Geographies Of Digital Culture

“Digital culture” reflects the ways in which the ubiquity and increasing use of digital devices and infrastructures is changing the arenas of human experience, creating new cultural realities. Whereas much of the existing literature on digital culture addresses the topic through a sociological, anthropological, or media theoretic lens, this book focuses on its geographic aspects. The first section, “infrastructures and networked practices” highlights the integration of digital technologies into everyday practices in very different historical and geographical contexts—ranging from local lifeworlds, urban environments, web cartographies up to global geopolitics. The second section on “subjectivities and identities” shows how digital technology use possesses the capacity to alter the subjective, perceptive, and affective engagement with the spatial world. Finally, “politics and inequalities” investigates the social and spatial disparities concerning digital technology and its use. This book draws attention to the deep interconnectedness of the cultural, digital, and spatial aspects of everyday practices by referring to a broad range of empirical examples taken from tourism, banking, mobility, and health. Scholars in human geography, anthropology, media and communication studies, and history will find this research indispensable reading. It addresses both young and seasoned researchers as well as advanced students in the aforementioned disciplines. The wealth of examples also makes this publication helpful in academic teaching.

This textbook presents a fully up-to-date, synoptic and critical overview of how digital devices, logics, methods, etc are transforming geography.

Who shapes our digital landscapes, and why are so many people excluded from them?

This book examines the changing digital geographies of the Anthropocene. It analyses how technologies are providing new opportunities for communication and connection, while simultaneously deepening existing problems associated with isolation, global inequity and environmental harm. By offering a reading of digital technologies as ‘more-than-real’, the author argues that the productive and destructive possibilities of digital geographies are changing important aspects of human and non-human worlds. Like the more-than-human notion and how it emphasises interconnections of humans and non-humans in the world, the more-than-real inverts the diminishing that accompanies use of the terms ‘virtual’ and ‘immaterial’ as applied to digital spaces. Digital geographies are fluid, amorphous spaces made of contradictory possibilities in this Anthropocene moment. By sharing experiences of people involved in trying to improve digital geographies, this book offers stories of hope and possibility alongside stories of grief and despair. The more-than-real concept can help us understand such work – by feminists, digital rights activists, disability rights activists, environmentalists and more. Drawing on case studies from around the world, this book will appeal to academics, university students, and activists who are keen to learn from other people’s efforts to change digital geographies, and who also seek to remake digital geographies.

This book reframes commemoration through distinctly geographical lenses, locating it within experiential and digital worlds. It interrogates the role of power in representations of memory and shows how experiences of commemoration sit within, alongside and in contrast to its official normative forms. The book charts how memories, places and experiences of commemoration play out and have, or have not, changed in and through a digital world. Key to the book’s exploration is a new epistemology of memory, underpinned by an embodied research approach.

How streaming services and internet distribution have transformed global television culture. Television, once a broadcast medium, now also travels through our telephone lines, fiber optic cables, and wireless networks. It is delivered to viewers via apps, screens large and small, and media players of all kinds. In this unfamiliar environment, new global giants of television distribution are emerging—including Netflix, the world’s largest subscription video-on-demand service. Combining media industry analysis with cultural theory, Ramon Lobato explores the political and policy tensions at the heart of the digital distribution revolution, tracing their longer history through our evolving understanding of media globalization. Netflix Nations considers the ways that subscription video-on-demand services, but most of all Netflix, have irrevocably changed the circulation of media content. It tells the story of how a global video portal interacts with national audiences, markets, and institutions, and what this means for how we understand global media in the internet age. Netflix Nations addresses a fundamental tension in the digital media landscape – the clash between the internet’s capacity for global distribution and the territorial nature of media trade, taste, and regulation. The book also explores the failures and frictions of video-on-demand as experienced by audiences. The actual experience of using video platforms is full of subtle reminders of market boundaries and exclusions: platforms are geo-blocked for out-of-region users (“this video is not available in your region”); catalogs shrink and expand from country to country; prices appear in different currencies; and subtitles and captions are not available in local languages. These conditions offer rich insight for understanding the actual geographies of digital media distribution. Contrary to popular belief, the story of Netflix is not just an American one. From Argentina to Australia, Netflix’s ascension from a Silicon Valley start-up to an international television service has transformed media consumption on a global scale. Netflix Nations will help readers make sense of a complex, ever-shifting streaming media environment.

