Geographies of Digital Exclusion

Data and Inequality

Mark Graham, Martin Dittus

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781786807427
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Humangeographie

Today's urban environments are layered with data and algorithms that fundamentally shape how we perceive and move through space. But are our digitally dense environments continuing to amplify inequalities rather than alleviate them? This book looks at the key contours of information inequality, and who, what and where gets left out.

Platforms like Google Maps and Wikipedia have become important gateways to understanding the world, and yet they are characterised by significant gaps and biases, often driven by processes of exclusion. As a result, their digital augmentations tend to be refractions rather than reflections: they highlight only some facets of the world at the expense of others.

This doesn't mean that more equitable futures aren't possible. By outlining the mechanisms through which our digital and material worlds intersect, the authors conclude with a roadmap for what alternative digital geographies might look like.

1

We All Are Digital Geographers

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don’t exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

(John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, 1996)

THE CARTOGRAPHIC ATTRIBUTES OF THE INVISIBLE¹

The internet used to be a faraway place. You would tap into the net through a clunky terminal and be transported into another world. People talked about travelling down an information superhighway, and surfing the net. We would enter a cyberspace and get ‘online’. It was never fully clear where the internet was, but what all of those visions had in common is that they weren’t here. John Perry Barlow’s ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’ famously summed up some of these transcendent visions. The internet was a new world for all of us to build: a world with its own culture, economy, politics, ethics and – most importantly – space.

But with every year since the penning of that Declaration in the late 1990s, something else has happened instead. We have found ever more ways of embedding the internet into everyday life and everyday places.

Temperance Street, Manchester

Temperance Street in Manchester is a short road that is only a stone’s throw from Manchester Piccadilly train station. It looks a lot like many other streets near British railway stations: on one side there is a brick viaduct for the main rail line into Piccadilly. The arches under the viaduct host garages, wholesalers and other businesses that don’t necessarily need to be in a more trafficked area. Moss, weeds and bushes grow out of the bricks, giving the road a relatively unkempt – even dishevelled – look.

Temperance Street is therefore a rather unassuming place, and most people from outside of Manchester (and indeed many within it) had likely never heard of it until Google Street View helped to bring this small corner of the city to fame. However, the attention it received was not necessarily the sort of attention that the Manchester tourist board would have chosen.

Like most European cities, most of Manchester is mapped by Google’s Street View feature, which allows people to virtually ‘be there’ in a three-dimensional snapshot of every navigable part of the city. Ironically, Temperance Street – named after the nineteenth-century mass movement to promote abstinence from excesses – was the site of an extremely public sex act. Anyone using Google Maps to navigate through that part of the city to the station wouldn’t just see the garages, parked cars and railway arches that make up Temperance Street; they would also see an image of a woman performing fellatio on a man leaning, pants down, against the viaduct.

After being noticed, the image quickly went viral. Journalists expressed shock that such a scene could be found in Google’s depiction of Manchester, and social media commentators took great delight in seeing the city documented in such a raw and uncensored way. Before long, Google had removed the offending stretch of road from Street View.

Where is Jerusalem?

The city of Jerusalem has been at the centre of ethno-political struggles for millennia. As a holy city to Jews, Christians and Muslims, the city is ascribed with tremendous importance by adherents of all of those faiths. The western neighbourhoods of the city are primarily home to Jewish residents and have been under Israeli rule since the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. East Jerusalem, on the other hand, is home to almost all of the city’s Muslim population, although Israel has administered East Jerusalem since 1967 – that is, following the Six-Day War. The city serves as the capital of the Israeli state, while also being the desired location for the capital of the State of Palestine. However, most of the rest of the world refuses to recognise the city as the capital of either state: which is why it was such a newsworthy event when the US Embassy was moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in May 2018, following a campaign promise made by Donald Trump the previous year. These fundamentally differing – and apparently irreconcilable – views about the status of this contested city in many ways lie at the very heart of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

Of course, a key way that many people learn about the city is through Wikipedia. Indeed, every major Western search engine links to Wikipedia’s Jerusalem article when conducting a search for the city. Jerusalem is one of the encyclopaedia’s most popular pages, and – because of Wikipedia’s open licence – content on the Jerusalem page ends up being reused and replicated elsewhere on the internet, from Facebook to weather apps. As such, it should come as no surprise that the page itself is highly susceptible to editorial conflict.

One of the many ways in which this conflict has been manifested is through the question of how best to represent its capital city status. At the time of writing in early summer 2021, the English version of Wikipedia (after much battling between various editors) notes in the first paragraph of the article that ‘Both Israel and the Palestinian Authority claim Jerusalem as their capital, as Israel maintains its primary governmental institutions there and the State of Palestine ultimately foresees it as its seat of power; however, neither claim is widely recognized internationally.’ This contrasts noticeably with the Arabic Wikipedia’s opening claim that Jerusalem is ‘the largest city in occupied Palestine’ and the Hebrew Wikipedia’s opening sentence that ‘Jerusalem is the capital city of the State of Israel.’ In this peer-produced encyclopaedia that – famously – anyone can edit, we see different people and communities wanting to represent the exact same place in fundamentally divergent ways.

