Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
electronic communications are a poor substitute for face-to-face contact, which is
necessary to transmit what Storper and Venables (
2004
) call ''buzz,'' the intan-
gible, culturally-saturated dimensions of agglomeration. Face-to-face contact
allows for substantial depth in interpersonal interactions, including body language
(including handshakes and eye contact), and emotional cues or affect (as stressed
in nonrepresentational theory), it eliminates the possibility of anonymity that
haunts digital interactions, enhances the ability of actors to engage in mutual
monitoring, and it induces feelings of belonging to a community that are necessary
to the creation of trust, synergies, and mutual understandings that arise from dense
networks of individuals in close contact with one another. The creation and
exchange of irregular, unstandardized, context-bound tacit knowledge is the key to
the success of innovative clusters, global cities, and post-Fordist centers of flexible
production that drive successful regional economies (Maskell and Malmberg
1999
;
Allen
2000
). Similarly, Richard Florida's (
2002
) celebrated ''creative class''
focuses on places in which the opportunities for both formal and informal inter-
actions abound. Thus, for all of the hyperbole surrounding the network society and
digital technologies, face-to-face contact still retains a vital role in contemporary
economic and social life.
The massive social changes unleashed by digital communication technologies
have, not surprisingly, changed what Lanier (
2010
) calls ''what a person can be.''
In enhancing human extensibility, telemediated ties allow for a far-reaching
rescripting of the self: from a system of one-to-one ties to a system characterized
by one-to-many connections, increasingly large numbers of people socialize today
via a vast network of weak digital ties. The result has been a series of convoluted
interpersonal landscapes marked by wormholes and tunnels, yielding complicated,
origami-like spatialities of daily life. Social media allow multiple spaces and times
to be folded into the self to an unprecedented degree: the computer screen allows
''being at a distance,'' blurring the boundaries between self and other. Gergen
(
1991
, p. 49) asserts that the immersion of individuals in networks of digital
technologies leads to a condition of ''multiphrenia,'' ''a world in which we no
longer experience a secure sense of self, and in which doubt is increasingly placed
on the very assumption of a bounded identity with palpable attributes.'' The
poststructural self, if it can be said to exist at all, is stretched across multiple
locations, both synchronously and asynchronously (Adams
1995
), mirroring the
rhyzomic structure of the internet. Telemediated networks both reflect and produce
a self with no core but consists simply of an assemblage of interactions. In contrast
to the modernist self, purportedly stable and coherent, the networked subject
consists of a pastiche of multiple selves, sometimes at odds with one another. As
Jameson (
1984
:63) argued, ''the alienation of the subject is displaced by the
fragmentation of the subject.''
If digital technologies muddle the boundaries between self and other, they also
problematize the dichotomy of human and machine, or, as actor-network theorists
have maintained, between human and non-human actors. Haraway (
1991
)
famously argued that in the current age the boundaries between bodies and
machines, the natural and the artificial, have become progressively blurrier, a
