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155
S.D. Brunn, S.L. Cutter, and J.W. Harrington (eds.), Geography and Technology,
123- 123. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
CHAPTER 7
MATTHEW ZOOK
MARTIN DODGE
YUKO AOYAMA
ANTHONY TOWNSEND
NEW DIGITAL GEOGRAPHIES: INFORMATION,
COMMUNICATION, AND PLACE
Abstract This chapter provides an overview of contemporary trends relevant to
the development of geographies based on new digital technologies such as the Internet
and mobile phones. Visions of utopian and ubiquitous information superhighways
and placeless commerce are clearly passé, yet privileged individuals and places are
ever more embedded in these new digital geographies while private and state entities
are increasingly embedding these digital geographies in all of us. First is a discussion
of the centrality of geographical metaphors to the way in which we imagine and
visualize the new digital geographies. Then the example of the commercial Internet
(e-commerce) is used to demonstrate the continued central role of place in new digital
geography both in terms of where activities cluster and how they vary over space. The
transformation of digital connections from fixed (i.e., wired) to untethered (i.e.,
wireless) connections is explored as to its significance in the way we interact with
information and the built environment. Finally is an examination of the troubling
issue of the long data shadows cast by all individuals as they negotiate their own
digital geographies vis-à-vis larger state and private entities.
Keywords Technology, telecommunications, social users of technology, e-commerce,
mobile phones, privacy
1. INTRODUCTION
Digital communications technologies are creating complex arrays
of new geographies through which we view, interact, and connect to the
world. It is now possible to view live shots of the Eiffel tower, chat with
a colleague in South Africa, or read a local newspaper from the comfort
of your home, from an Internet café in Chiang Mai, Thailand, or via
mobile phone in Helsinki. While this capability provides an image
(heavily promoted by the advertising of telecommunications companies)
of uniform and utopian connectivity, the reality of new digital
geographies is much more complex. The cost of these technologies, the
156 GEOGRAPHY AND TECHNOLOGY
ease, availability, reliability, and portability of their use, and even the functions
to which they are turned vary across time and space. Images of famous
landmarks may be easily available while vernacular landscapes are bypassed.
Certain parts of South Africa and Thailand (especially privileged spaces such
as cities and tourist destinations) are well wired while their hinterlands remain
cut off, and parts of the “developed” world such as Appalachia are struggling
to maintain meaningful digital connections. Even the space (private, public,
or publicly private) and means of connection (wired PC or wireless phone)
vary according to local availability and personal preference.
These new digital geographies (both social and economic) are by no
means technologically determined. Rather, the way in which places and people
become “wired” (or remain “unwired”) still depends upon historically layered
patterns of financial constraint and cultural and social variation. The geographic
and technological evolution of this digital infrastructure can therefore be
understood as a process of social construction of new (and often personal)
digital geographies. These new geographies are both immensely empowering
(for the people and places able to construct and consume them) and potentially
overpowering as institutional and state forces are able to better harness
information with growing personal and spatial specificity.
At the heart of new digital geographies is the ability to represent text,
sound, still, and moving images in digital formats which can then be transmitted
across common networks. This potentiality of shared transmission and
consumption via some digital receiver, be it a wired PC or a wireless phone,
is central to the geographical impact of information and communication
technologies (ICTs). The exemplar of this interoperability is the Internet, which
pioneered digital packet switching between disparate hardware and software
systems via a standardized set of protocols (Abbate 1999). Although in
existence for decades, mainstream Western society adopted the Internet during
the 1990s, often with unrealistic expectations that the technology would simply
substitute for geography in social and economic relations. Utopian visions of
a “digital and spaceless society” abounded, and thousands of so called dot-
com firms sprang up overnight intent on changing the structure of the economy.
Ironically, although the rhetoric often proclaimed an end of geography, ICTs
were and continue to be routinely imagined and understood through geographic
metaphors.
Metaphors of information superhighways and wired cities are useful in
imagining a world in which data is created, shared, accessed, and cross-checked
in historically unprecedented volumes. While primarily employed to emphasize
the exponential growth of “digital geographies,” metaphors were also central
in understanding the unevenness of these new landscapes. Some countries,
particularly relatively small ones such as Singapore or Finland, emerged as
NEW DIGITAL GEOGRAPHIES 157
so-called “cyberstates,” while others such as Estonia, Qatar, and Slovenia are
making considerable progress to this same goal although often with radically
different forms. Larger and wealthy countries such as the U.S. with developed
high technology industries were also able to quickly expand their presence in
digital geographies, albeit with significant digital divides. At the same time,
much of the developing world was limited to a few “digital islands” located
in capital cities and/or expatriate populations. Clearly a ubiquitous and uniform
global digital geography is more rhetoric than reality (Warf 2001).
