Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
and one out of eight uses Facebook, indicating an historically unprecedented
degree of connectivity. While Castells (
1996
,
1997
) conceived of the networked
society in terms of interconnected elites, digital social media allow substantial
numbers of people to become linked with one another in ways never seen before.
The implications of this change, which has unfolded within a remarkably narrow
slice of historical time, have yet to be fully explicated. The digital reconstruction
of the self is reflective of the massive wave of contemporary wave of time-space
compression, or ''distanciation,'' to use Giddens's (
1991
) term for how societies
are stretched over time and space. In the same vein, Jameson (
1984
, p. 83) notes
that postmodern hyperspace ''has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities
of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate sur-
rounding perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external
world.'' Without doubt, telemediated social networks have led to an ongoing
reconstruction of what it means to be a human subject.
In contrast to the long hegemony of the Cartesian model of the subject—
atomistic and highly individualistic, a view that denies its embodiment and social
origins—the networked self unleashed via digital social media is explicitly rela-
tional. For many users of the internet, the dichotomy between ''off-line'' and ''on-
line'' no longer makes sense: in a world of ubiquitous connectivity, we exist in
both of these domains simultaneously, all the time. Because telemediated ties are
unlikely ever to be equivalent to face-to-face interactions and the possibility they
allow for the creation of deep emotional ties forged through the exchange of tacit
knowledge, technologies such as email, phone calls, blogs and the like forge
networks of ''weak'' ties, to use Granovetter's (
1985
) terminology. The networked
self is thus extensible to large numbers of people and places but its relations with
others tend to be shallow, utilitarian, and transient. Digital networks constitute not
only extensions of the self, but also reverberate to shape the self, as the careful
maintenance of front stages on Facebook and blogs illustrates. Because technology
is indispensable in enabling (and constraining) the networked self, those who
construct and reproduce digital identities are necessarily cyborgs, seamless artic-
ulations of people and machines in which the role of one is inseparable from the
other.
Although oceans of trivia circulate through cyberspace, the internet is also an
indisputably political phenomenon. Numerous groups concerned about chang-
ing—and improving—the status quo have harnessed the technology to connect
with one another. Social media thus have powerful emancipatory potential,
although it is not always realized. Such an observation provides a glimmer of
optimism in an age otherwise marked by triumphant neoliberalism.
Despite the hyperbole that the internet or other forms of digital communications
have made geography obsolete, the stubborn fact remains that location is still
important in the age of networked social media (Wellman
2001b
; Papacharissi
2009
; Gordon and de Souza e Silva
2011
). The location of users' physical bodies,
their non-virtual, face-to-face ties, family and local context, the digital divide, and
the spatiality of institutions and processes that shape the form, content, and nature
of digital networks and the flows of information across them all testify to the
