Last year I wrote about two articles concerning digital geographies that I had coming out, the second of which was an article for Progress in Human Geography concerning the matter (both the issue and the materiality) of what have been called ‘virtual’ geographies. I am pleased to be able to say that this article is now available published in issue 3 of volume 38. Unfortunately this requires a subscription for access. However, I am happy to share pre-print copies of this paper, please contact me if you’re interested.
“The Matter of ‘Virtual’ Geographies“ revisits the articulation of ‘virtual’ geographies and reviews recent discussion within geography of digitally mediated activity. The aim of the article is to argue for a greater attention to the material conditions of ‘the digital’. This is achieved by articulating a theory of ‘technics’–the co-constitutive relation between the human and the technical,–and ‘transduction’–the iterative modulating and translation of a sociotechnical milieu from one state to another–through the philosophy of Bernard Stiegler. This article expands on existing work in geography, such as Kitchin & Dodge’s excellent ‘Code/space‘, that is pushing for more sophisticated understandings of software, code, and the plethora of increasingly sophisticated systems and devices with which we mediate ourselves and our (spatial) experience of everyday life.
[Amended: 15/04/2014 22:24 to reflect better stats on the links being shared]
As a number of other bloggers have highlighted, and as I noted on Twitter, the political philosopher Ernesto Laclau sadly passed away on the 13th of April. There is an excellent obituary on the publisher Verso’s blog, which is worth reading.
Like, I think, a lot of others I discovered this news on Twitter and, as is the modus operandi of the tweeter, I re-tweeted the tweets through which I discovered the news. I certainly do not intend to trivialise this news, but what is quite interesting about the spread of this sad news is that while the English spread of the news on twitter was largely driven by retweets, a lot of which linked to a story in the English language Buenos Aires Herald, the Spanish spike in tweets was not wholly driven by retweets.
There was, therefore, a muted version of a @BBCBreaking sort of effect in English tweets, in the way that there was for example with the news about the death of Peaches Geldof (again, I’m not seeking to trivialise that news or intervene in the discussions about whether or not there was genuine grief being expressed). So, for a ‘concerned public’ (in this case those who are at least partly familiar with Laclau, his work and the topics it addresses) social media became a conduit and key actor in the movement of the information in different ways.
I ran a quick search on ScraperWiki, from yesterday, that encompasses the relevant dates and used some of the tools we have been developing for the Contagion project to look at the time series of tweets and in particular the movement of the news between Spanish and English. We can see how the initial spike of tweets in Spanish leads the spike in English by approximately an hour (please bare in mind that the Spanish tweets are more numerous by an approximate multiple of ten).
Now, the spike in tweets in English can be mostly, but not quite wholly, attributed to retweets of the link to an English language article posted on the Buenos Aires Herald. Yet, there remains a majority of the tweets in the Spanish spike that are a case of other forms of ‘passing it on‘. Tweets featuring a direct link (some as shortened URLs) to the Buenos Aires Herald article account for over a half (at various moments in the spike) of all English tweets between 8pm and midnight on 13th April, and a few more of these tweets link to Stuart Elden’s blog post that links on to the Buenos Aires Herald.
So, its interesting to see how the combination of an emergent ‘public’ convened around that news and the somewhat phatic interaction of re-tweeting once the movement of easily shared links begins (this is related to what Martin Thayne discussed in a paper about Facebook in the issue of Culture Machine I co-edited with Patrick Crogan). This speaks to what Steve Hinchliffe and I have been trying to get at with the definition of ‘contagion’, inspired by Tony Sampson’s Thrift-ian reading of Tarde, as the ‘movement of movement’ – the sense in which the various intersecting constituents of a public / a network, propagate and in some senses ‘accelerate’ the iteration and mutation, hence difference, in repetition.
Obviously, there’s more to what we do, and, indeed, more todo, in this kind of critical theory-inflected analysis of virality in social media and that’s what I’m busy working out with both Steve and our diligent research fellow Rebecca Sandover, who has recently presented some initial ideas from the project at the AAG (the abstract linked here isn’t quite what was presented but it gives you a flavour!).
The Mobilities and Design workshop (later this month) looks interesting, not least cos Anne will be joining from afar to talk about her excellent Counting Sheep project, as she says on her blog:
I’m really pleased to be participating (via video & Skype) in the Mobilities and Design Workshop at Lancaster University, 29-30 April, 2014.