Moreover, even in the densest parts of these new digital geographies,
ICTs are accessed, adapted, and appropriated differently depending on
individual and societal imagination, culture, and history. This is particularly
pronounced within the economic sphere, as legacies of earlier, firm
technological and cultural structures create forms of electronic or mobile
commerce (e-commerce or m-commerce) that vary considerably between
places. While dot-com companies envisioned a single predetermined global
digital geography, evidence suggests that there are multiple digital geographies
interconnected but situated in places that are instrumental in shaping any
interaction. The introduction of mobile connections further amplifies the
dynamic complexities of contemporary digital geographies. These technologies
enable an entirely new type of interaction, whether through peer-to-peer
communications or new uses of the built environment, melding access to
information and instant worldwide communications in portable and personal
packages. We are becoming unique and powerful digital individuals within
multiple digital societies.
Yet even as people are using information in new ways and places, it is
being distributed and made available in greater quantity and with
unprecedented details. An ever growing number of personalized records are
collected, and at times disseminated in the databases and customer management
systems of businesses, organizations, and government agencies that service
modern living, thereby connecting the world via a complex and ever-changing
array of digitized transactions of ever more personal records. The Orwellian
notion of “Big Brother” is now distributed and multiple but is indeed watching,
and the implications can be simultaneously reassuring (monitoring individual
health) and terrifying (tracking what is being read and with whom it is being
discussed).
This chapter provides an overview of various contemporary trends of
significant relevance in developing a theoretical framework for digital
geographies. First, we discuss the centrality of geographical metaphors to the
way in which we imagine and visualize the new digital geographies. We then
use the example of the commercial Internet (e-commerce) to demonstrate the
continued central role of place in new digital geography both in terms of
158 GEOGRAPHY AND TECHNOLOGY
where activities cluster, and also in how they vary over space. We explore the
transformation of digital connections from fixed (i.e., wired) to untethered
(i.e., wireless) connections, which has significance in the way we interact
with information and the built environment. Finally, we examine the troubling
issue of the long data shadows cast by every individual as they negotiate their
own digital geographies vis-à-vis larger state and private entities.
2. IMAGINING DIGITAL GEOGRAPHIES
In both popular and academic discussions of digital communication
technologies and their possible socioeconomic implications, a large panoply
of metaphors has been coined with a premise on geographic place, such as
superhighways, teleports, server farms, homepages, and so on (Adams 1997).
Likewise, the transactions and data exchanges at the heart of the so-called
Network Society (Castells 1996), are also frequently imagined and envisioned
in terms of “spaces”—hyperspace, dataspace, netspace and, of course,
cyberspace (Dodge and Kitchin 2001; Thrift 1996). The result, according to
Graham (1998), is digital geographies that are made tangible and knowable
through familiar territorial analogy.
Although useful for imaging new social spaces, the metaphors and
geographic analogies used are rarely neutral; rather they are active, ideological
constructs often deployed purposefully to hide the underlying realities. The
implication at the heart of many of these visions of digital geographies
(particularly prevalent during the dot-com boom) is that “something new,
different, and (usually) better is happening” (Woolgar 2002, 3), the rhetoric
often supporting a deterministic and utopian viewpoint, with new spaces
creating opportunities for free-market exploitation. There are few studies,
however, that explicitly aim at “getting behind” these spatial metaphors, to
begin describing how digital communication technologies actually do their
“work” at the level of individual, everyday performances of space (notable
exceptions include Adams 2000; Kwan 2002a; Valentine et al. 2002). Such
“invisibility” of analysis of communication within the geography discipline
(Hillis 1998) in part derives from the fact that, unlike transportation networks,
much of the telecommunications and network infrastructures supporting
cyberspace are small in scale and often remain hidden from the public view,
such as the case for fiber-optic cables that carry many gigabytes of information,
anonymous servers rooms, and secure, windowless buildings, with cables
buried under roads and running through walls and under floors (Hayes 1997).
Such invisibility may in part have led to the erroneous assumption that
cyberspace is somehow immaterial, aspatial, and nongeographic. “The net
cannot float free of conventional geography” (Hayes 1997, 214), however,
NEW DIGITAL GEOGRAPHIES 159
even though most users of the Internet may be oblivious about practicalities
of “where” and “how” data flows to successfully send e-mail.
Current technology requires information to be served from somewhere and delivered
to somewhere. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle not withstanding, at geographic
scales a bit always has an associated location in real geographic space.” (Goodchild
1997, 383-84)
The “where” and “how” of the physical embeddedness of data networks
is important, first, because of their highly uneven geographical distribution
and the consequent sociospatial implications in terms of access and inequalities.
Second, it is important because of the increasing concern for the physical
vulnerability of cyber infrastructure to terrorist attack, with damage to nodal
points potentially causing major economic and social impacts for
technologically dependent nations. Cartographic visualization provides one
useful way to envision and begin to analyze the “where” and “how” of these
digital geographies.
