In my time as a management consultant, I visited dozens of disparate locales, but my experiences in those places inevitably bled together. Hotels in Ohio felt like those in New York. Starbucks in Singapore looked a lot like Caribou Coffee in Atlanta; and airports - the broad walkways, constant motion, and fleeting encounters with "single-serving friends" - exuded a similar anti-septic aura from Hong Kong to Chicago. I travelled extensively, but wrapped in the enclave of my Blackberry, an iPod, and these carefully manufactured corporate surroundings, I always felt as if I was missing something.
Professor Andy Wood captures these tensions perfectly with his newest work, City Ubiquitous: Place, Communication, and the Rise of Omnitopia. Wood, author of works as disparate as Motel America: A State By State Tour Guide to Nostalgic Stopovers and Online Communication: Linking Technology, Identity, and Culture, uses his latest book to synthesize his thoughts on modern life; and the result is an engaging, insightful read that works as both scholarly discourse and personal revelation.
At base, City Ubiquitous is a sophisticated academic treatise that explores a theoretically frame for understanding life in the 21st century. Wood has deployed the term "omnitopia" to help describe the way in which we can now "flow from place to place, experiencing it all as one vast interior, cocooned in [our] own bubble[s], interacting with other people and natural parts of the world only as a series of objects..." And he offers up a careful account of the ways in which this omnitopia manifests for contemporary Americans - in hotels, malls, airports, and the "aural enclaves" of our iPods and mobile phones - even as he marshals a rigorous knowledge of both history and academic research to support his claims. Despite this rigor, Wood's writing is never dry - the text is sprinkled with commentary on topics as diverse as Tom Hanks' performance in The Terminal, the origins of the Holiday Inn, and the hopefulness of Battle Mountain, Nevada (the so-called "The Armpit of America"). Throughout the book his arguments are nuanced, intelligent, and compelling.
On a second level, however, City Ubiquitous reads as a deeply personal journey and a work of passion. Wood isn't writing about the world as a detached observer. He's a fascinated tenant of Omnitopia seeking to make sense of the enclaves around him, and my favorite parts of the book detail Wood's own eclectic personal journeys. The introduction initiates this journey with a fitting tale - Wood's attempt to travel the entire length of the United States by car without speaking to anyone along the day (he succeeds, speaking only 5 words in 3,000 miles); and chapter after chapter proceeds with anecdotes of Wood's personal experiments in omnitopian life. He shoots zombies in West Edmonton Wall. He spends the night in an airport just to see what it feels like. He journeys to play baseball on the original "field of dreams". And the pages of City Ubiquitous are sprinkled with vivid imagery from the author's private collection of postcards and photographs that illustrate his principles. Wood isn't purely an academic. He is a resident. And that personal touch makes all the difference.
It's hard to categorize City Ubiquitous. It's an academic volume, a personal journey, and an accessible perspective on a new world that - for better or for worse - we now hold in common. Throughout, Wood manages to combine theory and story in a way that's both enlightening and enlivening, and his thoughts on our new omnitopian reality resonated deeply with me. I highly recommend this book for anyone looking for a way to explain that unsettling feeling that, in our age, we're all both homeless and always at home.
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