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spaces: distance, the city of bits, life in the ether
This page looks
at questions of time, space and place in the digital era.
distance
Geoffrey Blainey's The Tyranny of
Distance (Sydney, Sun 66), like Harold Innis' Empire &
Communications (Toronto, Uni of Toronto Press 72) and Elizabeth
Eisenstein's The Printing Press As An Agent Of Change:
Communications and Cultural Transformation in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge,
Cambridge Uni Press 79), highlighted the implications for society when
communications is a question of transporting 'atoms' rather than
'bits': a communications economy of scarcity rather than
abundance.
One view of the global information
infrastructure is provided by Frances Cairncross,
senior editor at the Economist, in The
Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution Will Change Our
Lives (London, Orion 97). It's lucid and entertaining but, like
much writing for the Economist, remorselessly upbeat and inclined to
focus on infrastructures - the pipes and peripherals - rather than how
they're used.
Saskia Sassen, a US academic, has not
produced such a coherent and panoramic view of the new "infospace".
However, many of her writings are of considerable value in considering
what the death of distance means for government/businesses structures
and how citizens perceive the world.
Her Globalisation & Its
Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People & Money (New
York, New Press 98) for example builds on James Beninger's Control
Revolution: Technological & Economic Origins of the Information
Society (Cambridge, Harvard Uni Press 89) and Joanne Yates' Control
Through Communications: The Rise of System In American Management
(Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Uni Press 93) in exploring how the death of
distance both allows management-at-a-distance and encourages
concentration of elites within the 'latte belt'.
Complementary analyses are provided in
Annalee Saxenian's classic Regional Advantage: Culture &
Competition In Silicon Valley & Route 128 (Cambridge, Harvard
Uni Press 96), MoneySpace: Geographies of Monetary Transformation
(Routledge, London 97) by Andrew Leyshon & Nigel Thrift, and in
Tendencies & Tensions of the Information Age: The Production
& Distribution of Information in the United States (New
Brunswick, Transaction 97) by Jorge Schement & Terry Curtis.
There are graphical representations of
that concentration in several of the studies highlighted in our Metrics
guide, in particular the Geography of Cyberspace (GeoC)
project and the US Urban Research Initiative (URI).
Matthew Zook's 1998 paper
on The Web of Consumption: The Spatial Organization of the Internet
Industry in the US is a striking
demonstration of how supposedly 'spaceless' new economy industries
clustering in specific geographical locations, in particular New York,
LA and San Francisco.
location
Gertrude Stein complained, in writing
about the US, that "there's no There, there". Sounds like
cyberspace? Margaret Wertheim's much-hyped The
Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the
Internet (New York, Doubleday 99) is markedly inferior to James O'Donnell in Avatars
of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace (Cambridge, Harvard 98) and
Rob Kitchin's Cyberspace: The World in the Wires
(New York, Wiley 98).
Among other studies of space, cyber- and the vanilla variety, we
recommend Michio Kaku's Hyperspace (New York, Oxford Uni Press 94),
Jeff Zaleski's The Soul of Cyberspace (San Francisco, Harper Edge
97) and Cyberspace: First Steps (Cambridge, MIT Press 92) edited
by Michael Benedikt.
The Electronic Space Project (Espace)
at Michigan State University complements the Geography project. We
recommend Information Tectonics: Space, Place & Technology In An
Electronic Age (New York, Wiley 00) a collection of papers edited by
Mark Wilson & Kenneth Corey and the associated maps
of hosts and access to telecommunications, and Martin Dodge's incisive Mapping Cyberspace
(London, Routledge 00), which has a companion site.
Manuel Castells' The Informational City: Information
Technology, Economic Restructuring & the
Urban-Regional Process (Oxford, Blackwell 89) and his
three volume volume The Information Society
(Oxford, Blackwell 99) consider the wider implications of
the networked economy for cities, suburbs and regions.
Strongly recommended. Telecommunications &
the City: Electronic Spaces, Urban Places (London,
Routledge 96) by Stephen Graham & Simon Marvin
explores some of those ideas.
cities of bits
Theorist William Mitchell's E-topia: Urban
life, Jim, but not as we know it (MIT Press, Cambridge 99) is a
glibly upbeat exploration from the school of Marcuse &
Gilder of how the "infostructure"
will affect urban life.
It kicks off with the obligatory McLuhan quote
- "the city no longer exists except as a cultural ghost for
tourists" - before arguing
that global digital networks are a new urban infrastructure that will
change the shape and function of cities as dramatically as railroads,
highways, electric power and telephone networks did in the past.
Accordingly we must extend the definitions of architecture and of urban
design to encompass virtual locations as well as physical ones, leading
to e-topias characterized by 24-hour neighbourhoods with a
vigorous community life complemented by widely-dispersed electronic
meeting places and decentralized production, marketing and distribution
systems. As we've noted in discussing globalisation and regionalisation,
that's inconsistent with most observable facts, although
in line with Gilder's vision of Moore's Law nuking
"the key concentration, the key physical
conglomeration of power in America today: ... the big
parasite cities sucking the lifeblood out of America
today".
It extends arguments in his earlier City of
Bits: Place, Space & the Infobahn (City)
(Cambridge, MIT Press 95), a manifesto that should be read in conjunction with Mike Davis'
more pessimistic - and to us more realistic - City of Quartz
(Holt, New York 94) and Noah Kennedy's The Industrialisation of
Intelligence (Unwin, London 89). Langdon Winner's acerbic 'Silicon
Valley Mystery House' in Variations on a Theme Park:
The New American City & the End of Public Space
(New York, Noonday Press 92) edited by Michael Sorkin is also of value.
Less visionary, but perhaps more
convincing, are the essays in Converging Infrastructures: Intelligent
Transportation & the National Information Infrastructure
(Cambridge, MIT Press 96) edited by Lewis Branscomb & James
Keller.
lost in
cyberspace
Patricia Wallace's The Psychology of
the Internet (Cambridge, Cambridge Uni Press 99) is a workmanlike
introduction to how people behave online, with chapters on group
dynamics, role playing, pornograph, gender, trust and other
issues.
Connections (Cambridge, MIT Press 92) by Lee
Sproull & Sara Kiesler retains its value as an incisive study of email
and identity.
Sherry Turkle's Life on the Screen: Identity in
the Age of the Internet (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson 96) is a
more anecdotal account - with dollops of French structuralism - of
online role-playing and gender-bending. Similar themes are explored
in Allucquere Rosanne Stone's The War of Desire & Technology At
The Close of the Mechanical Age (Cambridge, MIT Press 95). Online no-one knows you're a
dog, but there's a bit too much tail-sniffing by some sociology
professors.
Millennium: Winners & Losers In The Coming Order (New
York, Times 92) is a particularly delphic meditation on
digital nomads by Jacques Attali, former head of the
European Bank for Reconstruction & Development.
There's more value in Digital Nomad (New York,
Wiley 97) by Tsugio Makimoto & David Manners.
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