3. VISUALIZING DIGITAL GEOGRAPHIES
Efforts have already been made to map the material, economic, and social
geographies of cyberspace (Dodge and Kitchin 2001). They range from those
with a relatively basic cartographic design, such as the geographic layout of
cable infrastructures from the very local scale of city streets up to global scale
interconnections (as shown in Figure 7-1), to more sophisticated
representations. Cheswick and Burch created a visualization of the structure
of the core of the Internet using a graph representation (Figure 7-2). The
“map” shows the Internet’s topology as of December 11, 2000, representing
over 75,000 network nodes, color coded according to the ISP, seeking to
highlight who “owns” the largest sections of Internet. The choice of mapping
through abstract graphs also prompts one to think about the types of visual
representations, locational grids, and projections that are most effective to
map new digital geographies. For geographers, it raises fundamental questions
about how far Euclidean geography is useful or relevant to the analysis of
these digital spaces.
One key aspect that is missing from most current work on mapping
network infrastructures, including Cheswick and Burch’s, is information on
the nature of traffic flows and for what people are actually using the networks
(see Kellerman 2003). Yet mapping can reveal the nature of information
archives and social interaction by exposing their latent spatial structures (see
Skupin’s 2002 work on AAG abstracts). Online interaction is currently
dominated by visual interfaces, rather than aural, tactile, or olfactory interfaces,
which suggests that cartographic approaches are particularly apposite for
160 GEOGRAPHY AND TECHNOLOGY
representing information spaces and providing novel tools for their navigation
(Dodge and Kitchin 2001). Many of the most interesting cyberspace mapping
efforts produce nongeographic visualizations of information structures using
innovative processes of spatialization (Couclelis 1998).
Spatialization can be considered a subset of information visualization
and information retrieval, and is defined by Fabrikant (2000, 67) as the
processes of visualization that “rely on the use of spatial metaphors to represent
data that are not necessarily spatial.” The aim of spatialization is to render
large amounts of abstract data into a more comprehensible and compact visual
form by generating meaningful synthetic spatial structure (e.g., distance based
on lexical similarity) and applying cartographic-like representations, for
example by borrowing design concepts from terrain and thematic mapping.
Innovative developments in spatialization, information visualization, and
geovisualization are altering the nature of the map. Within geography, digital
Figure 7-1. An example of how cartography can be used to envision
infrastructure of digital geographies. This map shows Interoute’s fibre network
ring around the city of Amsterdam. (Source: TeleGeography’s Metropolitan
Area Networks Report 2003, http://www.telegeography.com.)
NEW DIGITAL GEOGRAPHIES 161
maps have increasingly become more tools for exploring data than static
representations for communicating results. Looking forward, developments
in digital communications technologies are likely to accelerate this as maps
become interactive and transitory, generated “on-the-fly” to meet particular
needs (e.g., web mapping services, in-car navigation, and on-demand mapping
to mobile devices). As maps become “intelligent” to some degree (i.e., aware
of the location context of the user), we will see mobile maps that provide an
individually tailored view of the world centered around the person’s location
and themed to match their interests. But as new modes of individualized and
context aware mapping are developed at fine scales and in real time, there
will be corresponding ethical and privacy implications to grapple with. These
new issues will involve politics just as in other forms of cartography, and
therefore their partiality and subjectivity should be taken into consideration
(Dodge and Kitchin 2000; Harpold 1999).
Figure 7-2. A graph visualisation of the topology of network connections of
the core of the Internet, December 11 2000. (Source: Bill Cheswick, http://
www.lumeta.com)
162 GEOGRAPHY AND TECHNOLOGY
4. COMMERCIALIZING DIGITAL GEOGRAPHIES
Arguably, one of the most powerful visions about the new digital
geography of the Internet was that distance would compress to nothing and
physical location would become irrelevant. The initial public offering (IPO)
of Netscape Communications in August 1995, through the market downturn
in April 2000, marked a boom in dot-com companies that strove to change the
way businesses and consumers conducted transactions. The dot-com boom
was a historically unprecedented effort to define and commercialize what
hitherto had been a fiercely noncommercial digital space and ushered in an
extraordinary moment in the economy.
The vision of this new commercial digital geography was so compelling
that the closing years of the twentieth century saw a tremendous expansion of
risk capital, media attention, and stock market growth based on dot-com
companies (Zook 2002). The subsequent bursting of the dot-com bubble in
April 2000 and rapid retreat from Internet companies (see Kaplan 2002 and
Cassidy 2002) has resulted in a marked decrease in rhetoric on the ability of
the Internet and e-commerce to transform the economy. Subsequent evidence
has shown that “spacelessness” was increasingly a mere product of imagination
as the twentieth century came to a close. Moreover, even at the height of the
boom, dot-com firms were overwhelmingly concentrated in major metropolitan
and technology centers (such as the San Francisco Bay area and New York
City), belying the very rhetoric they espoused (Zook 2000).
