Week 6 Presentation

Hi Everyone, I'm not here on thursday so this is a post with all the ideas and examples surrounding IBNIS which would be explored in the presentation.

What do Burrows et al mean when they say that Internet Based Neighbourhood Information Systems (IBNIS) are ‘being used to ‘sort’ places and the people who live in them in particular ways’?

What are IBNIS?
- ‘Neighbourhood Images’ used to be used to choose a location to move to. These were a creation of the neighbourhood residents and primary local sources (such as shopkeepers or estate agents). These were the ‘key information holders’ and the information was passed mainly verbally.
- Nowadays, the internet can do all of this for us through IBNIS.
- An example of a IBNIS is www.upmystreet.com
- I entered my postcode to get a description of my area and a summary of what came up is as follows:

Here is an overview of the likely preferences and features of your neighbourhood:

Family income- medium
Interest in current affairs -Medium
Housing - with mortgage - High
Educated - to degree - High
Couples with children - Low
Have satellite TV - Low

In addition, they give you a general description of the area:

‘Often, many of the people who live in this sort of postcode will be white-collar singles or sharers living in terraces.’

Also, a suggestion of other cities in the UK where I might find areas like this came up and even what newspaper my neighbourhood tends to read.

Types of IBNIS

- From the previous example it is easy to see how Burrows et al can identify IBNIS as a way of ‘sorting people’
- Nevertheless, there are different types of IBNIS
§ e.g. www.citystats.org is a policy research based one with some signs of social software while www.checkmyfile.com is a very commercial one.
§ Some IBNIS are derived from the government itself- neighbourhoodstatistics.gov.uk

Advantages and optimism VS disadvantages and pessimism

Advantages-
- Makes information ‘colourful’
- Makes information available at different ‘levels’ of geography and it is easy to more from one ‘location’ to another (end of geography argument).
- Could help the government identify areas in which more schools or better education are needed. (Targeting)
- This system of ratings and grouping fits in with the contemporary tradition of classification and data collection and use.
- ‘Local knowledge’ could help communication within and between neighbourhoods.
- IBNIS are essentially a service for people
- Finally, the last advantage is one that could also be a disadvantage- the possibility of neighbourhoods to‘re-invent’ themselves as poor aspects of their locality could be focused on and changed. Neverthless, this is supposing that if a problem is identified it will be fixed.

Disadvantages-
- The traditional time-consuming activity of searching for a house will not be replaced in certain places where the relationship between realtors and purchasers is valued (the US for example) and so it becomes just an extra thing to go through.
- ‘We are where we live’ will stop being applicable as our purchases or interests are recorded and prioritised by these systems. This leads to people being ‘what they consume’ and their identities arising from that.
- Technology of this type together with tracing can be considered as a form of surveillance. An example of how far this can go is www.followus.co.uk where by paying a certain amount per month it is possible to track down any registered mobile phone.
- The wealth (or type of information) may not be welcomed by those who live there. This is either because of the large amount of detail or because of the fact that the way we see ourselves and our neighbourhood is not necessarily the way that other people would rate it or write about it.
- In certain areas a description could be inaccurate and result in ‘red-lining’ with it being difficult to challenge the image that has already been created by IBNIS.
- The people who would have access to, or knowledge of, these web-sites would be within the richer 50% of the population so the result is that they find the best places to go with the best schools, best cultural activities, less crime etc. This leads to a larger gap between the richer and the poorer.