This edited book engages with the rapidly emerging field of the geographies of digital sexualities, that is, the interlinkages between sexual lives, material and virtual geographies and digital practices. Modern life is increasingly characterised by our integrated engagement in digital/material landscapes activities and our intimate life online can no longer be conceptualised as discrete from ‘real life.’ Our digital lives are experienced as a material embeddedness in the spaces of everyday life marking the complex integration of real and digital geographies. Perhaps nowhere is this clearer than in the ways that our social and sexual practices such as dating or casual sex are bound up online and online geographies and in many cases constitute specific sexuality-based communities crossing the digital/material divide. The aim of this collection is to explore the complexities of these newly constituted and interwoven sexual and gender landscapes through empirical, theoretical and conceptual engagements through wide-ranging, innovative and original research in a new and quickly moving field.

This volume celebrates the 100th anniversary of the Association of American Geographers. It recognizes the importance of technologies in the production of geographical knowledge. The original chapters presented here examine technologies that have affected geography as a discipline. Among the technologies discussed are cartography, the camera, aerial photography, computers, and other computer-related tools. The contributors address the impact of such technologies on geography and society, disciplinary inquiries into the social/technological interfaces, high-tech as well low-tech societies, and applications of technologies to the public and private sectors. Geography and Technology can be used as a textbook in geography courses and seminars investigating specific technologies and the impacts of technologies on society and policy. It will also be useful for those in the humanities, social, policy and engineering sciences, planning and development fields where technology questions are becoming of increased importance. Geography clearly has much to learn from other disciplines and fields about geography/technology linkages; others can likewise learn much from us.

Digital networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter have revolutionized everyday human interaction by facilitating the search for, and access to, information, entertainment, and social connection. But with the rise of digital surveillance and data extraction for profit, more people are seeking not just to disconnect from technology but to fully disentangle themselves from the widespread social, economic, and political networks of digital communications. Disentangling offers an interdisciplinary global analysis of this growing trend toward disconnection. Moving beyond technological disconnection, this volume proposes the term "disentangling" as a lens for re-thinking the structures of our digital world and categorizing the ways in which people reject, avoid, or rework their digital networks. Across twelve chapters, contributors explore the existential issues stemming from digitally entangled lives, including cultural capital and digital "detox" retreats, and investigate how geographies of disconnection relate to wider societal challenges. Additional chapters explore connections between digital disconnection and other forms of disconnection, including death, sleep, and the abandonment of human settlements. The volume closes with a reflection on connectivity in the post-pandemic society and how we might rework our connections to fit a "socially distanced" world. Blending philosophy and sociology with media geography, Disentangling offers a crucial reflection on how we might unravel our digital dependence by reasserting resilient boundaries between ourselves and the surrounding political, economic, cultural, and technological systems.

Theatre and Performance in Digital Culture examines the recent history of advanced technologies, including new media, virtual environments, weapons systems and medical innovation, and considers how theatre, performance and culture at large have evolved within those systems. The book examines the two Iraq wars, 9/11 and the War on Terror through the lens of performance studies, and, drawing on the writings of Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou and Martin Heidegger, alongside the dramas of Beckett, Genet and Shakespeare, and the theatre of the Kantor, Foreman, Socíetas Raffaello Sanzio and the Wooster Group, the book positions theatre and performance in technoculture and articulates the processes of aesthetics, metaphysics and politics. This wide-ranging study reflects on how the theatre and performance have been challenged and extended within these new cultural phenomena.