Wi-Fi, strings attached
MORE than a few obstacles stand in the way of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's plan, unveiled with some fanfare last month, to blanket all 498 square miles of Los Angeles with wireless Internet access by 2009.
But let's assume the mayor can work out a deal with EarthLink or another service provider -- as San Francisco, Houston and Philadelphia have done -- and put a plan in place that would allow anybody within the city limits to open a laptop and surf the Internet either free or for a modest monthly fee. And let's assume that the service proves attractive even if, as some critics have pointed out, it's little more than a faster, large-screen version of the access we can already get on cellphones and BlackBerrys.
What would it mean as an urban phenomenon, for the way we experience the city and interact with one another? What would a wireless Los Angeles look like?
In the sunniest scenario, the one sketched out rather persuasively by the mayor and his speechwriters, the plan would not only help make online access more affordable and available but expand the public sphere, turning every corner park and sidewalk bench into a possible home for the kind of coffeehouse culture that has always been a defining feature of urban life. It would send a message that the digital realm is a kind of public utility, as accessible as water and electricity.
A more likely effect, frankly, is a noticeable increase in the odd sort of public, shared alienation already on display in cafes everywhere, with people packed in next to one another but staring into their own individual screens. And given the sort of Angelenos who are most obsessed with being always connected, wireless access might fall far short of creating a new kind of social interaction or a revamped notion of communal space in the city. Ultimately, it might do little more than let a thousand PowerPoint presentations bloom in the open air.
Those issues aside, though, the plan's most intriguing aspects have to do with the way we think about the various borders that define the city and its limits. Even as wireless access could make architectural boundaries less important -- since networks will no longer have to be contained, as most are now, within the space of four walls -- it promises to draw civic ones more indelibly.
