Virtual Geographies

Bodies, Space and Relations

Mike Crang, Phil Crang, Jon May

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134703746
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This book examines the interrelationship between telecommunications and tourism in shaping the nature of space, place and the urban at the end of the twentieth century. They discuss how these agents are instrumental in the production of homogenous world-spaces, and how htese, in turn, presuppose new kinds of political and cultural identity.

Virtual Geographies explores how new communication technologies are being used to produce new geographies and new types of space. Leading contributors from a wide range of disciplines including geography, sociology, philosophy and literature:
* investigate how visions of cyberspace have been constructed
* offer a critical assessment of the status of virtual environments and geographies
* explore how virtual environments reshape the way we think and write about the world. This book sets recent technological developments in a historical and geographical perspective to offer a clearer view of the new vistas ahead.

1 Introduction

Mike Crang, Phil Crang and Jon May

The collection

Whether framed through the more generalised notion of cyberspace, or the more specific phenomena of the Internet, the World Wide Web, Virtual Reality, hypertext and genres of science fiction such as cyberpunk, it is hard to miss the proliferating debates over the social and geographical significance of new technologies of computer mediated communication. For some, these technologies are seen as facilitating, if not producing, a qualitatively different human experience of dwelling in the world; new articulations of near and far, present and absent, body and technology, self and environment (for a collection of essays mostly in this spirit see Featherstone and Burrows 1995). For others, emphasis is laid on the capacity of digitalisation to integrate previously separate operations such as computation, communication and surveillance, with the consequent emergence of new informational networks and ‘spaces of flows’, with associated morphologies of connection and disconnection (see Castells 1996). In either case, what is at stake is, at its starkest, the suggestion that computer mediated communication technologies are ‘generating an entirely new dimension to geography… Virtual Geography’ (Batty 1997b:339).

This collection of fourteen essays is provoked by such claims. Provoked, in that we endorse calls to take the development and use of these technologies seriously, to subject them to careful conceptual and empirical scrutiny, and to be open to the possibility that they embody different kinds of spatialities to those hegemonic within theorisations of ‘non-virtual’ worlds; but also provoked by worries about the danger of falling into what Otto Imken, in his contribution to this volume, calls ‘cyperbole’, an overdrawn opposition of the real and the virtual, whether this be through the reproduction of the (self-) promotional rhetorics of committed cyber enthusiasts and marketers or the dystopian visions of cyberpessimists. Instead, this collection, whilst not without some claims for a radical transformation of social life as constituted through virtual technologies—Imken's own chapter is a wonderfully engaging example—seeks to approach the virtual in ways that allow a serious analysis of particular socio-technical developments but also avoid their fetishisation as unambiguous locations of social good or evil. Collectively, four main elements to this approach can be identified.

The first is to eschew any simple technological determinism. In part this is based on a recognition that virtual technologies and virtual geographies are not synonymous. This collection's understanding of Virtual geographies’ is therefore that they include virtual technologies but are also constituted by the social relations, discourses and sites in which these technologies are embedded. Technologies are not self-contained entities that impact on the social. To use Nina Wakeford's terminology in her contribution on an Internet café, technologies cannot be considered in isolation from the ‘landscapes of translation’ in which they are encountered, used and for which they may be designed. One impact of this is that technologies have to be seen as socialised. Crucially, this is not a question of already existing technologies being reworked in a social realm that we can locate as exterior to them. No technology can come into being without its socialisation; and this socialisation is an ongoing process throughout the circuits linking technological production, distribution and usage. An example of work in this vein is that on the constructed and contested genderings of technologies, an issue pursued in this collection through considerations of the gendered forms of communicative interaction associated with technologies such as the Internet, through the gendered forms of communality they facilitate, through the gendered forms of expertise associated with computational and communicative technologies (and note the potential for multiplicity here), and through the gendered qualities of the spatial textures users are involved in (see the contributions of Wakeford and Joyce in particular). Moreover, as the case of gender exemplifies, technologies are not just socialised as technologies. They are also socialised as a variety of other entities—for example as commodities, as property and infrastructure, as the objects of attention for workers and consumers, as tools for economic and regional development, as items of interior decoration, as genres of literature— and in consequence are constituted through a range of social dimensions that, at first sight, might seem to have little to do with technology or indeed virtuality (see also Silverstone et al. 1992). Of course, at the same time it is important to recognise that technologies are also in part constitutive of these social dimensions. Just as technology does not come into being outside of the social, so the social does not come into being outside of the technological. To that extent, and although the language is difficult here, one can speak of the power of technology to affect social relations, without succumbing to technological determinism. One way to express this is to speak of a dialectic composed of the social shaping of technology and the technological building of the social (Bijker et al. 1987; Bijker and Law 1992) (see also Stein's contribution to this volume). Or pushing this a fraction further, one arrives at a conceptual emphasis on the ‘technosocial’ (see Bingham 1996 and this volume). Associated in particular with the writings of Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, this involves a recasting of the social so that it no longer excludes non-human actants, and a consequent conceptualisation of technological formations as ‘co-productions between people and things’ (Bingham this volume: 253). The question of technological determinism therefore becomes redundant, as the very entities of the technological and the social are themselves deconstructed.

