Forum
Hope Forsyth
Two thousand years of history, legislation, applications, and context converge in the term forum. Forum’s etymological basis and history set a foundation for considering it as a spatially grounded, physically embodied place of action, gathering, and societal interaction. Digital media have further complicated the term, with online bulletin boards and comment sections referred to as forums, while physical and commercial spaces have responded complementarily to these advances. Ultimately forums, whether spatial or digital, must be understood through physical and material terms.
From Trees to Gladiatorial Marches: Historical Context and Comparison
Forum is linguistically derived from the Latin fores, meaning “what is out of doors.” Similar to forest, forum originally designated an outside space. Its meaning evolved during Roman rule into a type of liminal space within society but outside of one’s home. In this context, a forum set apart a section of the community, neither home nor alien, as space where public and private concerns could be tended and civic gatherings could be held. Architectural historian David Watkin describes the Roman Forum, the best-known of the ancient forums, located between the Capitoline and Velian hills in Rome, as the “juridical, administrative, and commercial centre of Republican Rome [which] later became the key symbol of Roman imperial power” (2). The Forum served only those with specific credentials (namely, Roman citizens); accessibility was a key consideration in forums from early on. Additionally, the Forum intermingled business and military affairs, criminal trials and victory marches, religious shrines and the Senate. Roman citizens’ active societal lives were generally contained in the expanses of the uppercase-F Forum. In addition to the Forum’s civic infrastructure—places for courts, sacrifices, military demonstrations, and so forth—a key feature was its spatial, physically embodied, human-supporting infrastructure, such as food stalls (Watkin 20) and a sewage system (Ancient History Encyclopedia), used to drain the swampy land the Forum occupied. In this way, the human-supporting infrastructure preceded and accompanied the civic infrastructure; without the former, physical constraints would have rendered the latter unsustainable.
One thing the Forum did not include was spectator sports. Those, including the most famous gladiatorial games, took place at arenas such as the Colosseum. Arenas, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), can be “any sphere of public or energetic action” but more primarily are “a scene or sphere of conflict; a battle-field.” Citizens gathered in arenas for the largely passive activities of observation and entertainment. By contrast, the Forum provided for citizens a physical space for active gathering, participation, and progress.
Vestiges of the physical Roman Forum are still present today, as seen in the OED’s several definitions, including “as the place of public discussion” and “a court, tribunal.” The first definition has found new life with the rise of online message boards, but the second is also curiously relevant. Legal precedent in the United States also considers forums in the realm of free speech and commerce, with the Supreme Court utilizing the word forum when delineating three distinct areas with First Amendment protections.1 These spaces are distinguished by their accessibility and thus continue in the historical tradition of forums as liminal spaces. Forums serve communities and societies, but their liminal characteristics prevent them from being called public.
Considered generally, forums, whether uppercase-F Roman or lowercase-f American, exhibit three consistent attributes. First, they are spaces of societal gathering, where norms are reconfirmed and personal interests, including commerce and religion, are pursued. Second, they are liminal spaces of action, where both personal and public business is conducted. Third, they are physically embodied; the societal infrastructure2 they provide is impossible without physical, and more specifically human-supporting, infrastructure designed to provide the basic physical necessities—such as shelter, food, and plumbing—of those acting within them.
Don’t Read the Comments: Internet “Forums”
The internet resembles the Roman Forum in that it provides close and quick access to gathering and action, such as commerce, legislation and law enforcement, and religion. Many such activities—bill paying, tax filing, devotional reading, and news browsing—belong to private business, although public actions, such as searching open records or rallying community support, are not uncommon.
At the same time, online sites can have a tendency to resemble an arena more than a forum, especially given the plethora of opportunities for passive spectating. Flame wars and online comment sections can be as seductive as a car wreck in commandeering attention. Those who follow such clashes resemble the spectators in the Colosseum watching gladiatorial battles far more than citizens conducting business in the Forum. It’s a peculiar perk (and drawback) that the internet can, with rapid-fire typing and clicking, switch back and forth between mimicking forums and mimicking arenas. Further, while a person can physically inhabit only one space at a time, an internet user can mingle among multiple online spaces at the same time.
