A curation of articles, essays, book reviews and interviews on critical geographical concerns.
Investigates the spatial implications of the mass production, consumption, and disposal of digital media. Core areas of study include the environmental impacts, industrial landscapes, infrastructures, political transformations, social activities, and subjectivities particular to the digital age.
I argue that by focusing on middle class technological anxieties in the global North, "The Social Dilemma" inadvertently reinforces the spatial hegemony of technological optimism and ignores the socio-spatial contingencies through which social media and its artifacts are constructed and imagined.
This book is a timely set of dialogues on a series of key coordinates to navigate the political economy of Big Data Capitalism. Chandler and Fuchs have successfully composed a well-rounded volume addressing a wide range of urgent themes that include digital governance, posthuman knowledge, digital affective labor and its gendered dimensions, new (and old) forms of slavery and their respective technologies, emerging forms of political organization, and the appropriation of fixed capital by workers – among others.
The social practice of everyday hacking, digital and mobile workarounds, information piracy, illegal copying and sharing—in a word, jugaad culture—is an increasing feature of post-liberalization India. But it has a history that must be understood as always involving repeatedly forgotten experiments in techno-perceptual assemblages.
In the accessible and engaging style that we have come to expect from Miller’s publications, Webcam explores the socio-cultural effects of the webcam from an anthropological perspective. That said, this book will appeal to scholars from much of the social sciences and beyond, for its contents and core arguments pose important questions for what it means to be human, and connect with others in an age of instant global communication.
This article by Samuel Merrill, Shanti Sumartojo, Angharad Closs Stephens, and Martin Coward examines the forms and feelings of togetherness evident in both Manchester city centre and on social media during the first anniversary of the 22 May 2017 Manchester Arena bombing.
This paper pays attention to the immense and febrile field of digital image files which picture the smart city as they circulate on the social media platform Twitter. The paper considers tweeted images as an affective field in which flow and colour are especially generative.
Understanding the co-existence of, and the relationships between, these two forms of social control is essential for thinking through the urban politics of data and control. Our article illustrates this contention with three vignettes of how the dividualised data associated with discrete digital infrastructures and systems are also being ‘re-assembled’ by various authorities seeking to discipline the behaviour of individuals.
This paper examines how datafication is creating new topologies of education policy. Specifically, we analyse how the creation of data infrastructures that enable the generation, communication and representation of digital data are changing relations of power, including both centralised and dispersed forms, and space in education.
This article examines the mobilisation of spatial media technologies for digitally mapping informal settlements. It argues that digital mapping operates politically through a re-configuration of circulation, power, and territorial formations.