Augmented reality overlays our vision of the world with other orders of information. Not dominated solely by the perspectival, scopic regime of the view situated in three-dimensional space, augmented reality equips us with footnotes; with the voices of other events, other times impinging on the present. It equips us with overviews, with maps showing the unseen way ahead, with the disposition of our peers, with their commentaries, their experiences. It endows us with facets of exchange and of reflection. It exposes nodes and trackways unseen but pioneered by those who came before.
But typically, though, it begins with real space, with the three dimensional world we move around in. If there is buried treasure, x marks the spot ; if there is a review of a restaurant visible, it may hang like a billboard outside the plate glass window of the establishment itself as it sits on Main Street. If historical commentary is offered, you may be sure that it teems round the sites of important events, or wispily hangs around the desks where moments of brilliance attended the solving of an equation or the drafting of a declaration. A museum is clogged thickly with such ghosts. Augmented reality supplements the visible, the spatial, in ways which are perhaps familiar to scholars or enthusiasts of any sort, for whom particular sites resonate with the knowledge they bring with them. But experiencing augmented reality would reverse the experience of the world-as-memory -palace from their point of view. Rather than a walk through the special site prompting the recollection and configuration of fact and meaning, the site itself proffers meaning to the neophyte visitor, who has no prior knowledge (and may, shudder to think, not treat the hallowed groves with appropriate awe. or even interest).
Accompanying this is the non-spatial phenomenon of the social network. Relationships take place to an extent, not through places or spaces, but in virtualised forms of these. There is a small irony in the fact that much of what is discussed must still have its roots in the world. The band that plays a concert still plays it somewhere, likely with a real audience, even if the wider audience only ever witnesses it online. An academic conference may well take place entirely virtually, but can we conceive of a university that had no foot on the ground at all? Even a distributed university has offices and other facilities. Social networks take place in both spheres, and I would proffer the notion that healthy networks have at least an occasional chance to meet in real space. Most mature, larger-scale online networks make at least some effort to organise meetups IRL.
These two strands frequently coalesce and inform one another so that it is difficult to pick them apart. Indeed, I have no particular reason to do so except to point out their twin reliance on real space as an organisational framework, as a root or baseline from which to expand, augment, annotate and observe.
They also describe a couple of, I think, crucial facets of contemporary practices of knowledge and society, and I think that it is worthwhile to think of how libraries interact with or find a relationship to these practices.
To be continued…