Despite this decline in visibility, e-commerce nevertheless persists and
affects the way all companies conduct business, albeit with significant variation
across sectors and business structures. For every spectacular dot-com flame-
out, there are examples of companies using the web in new and innovative
ways. This trend, however, does not mark a return to the economic system of
the pre-Internet era but is simply the next step in emerging commercial digital
geographies. These companies often have no formal risk capital, employ small
numbers of people, and receive little in the way of media attention. One of the
best known examples of this phenomenon is the listings site called Craigslist
(www.craigslist.org). Founded by Craig Newmark in 1995 as an e-mail listing
service, this no-frills website leverages what the Internet does best, i.e.,
aggregating relevant information from scattered sources (such as individuals)
in an easily accessible format. In the case of Craigslist, it catalogs subjects
such as apartment listings, garage sales, and job listings for a local area. It is
this simplicity and the low cost of use that makes Craigslist such a success
and a marked contrast to the dot-com hoopla of the 1990s. It will not turn its
employees into overnight millionaires but it does have the potential of growing
steadily while providing sufficient revenues and profits to continue. In fact, it
NEW DIGITAL GEOGRAPHIES 163
is because Craigslist was not conceived as a big moneymaker that it still exists.
Ironically, precisely because Craiglist did not go all out to capture a market or
build a community of users, it has been able to become an important node in
emerging visions of the commercial Internet.
Commercial digital geographies also manifest themselves differently
across space and cultures. The way in which consumers adopt e-commerce
varies greatly between societies, and such variations are directly and indirectly
linked with construction of space in each society (Aoyama 2001a, b, 2003).
The causes behind such variations are cultural (e.g., “keyboard allergy” or
the lack of familiarity with using the standard Western keyboard for typing
and entry), institutional and regulatory (i.e., structures of retail/wholesale
sectors, consumer behavior), and spatial (urban form and settlement patterns).
Consumer behavior is governed by convenience, familiarity, and social habits,
which in turn are shaped by the historical evolution of retail trade. Hence,
even societies with similar income and education levels vary in the manner
and the speed of technological adoption. For example, e-commerce
developments in Japan and Germany have each shown unique historical
trajectories and have followed their own distinctive paths.
The notable aspects of the evolution of e-commerce in Japan include (1)
the lack of widespread and historical use of long-distance, nonstore retailing,
(2) the early adoption of e-commerce by neighborhood convenience stores,
and (3) the widespread popularity of Internet-abled mobile telephones. The
lack of popularity for nonstore retailing in Japan is attributed to its densely
populated urban structure (which gave advantages to ubiquitous storefront
retailers), low reputation (proliferation of fraudulent nonstore merchants), tight
regulations (as a response to fraudulent merchants), and strategic blunder on
the part of retailers who, in the interest of protecting and increasing profitability,
did not implement generous return/exchange policies (Aoyama 2001b).
The adoption of e-commerce in Japan was initially associated with an
innovative strategy of neighborhood convenience stores. Japan’s convenience
store franchises, such as Seven Eleven Japan, used their ubiquity and
preexisting information network infrastructure (used for point-of-sale
inventory reduction) to bring e-commerce into their storefronts by setting up
dedicated terminals that sold game software, concert tickets, and travel
packages. While the U.S.’s e-commerce sector innovated by bringing virtual
storefront to every home, Japan’s e-commerce sector attempted to achieve
ubiquity first by bringing e-commerce to every storefront. This strategy was
later superceded by the emerging Internet-abled mobile telephone, which then
brought portable virtual storefronts to every consumer.
In contrast, long-distance retailing was an accepted, legitimate, and
established medium of consumption in Germany for over a century before e-
164 GEOGRAPHY AND TECHNOLOGY
commerce emerged. German nonstore retailers established an early reputation
for convenience, quality, and affordability, some with well-known brands that
were sold exclusively via their nonstore operations. Two World Wars caused
significant disruption of consumer activities, where nonstore retailers served
important purposes during the time storefront retailing was being restored. E-
commerce merchants benefited from this well-established practice of nonstore
retailing and accumulated significant business know-how. Germany today is
the largest e-commerce market in Europe, and is the home of two of the top
10 mail order businesses in the world. Furthermore, eight out of the top 10
German e-commerce websites are operated by longstanding catalog houses.
This is in stark contrast to Japan’s e-commerce market, where top websites
are dominated by new, exclusively e-tailer merchants, with the exception of
two that are run by traditional mail order firms.
Germany’s retail sector has been governed by Europe’s most stringent
set of regulations, and they played a major role in shaping competition between
storefront and nonstore retailers, the predecessors of e-commerce merchants.
Regulations that controlled store closing hours, competition, and spatial
planning severely restricted the use of marketing and locational strategies of
storefront retailers, thereby giving opportunities for nonstore retailers to grow.
In-store impromptu discounts and sales were against the law, and spatial
planning policy practically eliminated opportunities for storefront retailers to
use strategies such as those used by Wal-Mart in the U.S. (locating on the
edge of town to reduce property cost), or those by Seven Eleven Japan (locating
a small urban store near public transportation to capture commuters). Thus,
not only did nonstore retailers have lower operating costs than storefront
counterparts, storefront retailers could not exercise many of the conventional
retail strategies to out-compete nonstore retailers.
E-commerce also reaches beyond the realm of mainstream consumption
to underground and “gray” economies with decidedly geographic implications.
