Reblog> ERC Video for the Programmable City Project
Nice video offering an overview of the Programmable City project (funded by the European Research Council):
This video introduces the Programmable City. In the video Rob Kitchin outlines the aims and objectives of the project and highlights the importance of the support received from the European Research Council (ERC). Each researcher on the Programmable City team also briefly discusses their work. The video was made by the Programmable City team in order to promote the project and the ERC.
Culture & technology – the text of my ‘provocation’
The video recordings of the two panel sessions for the Provocations of the Present event at the OU earlier this month have been posted online (links at the bottom of this page). The event was an enjoyable opportunity to engage with a range of contemporary concerns in cultural geography and a moment of reflection on the politics of such concerns – refracted through engagements with Doreen Massey’s work (it was, after all, the ‘6th annual Doreen Massey event’) and Peter Jackson’s Maps of Meaning (which, as Phil Crang observed, is in its ‘silver jubilee’ year, having been published 25 years ago).
The panelists were asked to offer a ‘provocation’ in advance of the event that would be posted to the Geography Matters Facebook page in order to promote discussion. We were instructed to write short provocations that made punchy points – a difficult task for a wordy academic(!) but this is my contribution:
All culture is in some way technical: it is an expression of technicity, understood as the ways in which technologies (in their broadest sense) are intimately enfolded into our experience of the world. How does this challenge or (re)configure understandings of ‘the human’ in human geographies? What kinds of politics does such an understanding of culture either reveal or elide?
In the talk I gave at the actual event I developed some of these themes in two ways: first, I asked how contemporary forms of mediation might prompt cultural geographers to think about popular culture and the ways we study it; and: second, I questioned what kinds of assumptions about ‘the human’ are we making when we talk about the ‘non-human’ or the ‘post-human’, and how does this influence how we talk about technology in relation to culture.
So, Ã propos of nothing apart from making this text do something more than be read aloud, here is what was basically a script of my talk:
Provocation:
As the introduction to the event highlights, in the conclusion to Maps of Meaning Peter Jackson offers the provocation that continues to resonate in contemporary debates around cultural geography, whether we are debating affect and emotion, identity and difference or the human and non-human:
If cultural geography is to be revitalised, … ‘It can only be by an engagement with the contemporary intellectual terrain – not to counter a threat, but to discover an opportunity’ (Jackson 1989: 180; Stedman Jones 1983: 24).
I want to address the kinds of discovery we might engage in, and in particular focus on two ‘provocative’ questions about what counts in the study of cultural geography. These carry with them the implications of the earlier provocation I was invited to post to Facebook that: all culture is in some way technical: it is an expression of technicity, understood as the ways in which technologies (in their broadest sense) are intimately enfolded into our experience of the world.
So, the first question I will pose is in relation to ideas about popular culture; and the second is in relation to the status of the human in cultural (human) geography.
My first provocation, then, is: should cultural geography be more vulgar? Which can be phrased differently as: how might we better accommodate geographies of ‘popular culture’ in our cultural geographies?
In a recent essay on the recurring accusation of ‘vulgar Marxism’, Makenzie Wark articulates several ways in which the epithet of vulgar gets used and I want to discuss a couple here.
First, vulgarians too readily align themselves with the interests of the working class, or to put it in Clive Barnett’s words, “the implication is that, by even suggesting that there may be some relationship between the higher things in life (opera, literature, fine wine and so on) and base considerations like work, causal explanation itself is guilty of bad taste”.
Second, vulgarians don’t think in great revolutionary leaps but rather in more modest durations. We might think here about the mundane and the everyday, and the micro- spatio-temporalities of repetitive and taken for granted tasks.
What then, might it mean to do ‘vulgar’ cultural geography?
