Quartzsite as Telecommunications System

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Although cities have traditionally been thought of as dense, fixed accumulations of buildings inhabited by people with a certain degree of infrastructure connecting them, recent urban theorists have begun to see the city as a form of communications technology itself.

In his seminal article “What Makes Cities Important,” (Bell Telephone Magazine, March/April 1970), geographer Ronald F. Abler writes "the production, exchange and distribution of information is critical to the function of the modern metropolis...cities are communications systems."

Quartzsite maintains the urban realm as a telecommunications system, but in new form. As visitors arrive from around the world and interactions between strangers in random configurations occur, knowledge and shared experience can be easily shared. With 1.5 million participants a year, all of these seemingly random conversations carry an enormous amount of information. Many more people arrive at Quartzsite just for this sense of impromptu community. But this conversation is meaningless. Quartzsite is really about sharing the feeling of anonymity.

In this respect, Quartzsite is the model of the contemporary city. Although we live in close proximity to each other, telecommunications makes it possible for us to have close relationships with people far away and with people who don’t know us (the one-way nature of the TV but also the two-way anonymity of amateur self-post internet porn sites). Therefore we don’t become the mass, we become an atomized group, carrying on conversations with isolated individuals both near and far away from us.

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