Megacity resources:

‘The influence of technology on urban experience might depend on your attitude toward environment, information as material or perceptions of overload.’

Q) How will the concept of access alter in this new urban dynamics. Will it give rise to a more open ‘Image of the city’ with information readily available on surface or will it create more segregation for marginalized communities by controlling access?

‘With citizen science, new genres of urban data curation such as urban computing become a significant cultural domain.’

Q) Who are considered as smart citizens here? What would be the learning curve for a citizen to be able to participate and how does it affect the hierarchy of decision making?

“The Metropolis and Mental Life,” the fatigue that dulls and blunts comes from ‘the intensification of nervous simulation, resulting from the rapid telescoping of changing images, pronounced differences in what is grasped at a single glance, and the unexpectedness of violent stimuli.”

Although distraction and overload could occur in any culture, modernity offered more means to become comfortably numb.

Q) How does this affect the concept of active citizen participation in networked cities. A top down approach that views citizens as data generating input nodes under surveillance may have an advantage here but how does the grassroots bottom up approach that require active citizens survive with this idea of comfortably numb audience.