INTRODUCTION: LOCAL CULTURE IN A GLOBAL, DIGITAL WORLD

Modern mobilities, such as physical and virtual mobilities (Urry, 2000), and encroaching globalisation promote the increasing jumble and homogenisation of disparate cultures in local settings. In a global city like Singapore there is tension between the lived history and reality of particular places and practices and the rush to feed and globalise “the tourist gaze” (Urry, 2002). Singapore is an ideal place to explore interactions between the emerging technologies, globalisation and the disappearing traditions because cultural heritage, like in many global, cosmopolitan cities, is a contested zone. Various interests, such as tourism marketing campaigns and the construction of a multicultural identity, compete over the function and the definition of the collective and personal past. How can memories and experiences be preserved in a city that is changing rapidly? How can the disappearing, even forgotten, past and the omnipresent future be reconciled?

These observations and questions point to a number of tensions, tensions that we wish to explore through this paper. On one hand there are tensions between performing and preserving particular aspects of everyday life. On the other hand there are aligned tensions between preserving aspects of ‘culture’ and external forces such as modernization, development and globalization. Urry (2002) points to the growth of “tourism reflexivity” or “identifying a particular place’s location with the contours of geography, history and culture that swirl the globe, and in particular identifying that place’s actual and potential material and semiotic resources.” In such a climate and with the rapid development of “communicative mobilities” and “corporeal travel” there are vast opportunities to both develop and mobilize “the tourist gaze”. This ‘reinvention and mobilisation’ can involve different individuals’ and groups’ localized heritage through personal auditory and visual narratives.

Developing appropriately relevant and rigorous methods that support both policy (e.g. tourism policies) and design (e.g. emergent services) decisions is challenging. Our focus here is on design, but not the kind of design that is typically labeled “creative design” or “engineering design” (Vetting Wolf et al., 2006). In our treatment of design we acknowledge the explosion of technologies and interfaces into multifarious aspects of people’s lives (Bowers and Rodden, 1993). We thus widen the ‘traditional’ notion to include e.g. assembling existing services in new ways. Thus, in this paper we examine the kind of ‘everyday design’ that is similar to the experience of the proficient home user or developer confronted with developing a ‘proof of concept’ or ‘demo’ or even simply ‘getting the job done’. In our treatment of ‘design’ we also recognize the convergence between content and service creation and publishing through Web 2.0 technologies, where: the development of a prototypical service may involve little more than the innovative assembly of existing services; the time between this assembly and launch may be short and; the potential for accessing a large audience quickly, who can, in turn, reinvent the service, is considerable.

In some ways ethnography and cultural heritage have similar goals: they are concerned with ‘the authentic’; they wish to represent this authenticity in some way; they have similar preoccupations with notions of place, artifacts and representation; both recognize the importance of experience; both are concerned with how to treat data (e.g. documents, photographs etc) and what to make of them. As Urry (2002:157) notes regarding tourism:

“Culture-developing-and-sustaining-travel can take on a number of different forms: travel to the culture’s sacred sites; to the location of central written or visual texts; to places where key events took place; to see particularly noteworthy individuals or their documentary record; and to view other cultures so as to reinforce one’s own cultural attachments.”

Thus separating the methods we report on and the focus of the research is somewhat artificial. However, heritage has a concern with preservation and display while ethnography’s prime concern is the investigation of local culture, wherever that locality may be and whoever might be engaged in the activities comprising that culture. Thus the questions we wish to answer here concern digital technologies supporting heritage activities, how to deploy these tools to understand the experience of those activities and the broader implications of these technologies for an understanding of heritage in a post-modern era suffused with different mobilities.

The specific work we report on here was part of an inter-disciplinary research project into the cultural heritage of Singapore and the use of geo-location technologies incorporating social networking platforms as a medium for interactive heritage walks. The goals of the project were to engage both locals and non-locals in experiencing Singapore from a first person perspective, giving them a wider understanding of the ethnic and cultural diversity, through interactive heritage walks. The project has also explored opportunities and challenges for new ways of probing, sharing and promoting local ‘culture’. The focus of this paper is reporting on the development of a prototypical service with a view to drawing out lessons for new ethnographies that combine ‘traditional’ and ‘new’ methods and deploy ‘digital life documents’ (Plummer, 1983) or, in Crabtree et al.’s (2006) terms, ‘digital records’. What we suggest is that both the methods and new services we present here, offer new opportunities for exploring social life.

THE LIVING AVATAR NETWORK

The concept of the Living Avatar Network (LAN) was developed through qualitative enquiry and reference to popular culture (e.g. “Avatar”, “Surrogates”), actual services (e.g. BBC News, 2009) such as ‘Rent-a-friend’ in Japan, and an art project on remote control (Silver and Rivrud, 2007). Popular culture, and science fiction in particular, inspired the idea that another body, appropriately connected with, can act as a proxy for experience while the phenomenon of being able to rent friends, relatives and even partners to ‘stand in’ for important others in one’s life suggested the potential commodification of such a body’s time. Silver and Rivrud’s art project, deploying similar technologies to those used here (http://girlfriend.mediamatic.net/), probed the mechanics of the relationship between a controller and a controlled avatar via performances. LAN drew on each of these to support sharing experiences and realities in real-time through making it possible to ‘walk in someone’s shoes’ via a living avatar, (re-)experiencing memories of a certain place. These ‘memories’ could be variously evoked and communicated, depending on the nature of the avatar-controller experience. The team (‘the team’) that developed the LAN concept comprised five students and two academic staff (one of the authors and another staff member) from the National University of Singapore. The second author periodically interacted with the team advising them on and answering questions.

The LAN concept developed by the team is quite simple: one person or group in a place being directly engaging with (e.g. through walking), ‘the avatar’, interacts with another person or group beyond that place, ‘the guide’, through the avatar using what we term ‘mobile interaction technologies’. Important features of these technologies are that they: are portable; allow the collection and sharing of experiences through, for example, video or audio recording; deploy wireless communication technologies (e.g. WiFi, 3G); utilize publicly available infrastructure (e.g. cloud computing) and; deploy particular recent, freely available real-time services (e.g. Skype). Thus, although we term these technologies ‘mobile interaction’ they also support real-time broadcasting to a potentially huge public. Clearly ‘the avatar’ is not simply a dumb automaton being steered by the guide – the relationship is more egalitarian and reciprocal than that and may also vary depending on the situation and individuals involved. For instance, the avatar may be re-experiencing a place for someone else who is guiding him/her while also experiencing a place for the first time.

One situation the team discussed involved a local, because her work tied her to a particular location, guiding a visitor around Singapore through mobile interaction technologies. In this case, the avatar’s experience is the primary motivation for and in the interaction. One particular scenario (Cooper, 1999) developed the relationship between the avatar and the guide further. This scenario (Wickrama, 2010) described a wheelchair bound Singaporean staying in another country vicariously visiting places (e.g. a location from childhood), performing activities (e.g. exercising) and even tasting local food through an avatar. In this case, the guide’s experience is the primary motivation for and in the interaction. The team’s vision extended beyond the particular trial described in this paper. They suggested LAN, if developed as a new Internet service, could encourage users “to exchange, volunteer or simply buy and outsource experiences and realities in real-time” (Wickrama, 2010) while walking around a specific location. Thus the idea, not unlike online relationships, could be extended to support people offering themselves as avatars (e.g. via the Internet) for someone they could connect with over a distance in order to share interesting stories, experiences and ideas in a novel setting.