Digital geographies 1: Reality bytes

Abstract

This report is intended to provide a foundation to debates which illustrate how geographers have approached the challenge of understanding something variously invisible and immaterial as the digital and its impacts on the production of space. Thus, this first report will focus on how geographers conceptualise digitally produced and mediated spaces. It will trace the way we have understood digital spaces from grappling with the dichotomies of online and offline, real and the virtual, to grounding them materially, rendering them visible, and to more recent shifts about their affective orientations.

I Introduction

Choosing which areas in digital geography to report on has been quite the challenge because there has been a significant growth of research on digital technologies across many of the subdisciplines of geography both in terms of scholarship and practice. The pervasiveness of the digital across all areas of geography has led some to argue that we should think of digital geography less as a subdiscipline but as the digital having the effect of reshaping and mediating geographies broadly and having multiple geographies of its own (Ash et al., 2018, 35). As Graham and Dittus (2022, 6) observe, ‘we are all now digital geographers’. It is inescapable then, that I cannot include all areas of digital geographies to discuss, so where to start when the entire field of geography can be chosen from? An obvious place would be to ground the three reports first in debates which illustrate how geographers have approached the challenge of understanding something variously invisible and immaterial and its impacts on the production of space. Thus, this first report will focus on how geographers conceptualise digitally produced and mediated spaces and the different approaches that have taken to understand them.

This report proceeds as follows. First, I address the challenges geographers have faced grappling with the digital. Second, I show how geographers have navigated these challenges in three key ways. These are categorised as making the digital material, making the digital visible; and feeling the digital.

II The challenge: dichotomies abound – the virtual/the real

To begin, I step away from the academic discipline and start instead with the following vignette from the IT Crowd, a mid-2000s British sit-com about the IT industry, to illustrate the challenges of grappling with the immateriality of the digital. In this scene, IT worker Moss and Roy have fun with their very non-IT expert boss, Jen, by setting her up to take the ‘internet’ with her as she accepts her prize as employee of the month (as an IT boss who knows very little about computers):

Moss: This, Jen… is the internet.

Jen: What?

Moss: That’s right.

Jen: this is the internet? The whole internet?

Moss: Yep. I asked for a loan of it so that you could use it in your speech.

Jen: It’s so small!

Moss: That’s one of the surprising things about it.

Jen: Hang on, it doesn’t have any wires or anything.

Moss: It’s wireless.

Jen: Oh, yes, everything’s wireless nowadays, isn’t it?

I can really use it in my speech? What if someone needs it?

Moss: People will still be able to go online. It will still work.

Jen: Oh, good.

Moss: I tell you, you present this to the shareholders and you will get quite a response.

Jen: Can I touch it? Oh! It’s so light!

Moss: Of course it is, Jen. The Internet doesn’t weigh anything.

Jen: No, of course it doesn’t.

(Linehan, 2008, The IT Crowd ‘The Speech’ Season 3, episode 4)

The above excerpt is emblematic of the challenges geographers have faced when trying to understand our spatial relationships to the digital. How do you grapple with something that ‘doesn’t weigh anything’, ‘is so small’? There is a hint in the way Roy and Moss have made the ‘internet’ into an object for Jen to take as she accepts her award, and the response they envision Jen receiving. That is, they have made something seemingly immaterial into something Jen can touch and ‘show’ to the audience. In setting her up for what they think will be a joke, they are acknowledging the emotional response that the digital can provoke, and Jen’s concern around whether people will need it shows how it integral it has become to everyday life. To put it clearly, by making the ‘internet’ material, by anticipating their emotional responses, and by expressing concern, Moss, Roy and Jen demonstrate how geographers have themselves attempted to understand a technology and phenomenon that has at times an almost magical quality - by making it material, by making it visible, and by acknowledging our emotional response to it. In what follows, I will show how we can understand geographical work on digital technologies as progressing along these three themes.

