Space, Place, and Identity in the Digital Age

Connectivity and Worlding

Definitions:

Space: that which we create in and around us by virtue of our embodied social practices or relationships with other bodies (including objects).

Place: those specific spaces or locations to which we are affectively attached, bound, or oriented by virtue of meaningful relationships with other bodies (including objects), through embodied practices of power (biopolitics), and through practices of representation, visualization, and mapping; those spaces or locations that gain meaning through technologies of surveillance.

Identity: the enduring bodily and psychic perception and conception of self across spacetime(s), including the extension of self through cultural tools, technologies, and virtualities; the disciplining of self through technologies of surveillance; and the imagination of self in relation to virtual and actual others or communities.

Questions:

1. This week’s readings were frustrating to me in that, in attempting to grapple with the complex idea of “connection,” they all to some degree took relationships at face value, necessarily simplifying the many nuanced layers or levels of connection in order to isolate modes of relating across multiple scales of space and time, variously shaped by changes in mobile communication technologies. I found Ito, Okabe, and Anderson’s “Portable Objects in Three Global Cities: The Personalization of Urban Places” to be the most useful in that, rather than assuming the self-evidence of the overladen term “connection,” the authors instead pay attention to spatial practices, arguing after Susan Leigh Star that “it is crucial that infrastructure be examined from a social and cultural perspective, and that these embedded and often unnoticed structures represent some of the most pervasive and foundational scaffolds of everyday life” (71-72). By attending to the ways people interact with what they call “technosocial” spaces and places (72), they are able to avoid what I read as Turkle’s technological determinism, thereby allowing the agency of their participants to manifest in the construction of “mobile kits” as well in daily routine interfaces with infrastructure and uses of technology. I found this interesting from an ethnographic perspective, in contrast to Fischer’s approach. As scholars interested in identification and community formation, how might we come to an understanding of our participants’ social practices of emplacement and local, as well as virtual, meaning making? How do we account for the real effects of imagined connectivity?
2. Questions of authenticity, or at least the real and the artificial, depth and surface, seem to hover throughout these readings. Turkle seems invested in nostalgic, “pure” forms of communication, attention, and presence. Is there some way to reformulate these debates? For instance, Turkle suggests that we make ourselves absent through certain uses of technology in public spaces (255), implying that this “lack” or diversion of attention could be construed as rude. There are certainly occasions when I find this behavior rude, yet theoretically I am reluctant to agree that we are any less “really” connected because we can engage many virtual and actual relationships simultaneously. What can affect lend to this discussion? How do socially sedimented structures of feeling shape our interactions with technologies of connection and vice versa?
3. I find Fischer’s focus on personal networks compelling, if somewhat formulaic in this iteration. These chapters are useful to me in attempting to develop a language around social worlds and “worlding,” the processes by which we assemble social “life” around us through people, things, and events. I want the language of worlding to be able to account not only for how we access those connections or nodes in the network that are most immediate to us but also how such connections seem to bridge or even transcend disparate times and places, existing virtually or potentially. How do these notions of connection, space, and place help us define a world? What can be said to constitute a world, and is this even generalizable or is it specific to each person? How might the concept of “worlding” enable us to think the interconnectedness of people, places, and things?