I originally wrote and published this post on the Landscape Surgery blog of the Social, Cultural and Historical Geography Research Group in the Department of Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. Landscape Surgery is a fortnightly seminar series that the SCHG hosts during term-time. Sessions are typically organised around a theme for which speakers (including external invitees) talk about their research, followed by questions/general discussion on the topic; though it can also include workshops and research training sessions. I attend the sessions as part of my PhD activities, and am one of four editors of the Landscape Surgery blog.
The session discussed in this post was organised around the theme of 'The Digital Libidinal City', with a presentation by Alfie Bown on how desire is mediated in the smart city, followed by responses from myself and Megan Harvey. Thanks to Alice Reynolds for editing this post.
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In responding to Alfie Bown’s observations on desire in today’s digitally-mediated cities, which comprised the first part of this Landscape Surgery session on The Digital Libidinal City, Jack Lowe used his discussion to focus on the relationships between digital technology and experience more generally within everyday urban life.
While much of the
early scholarship on digital technology in the humanities and social sciences
lauded the possibilities and dangers of ‘cyberspace’ and ‘the information age’,
Jack proposed that the ‘digital turn’ in these disciplines arrived at a ‘sweet
spot’ in academic exchanges. The critical scholarship of the 80s and 90s gave
us the tools to dissect the representational power of digital media, while
postmodern and post-structural approaches have helped us to make sense of the
agency that digital media have within wider processes of societal function and
everyday life. In particular, with the move since the turn of the millennium
towards thinking about materialities and the post-human, research into digital
technology has helped us become more aware than ever of how our lived
experiences are shaped by our relationships with material things. Ultimately,
Jack argued, this enables us to understand digital technology in context – as
one agent within a wider field of human and non-human agents that assemble
during our everyday experiences.
Turning to Alfie’s
example of Pokémon GO, Jack discussed how studying this widely-played mobile
game is useful for thinking about the geographical relationship between play
and everyday life. While existing studies of the game’s geographies have
largely focused on how the gameplay has changed practices of navigation,
sociability and embodiment in cities (e.g. Evans and Saker, 2019; Apperley and
Moore, 2019), much of the research on Pokémon GO focuses on what the game was
like during the craze of summer 2016, despite the game having changed
significantly since then.
Most impactfully,
players have since been able to participate in raids, a very
popular activity in which groups of players gather in designated locations at
particular times, working together to defeat powerful Pokémon and ultimately
capture them. Jack contended that geographers could fruitfully employ
techniques of rhythmanalysis (Lefebvre, 2004) to examine how the desire to get
a strong Pokémon influences the timelines of those
participating, and their relationships with other players,
non-players and their environment. For it is this intersection between the
rhythms of everyday life and the timescales of raids where the game has often
had the greatest impressions on the everyday experiences of players (and
non-players), provoking users previously unknown to each other to organise
themselves using social platforms outside the game, change their routines,
interact with the mundane events happening at the raid location, and develop
intimate connections (memories of past raids and friendships formed, knowledge
of signal strength, etc.) with the locations in which raids take place.
 |
| Raid battles in Pokémon GO are time-limited events where players must group together to defeat powerful Pokémon |
In relation to
Alfie’s discussion of dating and food delivery apps, Jack drew connections with
geographer James Ash’s (2015) work on interfaces. Ash’s research has explored
the digital media used by payday loans providers, for example, examining how
the affective qualities of app design features such as sliders and buttons can
purposefully alter users’ experiences of them (Ash et al., 2018). Nonetheless,
Ash and other interface scholars have been keen to emphasise that the ways
these digital products are designed and used do not amount to straightforward
manipulation, with the qualities of the experience depending on a number of
contingent factors. Indeed, many people will be familiar with having used
commercial websites owned by large companies that are frustrating to navigate;
and accessing any digital services can always be curtailed by technology
failures, or simple lack of affordability (e.g. of smartphones).
Furthermore, Jack
emphasised the need to be nuanced in thinking about the different kinds of
desire that can be fostered through various types of digital products. Not all
apps and games are intended to foster, or result in fostering, deliberate
patterns of consumption or generation of data for commercial and/or
surveillance purposes. For example, media artists such as Blast Theory have experimented with these platforms to
evoke experiences that question the ethics and affordances of digital
technologies, as well as the social relationships that are mediated by them.
Desire itself is a concept that encompasses a wide range of affective
relationships that could be harnessed, for example, towards artistic,
community-building and health-improving ends using digital media, and some
could even provide methods of potentially subverting capitalist forces mediated
by these technologies. Jack accepted, however, that such goals are always
hindered by the detachment we experience from the working conditions through
which digital products are made, and the lack of clarity regarding the ethics
of how they are used.
To make sense of
these nuances, Jack advocated for the value of ethnographic and
autoethnographic research into the everyday geographies of digital media, so
that we might perceive how they affect our lives at the level of experience
(Duggan, 2017). Notably, he highlighted the need for more practice-based
research in this area, where academics are actively involved in creating
products using digital tools. This process can enable researchers to identify
how each of their design decisions, as well as the affordances of the
technologies used, influence the outcomes of the product being made for
individual and collective experiences. In doing so, such research could
potentially reveal the level at which these design decisions and technological
affordances impact on our everyday behaviours.
Jack finished his
response by drawing together three key questions that geographers might
consider in relation to experience in digitally-mediated cities:
- How can we as geographers
critically examine the ways digital technology affects our everyday
experiences and behaviours, both theoretically and methodologically?
- How is power distributed in
different kinds of digitally-mediated experiences, and what roles do space
and place play in these relationships of power?
- In line with aiming to
adequately contextualise the production and experience of digital
technology, how would we study and interpret digitally-mediated
relationships in societies in the Global South, or across diverse
communities of people more generally?
This post is Part
2 of a three-part series based on The Digital Libinal City session. Part 1 featured Alfie
Bown’s presentation on desire and digital media in contemporary urban life.
Part 3 concludes the series with Megan Harvey’s discussion of the
psychoanalytic dimensions of desire and its relationship with capitalist
reproduction, dreamwork and subversion in the digital sphere.
References
Apperley, T. and
Moore, K. (2019) “Haptic ambience: Ambient play, the haptic effect and
co-presence in Pokémon GO” Convergence: The International Journal of
Research into New Media Technologies25(1): 6-17.
Ash, J.
(2015) The Interface Envelope: Gaming, Technology, Power. New York
and London: Bloomsbury.
Ash, J., Anderson,
B., Gordon, R. and Langley, P. (2018) “Digital Interface Design and Power:
Friction, Threshold, Transition” Environment and Planning D: Society
and Space 36(6): 1136-1153.
Duggan, M. (2017)
“Questioning “digital ethnography” in an era of ubiquitous computing” Geography
Compass 11(5). DOI: 10.1111/gec3.12313
Evans, L. and
Saker, M. (2019) “The playeur and Pokémon Go: Examining the effects of locative
play on spatiality and sociality” Mobile Media & Communication 7(2):
232-247.
Lefebvre, H.
(2004) Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. London and New York:
Continuum.
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