The digital has historically invited a complexing dichotomy often manifested in comparisons of the ‘virtual’ versus ‘the real’, ‘online’ versus ‘offline’, ‘cyberspace’ versus ‘physical space’, ‘material’ versus ‘immaterial’ and so on (Kinsley, 2014, 364). While these binaries characterised early discussions on the digital, geographical scholarship has moved forward having found more useful ways to think about and through the spatial effects of the digital. Much of these terms were used because of the necessarily speculative nature of emerging digital technology at that time (Kinsley, 2014, 376). Already in 2001, Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin, two geographers who would go on to be very influential in digital geography, released the Atlas of Cyberspace. The atlas, as a physical book and associated website, aimed to depict what the internet looked like, illustrating ‘graphically, the shapes, structures and complex forms of the Internet, the Worldwide Web and other virtual media’ (Dodge and Kitchin, 2001 in Dorling, 2002, 467). It provided glimpses of what users could encounter ‘surfing the web’ something we now just refer to as ‘googling’. The original hyperlink to the atlas’s site has broken and so we are left now with the physical book, critiqued by Dorling as ‘an atlas of what cyberspace was – how it began, how it grew, how people first started depicting it’, (2002, 467) but which demonstrates the challenges in researching digital sites that may not always exist.

It is necessary to highlight these early discussions as they have prompted the way we currently respond to digital research. That these should be considered virtual, not real, or immaterial is understandable, because as Graham and Duttis (2022, 6) observe, although we are surrounded by code and software, it is invisible. And when discussing digital spaces, we still frequently use terms such as ‘online’, the difference being the way we conceptualise these spaces now as just as ‘real’, valued, and world shaping. More recently, in the age of the Internet of Things, this has been conceptualised as the cloud, a similarly intangible, immaterial, inaccessible ‘thing’. Yet, it is important to address this invisibility that bestows the digital with its qualities variously described as ‘magical’, ‘lively’, a ‘form of sorcery’ and ‘enchanting’ because this immateriality serves to depoliticise the significant impacts of digital technologies (Lin et al., 2024; Kavanagh et al., 2015; Lupton, 2018). Making the digital knowable and overcoming the real/unreal binaries, therefore, is important geographical work.

In what follows, I identify three interrelated ways in which geographers have navigated the dichotomies and intangibility of the digital discussed here. These are 1) making the digital material by paying attention to its social and physical infrastructures; 2) making the digital visible through approaches that can help us see inside its ‘blackbox’; and 3) feeling the digital by orienting ourselves to digital technologies’ affective agency.

III Making the digital material

One of the most significant ways geographers have tackled overcoming the virtual/real, online/offline dichotomy is by making the immaterial material. Underlying this approach is an acknowledgement that the seeming invisibility of digital space was firstly, ultimately enabled by physical infrastructures – things like telecommunications cables, server farms, sensors, microchips and hardware, among others (Dourish, 2022). These are material things that we can see and understand. Secondly, digital spaces are also facilitated by social constructs – ideologies, politics, economies, and policy among others. As a result, the spatiality of the digital is a socio-technical assemblage comprised of both the social and the technical (Kitchin, 2016). Making the immaterial material is key to overcoming not only the virtual/real dichotomy but other binaries which maintained problematic distinctions between natural and authentic sociality and an inauthenticity of digital mediated worlds, perpetuating other long held binaries, such as ‘human/technology and nature/society’ (Kinsley, 2014, 371). For McLean (2020) this is expressed as the digital being ‘more-than-real’, drawing upon Massumi’s (1987) thoughts around the relationship between the original and simulation, with simulation being as real or even more real than the original. In many of the examples that follow, we will see how grounding the digital in the material has allowed geographers to interrogate the intersection of digital technologies with markets and financialisation, surveillance, discipline and control, discrimination and power, pleasure and connection, experiences and affect, that would otherwise have remained obscured by the opacity and other worldliness of the ‘unreal’, ‘online’, ‘cyberspace’.

