a networked
database to give branches the information
they need when meeting local managers
(Wilson, 1999, p. 685). As one agent, cited by
Choo (1998, p. 116) reported
By participating, by interacting with the
world, the world often suggests what to do
next. It affords actions.
(Notice in passing, and in line with the gen-
eral argument of this paper, that the ‘McDon-
alds’ case worked partly because there exists
an external common referent, these ubiqui-
tous restaurants, about which it is relatively
costless to form views.) It is always easy to
see ‘information-giving’ as ‘empowerment’.
But empowerment, unless tied to speciŽ c
competencies, can become condescending
or vacuous (for a fuller discussion, see
Macdonald and Macdonald, 1999a).
 USE AND VALUATION
Greater substantive involvement of the
polity with the structure of information starts
to interconnect with debates around privacy.
For example, were virtual meetings to pro-
vide more information on participants to par-
ticipants, we might more reconstitute the
involvement of physical meetings, but with
obvious conŽ dentiality implications.
Even in the present, much is collected as a
matter of routine—any spending that in-
volves a credit or bank debit card, most
Ž nancial transactions, telephone calls, all
dealings with national or local government.
Supermarkets record every item being
bought by customers who use discount cards.
Mobile phone companies are busy installing
equipment that allows them to track location.
Electronic toll booths and trafŽ c-monitoring
systems can record the movement of individ-
ual vehicles. Pioneered in Britain, closed-
circuit TV cameras now scan increasingly
large swathes of urban landscapes in other
countries too (and soon will have facial, and
movement, recognition algorithms added).
Lowered hardware costs facilitate acqui-
sition: for example, AT&T keeps track of the
billing information for roughly 250 million
phone calls each day. Every record includes
a caller’s number, the number of the person
called, the time of day, the duration of the
call and so on, resulting in 18 million giga-
bytes of billing data a year. The Economist
(1 May 1999, p. 16) speculated that
In a way, the future may be like the past,
when few except the rich enjoyed much
privacy. To earlier generations, escaping
the claustrophobic all-knowingness of a
village for the relative anonymity of the
city was one of the more liberating aspects
of modern life. But the era of urban anon-
ymity already looks like a mere historical
interlude. There is, however, one differ-
ence between past and future. In the vil-
lage, everybody knew everybody else’s
business. In the future, nobody will know
for certain who knows what about them.
This issue, although real—The Economist, in
the article cited, sees it as “one of the great-
est social changes of modern times”—is not
Downloaded from usj.sagepub.com at Universidad Nacional Aut Mexic on January 19, 2016
1889
at the centre of my present argument. There
are, though, two points to note. The Ž rst is
that the social implications of impersonally
held information, however detailed, are dif-
ferent from the implications of personally
held information; if AT&T knows where I
was last night, that is not the same as Aunt
Jenny knowing. The meanings of these viola-
tions of privacy, tied as they are to social
arrangements, are so distinct that to label
both as such may be more obfuscatory than
helpful. The second is that, once again, we
have to take on board actors as constitutive
agents. The consequences depend on our
usages, not just external relations. Consider a
tale from an earlier era. The tale relates to
technology and an increase in privacy. Stone
argues that
it was not until the late 18th century that
the growing desire for privacy and im-
proved technology led to the removal of
all the servants’ bedrooms to a separate
attic  oor linked to those of their employ-
ers merely by a bell and a bell-wire (Stone
1990, p. 212).
Indeed, this “must have been one of the most
important innovations in the creation of pri-
vate space for the owner and his family”
(Stone and Stone, 1984, p. 347). Insofar as
‘improved technology’ is taken as determin-
ing, there are counter-arguments:
As for servant bells, summons from a dis-
tance by bell-wire would certainly have
been a “considerable advance in sophisti-
cation” on Pepys’s bell to summon ser-
vants in the 1660s, which simply hung
outside his bedchamber. But if the aim of
bells was to facilitate “the segregation of
the family from the servants”, as the
Stones have put it, Pepys in his town-
house had surely achieved as much in
1663: he could send the servants away to
enjoy his seclusion, and still summon them
when required (Meldrum, 1999, p. 35).
Meldrum goes on to speculate that the advent
of bells to summon servants may have origi-
nated with a fashionable distaste for shout-
ing. But the point of the tale is that the
1890
impact of the technology depends upon the
social arrangements, and ‘privacy’ is not an
abstractly comprehensible good. This is more
readily seen in the past, where, from our
vantage, it is obvious that social relations
might have been different, so the impact
(both positive and negative) of the technol-
ogy might have been different. Unthinking
our own social structures is a tougher task
(and Winch would see it as logically im-
proper).
Usage and Valuation
The aim of this paper has been to raise some
issues regarding the proper role of manage-
ment and information in the political spaces
of the virtual urban world. Characteristically,
there are more questions than answers. But
the route to the raising of the questions was
structured to suggest the shape of some poss-
ible answers.