The event is being live-streamed so you’ll be able to follow along, and this is what I’ll be talking about:
Why Count Sheep, and Other Tricky Questions About Speculative Design Ethnography
Governments around the world require livestock farmers to tag their animals and track their movements from birth to death. Mandated for the purposes of local biosecurity and global market access, electronic identification is also used to keep track of breeding information and health treatments. Combined with location technologies like GPS, and sensor technologies that can monitor individual animal health and external environmental conditions, livestock are now capable of generating and transmitting enormous amounts of data.
At the same time, farmers in the developed world respond to increased public concerns about animal welfare and environmental sustainability by developing new online forms of agricultural advocacy, or what they call “agvocacy”. The US-based AgChat Foundation, and its equivalents in the UK, Australia and New Zealand, use social media to promote greater public awareness of agricultural practices and connect producers and consumers through weekly online chats. A “farm to fork” traceability ethos underpins agvocacy efforts, and aligns well with technosocial imperatives related to the “Internet of Things” – or the ability to connect data-rich objects (including animals) to the Internet.
For the past three years I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about sheep, talking about sheep, and hanging out with sheep or other people who care about sheep. I’ve done this because I’m interested in what the emergent technologies and politics I describe above might mean for our longest domesticated livestock animal, and for the people who continue to produce and consume them. In most ways, this has been standard STS-based ethnographic research: participant observation, interviews, etc. But the systems that I describe aren’t fully formed–and may not ever fully form as imagined–so I needed to come up with complementary research methods that could help me apprehend the future, or more correctly possible futures, and for that I turned to design.
This presentation will first outline the speculative design ethnography (SDE) methods developed, and outputs created, for the “Counting Sheep: NZ Merino in an Internet of Things” research project. (I encourage people to check out the design scenarios for themselves.) Then I will reflect on the challenges and opportunities of this kind of hybrid research practice, paying particular attention to how future visions act in the present to construct multiple publics and co-produce knowledge. Finally, using preliminary responses to our work, I will consider the potential of SDE as a public engagement strategy, and the role of disinterested or disagreeable publics.
Related reading
Galloway, A. 2013. “Emergent Media Technologies, Speculation, Expectation and Human/Nonhuman Relations.” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 57(1): 53-65.
Decent piece in The Guardianon maps and projections in relation to Africa. I often use examples just like this at the beginning of courses on territory and geopolitics.
Professor Rob Kitchin is currently engaged in a large five year EU-funded project: The Programmable City, concerned with the role of software on the ongoing production, performance and imagination of cities. Over on the blog for the project they have announced that Prof. Kitchin’s most recent book ‘The Data Revolution’ is now with the publishers, Sage, with a view to publication later this year. I’m looking forward to it”¦
Here’s the book outline blogpost from the Programmable City website:
Rob Kitchin has just submitted the final draft of a new book – The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences – to Sage and it’s moved into production. The chapter titles are below and the book will be published later in the year.
Preface
1. Conceptualising data
2. Small data, data infrastructures and data brokers
3. Open and linked data
4. Big data
5. Enablers and sources of big data
6. Data analytics
7. The governmental and business rationale for big data
8. The reframing of science, social science and humanities research
9. Technical and organisational issues
10. Ethical, political, social and legal concerns
11. Making sense of the data revolution
References
Deborah Lupton has blogged about the creation of a self-quantification researcher network:
Heather Patterson of New York University and I have set up a self-quantification and self-tracking research network. This forum is intended for anyone interested in the social, cultural, political, legal or ethical aspects of wearable technology, biosensors, digital health, mobile health, big data and algorithms, ubiquitous computing or similar topics.
Messages appropriate for the list include but are not limited to the following:
“¢ Announcements of upcoming events/conferences/talks/seminars;
“¢ Announcements of new or forthcoming publications;
“¢ Invitations for research collaborations;
“¢ Calls for conference or contributions to edited books or journals;
“¢ Information about requests for grant proposals;
“¢ Announcements for job openings that may be of interest to list members;
“¢ Pointers to information on new, interesting innovations in this research area; and
“¢ General comments or questions about relevant topics.
We welcome researchers of all disciplines, including media and cultural studies, internet studies, information privacy law, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, information science, business, medicine, and engineering; as well as colleagues working in advocacy, government, and industry. Please contact Heather at hp33[at]nyu.edu if you would like to join the list.