Kinsley (2014) argued that we could overcome these problematic binaries through technics and technicity. Technicity, largely informed by phenomenology, can be understood as either the unfolding ability of technology to make things happen; or, as a relational approach in which technology and humans are co-constituted (Kinsley, 2014, 372; Kitchin and Dodge, 2011, 42). By grounding digital geographic research in technicity, Kinsley argued, geographers could anchor the apparent immateriality of the digital in material expressions, and thereby better understand how they transduce space (2014, 375-376).

Another, particularly discipline specific, way in which geographers have tried to make the ephemeral nature of the digital tangible is through mapping. The Atlas of Cyberspace already mentioned, was described as the first of many books which would ‘act as an “Atlas” to this new world (cyberspace)’ (Batty, 2003, 282). Batty (2003) was not wrong, with numerous cartographic engagements with the digital since, particularly attuned to the way the digital both represents and produces space (see. e.g. Zook, 2005; Zook and Graham, 2007; Maclean et al., 2016; Fluri, 2006; Burns, 2021; Maharawal and McElroy, 2017), including more recently an Atlas of AI, which similarly highlights the material infrastructures and resources that underpin artificial intelligence (Crawford, 2021). Indeed, the digital has been part of mapping projects since the 60s, and later of course was critical to the development of GIS (Ash et al., 2018, 27; Balchin and Coleman, 1967; Tobler, 1959). The relationship between mapping and digital technologies is what Ash et al. (2018, 27) discuss in their framework as ‘geographies through the digital’ highlighting the role of digital technologies in producing geographical knowledge, both as a site of epistemological reproduction and critique. Maps help geographers make sense of the digital, accounting for the way that code produces space, and how ‘the politics of code (particularly map generating code) shape the representation of places’ (Zook and Graham, 2007), a relationship that Kitchin and Dodge describe as ‘code/space’ (2011).

Emphasising the materiality of the digital has become a persistent and valuable approach in geography. The reason for this is of course, that it is useful in overcoming the unhelpful boundaries outlined earlier. As digital technologies become pervasive, we see new materialities emerging. In recent work on digital ecologies, for example, Turnbull et al. (2022) have brought attention to the way that animals’ lifeworlds are becoming digitised through material means. They do this by focussing on the materiality of digital devices and their entanglement with social, political and economic worlds. Describing ‘wired’ wildlife (Benson, 2010) from bee sized monitoring tags (Barlow et al., 2019) to ‘smart forests’ (Gabrys, 2021; Moss et al., 2021), these ‘digitised nonhumans’ (Turnbull et al., 2022, 8) both become co-opted into a world of platforms, data production and subsequent data trails, extraction of both minerals and labour, and capital relations (Turnbull et al., 2022; Gabrys, 2020). The digitisation of ecologies has material effects, and it is this materiality that allows geographers to engage with the effects of digitisation.

Paying attention to the materiality of the digital is also seen in work dedicated to illuminating the environmental impact that digital technologies have. For example, the immateriality of ‘the cloud’ often makes invisible the very real energy and infrastructure that supports it and the damage that it inflicts. As McLean et al. (2022) observe, a key challenge for digital sustainability is the ‘intangible and invisible nature of digital infrastructure’ unsurprising considering the digital ecosystem’s diffuse spatialities (2022, 103,746). Geographers have consistently brought attention to the material components of the digital ecosystem to highlight its destructive impact. For example, bringing attention to the material complexity of the AirPod, Taffel (2023) shows how resource intensive such a small device is. This includes the extraction of minerals including purified silicon, acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, tantalum, gold, tungsten, lithium, nickel, cobalt, copper, neodymium, iron and boron, among others and which cannot be disentangled from associated conflicts and child labour. The process of extraction and refining the minerals for use generates poisonous waste, including acidic wastewater, radioactive waste residue and arsenic contamination, with elevated cancer rates reported among those living near some of the processing plants (Taffel, 2023, 440). Planned obsolescence designed into devices which limits functionality over time, further contributes to environmental impact, generating increased e-waste, and coercing consumers into purchasing new products (Pickren, 2014). This perpetuates the circuits of extraction, labour and harm involved in the production of digital technologies (Taffel, 2023; Turnbull, 2022) while also bringing in additional networks of labour and value through the process as Wong’s (2022) work on e-waste recycling in Singapore and Malaysia shows.