One might argue that the first twenty-something years of ‘new’ cultural geography are founded on readings: reading various landscapes and other spatial formations as texts – as the Duncan’s and others asked of us in the late 1980s. This, of course, speaks to a particular understanding of the medium and the expression of culture: a deliberative cogitation on particular constellations of meaning. One might argue that this implicitly goes hand-in-hand with a particular aesthetics of literature, when asked to ‘read’ landscapes it is analogous to reading Charles Dickens or Milan Kundera, and not Dan Brown or EL James. We apparently ought to aspire to an ‘unbearable lightness’ and not ‘fifty shades’ of cultural geography.
To attend to the everyday and to the popular one might suggest that different media and forms of expression of culture can become more suitable analogies. What does it mean to think in terms of television, radio, the smart phone and the tablet? So, perhaps a range of different sensibilities of watching, listening or touching needs to be added to reading. Such sensibilities might be more accommodating to recent proposals of atmospheres, not least by Ash and Anderson, in addition to landscapes of meaning and sensation. I am thinking in particular here of recent work by geographers that has been described as post-phenomenological (for example, see Ash & Simpson’s forthcoming piece in Progress in Human Geography).
Our techniques for thinking are intimately tied to the mediums through which we express thought and so, to pursue the metaphor, as increasingly ‘multimedia’ scholars we might well supplement the reading of landscapes as text with the watching of, listening to and touching forms of spatial experience as image and sound and haptics.
The subtitle to this event: what culture for what geography? Is for me pregnant with an additional question, so my second point of provocation is the question what do we mean by the “human” in human geography as it is discussed today? and in particular how might this relate to the various ways in which we figure things as not or perhaps after whatever it is we mean by human?
We have all variously framed our research in relation to different formulations of ‘the human’ – humanistic geographies, and their critique; the non-human; the post-human, but the category of the human can still be left as assumed. Such assumptions behind this prefixed ‘human’ condition and constitute how we understand and describe experiences of spatiality. So, this strikes at the heart of a key, ongoing, concern for cultural geography and the contribution we as cultural geographers can continue make.
Specifically, I want to raise this in terms of the implications of our various uses of the non-human, the post-human and invocations of technology.
As others, including Castree and Nash, have observed the assumptions that ‘the human’ carries with it are expressed in binaries – the normative human and its others. Nevertheless, by proposing a prefixed, non- and post- human we risk slipping back into reaffirming the category of the ‘bracketed off’ or ‘exceptional’ human, and so need to remain vigilant.
In particular, technology has been packaged up into the ‘non-human’ and particularly ‘post-human’ whereby the implication is that particular kinds of technology are entirely separate from us, humans, and can be seen to have ‘effects’ upon us and our societies. This is acutely evident in relation to digital technologies through forms of spatial imagination that can imply servitude to an autonomous and powerful technical master on the one hand and a gateway to the transcendence of material form on the other. While geographers have been rightly critical of these simplistic binaries of human/technical, there remains a common habit of referring to technologically mediated activities as somehow extra-spatial, as virtual, in contra-distinction to a ‘real’.
I have argued recently in Progress in Human Geography that, rather than propagating a peculiar human exceptionalism, we can understand ‘the human’ and technology as existing in a co-constitutive relation that can be called ‘technicity‘. There isn’t the one without the other. So, for example, rather than appeal to an amorphous alternate realm from which digital technologies draw their agency, we can instead study the particular spatial formations in which agency and technicity are generated.
Geography is, in this way, well placed to inform and enhance social scientific research concerning digital technologies, particularly in relation to the articulation of spatial experience and knowledge.
VIDEO> Algorithms, performativity and governability – Introna
Excellent critical reflection on ‘algorithms, performativity and governability’ by Lucas Introna – very helpful for a bunch of things I’m currently thinking about…
Lucas Introna: “Algorithms, Performativity and Governability” from Media, Culture, Communication on Vimeo.
Taking this discussion a few steps on, you can (and I intend to today) read David Beer’s article Power through the algorithm? and Daniel Neyland’s article On organising algorithms.