Today, the transfer of digital products and services such as online gambling
and pornography is a sizeable business generating significant revenue. These
activities have been shown to often locate outside the centers of the mainstream
Internet activities in more hospitable regulatory and labor regimes such as the
Caribbean and Eastern Europe (Wilson 2003; Zook 2003). The technology of
Internet does not itself determine the structure and role of these participating
places but offers new possibilities for participation, interaction and exploitation
based on existing historical and cultural attributes.
Thus, as the case of electronic commerce demonstrates, the form and
function of new digital geographies varies significantly across sector, place,
and culture. Moreover, any changes engendered by the use of digital
NEW DIGITAL GEOGRAPHIES 165
communications technologies generally take much longer than technological
visionaries hope. For example, David (1990) shows how a pivotal technological
innovation, the electrical motor, first introduced in the 1880s, took well over
four decades before altering the face of industry and fundamentally changing
the production process, e.g., from compact vertical to low-rise manufacturing
factories. Likewise, the new digital geographies that are emerging based on
the commercial use of the Internet are still in the state of dynamic flux—not
the least because the technology that supports these activities is also continuing
to evolve, as the shift towards wireless digital communications illustrates.
5. UNTETHERING DIGITAL GEOGRAPHIES
Although the dot-com boom and bust largely revolved around
technologies associated with wired PCs (particularly in the U.S. context),
wireless technologies (and the visions and metaphors associated with them)
are emerging as an increasingly important component of digital geographies..
Geographic research had only just begun to recognize the existence of this
new digital infrastructure despite the fact that mobile subscribers had always
outnumbered Internet users.
5.1. Wireless Technology, Local Variation
While mobile phone use enjoys worldwide popularity, it does so for a
variety of reasons. In countries with relatively undeveloped
telecommunications infrastructures, it represents an opportunity to “leap-frog”
over older landline technology in an efficient and economical manner and, in
many places, is fast replacing wired versions of telephony. Users in wealthier
countries are often attracted to the advanced data features, i.e., e-mail, photos,
and web access, that are increasingly common in mobile phones. Of course,
the precise combination of factors varies with the place, while industry and
regulatory issues shape the type of technology available.
The proliferation of the wireless web in Japan is an informative example
of how a particular sociospatial condition which allocates premiums on space,
portability, and ease of use, results in a specific digital geography. The
popularity of Internet-abled mobile telephones in Japan is the result of
combined technological and marketing schemes designed to provide an
affordable and user-friendly alternative, to those who did not have the money,
space, and computer literacy to handle PC-based Internet access (Aoyama
2003). NTT DoCoMo put together a project group in early 1997 to develop
the first Internet-abled mobile telephone service with deliberately limited
contents to avoid direct competition from PC-based Internet access (Matsunaga
166 GEOGRAPHY AND TECHNOLOGY
2000; Natsuno 2001). The team conceived the service to function much like
that of a hotel concierge or Japan’s convenience stores, providing a limited
yet essential array of services or products with instant access.
One can further speculate several society-specific factors that contributed
to a wide acceptance of wireless web in Japan: market positioning, portability,
urban spatial structure, and socially embedded user friendliness. Japan’s
sociospatial conditions accord high premiums for portability and space-saving
equipment, thereby creating a market for a service that provides portability of
access. Portability enabled through wireless web not only reduces cost and
time of communications, it also expands the timing and location of
communications, and enriches it through transfer of increasingly complex
multimedia features (Sanwa Research Institute 2001). Portability is particularly
attractive to residents in large metropolitan areas where commutes are long
and public transit is used heavily for travel, creating idle time. Over half of
the commuters in Tokyo Prefecture use public transit to get to work, with an
average commuting time of 56 minutes for the greater Metropolitan area
(Ministry of Construction 2000; Japan Statistics Bureau 2002).
The popularity of Internet-abled mobile telephones as a medium of
communication, particularly among the young, is not unique to Japan, however.
The wireless web, although to a slightly lesser extent, has been actively adopted
in Western European markets. The explanation is likely to lie in the success
of implementing common compatible technical standards (GSM/TDMA),
while the U.S. market is fractured between incompatible analog protocols.
Another explanation may be technological leapfrogging, which tends to occur
in the technological backwater areas. Unlike the U.S. market, where mass
home-ownership of Internet-abled PCs was achieved early, many Japanese
and Western European households lagged behind, which resulted in the absence
of significant competition against wireless web adoption.
In Germany, where mobile telephone ownership is actually higher than
Japan, usage (especially among the young) exploded with the introduction of
prepaid cards (Koenig et al. 2003). Much like the case of Japan, the early
adopters in Germany were teenagers, and today three-quarters of those aged
between 12 and 19 have a mobile telephone. The killer applications (the uses
of a new technology that drives its adoption) are similar across Japan and
Germany, and include downloading ring-tones or display logos, SMS greetings
(text messages), and simple games. Particularly for the youth, wireless web is
simultaneously a critical means of freedom as well as a means of ensuring
connection and mobility in an increasingly geographically and socially
dispersed world (Goban-Klaz 2002).