IV Making the digital visible

A second but interrelated way of approaching the world shaping powers of the digital is by calls to make the digital visible – to glimpse at it its inner workings and programming; to look for moments where it makes itself known which often happens when it doesn’t behave as it should; and for paying attention to how the digital itself ‘sees’.

Early work in digital geography made calls to ‘unblack box’ the algorithms and working of digital technologies. Just as paying attention to the material infrastructures of digital technologies helped us to better understand their ‘magic’, so too did efforts to ‘look under the hood’ of these technologies, to better understand the decisions that were coded into them, the data the collected, how they made decisions, and by consequence, the impacts they had. Understanding how these systems operated was seen as increasingly important in a world of algorithmic governance and power. The propriety nature of much of the decision-making and coding that goes into digital technologies is largely unknown, meaning that algorithmic practices and decision-making lacked scrutiny (Kitchin, 2017, 20; Zook and Graham, 2007; Pasquale, 2015). As Diakopoulos (2013, 2) observed, the opacity of algorithms, meant that we had little clarity over exactly how this power was exercised and this was a problem, because this power was exercised over us (Kitchin, 2017, 15). Making these processes visible is key to understanding how algorithms governed and bringing attention to their pernicious effects. Because of the proprietary nature of many algorithms and an associated opacity, geographers have had to try different ways to ‘look under the hood’.

Typical approaches to unblackboxing have involved ethnographies of coding and programming (Kitchin et al., 2016; Perng and Kitchin, 2016), genealogical work on code, and data codificiation (Sammler and House-Peters, 2023; Paßmann and Boersma, 2017).

Recent work by Sammler and House-Peters (2023), has aimed to unblackbox relations of digital fetishization in mining. By critically analysing corporate discourse, legal statutes, technical specifications and data collection tools used to capture sensory data at mining sites, alongside video representations of digital mines, they discover a future imaginary of the fully automated mine, mediated through the digital twin (2023, 4). Focussing on visible relations of mediation allowed Sammler and House-Peters an entry point into unpacking some of the black-boxed relations that subtract the lively material arrangements of earth as environment to earth as mine, that is produced through the digital twin (2023, 9).

What work on unblackboxing has shown however, is that it is very difficult to completely see digital technologies. What we see is always partial and incomplete. As a result, geographers have sought value in partial visibility. This is not necessarily a new problem, as Amoore observes, ‘algorithms do not bring new problems of black-boxed opacity and partiality, but they illuminate the already present problem of locating a clear-sighted account in a knowable human subject’ (2020, 135). This unachievable full transparency is not necessarily an epistemic problem because unknowability is part of life (Bucher, 2016: pp.86-87; Fields et al., 2020, 463). Instead, Fields et al. (2020, 465) suggest that geographers should look for the ‘potentiality, slipperiness, and mobilities’ that characterise digital technologies, as a fruitful way of understanding them. Indeed, accepting that our view of digital technology may always be incomplete allows geographers to critically engage with the question of how much digital technologies themselves can see, an important question considering that digital perspectives are central to automated decision-making. As Kitchin et al. (2016, 100) observe of urban dashboards, rather than all seeing, they are oligoptic and provide only partial views.