Reblog> Steve Hinchliffe on the ‘badger politics’ played out on twitter
Over on our nice shiny new website for the Contagion project, the PI, Professor Steve Hinchliffe, has written a timely blogpost concerning the formations and formulations of concerned publics with regard to the 2013 ‘pilot’ cull of badgers in the South West of England.
In the blogpost Steve highlights the social networking analysis being undertaken as a part of the broader Contagion project, through some interesting case studies, to work through how we can understand the data available in relation to particular issues, the tools that can be used to interrogate them, and the theoretical frames we can use to epistemologically anchor and deepen what can be said about these data.
Steve is also writing, in part, in response to a recent presentation/report by the IpsosMORI Social Research Unit, who are engaging in research around ‘social listening’, which focuses on fracking and the badger cull. The social network analysis undertaken by the Contagion project team arguably deepens and nuances the broad brushstrokes of the temporal analysis undertaken by IpsosMORI and highlights the messiness of the ‘modularity’ of the network convened around the topic of concern – the badger cull. As Steve suggests:
…issues are performed or issue-led publics are generated in ways that involve a key role for social media and for twitter in particular. What we are starting to explore is how those publics are constituted – they aren’t always partisan, they tend to be heterogeneous rather than homogeneous (a standard assumptiion in social network theory is that people of like minds clump together, but this homophilly as it is called, is not so clear cut in public issues – clumping is somewhat conditional on other relations and roles). Moreover, there are suggestions here of key actors and sub-groups that confound any simple sense that social media simply relays a message – communication is messier than that. There is a roughness or spatiality to the social.
Morozov on selling personal data
In a piece over on New Republic, Evgeny Morozov (author of To Save Everything Click Here) outlines a version of ‘the attention economy’, in which, because it is mediated through digital media, everything that we do, every way we interact with people, places, services and things becomes an ‘asset class’, and traded in bulk. Ultimately, Morozov’s argument is not dissimilar to Bernard Stiegler’s critique of a ‘generalised proleterianisation‘ insofar as the grammatisation (capturing, storing and sorting as data) of ever-increasing parts of our lives we become subjectivised through systems of calculation at an industrial scale that results in a kind of ‘incapacitation’. As Morozov suggests:
[T]o sell our intimate data in bulk is to fully surrender our quest for autonomy, accepting a life where the most existential choices are shaped either by the forces of the market or by whatever war–be it on climate change or obesity–the government has enlisted us (rather than corporations) to fight. In this world, whether we become vegetarians, and even whether we end up thinking about it, might ultimately hinge on which player (the steakhouses, the supermarkets, the bureaucrats) has the most to gain from this switch. Our data constitutes our very humanity. To voluntarily treat it as an “asset class” is to agree to the fate of an interactive billboard. We shouldn’t unquestionably accept the argument that personal data is just like any other commodity and that most of our digital problems would disappear if only, instead of gigantic data monopolists like Google and Facebook, we had an army of smaller data entrepreneurs. We don’t let people practice their right to autonomy in order to surrender that very right by selling themselves into slavery. Why make an exception for those who want to sell a slice of their intellect and privacy rather than their bodies?
Worth a read anyway, in spite of being a bit dystopian…
Contextualising ‘virtual’ geographies
Following on from the publication of my article in Progress in Human Geography, I wanted to post here some thoughts that didn’t quite fit into that paper but nevertheless feel like a worthwhile contextualisation of the long-running engagement with digital mediation and ideas of a ‘virtual’ or ‘cyber-‘ spaces in geography.
Discussions of alternative or transformed forms of spatiality constituted by computation have spawned a range of names and phrases for those spatial formations. As Pile argued, the descriptions of ‘cyberspace’ and ‘the virtual’ are ‘a plurality of clashing, resonating and shocking metaphors’ (Pile, 1994, page 1817). In this post I want to begin to discuss the malleable nature of our descriptions of computation, data and software. In particular it seems pertinent to examine the role of metaphors and how some geographers have addressed that role. Sawhney (1996) describes metaphors as ‘midwives’ that ease new conceptualisations of spatial experience into understanding. However, metaphors that constitute discourses are not politically neutral. If metaphors ‘do things’ as Lakoff and Johnson (2003) assert, what they ‘do’ needs to be explicitly examined.
