Weekly Post 4
1: With regards to the Sassen reading, I’m wondering just how much digitization and globalization have changed this “citcuit-based” means of analyzing the mapping the movement of people, economic goods, culture, and other factors between areas. I suspect that a map of this variety could have been made prior to the rise of digital media, and that while these media may have hastened this sort of exchange I suspect it was always present if one looked for it. That it was not looked-for seems to be a shortcoming of theory and practice (which the author points out) rather than one of this method being necessary to analyzing a global, digital world. I suppose what I’m getting at is the question of how much the world really has “changed” from digital media and how much this “change” comes from theoretical progress as we take into account new perspectives as time goes on.
2: This is something of a tangential thought from the Sassen reading (strange to draw so much from the short article, but I admit I am a lover of maps and the concept of such), but in the article Sassen notes the loss of the nation-state’s authority over components of activity. This is a common assumption in the research of the digital and the global – that nation-states are ceding de facto, it not de jure, authority over people to the tides of the global world – but it’s one I don’t think should be taken for granted. Despite the global nature of the internet, much of its infrastructure remains housed in the United States and, thus, is subject to U.S. Laws. As an example, during the SOPA/PIPA debate, the passage of either of these laws would have subjected web users across the world to U.S laws as the American government pursued copyright violators. With this example, my question is as follows. Has digitization truly resulted in a ceding of national influence, or has it perhaps allowed nations to project their authority over a global scale and even further beyond its borders? What does this mean for the study of globalization, digitization, topography, and other similar fields?
3: While Farman’s discussion of the interactive museum application represents a clear mixture of the digital and the physical in a space, do spaces lose a connection to the digital for the lack of access to the internet or these mobile technologies? In a world where the same cables that bring us internet utilize the same sort of satellite communication as television and radio that are utilized even in areas which have little to no internet access, does the digital ever stop impacting the lives or the world of those living in the industrial west?
Terms:
Spacialization: From my reading, “spacialization” refers to the conception, creation, and interaction with various spaces, both physical and non-physical. In this week’s reading, spacialization seems to refer specifically to the construction and interpretation of digital space and how that space relates to and intermeshes with physical space.
Cartesian: While the term doesn’t explicitly come up in the readings, I’ve begun to take this as a term to follow in a way. I think Cartesian philosophy and how Lefebvre tries to relate it to physical space are important concepts here, as this idea of an imbedded space is almost exactly what he discussed in his book. The idea of embodying through certain items or behaviors and merging the physical and mental through meaning figures strongly into the ideas Lefebvre put forth.