Louise Amoore’s contributions have been critical to work that seeks to bring visibility to digital practices and processes. In particular her work on risk and dataveillance critiques the disembodied and disaggregated ways that technologies see (Amoore, 2011, 2020). Yet, while highlighting how algorithms are involved in systems of seeing – for example, through dataveillance – Amoore also shows how this anticipatory logic of algorithmic visuality can be countered by different ways of seeing (2007). She suggests that critical visual culture offers alternative ways of seeing that are comfortable with multiple views, the undecidable and which has a commitment to seeing what is often overlooked (Amoore, 2007, 228-229). Acknowledging the generative potential of different ways of seeing, Pereira and Moreschi (2020) show how an AI’s incorrect readings of artworks, for example, misidentifying compositions as doors or windows, can ‘level and reimagine’ art (2020, 1). The algorithm’s alternative artistic analysis offers a ‘new way of reading art’, while also simultaneously allowing us to see through the assumptions it makes, what types of visual images are familiar to it – a glimpse into its black box, a situated algorithmic knowledge (Pereira and Moreschi, 2020; Maalsen, 2023).

Making the digital visible, even if it is only partially seen, is therefore one of the key ways that geographers have attempted to understand the digital. It has brought attention to the way that digital technologies generate uneven spatial experiences, and how the decisions made at the coding level shape what is seen, what decisions are made as a consequence and therefore illuminates their significant world shaping power. It has also allowed us to identify digital work when it does not see as expected and this can, alternatively, generate original and novel insights on the way people and technologies see. Furthermore, making the digital visible has political potential, as Amoore (2020) shows how even an incomplete view, the never wholly knowing, can be integrated into an ethicopolitics of the digital. An algorithmic embodied doubt accounts for the limits and flaws of the algorithm and leaves open an opportunity for future political action (Amoore 2020, 153).

V Feeling the digital: knowing the digital through affect

A third way in which geographers have attempted to know the digital is by paying attention to its affective impacts. There has been a growth in academic work that seeks to understand digital spaces through how they make us feel. Here, the digital is made real not through focussing on its materiality, or seeking to glimpse inside the blackbox, but through our emotional encounters with digital devices and infrastructures. Minna Ruckenstein’s The feel of algorithms (Ruckenstein, 2023) is illustrative of work that considers our emotional entanglements with the digital, including irritation, frustration, enthusiasm and vulnerabilty. Feelings, Ruckenstein contends, are valuable for understanding digital technologies because they include both ‘pleasures and discontents’ helping to reveal problematic impacts and argue for alternatives (2023, 197). Situating their work in the context of automation, Lin et al. (2024) put forward a series of dispositions that characterise our encounters with digital technologies, including enchantment, aspiration and acquiescence. Enchantment, associated with feelings of ‘wonderment, magic and mystery’, is entangled with the confusion and excitement often associated with automation, yet these feelings also depoliticise and obscure the impacts of such technologies (Lin et al., 2024, 57).

Paying attention to the politics that may otherwise be hidden by the wonderment and convenience of digital technologies, David Bissell’s work on gig workers and automated platforms focuses on the affective responses to these platforms, or as his empirical work shows, its ‘disaffect’. Bissell situates the affect of on-demand platformisation as a site of politics and identifies an ‘“automated” structure or feeling’ (2023, 12). The ease and pleasure associated with the automation of on-demand platforms, is for Bissell, an (un)feeling of automation (2023, 12) which invisibilises the labour that underpins automation platforms. Yet, this unfeeling is disrupted when the circuit of automation does not perform as expected. For example, the immediacy of being able to order a ride at the tap of an app is experienced negatively when there is delay caused by the driver cancelling the trip or there being no drivers nearby (Bissell, 2020, 13). These bad feelings are experienced by consumers of automation but also by the gig workers themselves when they too have to wait – for jobs, for orders to be prepared – creating sites of intensified disaffection for a variety of differently situated users and workers (Bissell, 2024, 12). By understanding automation as comprised of both technical and embodied circuits, Bissell shows how ‘disaffection is the feelings of circuits coming apart’, the registering of its breakdown in bodily sensation (Bissell, 2023, 12). Thus by focussing on how we feel the algorithm, we can see breakdowns and failures of automation, that would remain partially obscured by only focussing on the technical (Bissell, 2022, 12).