We will have more to say on this, and in particular on the alternative questions and forms of analysis suggested by this deconstruction, when we come to introduce the individual contributions. For now, though, let us turn to a second feature that characterises the collection as a whole: its emphasis on historical geographies of virtuality. Given the aura of futurology that surrounds discussions of the virtual this may seem paradoxical. However, it is important, we would argue, to counteract or at least question the associations with novelty and epochal transition that cling to the subject of virtual geographies. For instance, one can point to how contemporary celebrations and worries about computer mediated communications are paralleled in debates over ‘past’ virtual technologies, such as the television, the telephone (see Stein this volume) or even the camera obscura (see Hillis this volume). (We place the now obligatory quote marks around ‘past’ to signal that the associations of technologies with modernity are contingent not only historically but also geographically; for much, indeed most of the world, the telephone is still thoroughly new and modern.) For example, as Jennifer Light argues in her essay on cityspace and cyberspace, ‘while statements such as “something unusual is happening today in the relation between the real and the imaginary” (Soja 1996:242)…. may be applicable today, they would also have characterised observations of fifty and one hundred years ago’ (this volume: 124). It is also important to emphasise the dangers of falling into either an uncritical celebration of the new as new (the ideology of modernisation beloved of the technophile) or an unproductive lamentation for all that is perceived to be threatened by it (an ideology of nostalgia, mobilised by many a technophobe, but often as detrimental to a critical understanding of the past as it is to any account of the present and future). And at a more substantive level, one needs to recognise how new technologies are in part socialised via their shaping according to old, existent technologies. None of this should be taken as denying the possibility of contemporary virtual geographies being in some important respects new and different. However, it does highlight how our investigations of these contemporary virtual geographies can benefit from a historical perspective. First, through the sharper focus this gives on just what is different and new about them. Second, through an insistence on moving beyond simplistic periodisations of a virtual future, a partly virtual present, and a non-virtual past, and towards more textured understandings of the varying forms of virtuality worked through different technologies in different times and places. And third by conceptualising and responding to contemporary changes through the lens of longer running processes of virtuality, for example in terms of histories of vision (Hillis), space-time distanciation (Bingham), civic life (Light), mediatised communication (Froehling), or writing, reading and representation (Joyce).

The presence in the previous sentence of a number of different longer histories through which the contemporary virtual geographies of computer mediated communication can be framed makes even more obvious something we have so far been skirting around, but no doubt readers have already been pondering. The question of just what we or anyone else means by the virtual in virtual geographies. The collection addresses this at two levels, both of which also contribute to the ethos of toning down the epochal hyperbole attached to virtuality. Substantively, both within and between essays there is an emphasis on the heterogeneity of material —semiotic practices constituting virtual geographies. There is a diversity to both the constitution and character of virtual geographies. Hence, for example, we can see how ‘the production and consumption of ideas of cyberspace take place in many very different contexts’ (Kneale this volume: 205) including: generically conventionalised technologies and techniques of writing and reading (the term comes from William Gibson's short stories and novels) (see Kneale and Joyce this volume), as well as practices of and on the net (see Wakeford and Froehling this volume), and the more strategic visions of planners and place developers (see Light this volume). Indeed one potential conclusion is that cyberspace is in fact produced through the interrelationships between these practices, in so far as planners read (or at least quote) William Gibson, or William Gibson's readers use the Internet and use it to make sense of what they read, or the Internet is marketed through auras drawn from cyberpunk science fiction and/or virtual urban planning. There is then no single version of cyberspace, but a plurality of networked conceptions, each associated with particular generic and geographical sites, and translated for others with varying degrees of success. It is these sites, networks and their translations that we need to understand if we are to investigate the production of cyberspace or other virtual geographies (Ray and Talbot use this approach in analysing rural telematics).