NEW DIGITAL GEOGRAPHIES 167
5.2. Changing Patterns of Mobility and Social Interaction
The widespread use of wireless technologies by teenagers illustrates the
way in which digital technologies are allowing people to interact with
information and the built environment in new ways. In the late 1990s, observers
noted changes in the mobility patterns of teens in countries around the world
that exhibited high levels of mobile phone ownership. Rather than meeting at
landmarks in public locations like plazas or street corners, youths tended to
loosely coordinate movements and meetings through constant communications
via mobile phone (Townsend 2000). Repeatedly and independently in various
cities, this pattern of coordinated mobility was understood via the metaphor
of flocking.
The flock-like behavior of teens using mobile phones was neither unique
nor representative of a limited phenomenon. This behavior was merely the
most visible manifestation of a widespread new type of emergent behavior in
the untethered digital geographies, the microcoordination of daily activities.
Put simply, the mobile phone permitted a much freer flow of information
within social and professional networks. Operating at a highly decentralized
level, these untethered networks carried the viral-like flow of information
first observed in e-mail usage on the Internet into streets, cafes, offices, and
homes. In these intimate, everyday locales, untethered digital networks became
far more essential and intricately interwoven into human society than any
wired network ever was.
By the first decade of the 21st century, mobile communications
technology had led to the creation of a massively hypercoordinated urban
civilization in the world’s cities. These flows had remarkably destabilizing
impacts on existing social and economic structures. Employed by smart mobs,
these new patterns of communication were successfully used in massive ad
hoc antiestablishment political demonstrations and actions from Manila to
Manhattan (Rheingold 2002).
While changes in the social networks of these untethered digital
geographies are now well documented, there was little research to help
geographers and urban planners understand the complex impacts on the
physical forms of the city. The urban environment generates an enormous
amount of information that needed to be anticipated, reacted to, and
incorporated into everyday decisionmaking. Information about constantly
changing traffic, weather, and economic conditions could be better transmitted
through mobile phones and other wireless digital media. Traditionally, cities
had functioned on a daily cycle of information flow with mass media like
newspapers, third spaces like bars and cafes, and family conversations at the
dinner table as the primary means of information exchange. With ubiquitous
168 GEOGRAPHY AND TECHNOLOGY
untethered communications, this old cycle was dramatically speeded up. As
the information cycle sped up, there was a corresponding increase in the rate
of urban metabolism–the pace at which urban economic and social life
consumed information and materiel–and the potential number of places where
interaction could occur. In effect, instead of the synchronous daily rhythm of
the industrial city coordinated by standardized time and place, untethered
communications were leading to a city coordinated on the fly in real time.
Untethered communications also provided more flexibility in travel,
supported higher levels of mobility among certain classes and places, and
helped increase the pace of all types of transactions, from making a business
deal to making a date. With the ability to rapidly get information to and from
the people who mattered most in any decision, the efficiency and flexibility
of entities (from the corporation to the family) to deal with changing conditions
was greatly enhanced. From this perspective, the use of systems such as mobile
telephony can be seen as a parallel globalization process, whereby individuals
may achieve the same flexible manipulation of space and time locally as
corporations have globally for many decades. In short, untethered digital
geographies are allowing individuals more freedom and control of the process
of constructing new (and often highly personal) geographies of how and where
they create and consume information. While this freedom and control is by
no means equally available (relatively wealthy and urban populations are at a
distinct advantage), and it does not dissolve other social divisions of gender,
age and race, it does suggest the potentially liberating aspects of these new
and diffusing geographies.
6. PANOPTIC DIGITAL GEOGRAPHIES
The individual empowerment afforded by the untethering of digital
technologies, however, is accompanied by an increased ability of businesses,
governments and other institutions to create panoptic geographies of people’s
lives, with important implications for individual privacy. Digital technologies
create many new types of records that entangle the daily life of each person
into a dense web of threads, across time and space, and easily give rise to
Orwellian visions. These threads are created through routine daily electronic
transactions (e.g., automatic bill payment or mobile phone calls) and
interactions (e.g., companies setting cookies to track individual surfing patterns
through the web). Each single item of transaction-generated information is
accumulated, byte by byte, to form an ever more panoptic picture of a person’s
life. People are also increasingly leaving digital tracks in noncommercial arenas
as more and more personal interactions are undertaken via computer-mediated
communication. E-mail logs and web surfing histories can be just as revealing
NEW DIGITAL GEOGRAPHIES 169
of a person’s daily behavior patterns and lifestyle as their bank statement,
medical records, and tax returns.
7. DIGITAL GEOGRAPHIES OF THE SELF: DATA
SHADOWS AND TRACKING
The result is that we have all become “digital individuals” (Curry 1997)
and are represented by a parallel “data shadow.” The data shadow is partial
and ever changing, it represents us in transactions where we are not bodily
present (e.g., authorizing an online purchase) and also identifies us to strangers
(e.g., the shop assistant). We produce our own data shadow, but do not have
full control over what it contains or how it is used to represent us. It has
become a valuable, tradeable commodity, as evidenced by the growth of credit
reference agencies, lifestyle profiling, and geodemographics systems (Goss
1995). A data shadow is inevitable in contemporary society and also necessary
if we wish to enjoy many modern conveniences; we can no more be separated
from it than we could be separated from the physical shadow cast by our body
on a sunny day.