The West African Ebola epidemic

In early 2014, the West African country of Guinea faced an early outbreak of Ebola, now widely known as one of the world’s deadliest diseases with an average fatality rate of 50 per cent. At the time there were no vaccines or treatments for Ebola available, beyond supportive care with rehydration and symptomatic treatment. After its initial reporting in rural Guinea, it subsequently spread to the densely populated capital Conakry, then to neighbouring Liberia and Sierra Leone and beyond. Global aid organisations such as Médecins Sans Frontières and the Red Cross were ready to spring into action with medical aid, but quickly found that large parts of the affected regions were as yet unmapped in commercial or public sources. In order to coordinate aid, their field logistics teams needed population estimates to prepare sufficient provisions, and they needed information about the local road network to coordinate delivery. Instead, they were faced with a blank map – neither the national mapping agencies nor commercial geodata providers had mapped the affected areas (Clark 2014).

This geospatial information gap was ultimately resolved by an unusual collaborator: the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), a global non-profit organisation that specialises in the production of crowdsourced digital maps, traced from satellite imagery by a global volunteer force, with the specific intention to support humanitarian aid. In response, HOT organisers initiated a multi-month effort to recruit and train digital volunteers at large scale, resulting in its largest mapping project to date. Ultimately the effort was successful, and new map data were quickly made available to coordinators, drastically improving the capacity of aid organisations to provide medical support (Clark 2014; Dawson 2014).

These volunteer maps can have significant reach beyond their primary purpose. Thanks to OpenStreetMaps’ open licence, other mapping providers are able to integrate these volunteer contributions into their own maps. For example, both Google Maps and Bing maps are now selectively integrating OpenStreetMap data into their own maps of remote areas in order to fill in coverage gaps. As a consequence, volunteer maps that have been collected in the context of disaster response become significant digital representations of places that have fewer alternatives available, commercial or public. In a sense, we can consider these initiatives as part of an effort to improve digital representation of the Global South, even if that is not necessarily the primary aim of the original work.

And yet, we can also consider them to be ‘outsider maps’ – both in the sense of being volunteer efforts by non-professional and professional cartographers alike, but also remote efforts by people from outside the areas they are representing. The maps are typically traced from satellite imagery by remote mappers who lack local knowledge of the terrain and the street-level experience of the places they map. Thematically, disaster-response maps focus on a limited set of functional concerns that are needed for field logistics, such as road networks to plan transport routes, and the tracing of settlements to support population estimates. The resulting representations are insufficient to navigate a city, at least not without first having to augment them with further information such as street names and the locations of public amenities.

What are digital geographies, and why do they matter?

The three cases presented here range from the humorous to the life changing, but what they have in common is that they tell us stories about how digital information is enrolled into everyday geographies. When most people think about geography, they tend to think about the study of the world’s mountains, rivers and place names. Yet, it’s guaranteed that if you approach a professional geographer with the joke that their job involves memorising the name of all the world’s capital cities, you’ll be met with an eye roll.

Geography is location. It is interconnections, flows and networks. It is both materiality and discourse. It is grounded, but in flux. It has a multiplicity of histories and futures. It is local, global and relational. It is space and time. It is undergoing continual augmentation by the anthroposphere. It is made up of memory and imagination. It is a platform and a process. It both shapes and is shaped by geometries of power. It is experienced, produced and continuously brought into being. And, it is, of course, also digital.

At the end of the day, we care about geography because we care about the world: the environmental, economic, social and political contexts, ecosystems and networks that we are embedded in. We care about how things work, how things are represented and the relationships between those things. So, think about the place that you live in. There are surely some local conflicts about land ownership; about who gets to have a say in how, where and for whom new buildings are built. There are also likely conflicts about how things are represented: perhaps whether a street should be renamed to avoid commemorating that historical figure who now looks somewhat less heroic and noble than he used to.

In the digital age, some of these concerns merge. By augmenting our world with digital information, contemporary information technologies shape both the ways in which geographies are structured and the ways in which they are represented. Indeed, it starts to become hard to distinguish between those things.

As the digital is ever more infused into our everyday lives, John Perry Barlow’s vision of what the internet was, and could be, is revealed as simple wishful thinking. The geography of the internet no longer involves just a mapping of virtual realities and digital worlds. Indeed, the examples above show that the cities we live in are much more than just their material presences. Take the place that you live in as an example: you’re surrounded by buildings and roads, concrete, bricks and glass, houses and shops. But you’re also surrounded by information and code that is invisible to the naked eye but which fundamentally alters how the city functions and how we interact with it.

What this means is that ...