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1 Geographies of digital culture
An introduction
Tilo Felgenhauer and Karsten Gäbler
It is an often-heard diagnosis that the world and our everyday lives are currently undergoing major transitions (see, e.g., Floridi 2014 or Rifkin 2011). The advent of digital, especially mobile digital technologies seems to have changed nearly all domains of life, transforming the ways people share information, relate to one another, engage in political issues, act in public and private spheres, etc. Geographers in particular often stress that digital technology is closely associated with new spatialities, i.e., new perceptions of space, new spatial or corporeal practices, or new patterns of the distribution of digital devices and infrastructures. At first glance, it seems as if the so-called “Digital Turn” fundamentally altered—and continues to alter—our ways of being in the world (see Lagerkvist 2017).
From a social and cultural science perspective, however, the popular talk of a Digital Turn merits a second look. Indeed, the newly emerged digital culture and its geographies present us with previously unheard-of everyday practices. One might even say that the use of digital technology serves as a fundamental means of social integration today. In many contexts, possessing digital devices and broadband internet access means leading a “normal” life. From a geographical perspective, digital technologies derive much of their novelty from their capacity to (seemingly) deterritorialize everyday phenomena. For instance, virtual public spaces offer new forms of political expression for citizens and social movements and thus alter forms of political participation and protest (see, e.g., Kavada 2016; Lee et al. 2017; Maireder and Ausserhofer 2014). Digitally mediated communication also facilitates the simultaneous integration into dispersed communities, thus fostering multi-local lifestyles and intimate relationships from a distance (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2014). Digital labor additionally blurs the lines between work places and private places, producing both new forms of freedom and flexibility and new forms of exploitation (see, e.g., Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2011, 2014; Dyer-Witheford 2015; Huws 2003).
Yet, these forms of digital technology use are not in any way deterritorialized or “despatialized,” but produce—as will be shown in this book—their own spatial configurations. For instance, internet or telephone network access relies upon unequally distributed material infrastructures (as the rural-urban or other broadband divides indicate); network usage is embedded in national or territorial regulatory systems (see, for instance, the different laws for regulating data traffic surveillance or the debates on geoblocking); and access to devices and infrastructures is differentiated not only spatially, but also socially and culturally (for instance, marketing lingo’s “ubiquitous connectivity” does not reflect the lived experience for many people).
As we can see from these few examples, talk of a Digital Turn is ambiguous. New forms of “digital” practice intermingle with “pre-digital” forms of social organization, strategies of surveillance, regulation, exploitation, or patterns of social stratification, to name but a few.
As research in the history of technology has shown (see, e.g., Park et al. 2011 or Rid 2017), the current talk of a Digital Turn in many respects is historically shortsighted and tends to unjustifiably privilege the present. Emphasizing the novelty of real-time communication and global connectivity, for example, masks the fact that current technologies often merely perpetuate technological principles established in the mid-nineteenth century (see, e.g., Marvin 1988 and Wenzlhuemer in this volume). It is without doubt that the pervasiveness of modern digital devices—like the cellphone—and their integration into what Floridi (2014: 59ff.) has called “onlife,” distinguishes them from, say, nineteenth-century telegraph use. However, “Digital Turn” diagnoses often assert fundamental transformations of society-space relationships and thus tend to lose sight of the subtler geographical and socio-cultural changes associated with digital technology use. Talk of disruptive change tends to homogenize everything before and after the (moment of) transformation—as if everything in the twenty-first century was “digital” compared to a thoroughly “analog” past. Hence, research on the Digital Turn and its geographies requires both a historical perspective and an investigation of contemporary practices constituting digital culture.
In the following sections the overall scene for the contributions presented in this book will be set. We first identify some key features of the digital, trying to grasp the conceptual core of digital technology and its use from a rather general point of view. In the second part we offer a brief overview of current geographical research on the digital in geography with particular emphasis on research in social and cultural geography. The final section outlines three fields of research on digital culture and presents the overall structure of the book.
