Metro: Rebuilding Time and Space

The metro system, as a modern infrastructure, rebuilds the relationship of time to space in human experience. When I take the subway every weekday, I should take elevator or lift deep down to the underground, where segregates from the surrounding architectures and landscape. Inside of a single line station, there is only two directions. And the metro will take you to the station you want without knowing how you cross the space. Paul Edwards articulates that infrastructures allow us to control time and space by travelling at speeds beyond human body’s pace (Edwards, 2003). At the same time, the speed deprives human’s sensibility of space and brings orderly and dependable expectation over time, as one characteristic of infrastructure’s modernity is the speed.

A good example for my own experience is when I went to any unfamiliar stations, it seems like I have never been to this city before, even when I was back to the city I lived for ten years. The surrounding disappears, which is mentioned by an anthropologist, Xiangbiao, in an interview. Due to the well-established infrastructures, one of which is the high-speed metro system, the connections between human and surroundings are reduced: people are no longer familiar with the small shops and pitches around, and the actions of exploring remote but famous restaurant are based on the online information. Another point worthy to be mentioned is that the convergence of online information, at least in certain territories, reduces people’s ability to perceive the detailed difference in each district. Even when people travel around similar modern cities with similar transportation system, people cannot see the landscape over the ground.

References:

Brey, P. (2003). Modernity and technology. Infrastructure and Modernity: Force, Time, and Social Organization in the History of Sociotechnical Systems. p185-227.Retrieved from https://ebookcentral.proquest.com

项飙：用人类学家的眼光洞察社会（Biao Xiang: Observe the Society from Anthropologists’ perspective). (2020). Retrieved 5 January 2020, from https://www.jianshu.com/p/ded9cf81811b

Underground Tube London Metro Railway

VPN and Copyright

I began to use the VPN to visit Chinese websites when I studies abroad for the first year in 2015. At first, it is only a natural action for me to turn on my music applications I used in China, but it turns out that my whole list of more than 500 songs cannot be listened. The application says: “sorry, due to the limitation of copyright, the country or territory you are in cannot provide the service of the music.” (see the photo) The same situation happened when I tried to watch videos, the Chinese video websites told me that the videos are only available to Chinese mainland.

A screenshot from Kugou music application

From my personal experience, there are two questions lead my thinking. The first one is why Chinese overseas have the needs to use the same applications, and the second one is about why the copyright limit to territory.

When the need of using VPN to avoid Chinese firewall is to gain uncensored information, especially from Google search engine, the demand of using VPN in reverse direction is the embodiment of people’s habitus (Bourdieu & Nice, 2013). At the same time, the different composition of internet social platforms, resulted from Chinese firewall, segregates the internet into two worlds for Chinese citizens: China and outside of China. Thus, the isolated cyber world lead Chinese counting on the indigenous platforms.

The second question mentions the regulation of copyright, that copyright laws are territorial. Lessig criticized on the over-strictness of copyright’s regime and time span. On the one side, the copyright protects both economic and moral rights for the creator; on the other side, the copyright becomes a burden, more than expanse over artists (Lessig, 2001). The existence of intellectual copyright also becomes the instrument of press and publisher. An interesting event is that Lessig (2001) announced the Future of Ideas has been licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license, and the book can be downloaded the book for free. From the pdf version, the sentence of reserved copyright has been crossed. On the contrary, China is still at beginning level of protecting copyright of music and videos. While Chinese netizens are highly recommending the awareness of copyright, finding the balance of suitable scope of copyrights will be the next topic of discussion and research.

A screenshot of the electronic version of Future of Ideas

Reference:

Lessig, L. (2001). The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World (1st ed., pp. 3-17). New York: Random House, Inc.

WIPO. (2020). Frequently Asked Questions: Copyright. Retrieved 5 January 2020, from https://www.wipo.int/copyright/en/faq_copyright.html

Bourdieu, P., & Nice, R. (2013). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

(Bourdieu & Nice, 2013)

Keywords: VPN, borders, habitus, copyright, de-copyright, China