More generally, the work collected here emphasises how unhelpful it is to seek or proclaim a singular character to virtual geographies. This is worth stressing as, perhaps because of the limited volume and depth of work on virtuality, there is still a tendency to conduct debate in these terms: to ask whether virtual worlds are democratising or controlling; whether they are a liberation from the structures and drags of the non-virtual world, or marked by an intensification of existing, ‘real world’ relations of inequality and domination; and so on. This totalising logic produces a bluntness of analytical judgement, fetishises and over-simplifies both the virtual and the non-virtual (of which more below), and allows little room for expressing variations across virtual time and space. It is hardly surprising then that, in contrast, arguments can be found in this volume for virtual geographies as being both de-centred and centralising, masculinist and feminist, rationally ordered and inconceivable to the rational mind. In part, this is a reflection of fundamental ambiguities which are constitutive of particular virtual geographies. For example, Ken Hillis’ account of virtual reality points to its paradoxical combination of self-centred rationalist realism—through an emphasis on viewers making sense of what they are immersed in—and of de-centred magical transcendence— through an abandonment to this received virtual environment. As he puts it:

VR thereby achieves a cultural point of purchase with subjects who seek to maintain control over their individual production of meaning even as they might play with the spectre of abandoning the formal maintenance of modern identity to external sources such as VR and the ‘performativity’ it encourages.

(Hillis this volume: 31)

But more prosaically the problems with any ‘once and for all verdicts’ on the character of virtual geographies are a result of the many kinds of virtual geographies in existence and yet to come into being. So, for example, the Internet is, unsurprisingly, far from homogeneous. Thus Nina Wakeford's chapter on the gendering of the net mentions in passing the varying moral norms with regard to styles of communication found in different MUDS and MOOS, and between discussion lists and newsgroups, to the extent that ‘online landscapes cannot be characterised by a single set of conventions relating to gender’ (this volume: 187). And of course the net cannot be taken as a generalisable model for all computer mediated communications, let alone contemporary virtual geographies. The matrices of integrated telematics have a number of different arms. Stephen Graham's chapter, for example, examines integrations of surveillance, computational and simulatory technologies (themselves as diverse as digital CCTV, electronic tracking and geo-positional technologies, and home teleservices) and, in contrast to the emphasis on the difficulties of controlling the operations of the Internet (see for example Shade 1996), draws out their role in intensified state and commercial practices of surveillance. The character of virtual geographies is dependent on what sort of virtual technosocialities one chooses to focus on.

Substantively, then, we have to unpack the category of virtual technologies, both through identifying the different forms in which computer mediated communicational networks are being developed and, as we suggested earlier, through recognising the much longer histories of virtuality that have preceded and coexist with these technologies. Even more importantly, this needs to be paralleled by a conceptual unpacking of virtuality, an exploration of the dimensions through which this empirical diversity is structured. Four such conceptual dimensions, we think, can be seen to be highlighted and developed in the essays that follow: we term these simulation, complexity, mediazation and spatiality. These are far from mutually exclusive, but each signifies a rather different approach to virtuality, and stimulates slightly different questions about it. The first three emphasise the virtual constitution of our human geographies, the last highlights the geographical constitution of the virtual. We will now say a little about each in turn.

Dimensions of virtuality

Simulation is perhaps the dominant dimension through which virtual technologies are popularly conceived. Notwithstanding their influence in understandings of the virtual, here we use the term not as a sign of adherence to Jean Baudrillard's particular formulations (Baudrillard 1994a), but to signal a looser set of understandings in which the virtual is positioned in relationship to the real, indeed as its Other, in an oppositional imaginative geography which at the same emphasises the mutual constitution of reality and virtuality (Said 1978). A number of potential approaches to virtual geographies results. First, as Marcus Doel and David Clarke argue in their insightful concluding essay, this oppositional framing frequently positions the virtual as a copy, always striving towards but never quite achieving a mimetic replication of the real. Hence the presence of a two-sided cult of authenticity around the virtual, which generates both the promotional celebrations of each step made closer to this replication (whether within popular culture of the new virtual realities and digital special effects that are even more real, or in academic culture of the computational geographies that deliver an ever more exact portrait of reality ‘on the ground’), but also the criticisms of the virtual as being a retreat from, and poor substitute for, real life (for example the stigmatic stereotype of Internet chat users as rather sad individuals, either unable to cope with or increasingly divorced from face-to-face social interaction; or the broader social critique of virtuality for a retreat into idealised fantasy worlds rather than facing up to real world issues).

