ok one more blog post on something that informs thought process (again Kevin this is your fault!)
I read lots of books from economic geographers and communication theorists about the effects of new technologies on society. Many theorists agree that digital tools cause spatial and temporal disconnects, shifting the way we experience everyday life. Within this group are scholars who propose widely popular and cited phrases about time and pace.
Some examples:
- David Harvey says that this creates “time-space compression.”
- Manuel Castells claims that the global IT workers in the tech industry are increasingly located in the “space of flows,” the distributed geographic digital networks that mediate virtual communication. In such a society, “places do not disappear, but their logic and their meaning become absorbed in the network” so that the structural logic that runs a network society is not based on places (pg 443).
- Even the economists agree but they tend to have a more positive take. George Gilder (2000, Telecosm: the world after bandwidth abundance) believes that global diffusion of telecom will emancipate people from face-to-face relations.
- Frances Cairncross (2001, The Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution is Changing our Lives) doesn’t see distance as a limiting factor in social interaction.
Essentially, what these authors claim of digital tools are the same claims that we have heard about all preceding technologies from trains to telephones to the cotton gin to cars - technologies compress space-time. They create confusion, chaos and overload.
There seems to be a great sense of urgency on the affects of our new digital time. This urgency is borderline fear and fetish of a new so-called compressed space-time experience where daily life at increasing at speeds so fast, so FAST THAT WHAT? What will happen??? We will explode!!! And now social media is killing us! Info Overload!
Paul Virillo, a theorist on speed, politics, and wars, is very concerned about time-space compression and outlines a possible future of time concussions:
What lies ahead is a disturbance in the perception of what reality is; it is a shock, a mental concussion. And this outcome ought to interest us. Why? Because never has any progress in a technique been achieved without addressing its specific negative aspects. The specific negative aspect of these information superhighways is precisely this loss of orientation regarding alterity (the other), this disturbance in the relationship with the other and with the world. It is obvious that this loss of orientation, this non-situation, is going to usher a deep crisis which will affect society and hence, democracy……For the first time, history is going to unfold within a one-time-system: global time. Up to now, history has taken place within local times, local frames, regions and nations. But now, in a certain way, globalization and virtualization are inaugurating a global time that prefigures a new form of tyranny. If history is so rich, it is because it was local, it was thanks to the existence of spatially bounded times which overrode something that up to now occurred only in astronomy: universal time. But in the very near future, our history will happen in universal time, itself the outcome of instantaneity - and there only.
Now when I need to find some sanity in all these calls to deconstruct grand meta-narratives of super-modernity’s time-space compression - there is one woman that I always call upon, the amazing Doreen Massey. She is freaking AWESOME. I worship her brain. I put her in the cloud with Donna Haraway. Donna and Doreen - solid.
Doreen Massey’s work is in many ways a response to a deficiency in spatial theory to account for practices and conceptions of place beyond elite individuals who can jet set from one time zone to another and effortlessly relocate and disassociate from places. Many of the compression-space-time scholars theorize broadly about a very elite and narrow experience of life with digital tools, of which Massey avoids doing. She is one of the key thinkers who deplore universal accounts of place as bounded and fixed across social relationships and the dichotomy of place as bounded and space as open.
For Massey, even if a place appears to be bounded, she argues that this place is located in a grander scheme of space that is constantly in flux. She employs the concept of “power geometry” in insisting that the production of place and space be examined across class, gender, nations, cultures, economies, and race, and that this analysis must be examined together in relation to the flow and movement within one place and in relation to other places (1993). For Massey, places are constantly in flux and reflect hybrid forms of power and culture, and to see it any other way would gloss over the mobile, imaginative and unpredictable practices of everyday life.
Doreen Massey reminds me why I do the research that I do with who I do it with. Massey always has a great sense of justice and power infused into her work. Working in low-income or marginal communities isn’t exactly sexy and I don’t produce research that affirms what Western tech companies want to see or hear. But I have tons of fun and I believe in the importance of my work because it addresses uneven distribution of power and resources.
Massey is so awesome that I’ve cut some of my fave sections out of one the most beautiful essays every written by a geographer - A Global Sense of Place in Reading Human Geography (1997). Someone has put her essay up here - download while it’s avail!
I’m just going to let Doreen do her thing now - these are several excerpts that I can’t even cut up - every word is beautiful. But the essay really does need to read in its entirety so that you can see the narrative she traces. If you end up really liking her, I suggest that you also read For Space. It’s another deeply thoughtful meditation on space and place.
Now I want to make one simple point here, and that is about what one might call the power geometry of it all; the power geometry of time-space compression. For different social groups, and different individuals, are placed in very distinct ways in relation to these flows and interconnections. This point concerns not merely the issue of who moves and who doesn’t, although that is an important element of it; it is also
about power in relation to the flows and the movement. Different social groups have distinct relationships to this anyway differentiated mobility: some people are more in charge of it than others; some initiate flows and movement, others don’t; some are more on the receiving-end of it than others; some are effectively imprisoned by it.
In a sense at the end of all the spectra are those who are both doing the moving and the communicating and who are in some way in a position of control in relation to it - the jet-setters, the ones sending and receiving the faces and the e-mail, holding the international conference calls, the ones distributing films, controlling the news, organizing the investments and the international currency transactions. These are the groups who are really in a sense in charge of time-space compression, who care really
use it and turn it to advantage, whose power and influence it very definitely increases.