Bernard Stiegler has recorded a set of two pieces concerning the ‘digital revolution’ for Le Monde: for their Laws of the Networks[Lois des réseaux] blog, convened by the journalist Dominique Lacroix.
In the first of the two pieces, Stiegler articulates the ‘pharmacological’ nature of the internet, the ways in which our use of the digital both opens up new ways of living and, at the same time, constitutes great risks to our collective and, importantly, mental individuation. In particular, Stiegler focuses on understandings of the public and the private, in the wake of the revelations made possible by Edward Snowden’s ‘leaks’, and the ways in which the digital unsettles and unbalances what we can understand to be private or ‘secret’.
I have translated this first instalment, below. As usual clarifications or questions over the translation of a particular word are in square brackets and all emphasis is in the original text. The notes at the end are also from the original piece.
The Net blues [le blues du Net]
The philosopher Bernard Stiegler defines the digital revolution through the idea of publication and its social significance. The internet and the web bring incredible and unprecedented potential. However this process has become a target for the big American corporations which represent a risk for our societies. Bernard Stiegler brings together the Greek Myths and the work of historian of Greek myths Jean-Pierre Bernant, to clarify the issues of the Snowden affair.
Net blues
The digital revolution truly began a little over twenty years ago, when the United States enabled the internet to be accessible through the web. They appropriated a vision, formed by the European Tim Berners-Lee, and made it an apparatus of neo-colonialism. It was a deliberate strategy for at least five years and which has significantly transformed the face of the world. We have not fully understood, by the way, and I’m not certain we will ever truly comprehend, this extremely complex (always) ongoing process that has a global spread.
The digital is above all a process of generalised formalisation. This process, which resides in the protocols that enable interoperability, makes a range of diverse and varied techniques. This is a process of unification through binary code of norms and procedures that today allow the formalisation of almost everything: traveling in my car with a GPS system, I am connected through a digitised triangulation process that formalises my relationship with the maps through which I navigate and that transform my relationship with territory. My relationships with space, mobility and my vehicle are totally transformed. My inter-individual, social, familial, scholarly, national, commercial and scientific relationships are all literally unsettled by the technologies of social engineering. It is at once money and many other things – in particular all scientific practices and the diverse forms of pulbic life.
This has become what I have called – taking an expression of Sylvain Auroux – the process of “grammatisation”. Drawing on recent work, I ask if this process – as André Leroi-Gourhan has already suggested – triggered the Upper Paleolithic, then suddenly intensified in the event of the neolithic, resulted in ideogrammatic writing. This has been rendered more complex, and enriched, via the automata of Vaucanson; then through the automation of factories, and thus the operation of machinery: and finally to the present situation, which is digital.
Le canard digérateur, one of the most sophisticated automatons by Jacques Vaucanson, French engineer (1709-1782). source Wikipedia
The word “grammatisation” coming from τα γÏάμματα (ta grammata, Ed.), which can be called “the letters” in greek. This makes possible the ‘discretisation” of the flow of the temporal continuum, in the form of words, and this discretisation is effectuated through a spatialisation that is also a graphical reproduction, in other words a visualisation.
Today, the digital permits the discretisation not only of the movements of the mouth and tongue, which provide words, but rather all movements, both human and non-human – for example the movement of beef carcases that cross the Atlantic on cargo ships from Argentina to feed Europeans, which carry RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags, and which create what today we call traceability. Other examples include: how we follow the movements of animals and insects to attempt to understand the transformative processes of life, of the earth, and of other ecosystems extraordinarily perturbed by human and industrial activity, which we call the “anthropization” of the world. Yet the digital equally facilitates user profiling–and thus from this facilitates a control of behaviour through social mimesis–to track all human actions and gestures and to apply mathematical correlations with feedback loops to institute what Antoinette Rouvray and Thomas Berns [1] describe as “algorithmic governmentality”, which represents an automated forecasting of both private and public life. Or, again, the discretisation of the movements in the brain, such as brain imaging and the use of such descritisation processes to aid neuromarketing, based in an analysis of the brain that tends to directly solicit automated drives that short-circuit social development [apprentissages].