Putting digital culture in perspective
Questions of digital technology have been around for a while in social and cultural science. Whereas the dissemination of personal computers (PCs) to a wider public since the mid-1970s and the development and common use of the World Wide Web since the early 1990s have, for instance, raised questions of organizational change (see, e.g., Berghel 1997; Morell 1988; National Academy of Engineering 1983), or questions of the growing significance of information for modern societies (see Manuel Castells’ trilogy “The Information Age,” and in particular Castells 1996), since at least the mid-2000s an increasing portion of literature on digital technology focuses on everyday practices and the advent of a quotidian digital culture (see, e.g., Couldry 2012: 33ff.; Horst and Miller 2013; Poster 2006). In particular, a renewed theoretical interest in the relationships of technology—conceived as software and hardware—and society has emerged since then (see, for instance, Berry 2014; Dolata 2013; Matthewman 2011; Miller 2011). While on the one hand acknowledging the essential role of technology for modern societies, most of these more recent positions reject the implicit and explicit technological determinisms popular in earlier accounts of the digitalization and assert theories of socio-technical co-evolution. One of these approaches’ main questions is: How are “digital” technologies distinct from other technologies?
Surveying the numerous insightful answers offered to this question (see Miller 2011 for a particularly discerning approach), three elements seem particularly striking from a geographical point of view: (1) digitality, (2) network character, and (3) mobility.
(1) It is all but surprising that digitality and digitalization are the central terms to understand the processes commonly described as the Digital Turn. Despite the apparent self-evidence of these concepts, they turn out to be remarkably ambiguous upon a second view. Digitalization, for instance, serves as an umbrella term for various things (Passig and Scholz 2015). On the one hand, it refers to developments such as the rapid diffusion of large computer systems and later of PCs in public administration, hospitals, etc. since the 1970s, or to the current permeation of everyday lifeworlds with networked devices and their social, cultural, or economic effects. Such accounts of digitalization are fundamentally bound to a user’s point of view; they presume technological change, but they do not address the underlying technical procedures.
On the other hand, the term “digitalization” (in a somewhat imprecise fashion) is also used to refer to the conversion of analog data into a binary numerical system, or, to code information using 1s and 0s. This notion of “digital” can be traced back to the Latin noun “digitus,” meaning the finger used to count. In academic language, the process of transforming information into 1s and 0s is thus often called “digitization,” as opposed to “digitalization,” denoting the consequences of digitization for institutions and organizations (Brennen and Kreiss 2016). Digitization as the underlying core practice of digital culture has been discussed extensively in practical contexts, but has, of course, historically also always been a subject of mathematics or philosophy.
With regard to the transformative capacity of digitization, the translation of continuous into discrete numeric values initially seems to be of particular importance, because it comprises a fundamental reduction of complexity. This has significant consequences for technically mediated communication, because it could be said that any device able to represent two sufficiently different states may perform digital information processing. In a historical perspective then, we can observe digital communication independently of the use and availability of electric power—think, for instance, of optical telegraphic devices like the heliograph, a mirror using reflected sunlight as a communication signal, or flag telegraphy (see Maddalena and Packer 2015: 94ff.). In geographical respect, such digitally enabled detachment of information transmission from the mobility of a physical carrier facilitated long-distance communication. With the marriage of electricity and digital information encoding—best represented by the Morse code and the telegraphic system developed in the 1830s and 1840s—digital communication saw its first heyday.1
Another influential property of the digitization of information is that it allows for electronically enhanced computation. In fact, it seems as if many of the features currently ascribed to digital culture are rather an effect of computation than of sheer digitality. Nowadays, automated data processing—from simple algorithms through to notorious “big data” applications—shapes a big part of our technologically mediated experiences and our ways of constructing reality (see, e.g., Amoore and Piotukh 2016; Seyfert and Roberge 2016). For instance, what is being presented to us as relevant information by digital media—what news and advertisements we get to read, what search results we get, etc.—is mainly a result of algorithmically analyzed (user) data. As has been pointed out by many critical approaches (see, e.g., O’Neil 2016), algorithms in this sense (as automatically acting instances) possess agency. However, with regard to the historical dimension of digital culture it should be noted that algorithms—conceived in a general sense as pre-defined steps and instructions to solve certain tasks—are in principle independent from modern electronic technologies but can be traced back to the eighteenth century and its mechanical computation machines. In particular, Charles Babbage’s “Analytical Engine,” developed as early as the first half of the nineteenth century, mechanically embodies the modern-day idea of a computer as an automatic calculating machine (Burckhardt 2017: 50ff.).