On its more prosaic fringes this group probably includes a fair number of western academics and journalists - those, in other words, who write most about it. But there are also groups who are also doing a lot of physical moving, but who are not ‘in charge’ of the process in the same way at all. The refugees from El Salvador or Guatemala and the undocumented migrant workers from Michoacan in Mexico, crowding into Tijuana to make a perhaps fatal dash for it across the border into the US to grab a chance of a new life. Here he experience of movement, and indeed of a confusing plurality of cultures, is very different. And there are those from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Caribbean, who come half way round the world only to get held up in an interrogation room at Heathrow.
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This is, in other words, a highly complex social differentiation. There are differences in the degree of movement and communication, but also in the degree of control and initiation. The ways in which people are placed within ‘time-space compression’ are highly complicated and extremely varied.
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But this in turn immediately raises questions of politics. If time-space compression can be imagined in that more socially formed, socially evaluative and differentiated way, then there may be here the possibility of developing a politics of mobility and access. For it does seem that mobility, and control over mobility, both reflects and reinforces power. It is not simply a question of unequal distribution, that some people
move more than others, and that some have more control than others. It is that the mobility and control of some groups can actively weaken other people. Differential mobility can weaken the leverage of the already weak. The time-space compression of some groups can undermine the power of others.
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Many of those who write about time-space compression emphasize the insecurity and unsettling impact of its effects, the feeling of vulnerability which it can produce. Some therefore go on from this to argue that, in the middle of all this flux, people desperately need a bit of peace and quiet - and that a strong sense of place, or locality, can form one kind of refuge from the hubbub. So the search after the ‘real’ meanings
of places, the unearthing of heritages and so forth, is interpreted as being, in part, a response to desire for fixity and for security of identity in the middle of all the movement and change. A ‘sense of place’, of rootedness, can provide - in this form and on this interpretation - stability and a source of unproblematical identity. In that
guise, however, place and the spatially local are then rejected by many progressive people as almost necessarily reactionary. They are interpreted as an evasion; as a retreat from the (actually unavoidable) dynamic and change of ‘real life’, which is what we must seize if we are to change things for the better. On this reading, place
and locality are foci for a form of romanticized escapism from the real business of the world. While ‘time’ is equated with movement and progress, ‘space’/’place’ is equated
with stasis and reaction.
There are some serious inadequacies in this argument. There is the question of why it is assumed that time-space compression will produce insecurity. There is the need to face up to - rather than simply deny - people’s need for attachment of some sort, whether through place or anything else. None the less, it is certainly the case that there is indeed at the moment a recrudescence of some very problematical sense of
place, from reactionary nationalisms, to competitive localisms, to introverted obsessions with ‘heritage’. We need, therefore, to think through what might be an adequately progressive sense of place, one which would fit in with the current global local times and the feelings and relations they give rise to, and which would be useful in what are, after all, political struggles often inevitably based on place. The question
is how to hold on to that notion of geographical difference, of uniqueness, even of rootedness if people want that, without being reactionary.
There are a number of distinct ways in which the ‘reactionary’ notion of place described above is problematical. One is the idea that places have single, essential, identities. Another is the idea that place - the sense of place - is constructed out of an introverted, inward-looking history based on delving into the past for internalized origins, translating the name from the Domesday Book.
These arguments, then, highlight a number of ways in which a progressive concept of place might be developed. First of all, it is absolutely not static. If places can be conceptualized in terms of the social interactions which they tie together, then it is also the case that these interactions themselves are not motionless things, frozen in time. They are processes. One of the great one-liners in Marxist exchanges has for long been, ‘Ah, but capital is not a thing, it’s a process.’ Perhaps this should be said also about places, that places are processes, too.
Second, places do not have boundaries in the sense of divisions which frame simple enclosures. ‘Boundaries’ may be of course be necessary, for the purposes of certain turn of studies for instance, but they are not necessary for the conceptualization of a place itself. Definition in this sense does not have to be through simple
counterposition to the outside; it can come, in part, precisely through the particularity of linkage to that ‘outside’ which is therefore itself part of what constitutes the place. This helps get away from the common association between penetrability and vulnerability. For it is this kind of association which makes invasion by newcomers so
threatening.
Third, clearly places do not have single, unique ‘identities’; they are full of internal conflicts. Just think, for instance, about London’s Docklands, a place which is at the moment quite clearly defined by conflict: a conflict over what it past has been (the nature of its ‘heritage’), conflict over what should be its present development, conflict over what could be its future.
Fourth, and finally, none of this denies place nor the importance of the uniqueness of place. The specificity of place is continually reproduced, but it s not a specificity which result from some long, internalized history. there are a number of sources of this specificity - the uniqueness of place. There is the fact that the wider social relations in which places are set themselves geographically differentiated.
Globalization (in the economy, or in culture, or in anything else) does not entail simply homogenization. On the contrary, the globalization of social relations is yet another source of (the reproduction of) geographical uneven development, and thus of the uniqueness of place. There is the specificity of place which derives from the fact that each place is the focus of a distinct mixture of wider and more local social relations. There is the fact that this very mixture together in one place may produce effects which would not have happened otherwise. And finally, all these relations with and take a further element of specificity from the accumulated history of a place, with that history itself imagined as the product of layer upon layer of different sets of linkages, both local and to the wider world.
Cultural Bytes engages with research on information communication technology (ICT) users of low-income communities. This is run by Tricia Wang - me! My motivation is to better understand how low-income/under-served populations manage their social connections with a variety of practices. I bring attention to the ways that low-income users challenge, change, and innovate ICT usage patterns. I focus on mobile populations, such as migrants and youth in Mexico, China and US.
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