Geographies of Cyberspace: Putting It

Together

Martin Dodge

Lecture 10, Monday 13th December 2004

http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/cyberspace

3011: Geographies of Cyberspace

1. what have we covered in the course

2. questioning cyberspace

3. geographies of cyberspace exemplar– cyberspace and the need to travel

4. coursework report

Today’s lecture

1. Course overview: Lectures• geographies of cyberspace theories

• three conceptions of technology and society– one way (deterministic. utopians or luddites)– two way (social shaping of technology)

– networks (actor-networks bring technologies to life)

• geography of Internet & digital divides• maps of cyberspace • surveillance and cyberspace• virtual reality and city design and planning• cyberspace fiction• Internet governance and geopolitics• virtual communities

• much else we could cover• example of popular themes in cyberculture

– community networks & protests– cyberspace and democracy– cyberspace and the body. nature & technology– cyberspace and identity politics (gender, race)– education and technology– crime and deviance. law and jurisdictions– rise of the ‘new economy’ [Peter Wood’s course]

• don’t rely on just the lecture slides. you must do the reading. materials on the course website - www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/cyberspace

• Castells’s The Internet Galaxy

Cyberspace can’t be ignored

• some implications will be felt regardless of individual wishes and needs

• Castells concludes The Internet Galaxy thus,

“ ‘Why don’t you leave me alone?! I want no part of your Internet, of your technological civilization, of your network society! I just want to live my life!’ Well, if this is your position, I have bad news for you. If you do not care about the networks, the networks will care about you anyway. For as long as you want to live in society, at this time and in this place, you will have to deal with the network society.” (page 282)

Cyberspace is not separate, but part of the

whole• tried to highlight and then understand the complex roles of

cyberspace in everyday life• in the lectures and practicals and visits• get a sense of what cyberspace is; a social-technical

assemblage (not just hardware). we all make it!• get a sense of what it ‘looks’ like, its physicality; the

metaphors and representations; role of maps• looking at cyberspace embedded into the local streets• think about how cyberspace entwined into your daily

activities• cyberspace, part of much larger technologies in everyday

life of course

• at the heart of the course I hope you’ve seen a concern for the implications of ICTs on people and their social-spatial relationships

• not simply a concern for describing the ‘impacts’ of the Internet on geographical locations and patterns. Not simple utopian/dystopian binary

• socially informed analysis of cyberspace through the geographer’s perspective of space and place. analysis in which spatial differentiation is a significant ‘explanatory’ variable in processes and networks that bring cyberspace into being

• spatial context has often been overlooked, in the rush to declare the ‘death of distance’

2. Questioning cyberspace

drawing on a paper by Steve Woolgar, (2002), "Five rules of virtuality", in Woolgar S. (ed.) Virtual Society? Technology, Cyberbole, Reality, Oxford University Press.

Critical social science research

• “All aspects of social, cultural, economic, and political life thus stand to be affected by the continued massive growth in electronic technologies. … these new technologies require us to rethink the very basis of the ways in which we relate to one another.” (Woolgar, p.1)

• example of a pervasive ‘common-sense’ type of rationale for considering technologies

• Woolgar goes onto question some fundamental tenants of this type statement

• the importance of critical reflection. you need to approach this as the ‘virtual society?’ (with a big question mark)

• cyberspace is undoubtedly changing things• the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of changes are hard to understand • is this a period of wholesale societal change? are we

entering or already in the ‘network society’, an ‘information age’?

• must question just how fundamental are the shifts really in the ways people behave, organise activities and interact? and how much are changes due to cyberspatial technologies?

• technology needs to be studied by social scientists and patterns of use analysed by geographers to unpick ‘place-effects’

Current analytical failings

• metaphors and discourses often imply that things are new, different and (usually) better

• three type of failings Woolgar flags:– predictability– universality– clumping

• technological implications are never predictable • never universal across difference places or at different times or for

different social groups• large-scale technology trends assumed to have some outcomes for

individual experience. top-down synoptic causation. ecological fallacy

• “…attention at the macro-level gives rather little clue as to how these technologies are actually used and experienced in every day practice.” (Woolgar 2002, page 6)

• always resist making sweeping generalisation. problem with much large-scale, empirically driven, analysis of ‘impacts’, particularly at national and international trends

• ‘clumping’ together of technologies to provide simple narratives of impact

Plethora of technologies• range of cyberspatial technologies, diversity of ICTs. resist

‘clumping’ them together• the Web is not the Internet• email is very different from instant messaging• cyberspace is not the Internet • things we’ve seen in the course

– rooms of servers and networking hardware– banks of television monitors and dome camera– out in the street

• technologies are not just the hardware you can touch. the invisible protocols and applications. social practices (e.g. cctv operators)

The importance of context• a key part of the unique contribution of social

scientists in analysing cyberspace is their concern for context

• local is important• everything is contingent. Socially embedded • hype almost always posits universalist notions• in a supposedly globalising world, technologies still

have different uses, meanings and are experienced differently, from place to place

• time contingent. the Internet today is very different from say 5, 10 years ago

Woolgar’s 5 ‘rules of virtuality’

1. the uptake and use of any new technology depend crucially on local social context

• e.g. extensive non and former use of the Internet• answer for ‘failure’ is usually non-technical

2. the fears and risks associated with new technologies are unevenly socially distributed (winners and losers)

3. virtual technologies supplement rather than substitute for real activities

• “… the indications are that virtual social life provides a further dimension to a person’s real social life, not a substitution for it.”

4. the more virtual the more real• myth of paperless office• email created more f2f meetings• peer music piracy will actually increase record sales?