Knowing digital technologies through disaffection as breakdown has parallels with Leszczynski and Elwood’s (2022) work on the glitch as an epistemological vector that brings attention to the minor narratives around digital experience. In their work on the glitch city, they show how interruptions of algorithmic order and aesthetics can help contest the metanarratives of algorithmic control and extraction. Glitch theory shows how aberrations in the computational city are held in tension, being simultaneously reinscribed in technocapital circuits through idiosyncrasy, while also interrupting technocapital by being noncomputable (2022, 365). Focussing on the ‘desirability’ of the digitally mediated city’s orderly streetscape, they show how the failures of shared e-bike platforms, contest these feelings of order. Dumped, pathblocking ‘out of place’ e-bike and e-scooters contest the desired orderly streetscape. In challenging the desired feelings or (un)feeling (Bissell, 2024) of automation, one example where the bike was presumably ‘out of place’ – parked outside a tent encampment – is used to show how the glitch can lead to two impressions. One is the negative feelings associated with disorder and second a more optimistic response that suggests platforms could affect more equitable access to transport, a reading made possible by understanding people have vastly different experiences of the city (Leszczynski and Elwood, 2022, 367). By framing the glitch within minor theory (Katz, 1996, 2017), Leszcyzynski and Elwood (2022) bring attention to ways that digital platforms can mediate things ‘as out of place’ and which can be read in multiple ways, prompting different feelings to those generally identified by hegemonic readings of critical theory and political economy (2022, 372).

In a similar vein, while much critical work in digital geographies illuminates the logics of control and extraction that underpin many of our algorithmic encounters, there is work that shows that our actual experience of them is not phenomenologically experienced that way. For example, much of our algorithmic interactions are characterised by ambivalence (Lin et al., 2024). Framing our encounters with digital technologies as a form of cybersymbiosis (Hayles, 2021), Maalsen shows how focussing on our relationships with digital technologies rather than the digital device itself can account for the fluctuations of our digital encounters, making visible moments of gain, ambivalence and harm (Maalsen, 2024). This occurs, for example, in mutualistic relationships where the benefits of using the technology outweigh the harm that its data collection, for example, might enact. Bissell’s work on delivery platforms also highlights these tensions, showing how consumers’ relationships with these are ‘ambivalent and changeable’ (2020, 109). This ambivalence also sometimes characterises the affective responses of the gig workers themselves who sometimes reported contradictory opinions. These expressions of ‘unfeeling’, as a type of anaesthesia, can be read as a mechanism of defence against affect (Bissell, 2022, 108), a necessary survival tactic for coping with the precarity and harm of gig labour. Narratives of ambivalence, Bissell claims, could be used in policy settings to contest the idea the on-demand platforms are what people want (2020, 109).

VI Conclusion

The digital has long been characterised by binaries of the real/unreal, online/offline, and so forth, presenting a challenge when trying to understand something that is seemingly intangible and magical. In this first of three reports on digital geography I have tried to address the way geographers have approached these challenges to set the foundation to inform deeper discussion. Making the digital real – through grounding it in its social and infrastructural materiality, through rendering it visible, and through orientating ourselves to its affective power – has allowed geographers to better interrogate and ask questions about how power, politics and capital intersect with digital technologies, which otherwise remain hidden by the digital’s opacity and otherworldliness. In bringing these intersections to light, geographers have also demonstrated a heterogeneity of insights into our relationships with the digital, including political economic critiques of extraction and control but also attending to the minor politics and experiences which reveal more optimistic or counter readings of our digital encounters.

Asking such questions of the digital remains a critical task as technology continues to rapidly evolve and reshape our world, as contemporary debates around AI demonstrate (Caprotti et al., 2024). The next two reports will continue this discussion on geography’s engagements with digital technologies – whether they are behaving as programmed, glitching, being hacked or, to return to the IT Crowd, whether we simply need to ‘turn it off and on again’. I look forward to going on this journey with you, but remember, ‘please, no flash photography. You’ll harm the internet’ (Linehan, 2008).