The spatial density of successful economic
exploitation of the virtual economy suggests
that anchoring in ways of life, modes of
behaving, ‘competencies’, may matter. Dis-
cussion of historical public space indicates
the importance of structured information for
participants, as does re ection on the usage
of information. The overall narrative is one
which suggests that for the successful devel-
opment of an information-rich urban polity
we need more than ‘smart’ buildings or pro-
vision of Internet access. We need co-
ordination between the spatially anchored
decision-making structures and the possibili-
ties of cyber-space. Cyber-space becomes
politically of use and of value when tied to
actions and concerns. This is Ž rst cousin to
Harvey’s (1996, p. 11) suggestion “to replace
the Ž xed idea of ‘values’ with an understand-
ing of the ‘process of evaluation’ ”.
An additional move can be adduced to
strengthen this line of argument. One of the
more exciting intellectual developments in
recent social psychology, with disturbing im-
plications for such of sociology as has
grounding in some rational-action model of
human behaviour, has been so-called evol-
utionary psychology. The central insight is
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KENNETH I. MACDONALD
that human reasoning is not some abstract
ratiocinative unit; rather, humans are an evol-
utionary selected bundle of problem-solving
strategies, concatenations of algorithms, the
possessors of which have been reproduc-
tively successful. One perceptual example
might be our automatic correction for dis-
tance. Place two identically sized cut-out
photographs of people upon a photograph of
a street receding into the distance; one placed
‘far’, one ‘near’. The ‘far’ Ž gure will seem
larger, and the illusion persists even with
awareness. The human animal (usefully)
automatically compensates for perceived vis-
ual distance. (This is why the moon on the
horizon—where ‘distance’ cues kick in
strongly—seems larger than the moon at
zenith.) Or again, consider our excellent fa-
cial recognition skills (although few of us
can verbalise informative facial descrip-
tions). More socially interesting is our alert-
ness to social cheating. The overall image is
of human animals with skills well adapted to
survival in smallish social groups; the struc-
ture of these skills has implications for the
developed shapes of human culture (the clas-
sic overview is Tooby and Cosmides, 1992).
Within evolutionary psychology, one sub-
literature has focused on decision-making
and, for present purposes, the work of
Gigerenzer et al. (1999) is particularly perti-
nent (see also Schmitt and Grammer, 1997).
Our premise is that much of human rea-
soning and decision making can be mod-
elled by fast and frugal heuristics that
make inferences with limited time and
knowledge. These heuristics do not in-
volve much computation … we see heuris-
tics as the way the human mind can take
advantage of the structure of information
in the environment to arrive at reasonable
decisions (Gigerenzer et al., 1999, pp. 6,
28).
They see this as superior to a model of
rationality which assumes unbounded ration-
ality (as not Ž tting the facts) or a model of
rationality which is optimisation under con-
straints (the need, before implementing a
stopping rule, to evaluate the potentiality of
 USE AND VALUATION
further information leading to an inŽ nite re-
gress). Both of these models are perhaps
close to the implicit assumptions underlying
much information (political and other) cur-
rently presented on the Web—it is all there,
people can Ž nd and make sense of it because
it is all there. As well as querying these
models of information processing, Gigeren-
zer et al. also wish to dissociate themselves
from the ‘heuristics-and-biases’ programme
which negatively suggests that ordinary peo-
ple are cognitive misers who use little infor-
mation and little cognition and thus are
largely unable to estimate probabilities and
risks (for an exposition and critique of some
of this literature, see Macdonald and Mac-
donald, 1999b). The heuristics-and-biases
literature is concerned to locate the fallibility
of the rules of thumb we habitually deploy
(for example, when confronted by Bayesian
issues we appear to average, not multiply,
prior odds and diagnostic ratio). But for
Gigerenzer et al. (1999, p. 22) the function of
heuristics “is to make reasonable, adaptive
inferences about the real social and physical
world given limited time and knowledge”
and the volume adduces impressive evidence
of the efŽ ciency and accuracy of that heuris-
tic when confronted with the contingencies
that occur in real life.
The implications are obvious. Fast and
frugal heuristics exploit the information
structure of the social environment to enable
adaptive interactions with other agents, and
this entails domain-speciŽ c rationality, for
different environments can have different
fast and frugal heuristics. The structure of the
environment, and its information, affect the
appropriate rationality—a re-emphasis on the
second half of the title of Simon’s classic
(1956) paper “Rational choice and the struc-
ture of environments”. But if humans have
been selected with heuristics that work in the
real world, the set of environments in which
their fast and frugal algorithms work must be
bounded. The task is to place the structure of
the virtual world within that set. (And again,
some tying to concrete ways of life might be
indicated. And the underlying psychology of
decision-making would Ž t with our earlier
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1891
discussion on the effective shape of political
association.)
This is a speciŽ cation of what-should-be-
attended-to, not a toolkit for doing it. A Ž rst
step. But a Ž rst step is not no movement.
So. There is a need for (digital) political
information which is actively connected to
decision-making, and organised and pre-
sented in ways that make sense to creatures
with our evolutionary psychology, our search
strategies and fast and frugal heuristics. And,
most importantly, it should be embedded in
ways of political life, which give the infor-
mation meaning, structure and sense. The
inŽ nity of the Internet needs devices for
structuration. As with the economy and its
regions, political activity requires a com-
petent region, anchored in physical space, to
 ourish. So, on this narrative, the electronic
exchange of information provides us not with
new problems, but old problems, more
sharply.
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