Online message boards, commonly called forums, fulfill the first and second attributes of forums—public gathering and meaningful action—and, at first glance, appear to fulfill the third as well. After all, the internet cannot exist without its profoundly material infrastructure of physical wires, plugs, pixels, fiber-optic cables, displays, electricity grids, and sundry other material supports. Further, the internet does supply various types of human support, especially related to emotions and reputations.
Nevertheless, the mediated interactions and feedback systems of online forums are insufficient to qualify the digital gathering spaces in question as true forums under the present definition. Though they provide a wealth of resources and meaningful interactions, internet forums do not provide sufficient human-supporting infrastructure. Put flippantly, some types of hardware may be called chips, but they’re no substitute for potatoes. John Perry Barlow triumphantly proclaimed in his “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” that the internet “consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself . . . [it] is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.” True enough, except that bodies have to live somewhere offline. Refocusing concentration not on internet “forums,” but on the internet more broadly leads toward a potential resolution.
Sum of the Parts: Human Infrastructure and Action
The Roman Forum’s evolution caused distinctly stratified layers of development. When fires raged or buildings became decrepit, new infrastructure sprang up on top of its predecessors. In a similar way, the evolution of the internet has prompted new layers of forums to develop, and just as the Forum’s layers built upon each other, the internet provides yet another layer to the ongoing media archaeology propping up the modern-day forum.
Internet users have come to seek the missing human-supporting infrastructure of their media in order to have the most fruitful and productive interactions with it. Writing in “Where Code Meets Place,” design scholar Laura Forlano emphasizes the interconnectedness of place and organization when people interact with the internet: “Physical spaces are quickly being mapped, located and layered with an invisible digital skin signaling a merger between the digital and the real, offline, analog worlds” (3). As computers have grown smaller, users’ abilities to mesh interactions with the internet and interactions with the physical world into symbiotic experiences have increased. Though some might argue that this meshing succeeds a bit too well for comfort,3 these interactions have the potential to build and rebuild forums in the coupling of gathering and action, whether online or off, within space and time.
Others have examined more closely one historical example of such a site of digital and analog mergers: namely, the coffee shop. Brian Cowan, a historian of early modern British history, establishes a historical context and precedent for considering the coffee shop as a significant physical space for social activism and public participation, in his 2005 book The Social Life of Coffee. He writes: “The coffee house has been understood to be a novel and unique social space in which distinctions of rank were temporarily ignored and uninhibited debate on matters of political and philosophical interest flourished” (2). In 2003, the Economist published an article entitled “The Internet in a Cup: Coffee Fuelled the Information Exchanges of the 17th and 18th Centuries,” which traces the development of coffee shops as “information exchanges for writers, politicians, businessmen and scientists” and remarks that “coffee-houses provided a forum for education, debate and self-improvement.” Coffee shops became one of the first early modern places where gathering, interaction, and activity could occur outside of government-owned property or private homes.
Current coffee shops, from behemoth Starbucks to twee hipster hot spots, may not always host the lofty philosophical debates that Cowan and his predecessor Jürgen Habermas describe in their works. Rather, Wi-Fi-hospitable coffee shops are a fitting example of physical infrastructure and internet activity coupling to provide all three attributes of a forum. Their variety of gatherings and actions, from job interviews to Wi-Fi workers, and their necessary physical support structures—food, shelter, climate control, plumbing, and abundant caffeine—provide all three forum attributes. Coffee shops (and by extension, other Wi-Fi hot spot hosts), considered purely physically, provide the human-supporting infrastructure the internet needs to be a sustainable forum.4
Coffee shops function similarly to the Roman Forum in the way they establish liminal spaces, outside both the private domestic sphere of one’s home and the public sphere of one’s business, but still within society. Former Starbucks CEO Jim Donald explicitly reveals this motivation: “It’s all part of their strategy to make Starbucks a third primary ‘place’ in the day of Americans. ‘We say the first place is home, second place is office, and then Starbucks is a third place. . . . They use our stores for gathering spots, and we think that that’s what makes that whole experience what it is today’ ” (“Starbucks’ Psychology”). Perhaps the description was just meant as good marketing, but whether Donald intended to or not, through this idea of a “third place” between private (home) and public (office), he situates his company in the discourse of liminal spaces.5
Historical context establishes the forum as a site of physical embodiment, gathering, and action, whereas the arena appears as a site for spectating, entertainment, and gawking. Though forum has a number of senses, including judicial and historical, it is defined most clearly and generally by three attributes: gathering, action, and human-supporting infrastructure. Even with material aspects, the internet does not function as a sustainable forum considered on its own because of its lack of human-supporting infrastructure. Coffee shops—which first became sites of gathering and action in early modern Britain—now couple physical resources with internet accessibility, meeting all three attributes necessary to activate a new sense of a sustainable forum simultaneously online and off. In an inversion from its etymological roots, forum has evolved from being a descriptor of outside status to a mediator of inside and outside—a mediator that must balance accessibility and restriction, publicity and privacy, society and government. Through the coupling of infrastructure and internet, Silicon Valley innovations and one’s favorite coffee are integrated into the ancient Roman Forum’s strata.