All of this opens, at the same time, tremendous new and extremely promising opportunities in social relations, in forms of knowledge, in cooperation in all forms, in communities of peer contributors, in the economy of contribution, in new tools for research, in education and creativity and finally in a new age of the life of the spirit. This speaks to a process underwritten with huge contrast and contradictions. I believe that there is a lot less time left than human society, and in particular European society, realises. Unfortunately, in Europe, this realisation was exceedingly late.
The case of Snowden, considered as a whistleblower in Europe and a traiter in the US, has revealed the practices of NSA (National Security Agency) with the collusion of Facebook, Google and other American organisations, informing the US intelligence agencies of all of our activities, through a generalised traceability. Faced with these developments, but also with the growing feeling that it is is less and less tolerable that there is a hegemony of commercial objectives that have no political or social regulation and which are almost exclusively conducted in California, by hackers, the militant developers of the web, the internet and computing and digital technologies in all sectors–which I have been personally using for over 30 years- a large number of proselytisers of the “digital revolution” have been hit by what I have called, during a public talk for Ars Industrialis at the Théatre du Rond Pont: the “Net blues” [2].
These activities and these communities suddenly [tout à coup] discovered that the internet has extremely toxic aspects. For example, because we have seen what Snowdon revealed we have discovered the very possibility of secrecy seems to have disappeared with the digitisation of everyday life. This dissolution of secrecy is very serious. On a psychical level, it is perhaps the destruction of the possibility of a psyche endowed with intimacy and of singular individuation, if it is the case that the unconscious is what remains hidden and secret to oneself. And at the level of diplomacy, the publication of the diplomatic data and cables by Wikileaks – through a channeling [pompage] of data that made the internet possible – which has been presented as a positive thing, is also literally the destruction of the conditions for classic diplomacy, which is to say [de ce qui sert parfois à éviter la guerre]. For me, the publication of the diplomatic cables without doubt includes a positive dimension, but it is absolutely necessary not to elide that it is also a dangerous shift.
That secrets are necessary for international life is obvious. However, for example, is banking secrecy necessary? This is another topic for which we do not have time to discuss, but many believe (including myself) that the automated transfer of information to prevent bank secrecy should be mandatory.
Be that as it may, the secrecy of intimate life is essential and forms the possibility of attaining a dignity of existence–a dignity defined for humanity by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. The traceablity of personal data creates a kind of digital nudity which is an indignity for the human [l’homme]. Initimacy is the possibility and the necessity of having a secret life that I compose for myself. This is the primary lesson from Freud. I do not truly know for myself what is extremely intimate to me because that is what we call the unconscious. In the guise of self-expression, the whole of human history is in some way a “keeping of secrets” without making them public and without ever totally having access to them ourselves.
Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myths and thinking with the Greeks
From the advent of the politeia this becomes a fundamental aspect of social organsiation. The Greeks played an extremely important role in the precise, delineated and institutionalised differentation between the public and the private, for we cannot have a public sphere without a private sphere. To understand this, one must read the text that Jean-Pierre Vernant dedicated to the relation between the couple Hermes and Hestia, Hestia is the figure of the home, privacy, secrecy and the care given to the fire that always comprises a sacred and divine dimension. Hermes is the figure of movement, communication and public space. Vernant shows that there is not one without the other: if we destroy what is secret, we also destroy public space, and vice versa.
As for us, the men and women of the 21st century, we are experiencing a publishing revolution: the digital space constitutes, above all, a process of publishing. We publish ourselves, voluntarily or not. We do it unintentionally when we are tracked by cookies: everything that we do is parsed, storable and analysable through so-called big data, which are new ways of implementing applied mathematics through algorithms which can capture and process the hundreds and billions of [units of] data, which, through feedback loops, performatively change the dynamics of the behaviour of those whose data are analysed in real-time, and which constantly formulate adjustments to trajectories which are in reality a kind of autopilot for behaviour.
Be that as it may, through these publishing systems, we are all capable of publishing and so distributing our ideas, our propositions, our analyses, our points of view, our critiques, and so on – and through this, we become able to take part in a new form of public life, for example by creating [web] sites, like that of Ars Industrialis, and thereby constituting the new possiblities, which Gilbert Simondon called pyschic and collective individuation. I use the word “individuation” to explicate the “pharmacological” character of the internet: the internet is double-edged, it offers new and absolutely extraordinary opportunities for individation but also, at the same time, it threatens the fundamentals of individuation.
