Abstract
Based on the principle of the social production of space, this chapter examines the dual role of digital technologies as technologies of control and technologies of freedom. The structures and biases that are imposed on public space and public life by the mediating role of digital technologies, both on regimes of control and on the exercise of free will in day-to-day life, is articulated. The metaphor of the interface is introduced to encompass commonalities between the affordances of digital technologies and the nature of public space. The role of spatiality in physical public space and the spatial metaphor applied to digital “spaces” is expanded upon.
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Notes
- 1.
The distinction between these two senses of this word is made for the sake of the discussion of a specific point relevant to the issue of public space and not to propose that these two senses of the word constitute an exhaustive or fundamental dichotomy. These are just two of the several ways in which the term is used. Newtonian absolute space, for instance, is a more fundamental and abstract concept than either of these, just as space in the sense of a constructed room or enclosure is a more concrete and prosaic one.
- 2.
Many have applied LeFebvre’s concept of the production of space to virtual worlds (McIntosh, 2008) and other digital social platforms.
- 3.
And, of course, preceding this extraction is the paring-down of the limitless expanse of space to the vanishingly miniscule portion thereof that is subject to human habitation, as determined by the exigencies imposed by the requirements and limitations of our biological bodies.
- 4.
As of 2010, around 3.6 million square kilometers of the earth’s 149 million square kilometers of land area was urbanized (World Bank), or about 2.4 percent of the planet’s dry surface. The Inter-American Development Bank proposed a normative allotment of 7–10 hectares of public space for every 100,000 urban dwellers (IDB, 2013). At the current world population of 7.6 billion and urbanization rate of 54 percent of the population, this yields a norm of 2870 to 4100 square kilometers of urban public space (a total size between the sizes of the urban areas of, say, Nagoya and Los Angeles), from .08 percent and .11 per cent of urbanized areas, or around 1/40,000 of earth’s land area.
- 5.
It is acknowledged that these are time-bound (and in many cases place-bound) limitations. The era of colonization and westward expansion in North America sustained, for a time, imaginaries of unbounded potential for settlement. Similar imaginaries linked to the promise of maritime and extraterrestrial expansion of human settlement have perennially gained and lost currency in the modern era. The parameters of the limits of potential future expansion of geographical space for settlement are quantifiable (the water surface of the earth 361 million square kilometers, the surface of the moon 38 million, the surface of Mars 145 million, augmentable by above-ground and below ground multiplication of area, as well as artificial space colonies, dependent on available technologies and resources). Trans-human developments of the future that enable the decoupling of human consciousness from human bodies would require the development of an understanding of publics decoupled from material space, which would entail a fundamental reconfiguration of concepts of being-together as humans.
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Jachna, T. (2021). Us and Others. In: Wiring the Streets, Surfing the Square. The Urban Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66672-9_4
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