See in this volume: analog, community, digital, internet, participation, sharing
See in Williams: city, community, culture, democracy, popular, private, regional, structural
Notes
1During the 1980s and in response to multiple lawsuits regarding free speech in public schools, the Supreme Court established three types of forums where First Amendment rights to free speech can be exercised: public forums (i.e., “public parks, sidewalks and areas that have been traditionally open to political speech and debate”), which are open to all at all times; designated forums (i.e., “municipal theatres and meeting rooms at state universities”), which are used at specific times; and nonpublic forums (i.e., “airport terminals and a public school’s internal mail system”), which require vetting ahead of participation (Cornell Law School). This delineation is mutually exclusive.
2See Bowker and Star’s Sorting Things Out, which identifies some features of infrastructure, including embeddedness in social arrangements and links with conventions of practice (Bowker and Star, 35).
3Case in point: the person on holiday at the beach, smartphone in hand.
4The Economist remarks characteristically that “history provides a cautionary tale for those hotspot operators that charge for access . . . information, both in the 17th century and today, wants to be free—and coffee-drinking customers, it seems, expect it to be.”
5The physical infrastructure of coffee shops goes beyond fulfilling the third criterion for a forum and extends influentially to another attribute: the action that takes place. The hum of a bustling coffee shop—espresso machines whistling, chairs scratching, greetings being exchanged, muted conversations, carefully cultivated indie music playing in the background—has been shown to enrich the creativity of the people within the space. A study done by several business administration professors on ambient noise concluded that “a moderate (vs. low) level of ambient noise is likely to induce . . . processing difficulty, which activates abstract cognition and consequently enhances creative performance. A high level of noise, however, reduces the extent of information processing, thus impairing creativity” (Mehta, Zhu, and Cheema, 785). In other words, working in a physically bustling forum improves the quality of that work—at least when it comes to creativity—by forcing the brain to create work-arounds and responses to small difficulties. This resembles an inoculation: prompt a response on a small scale and you get a productive result; mess with it a lot and things go haywire.
Forlano also recognizes this effect and remarks that “mobile professionals working in cafes are often surrounded by the loud screeching of the espresso machine. . . . While this could be seen as an inconvenience, many mobile workers report that sound is an important stimulant for their work” (155). This effect can be approximated somewhat with looped audio tracks of coffee shop sound, though the effect isless pronounced and the coffee less abundant; here again, physical infrastructure cannot be escaped. In this way, the human-supporting infrastructure and the spatial qualities of the coffee shop both complete the requirements of a forum and go beyond mere sustainment of the environment, enriching the other forum attributes and positively influencing the actors within the system.
References
Ancient History Encyclopedia. “The Roman Forum.” http://www.ancient.eu/search/?q=the+roman+forum&sa.x=0&sa.y=0.
Barlow, John Perry. “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html.
Bowker, Geoffrey C., and Susan Leigh Star. Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.
Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute. “Forums.” https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/forums.
Cowan, Brian. The Social Life of Coffee. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011.
Forlano, Laura. “Where Code Meets Place.” PhD diss., Columbia University, 2008. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/doc/304625179.html?FMT=ABS.
“The Internet in a Cup.” Economist, December, 2003. http://www.economist.com/node/2281736.
Mehta, Ravi, Rui (Juliet) Zhu, and Amar Cheema. “Is Noise Always Bad? Exploring the Effects of Ambient Noise on Creative Cognition.” Journal of Consumer Research 39(4) (December 2012): 784–99. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/665048.
“Starbucks’ Psychology.” ABC News. http://abcnews.go.com/WN/Consumer/story?id=3162590.
Watkin, David. The Roman Forum. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.