The internet is a “φάÏμακον” (pharmakon Ed.), in the sense that Plato described writing, and we are discovering this double-edged nature [cette double face]. The actual system of the web is dangerous for secrets, for psychic individuation, for collective individuation, because we cannot and we should not submit to forms of calculability. Such a capitulation [soumission] can only engender a “voluntary servitude” which could rapidly become involuntary and inescapable [insurmontable]. In contrast, the digital allows the intensification of the incalculable in the same way that writing in Ancient Greece had huge effects on individuation through an enriched social diversity – especially by making citizenship possible, which formed the birth of a new process of psychic and collective individuation.
The promulgation of writing has certainly engendered a loss of idiomatic differences, that is to say, local individuations. All kinds of idioms began to disappear. At the same time, it was a growth in individuation through citizenship, tragedy, philosophy, etc. – All on the basis of public law [rights? droit public].
The question for us is whether the switch to digital is creating a phenomenon of this kind or, conversely, a process of widespread “disindividuation.”
Bernard Stiegler’s office, Épineuil-le-Fleuriel, 28 juillet 2013, taken by Dom Lecroix.
Notes
1. Cf. Réseaux, février 2013, La Découverte.
2. Cf. http://www.arsindustrialis.org/
3. I speak here of performativity in the sense of John Austin, for whom a performative utterance is a self-declaration such as that which I say, by the fact that I am saying it, creates a situation, and this “fact” is something in the situation that is prior to the creation of the situation. Cf. John Austin, Quand dire, c’est faire, éditions Seuil.
David Beer points to a recent blog post by Deborah Lupton (it is an excellent blog and worth browsing) concerning how we can understand academic obsessions with measurement as a version of the self-disciplining ‘quantified self’ movement. Interesting stuff…
Academics have been counting elements of their work for a long time as part of their professional practice and presentation of the self, even before the advent of digital technologies. The ‘publish or perish’ maxim refers to the imperative for a successful academic to constantly produce materials such as books, book chapters and peer-reviewed journal articles in order to maintain their reputation and place in the academic hierarchy. Academic curricula vitae invariably involve lists of these outputs under the appropriate headings, as do university webpages for academics. They are required for applications for promotions, new positions and research funding.[…]
In adopting a critical reflexive approach to all this monitoring and measurement, we need to ask questions. Should the practices of quantifying the academic self be considered repressive of academic freedom and autonomy? Do they place undue stress on academics to perform, and perhaps to produce work that is sub-standard but greater in number? However it is also important to consider the undeniable positive dimensions of participating in digital public engagement and thereby reaching a wider audience. Academics do not write for themselves alone: being able to present their work to more readers has its own rewards. Quantified selfers can find great satisfaction in using data to take control over elements of their lives and also as a performative aspect. So too, for academics, collecting and presenting data on their professional selves can engender feelings of achievement, satisfaction and pride at their accomplishments. Such data are important to the academic professional sense of self.
The 20th century is the century of the industrialisation, the conservation and the transmission–that is, the selection–of memory. This industrialisation becomes concretized in the generalisation of the production of industrial temporal objects (phonograms, films, radio and television programs, etc)
[Bernard Stiegler, ‘The Time of Cinema. On the “New World” and “Cultural Exception”‘, p. 106.].
Following on from the post I made a few months ago, providing a version of a paper entitled ‘memory programmes‘ that I gave at the “Conditions of Mediation” conference at Birkbeck in June, I wanted to share some thoughts I have included in a recent submission around the theme of the ‘industrialisation of memory’, following Stiegler (as above), and the discourses of the ‘smart city’. I play around with the suggestion of the formation of a ‘municipal memory‘, which could be considered one of the cornerstones of what Nigel Thrift has diagnosed as “Lifeworld Inc.“.
While the lines drawn on maps, policed at crossings and customs posts, can apparently clearly delineate a border, other technologies that can also (be used to) place us, on one side of a border or another, may ebb and flow with atmospheric, material and technical differences. In particular, the relatively well known tendency for the cellular mobile phone system to record the location of a given device (via triangulation) as some distance from the actual physical location has been interrogated and played with by artists and activists alike.
One such meditation on the vagaries of the locational capabilities of the GSM system is the Border Bumping project. Julian Oliver has played around with how we traverse borders by examining how phones register with the network and redrawing a map of the borders accordingly. Oliver has created an app that lets owners of Android phones contribute to the project.