Second, despite the dominant rhetorics of mimesis, there is the potential within the dimension of simulation to argue for the continuing representational nature of virtual geographies; to emphasise that despite some claims made on their behalf, computer mediated communications do not institute a post-symbolic order. They do not pull off what Donna Haraway calls the ‘God trick’. Paralleling the forms of critical analysis applied to literary and artistic representation, studies in this vein might involve an exposition of the poetics and politics of the virtual worlds and subjects created in virtual space: the bodily picturings of avatar personae, the social and geographical landscapes of games and other simulations, and so on. Perhaps more provocatively, it can also stimulate an investigation of the different representational economies of varying virtual technosocialities. In this volume, for example, Ken Hillis’ chapter provides just such an analysis of VR, at least in terms of its emphasis on visuality, teasing out the complex and often ambivalent conceptions of optics and truth that it mobilises. More implicitly, Michael Joyce's evocation of hypertextuality is a highly suggestive thinking through of the reconfigurations of representational authority that hypertext can produce, as it reconfigures the compositions and locations of authors, texts and readers and the relations between them.

A third approach to the virtual—real opposition can also be detected here: the recognition not just of virtual realities but of ‘real virtualities’ (Castells 1996), operating in parallel to the ‘real-real’. The virtual not as copy or representation but as alternative. Sometimes these virtual alternatives are conceived as problematic; sometimes as socially and politically progressive. The anthropologist Danny Miller has recently developed a strong argument of the former sort in an analysis of the regressive socio-political implications of the virtual, abstract worlds of economic modellers, public service auditors and postmodern theorists (Miller 1998). The juxtapositions here are themselves provocative, but let us just stay with the first of these. Miller's contention, part of a longer running opposition to the dominant intellectual project of contemporary economics, is twofold: that economists’ understandings of economics are woefully detached from the real, lived worlds of the producers and consumers involved in the practice of lived capitalism; but, and here is the rub, that they also have the authority to impose their own detached visions on to those real producers and consumers. Structural adjustment is the epitome of this brutal virtualism. Miller's verdict is worth quoting at length:

Structural adjustment…comprises a series of procedures and models devised by groups of economists working within some of the key institutions that were set up following the epochal meeting of Bretton Woods. These models, fostered by the IMF, World Bank and their ilk are purely academic models, in the sense that they seem to pay no attention whatsoever to local context…they are simply idealised and abstract models that represent the university departments of economics engaged in academic modelling…. So while capitalism as a process by which firms seek to reproduce and increase capital through the manufacture and trade in commodities has become increasingly contextualised, complex and often contradictory (Miller 1997), another force has arisen which has become increasingly abstract. These are academics, paid for by states and international organizations and given the freedom to rise above context to engage in highly speculative processes of modelling…. While capitalism was forced to engage with the world and was thus subject to the transformations of context, economics remains disengaged…. Social scientists may not think of academics as particularly powerful—but then they are not economists…economics has a form of power that again surpasses early capitalism, that is the legitimate authority to transform the world into its own image…. In short, in every case where the existing world does not conform to the academic model the onus is not on changing the model…but on changing the world…, and the very power of this new form of abstraction is that it can indeed act to eliminate the particularity of the world as a series of distortions which prevent the world from working as the model predicts it should.

So it is not that the principles of the market represent capitalism, but that capitalism is being instructed to transform itself into a better representation of the model of the market.

(Miller 1998:8–9)

Miller's argument, then, is that structural adjustment is not a product of the inherent and unyielding logic of capitalism, but of the abstractions and decontextualisations of a particular form of virtualism: academic economic modelling. Whilst Miller is tentative about its wider applicability—he writes ‘I do not pretend to be clear myself as to how far the argument works in relation to other phenomena such as…the virtualism of virtual reality within computer technologies’ (1998:2)—we ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Sussex Studies in Culture and Communication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Embedding the virtual
• Part II Cyberscapes
• Part III Thinking and writing the virtual
• References
• Index