Finally, processes of digit(al)ization and the respective juxtaposition of “analog” and “digital” are fuzzy in another, usually quite unexpected way. As Passig and Scholz (2015: 78f.) have pointed out, the binary opposition of “analog” and “digital” is not even convincing in a technical sense, since discrete values like 1 and 0 can only indirectly be represented in computers. Instead of clear distinctions between “power on” and “power off,” computers need to operate with continuous voltage ranges and—more or less arbitrary—thresholds. What is analog and what is digital then depends on the perspective or scale the observer selects. As this book will show, there is good reason to assume that this holds true also for the distinction of an analog and a digital realm of everyday life (in particular, see Montuoro and Robertson’s contribution in this volume).
(2) The second key element of digital culture to consider is network character. The integration of stationary and portable electronic devices into everyday life considerably increased with public access to global communication networks such as the internet from the early 1990s onwards (see, e.g., Kohut et al. 1995 for the U.S.-case). It can reasonably be stated that digital culture as to a large extent known today is a product of web-enabled (mobile) devices.2 In today’s digital practices, links to distant others are constantly created, constituting subjects as nodes in communication networks; the World Wide Web is used more or less effortlessly as a comprehensive, globally linked information system (see Wilson et al. 2013: 48) and non-human actors are becoming more and more integrated into an internet of (intelligent) things.
Whereas it is true that the internet has massively boosted global connectivity—like the telephone and the telegraph before—and brought all kinds of computers into common use, networking as a practice, of course, is not at all bound to twentieth or twenty-first century digital (electronic) technologies. From a very general point of view, networking means nothing more than creating connections between two or more entities and setting up processes of circulation. Networks thus consist of nodes, links, and streams, constituting a topological space. In this wide sense, networking must be considered to be a fundamental, almost inevitable human practice. Yet, using the image of a network to describe interconnected entities is a rather modern affair. Giessmann (2014: 17; see also Barkhoff et al. 2004), for instance, points out that networks as explicit interpretative models have been used at least since eighteenth century discourses.3 Osterhammel (2014: 710ff.) on the other hand, associates networks with the nineteenth century “transformation of the world” and in particular with the development of circulative systems in the domains of traffic and communication (e.g., regular steamship service, railway, telegraphy), commerce (e.g., stable international trade relations), and money and finance (e.g., adjusted international currency systems). According to Osterhammel, networks possess a fundamental geographical dimension and are essentially linked to globalization.
With regard to today’s digital technologies, the network character seems to be particularly pertinent: Digital communication, for example, is often bidirectional or interactive—content can be exchanged by many agents, and information can be shared more or less easily. This is important to note because it multiplies the information potentially available. As Miller (2011: 15) points out, the multitude of active nodes in networks (namely, subjects producing content) increases the diversity of choice, thus challenging the informational monopolies represented by “old” one-way media. However, as the debates on internet surveillance or “fake news” indicate, utopian visions of a democratization through networked digital practices must be handled with great care.
Digitally mediated circulation of information between subjects, additionally, can be experienced as physical presence at a distance. In particular, the convergence of visual and audio communication channels in modern devices and the availability of broadband internet connections facilitated the seeming irrelevance of bodily locations (see Miller 2011: 31f.; for an early account ...