Paul Adams, Stephen Graham and Ken Hillis all offer examinations of the role of metaphors in understanding the spatial experience of ICTs that are worth revisiting (see also: Graham, 2013):
First, Adams’ (1997) useful review of metaphors in literary treatments of computer mediation identifies three, overlapping, ‘fields’ of metaphors: ‘virtual architecture’, ‘the electronic frontier’ and ‘cyberspace’. Adams argues that, despite fears concerning ‘a metaphor’s power to corrupt’ (1997, page 167), such ‘mythical geographies’ fill in the spaces between established knowledge to form what Tuan calls the ‘fuzzy area of defective knowledge’ (Tuan, 1977, page 86).
Second, Hillis (1999) highlights a background of mysticism to metaphors utilised to describe and explore virtual reality as a ‘cyberspace’. For Hillis, many of the metaphors draw upon understandings of light. Hillis (1999) offers three types of metaphor: virtual reality as a privileged position affording ‘vision’; virtual environments as facsimiles or simulations represented through light, akin to Plato’s shadows on the cave wall, and the virtual as an ability to inhabit images as such. Both Adams (1997) and Hillis (1999) postulate a link between the types of metaphors used and the desire to affirm an elevated or omniscient perspective, drawing upon the remote gaze as a tool of imperialism (akin to Virilio, 1984) or the near-omnipotent reach of light to illustrate that desire.
Third, Graham describes the ‘powerful role of spatial and territorial metaphors’ that anchors discourses of ICTs (Graham, 1998, page 165). Graham (1998) identifies a typology of spatial metaphors through which space and place are conceptualised in relation to ICTs: ‘substitution and transcendence’, ‘co-evolution’, and ‘recombination’. Metaphors of substitution and transcendence, echoing Hillis’ (1999) critique, denote replacing physical territory with a ‘virtual’ using new technologies. A co-evolutionary perspective argues that, while remaining separate, both physical and electronic ‘spaces’ are necessarily produced together.
Finally Graham (1998) posits a re-combinative, topological, understanding of socially constructed forms of spatiality that are ‘sociotechnical’ (i.e. linkages between ‘heterogeneous’ actors, including humans, technology and others, formulate spatial experience). Graham (1998), along with Adams and Hillis, identifies the problematic form of Cartesian dualism (a mind/body split) implied by his first category, which also somewhat underlies the second, and the uncritical technological determinism that often accompanies this somewhat fanciful race away from our embodied existence.
Regardless of the apparently ephemeral or amorphous nature of the metaphorical ‘virtual’ or ‘cyberspace’, such evocations are still grounded in a resolutely material register. As Hillis (1999, pages 160-162) notes, language itself is profoundly spatial, and material, in its expression. Writing is the spatialisation of knowledge, what philosopher Bernard Stiegler calls the externalization of thought recorded as ‘tertiary retentions’ (Stiegler, 2007), most frequently orthographic writing (see: Stiegler, 1998), with different technologies of retention using space differently. The expression of ‘virtual’ spaces is, then, always already material in character. Hillis, in an argument similar to Stiegler (1998), presses further, highlighting the reciprocal, yet fragmented, relation between word and world:
language is not only a discrete, concrete thing”¦ Neither is it ephemeral, language can be thought of as an “embodied prototechnology”, both confirming us to ourselves existentially at the level of embodied voice and extending us to engage with the lived world through its symbolic affect (Hillis, 1999, page 161).
