augmented realities and uneven geographies

augmented realities and uneven geographies Symposium on the Dynamics of the Internet and Society Oxford, 2011 Mark Graham Oxford Internet Institute e: [email protected] t: @geoplace Matthew Zook Department of Geography University of Kentucky e: [email protected]

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People have always placed great weight on the ways in which places become fixed though depictions, names and representations (e.g. Basso, 1996). Fixings of place in names, story, song, books, newspapers, videos, and other media matter because those stabilizations, in turn, become the basis for how we understand, produce, reproduce, enact and re-enact the places and cities that we live in. Places are now increasingly defined by dense and complex layers of geocoded content and interactions, accessed via digital technologies and filtered through opaque lines of coded algorithms. New media outlets ranging from free encyclopedias to micro-blogs to social networking platforms present a constantly shifting narrative about different parts of our world, while software and social-sorting systems, embedded into both the devices used for access and the online platforms that host content, serves to sort and prioritize the small slice of material about places that people are capable of absorbing. This digital geospatial information is layered throughout our urban landscapes; it is invisible to the naked eye, but is a central component of the augmentations and mediations of place enabled by hundreds of millions of mobile devices, computers, and other digital technologies. We not just produce, access, and use all of this geospatial information about place, but also access it whilst we are in those very places. Moreover, due to advances in mobile technology, many people now quite literally have access to this information in the palms of our hands. But far from uniform and ubiquitous, these digital dimensions of places are fractured along a number of axes such as location, language and social networks. This paper analyzes how these fractures differ across space and language to both highlight the differences and begin the process of explaining the factors behind them. While some of the disparities conform to longstanding offline patterns, others highlight the changing fortunes and positions of places in a globalizing economy and highlight the increasingly finer scale of differentiation in which understandings of places are constructed.

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augmented realities and uneven geographies

Symposium on the Dynamics of the Internet and SocietyOxford, 2011

Mark GrahamOxford Internet Institutee: [email protected]: @geoplace

Matthew ZookDepartment of GeographyUniversity of Kentuckye: [email protected]

Page 2: Augmented Realities and Uneven Geographies

“We’re trying to build a virtual mirror of the world at all times”

Marissa Mayer, Google’s Vice President of Location ServicesLeWeb Conference, Paris 2010.

Page 3: Augmented Realities and Uneven Geographies

Spatial Palimpsests

Page 4: Augmented Realities and Uneven Geographies

“The Internet surrounds us like air, saturating our offices and our homes. But it’s not confined to the ether. You can touch it. You can map it. And you can photograph it”

- Andrew Blum 2009

Page 5: Augmented Realities and Uneven Geographies

Page 6: Augmented Realities and Uneven Geographies

Cores and Peripheries of Information

• Singer’s (1970) international technological dualism between rich and poor countries.

• UNESCO’s ‘New World Information Order’ to describe uneven global flows of information (Mowlana 1997)

• The Internet ‘as a new phase in a long history of the West’s attempt to colonize not only the territory and the body but also the mind of the Third World “other” (Sardar 1996).