5. the more global the more local• can only be understood through local context

• some may seem to be counter intuitive. but then you must ask who defines the conventional expectations of technology? In who interests do the assumed narratives on ‘impacts’ work for?

3. Cyberspace and the need to travel

drawing on a paper by Andy Gillespie and Ronald Richardson, "Teleworking and the city: Myths of workplace transcendence and travel reduction", in Wheeler J., Aoyama Y. and Warf B. (eds), Cities in the

Telecommunications Age: The Fracturing of Geographies

End of geography?

• cyberspatial technologies commonly assumed that enabling communication and organisation through computers will (logically) replace face-to-face interaction

• physical movement is a burden to be overcome and (hopefully) eliminated

• the death of distance where the “...social and psychological interaction, economic transactions and political relations may proceed unimpeded by the need for physical proximity.” (Woolgar 2002, page 2)

• In fact, the Internet is creating new geographies, new activity patterns of its own

• following Gillespie and Richardson (2000)• debunk three interrelated spatial myths of ‘disappearance

through redundancy’ 1. the unnecessary workplace2. the unnecessary city3. reduced need to travel

• spatial ‘glue’ that binds the city together is dissovlving. the city is an anachronism of the industrial age

• workplaces replaced by virtual teams in online workspaces and mobile offices

• “The problem with both visions lies in their impoverished understanding of the rationale for, and benefits of, physical presence.” (Gillespie & Richardson, p. 230)

• workplaces are going strong, e.g. thousands commutting daily into central london this morning!

• teleworking has stubbornly remained very low level• ‘work’ firmly embedded in its social and material

context of particular places• loss of F2F is much more significant than often

thought. people are sociable more than rational• much work is social, networking contacts• management problem of control and motivation. much

is informal level, e.g. reproduction of organisation’s culture/ethos and sharing tacit knowledge

1. The strength of workplaces

• Even low level teleservice type jobs also still grouped physically into call centres

• misreading the workplace as just an inert physical ‘container’ in space-time

• “What these approaches fail to recognize is that the workplace is a highly functional device for facilitating activities of collaborative work groups, which is how nearly all work is accomplished.” (Gillespie and Richardson, p. 232)

2. Death of the city - not likely!• empirical evidence is that cities are not

disappearing. percentage of urbanised population is increasing rapidly

• far from dissolving cities, cyberspatial technologies are actually strengthening role of certain major urban centres

• morphology of cities is changing - rise of megacities and edge cities

• mutually reinforcing demand for and ability to supply advanced telecommunications facilities and services are concentrated points

• Castells (2001) argues “… the Internet is in fact the technological medium that allows metropolitan concentration and global networking to proceed simultaneously. The networked economy, tooled by the Internet, is an economy made up of very large, interconnected metropolitan regions.” (page 225)

• territorial complexes of innovation. concentration of talent, ideas and power

• webs of power depend on F2F, social networks of decision-makers in cities

• economy of presence is an urban phenomena

• pattern of investment and supply- ‘hot spots’, surrounded by ‘warm haloes’ and then ‘cold shadows’. differentiated geography of cyberspace favours the centre not the periphery

• where does innovation occur? ‘cool’ things still happen first at the centre of large cities

• ‘creative class’ are predominately urbanites• compulsion for proximity is enhanced in a ‘speeded up’

economy. easy F2F is vital to make sense of risky, unstable and fluid situations.

• cyberspace increases risk and thus increases need for place-based social networks to handle this

3. The need to travel• concern for cyberspace and changing spatial

structure of the city. technology means people don’t have to move so much or so often?

• 4 possible interactions between travel and ICTs– substitution (ICTs decreases travel)– enhancement (ICTs generate new travel)– operational efficiency (intelligent transportation)– indirect, long-term impacts (land use and business

location decisions)

• not simple substitution. complex and contradictory implications

• even for classic teleworking scenarios it is likely not to reduce the need for travel

• cyberspatial technologies tend to expand ‘activity spaces’ in which work takes place and leading to longer distances

• hot-desking, mobile nomadic workers. fragmented lives• new ways of working get more diffuse and less nodal - more complex

journeys (often can not be done on mass public transport, like the 2-way daily commute)

• not reduced mobility, but the rise of hypermobility• “Far from contributing to more sustainable urban ways of life and

travel behavior, therefore, teleworking and teleservices seem to be developing hand in hand with lower-density, less nodal urban forms and with travel behavior that is more car-dependent than before.” (Gillespie & Richardson, 2000, pages 242-243)

Reading for this lecture• Two key articles:

• Andy Gillespie and Ronald Richardson (2000) "Teleworking and the city: Myths of workplace transcendence and travel reduction. In Wheeler J., Aoyama Y. and Warf B. (eds.), Cities in the Telecommunications Age: The Fracturing of Geographies, pages 228-248.

• Steve Woolgar (2002) Five rules of virtuality. In Woolgar S. Virtual Society? Technology, Cyberbole, Reality (3011 box file).

Coursework Assessment• 50% exam • 50% group project

– 20% taking part – 40% website and presentation – 40% individual report

• individual project report is due Wednesday 12th January 2005

Individual project report• you need to write 1,500 word report on the group project. • include a hardcopy printout of the full website and

powerpoint slides used in presentations• things you might want to discuss in the report

– results - your study area and what you found– advantages and disadvantage to this type of research methodology.

limits in the data collection. ethical issues?– your contributions to the project. how well the team worked. auto-

critique– maps effectiveness. content of the website, the design aims. Its

strengths and weaknesses. possible improvements

• written report - so don’t overlook presentation, spelling, writing style, etc. But most of all I am looking for your opinions, ideas and interpretations