Why a sidewalk

I went back to school late, and I went back for a reason that sounds like a joke until you sit with it. My voice helped automate switchboard operators out of their jobs. I was the voice on the line, for twenty-five years, for a lot of companies you have called. At some point it occurred to me that if my voice could do that to them, something could do it to me. That is not a complaint. It is just the kind of thing you notice when you have been working since you were eight and you were raised by a television, a first Macintosh, and a Lisa.

So the question I took into the PhD was plain. What does media do to the people who grow up inside it? Not what does it do to an audience. What does it do to us, the ones who never had an outside.

The sidewalk came from Jane Jacobs. She wrote about what keeps a city street safe, and it was not police and it was not walls. It was people. Shop owners who watch the street because it is their street. Regulars. Strangers who are around enough to be recognized. She called it eyes on the street, and the phrase stuck to me because I had lived it in a different medium. Every online community I had ever been part of that worked had the same thing, and every one that died had lost it.

Gordon Pask gave me the other half. His interaction of actors is a theory about what changes when two people actually exchange understanding, not just information. A message arriving is not the same as a person changing. I needed that distinction because I was going to study learning that happens sideways, from watching someone build a thing at eleven at night, not from a syllabus.

Mitchell Duneier wrote a book called Sidewalk about the people who sold books and magazines on Sixth Avenue in New York, and he wrote it by standing there for years. That was the method. Stand there. Keep the record. Do not decide what it means until you have enough of it.

Those three gave me the name. I did not have the place yet. That came a year later, in San Francisco, at the bottom of a hill.