This is not a wholly new concern as the threats to individual privacy
posed by digital “databanks” have been analyzed by commentators at least
since the mid-1960s when some of the first large-scale computerized systems
for storing and processing individual records were instigated (e.g., Vance
Packard’s 1964 book The Naked Society). Yet it is apparent that the growth in
both the extent and level of detail of people’s data shadows has inexorably
and dramatically accelerated in the last decade as digital geographies are
mediating more daily transactions.
The growth of our data shadows should not be viewed solely in dystopian
terms, as it is an ambiguous process, with varying levels of individual concern
and the voluntarily trading of privacy for convenience in many cases. But
much of the data captured through routine surveillance are hidden in the
background, easily accepted as part of everyday activities (Lyon 2003). Those
who try to opt out of using digital technologies as far as possible in their
personal life are hard pressed to avoid their routine inclusion in government,
business, and medical databases. Even technologically sophisticated people
often focus on the benefits that flow through their data shadow and give little
thought to the type and amounts of personal data that are captured every time
a card is swiped or a pin number entered. It is likely to become even harder to
undertake routine daily transactions in an anonymous fashion over the next
few years. Increasingly, developments in sociotechnical systems are able to
personally identify and track people through the objects people use. Examples
include smartcard tickets, electronic road pricing, new intelligent postal
170 GEOGRAPHY AND TECHNOLOGY
systems that can track the sender of all letters via “personalized stamps” (using
2D barcodes), and the likely deployment of radio frequency identification
(RFID) labels in retail goods. The security paranoia, post-9/11, is making it
much easier for governments and corporations to justify the introduction of
new layers of tracking, facilitated in large part by digital geographies.
The data shadow is undergoing changes as it becomes mobile, continuous
across time and space, longer lasting, and more widely accessible. The very
wireless technologies that afford us new flexibility in constructing our personal
daily geographies are simultaneously providing the means for our tracking.
The ability to determine the location of individuals at all times via cheap and
accurate Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and wireless tracking systems
will become commonplace in the next few years, encouraged in large part by
the development of novel location based services. There will be significant
implications for the nature of individual privacy as the data shadow can be
tied to place on an almost continuous basis. Conventionally, locational
coordinates for a person have only been recorded sporadically in their data
shadow at certain points of interactions (e.g., using an ATM). As yet, few
people have really begun to think through the consequences of the fact that
their movements through space are being tracked by mobile phones and
recorded by the phone company (see Phillips 2003 for an in-depth discussion).
8. FOREVER STORAGE AND BOTTOM UP
SURVEILLANCE
While people’s data shadows are becoming mobile and continuous, they
are also developing much longer memories, potentially holding digital records
forever. The capability to log, process and permanently store streams of
transaction-generated information about individuals (e.g., time, place of a
mobile phone call) has become feasible for most businesses and organizations
as the cost of computer storage has tumbled. Hard disks, in particular, have
become orders of magnitude bigger in the last decade, which has driven down
the cost per megabyte of storage at a rapid pace. This has effectively removed
the technical and cost barriers to storing the complete data shadow for the
whole life of the subject, with the consequence that what you say or do today
(e.g., post a message to a listserv, paying in a store with a credit card, speaking
to a friend on the phone) may well be logged and kept for the rest of your life,
with the potential to be recalled and analyzed at any point in the future. (Note,
there are, of course, still major technical challenges in the intelligent
summarization and analysis of such huge and detailed peta-byte databases.)
Long-term data retention is also being encouraged by the realization of
the commercial value, or likely future potential value, locked up in individual-
NEW DIGITAL GEOGRAPHIES 171
level transaction data. Also, governments are mandating long term data
retention on certain service providers (especially banking, health, and
telecommunications) because of its perceived rich evidentiary potential for
law enforcement. Like India ink, the marks people leave in cyberspace may
remain indelibly with them forever. The costs for individuals and society as a
whole of data shadows that never forget are manifold (see Blanchette and
Johnson 2002). When we all live in place with no fading memory, will this
give rise to a much more intolerant and self-policed society?
The emergence of “forever storage” of personal data is not only available
to institutions with large IT budgets. Access to massive digital storage is within
range of most anyone, with average retail PCs having ballooning hard disks.
Many academics and other professionals, for example, can store all their e-
mail communications in searchable archives, realizing their value as
information repositories. Many will have experienced the fact that each new
generation of PC they purchase has a storage capacity several times larger
than the old one, and they can simply copy over their entire digital store of
work. It becomes easier to keep documents and data just in case they might
be needed in the future as there is no longer a constraint of digital space for
the majority of users. This may well give rise to new forms of individual
memory keeping, the creation of permanent digitized scrapbooks and a virtual
diary of life events (an experimental example of this is the MyLifeBits project,
see Gemmell et al. 2002).