Metaphors and neologisms are, of course, not the sole preserve of geographers or, indeed, academics. Of course, much of this work speaks to broader popular (Western), late 20th century interests in ‘telematic culture’ (Ascott, 1990), the creation of ‘artificial experience’ and ‘virtual communities’ (Rheingold, 1989, 1998), and the convergence of subaltern cultures experimenting with drugs and computing (Rushkoff, 1994). Alternative, less dyadic, conceptualisations of a ‘virtual’ are also offered by geographers considering the growth of digital mediation. Although perhaps now considered somewhat dated, we might note that ‘cyberspace’ or ‘virtual space’ has not been solely evoked as an abstract alternative realm, as Kitchin (1998) has argued:
Cyberspaces are dependent upon spatial fixity, they are embodied spaces and access is unevenly distributed”¦ cyberspaces do not replace geographic spaces, nor do they destroy space and time (page 403).
Following Adams (1997, 2011), Graham (1998, 2005), Hillis (1999) and Kitchin (1998, 2011; Kitchin and Dodge, 2011) we can see how, and perhaps why, metaphors and neologisms are used to describe computer-mediated spatial experience and also how geographers have situated the agency of those terms. Earlier engagements with computation were necessarily speculative and concerned with formulating understandings of nascent or imagined technologies. However, in the last decade the growth in ownership of digital technologies has created case studies of widespread everyday use. Some of these case studies are explored in my recently published article ‘The matter of ‘virtual’ geographies‘.
Some references
Adams, Paul C., 1997, “Cyberspace and virtual places” Geographical Review 87 (2), pp. 155-171.
Adams, Paul C., 2011, “A taxonomy for communication geography” Progress in Human Geography 35 (1), pp. 37-57.
Ascott, Roy, 1990, “Is there love in the telematic embrace?” Art Journal 49 (3), pp. 241-247.
Graham, Mark, 2013, “Geography/Internet: Ethereal Alternate Dimensions of Cyberspace or Grounded Augmented Realities?” The Geographical Journal forthcoming.
Graham, Stephen, 1998, “The end of geography or the explosion of place? Conceptualising space, place and information technology” Progress in Human Geography 22 (2), pp. 165-185.
Graham, Stephen, 2005, “Software-sorted geographies” Progress in Human Geography 29 (5), pp. 562-580.
Hillis, Ken, 1999 Digital sensations: space, identity and embodiment and virtual reality. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN.
Kitchin, Rob, 1998, “Towards geographies of cyberspace” Progress in Human Geography 22 (3), pp. 385-406.
Kitchin, Rob, 2011, “The programmable city” environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 38 (6), pp. 945-951.
Kitchin, Rob, Dodge, Martin, 2011 Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Lakoff, George, Johnson, Mark, 2003 Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.
Pile, Steve, 1994, “CyberGeography: 50 years of Environment and Planning A” Environment and Planning A 26 (12), pp. 1815-1823.
Rheingold, Howard, 1989 Virtual Reality: Exploring the Brave New Technologies of Artificial Experience and Interactive Worlds – From Cyberspace to Teledildonics. Mandarin, London.
Rheingold, Howard, 1998 The Virtual Community. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Rushkoff, Douglas, 1994 Cyberia: Life in the trenches of hyperspace Flamingo, London.
Sawhney, H, 1996, “Information superhighway: metaphors as midwives” Media, Culture and Society 18 pp. 135-155.
Stiegler, Bernard, 1998 Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. trans. Beardsworth, R., Collins, G., Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA.
Stiegler, Bernard, 2007, “Anamnesis and Hypomnesis: The Memories of Desire”.) Technicity. Charles University Press, Prague, pp. 15-41.
Tuan, Yi-Fu, 1977 Space and Place: The prespective of experience. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN.
Virilio, Paul, 1984 War and Cinema: The logistics of perception. trans. Camiller, P., Verso, London and New York.
The matter of ‘virtual’ geographies
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.
Hubert Dreyfus re-represents his critique of AI
An entertaining blast through Hubert Dreyfus‘ arguments about ‘what computers still cannot do‘. With an excellent and amusing introduction to Dreyfus’ importance to understandings of computation in relation to phenomenologies of consciousness by Eric Paulos.
Via: ANTHEM.
Tweets about Ernesto Laclau
[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 to do, 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!).