The beginnings of wholesale storage of your own copy of your data
shadow can be interpreted as part of a larger societal shift from a centralized
“Big Brother” to distributed “bottom-up” surveillance (Batty 2003). Digital
tools and software are providing many individuals with new opportunities for
detailed surveillance of physical and virtual spaces. Examples include
networked webcams, picture phones, and location tags for tracking loved ones.
Also, many large and detailed information archives and databases are now
online and available to individuals and can be quickly and easily searched.
Indeed, a surprising amount of personal information is seeping onto the web
and can be freely accessed directly through search engines. There is a noticeable
“Google effect” as information can be tracked down much more effectively,
fast dissolving the accepted notion of “privacy through obscurity.”
Twenty-somethings are going to search engines to check out people they meet at
parties. Neighbors are profiling neighbors. Amateur genealogists are researching
distant family members. Workers are screening co-workers. (Lee 2002, 1).
In the realm of academic research, the JSTOR archive (www.jstor.org) has
provided access to the full content of many major journals, through a simple,
searchable web interface. It has unlocked a wealth of previously hard-to-access
172 GEOGRAPHY AND TECHNOLOGY
material and added real value to the journal articles. Another example, is the
Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, a serial archive of the web that provides
a powerful illustration of the potential of “forever storage.” The Wayback
Machine makes it possible to travel in virtual time to surf websites as they
looked in the past (Figure 7-3). It enables everyone to access web pages that
have long been deleted.
8. FUTURE RESEARCH AGENDA
Newly emerged digital geographies have already had pervasive effects
on the contemporary economy and society, from businesses to peer-to-peer
communications, from consumption to urban space, and from network
infrastructure to the digital self. Digital geographies entail ever more complex
webs of infrastructural, social, cultural, and economic interactions that are
increasingly supported by, and are, digitized information. While the interactions
among technology, society, and geography are by no means unique to the
Internet or mobile phones, this chapter identified a set of processes and
emerging trends which are particular to digital communication technology.
Visions of utopian and ubiquitous information superhighways and placeless
commerce are passé, yet individuals and places are increasingly embedded in
new digital geographies while private and state entities are increasingly
embedding these digital geographies in all people and places.
Digital geographies are “democratizing” spatial data, making it less and
less the preserve of the professional geographer, cartographer, and surveyor.
As GPS and other spatially aware digital tools become more affordable and
widely used, the unique power of the locational key becomes available to any
business or individual, as easily as reading the time. Just as the marine
chronometer of the 18th century allowed ships to more efficiently locate
themselves and thereby facilitate the expansion of global trade, digital and
mobile GPS systems are ushering in a new era in the use of locational
knowledge, only at a vastly finer social and geographical scale.
Continuous and real-time knowledge of location is also inspiring a raft
of innovative new projects, particularly from computer-savvy artists and
community activist groups. Notable examples include GPS drawing, virtual
treasure hunts and games of hide and seek played in real places, and the posting
of geo-notes, so-called “mid-air messaging.” (This is a piece of information
assigned to geographic location that can then be read by people at the place).
These are speculative projects at the moment to a large degree but focus
attention on the ways that new digital geographies of wireless communications,
information sharing, and ubiquitous location data will be able to “remake”
material geographic environments in surprising, playful, and useful ways.
NEW DIGITAL GEOGRAPHIES 173
Figure 7-3. Top: A screenshot of the AAG homepage as it was in January
1997 available from the Wayback Machine. Bottom: A listing of all available
views of the AAG web pages from different dates stored in the Wayback
Machine. (Source: http://www.archive.org/)
174 GEOGRAPHY AND TECHNOLOGY
There is also hope that these types of efforts can lead to the creation of fine-
scale spatial data that is gathered in a participatory fashion, a kind of ground-
up, open-source digital map that is richer and more diverse in themes than the
conventional topographic data of government and commercial mapping
concerns.
In the realm of academic geography research, these digital geographies
potentially open new avenues as they make available unique new data sources
and quantitative methods of analysis. To give just one example, drawing on
the themes of visualization and individual tracking through the mobile data
shadow, we believe there is scope for a new type of real-time social geography.
The fusion of fine-scale individual activities patterns that are automatically
logged and novel forms of geovisualization could give rise to fully dynamic
time-space diagrams. (The work visualization in Kwan 2003b is clearly
pointing in this direction.) When many individual diagrams are aggregated to
the level of cities and regions, these visualizations may provide geographers,
for the first time, with truly dynamic maps of dynamic human processes. One
might imagine them as twenty-first century “weather maps” of social processes.
Yet, at the same time as the digital geographies give us new means to observe
and model society, they will also challenge current notions of privacy and
make the object of study that much more fragmented, dynamic, and chaotic.
The challenge will be to appreciate and use the complexity and richness of
the new digital geographies without dissolving into chaos or crystallizing
into authoritarian structures.
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