Digital Geography and Society最新文献

Emerging civic technologies can support civil society and the state toward participatory democracy. They offer citizens alternative tools for online participation or e-participation. In this study, we explore the socio-spatial dynamics of an e-participation activity in a city's policy-making process through the artifice of the network analyses. We build upon the idea of a network conceived as an object of human action, considering its social, technical, and spatial elements. We propose a conceptual framework to translate the geographic network of an e-participation activity in the city's policy-making process constituted by six dimensions: vocation, technology, institutional design, spatiality, participation, and the deliberative system. The case study applies the framework to the Mudamos application in the city of João Pessoa, in the State of Paraíba, Brazil. This e-participation tool facilitates digital signatures for Citizen Initiative Draft Bills (CIDB). Despite initial technical, institutional, and financial support, the app did not deliver its potential value. The reasons for low adoption are the lack of economic resources, low levels of civic skills, discontinuation of citizen recruitment, and discontinuation of the partnership between the control agents. Furthermore, socio-spatial inequality was critical in users' access and participation. Our findings suggest that the development of state capacities and participatory literacy are crucial to the success of e-participation initiatives. Consequently, the proposed framework and its application serve as a valuable starting point for researchers and policymakers seeking to understand the socio-spatial relationships involved in this process, offering knowledge to address digital inequalities and increase the effectiveness of e-participation initiatives.

In European cities, lean labour platforms increasingly mediate domestic service gigs related to social reproduction, such as food delivery and cleaning tasks on-demand. This fast-growing type of platform depends on spatial proximity and the population density of cities, economic relations enabled by digital technologies and embodied gendered and racialised norms. At the same time, platforms are linked to the crisis of social reproduction and to a constant supply of people in precarious positions looking for income. The paper tackles the question how platform-mediated service gigs related to grocery shopping, cooking and cleaning change caring relationships. This comprises considerations of the dimensions of marketisation and the transformation of reproductive work symbolically, materially, and socially and is presented with a feminist perspective pointing to social reproduction as an essential but devalued part of everyday life. These endeavours are explored with findings from various case studies dealing with food delivery and cleaning platforms in Austria and Germany and are discussed with reference to relational care ethics. Put forward here is a reflection on the ways in which digital mediation of domestic care work relies on gendered and racialised norms – and how this dependence intensifies structural inequalities inherent to social reproduction.

Tracking, viewing and livestreaming wildlife in situ but online has enabled new relations of proximity and immediacy to proliferate among people who experience few real-life encounters with wild animals. Innovating affordances of programs, broadcasts, and citizen science apps to foster virtual encounters, both with the wild animals in front of the camera, and between other human users following them, now generate an arena of vicarious consumption of wildlife from one's armchair, and at the click of a button. We show how The Great Moose Migration, a slow-TV sensation airing in Sweden every spring, blends multiple genres of nature documentary to create a unique space for the constitution of new attitudes to wildlife in general and moose in particular. This program's dynamic hybridity ‘migrates’ across event-based TV, slow-TV, participatory media, multimodal media, travel-based TV, reality TV, and cross-platform media. We demonstrate how the particular features of each format represents and thus mediates the wildlife. Using a digital ecologies approach, we show how the moose also ‘migrates’ across various media and formats, becoming subject to the whims and preferences of viewers who feedback into the production- This newfound virtual accessibility to moose breaks with tradition in Sweden. We argue that an emancipation of moose from hunters is partly occurring, but that its representation – even in so-called authentic, reality TV – is subject to new registers of power, narratives and aesthetics. Our study speaks to the various implications of the re-entanglement of nature into the everyday lives and leisure and work spaces of people in modern society.

This paper presents a survey-based case study of the experiences and perceptions of, and attitudes towards, various forms of online deviance amongst a largely female, educated sample of young people drawn predominantly from the Armenian capital city of Yerevan. It found high levels of reported victimisation and encounters with online deviance, including from multiple forms of online deviance. Online information that is deliberately misleading, biased or fabricated and information that is abusive or threatening, or that expresses a prejudice against a particular group were the two most widely reported categories of victimisation and encounter. The paper also explores the claim that forms of online deviance enjoy some degree of social legitimacy within post-Soviet space. Our case study found that online deviance enjoys very little social legitimacy amongst survey respondents. The case study explores the ways in which the experiences and perceptions of, and attitudes towards, various forms of online deviance vary across different forms of online deviance in a way that no studies have done previously. It also offers a rare empirical engagement with questions of online deviance within the post-Soviet space and the very first addressing online deviance in Armenia. This paper adds to our limited knowledge of the internal geographies of online deviance within post-Soviet space. The findings presented here begin to challenge the perception of post-Soviet countries, or countries in the post-Soviet space, as constituting a universal cyber-threat landscape and suggest that future research should probe the internal geographies of online deviance (and victimisation) across the region. It also highlights gender as a perspective from which future research might scrutinize online deviance. It further suggests nuanced policy stances more reflective of the empirical realities of different forms of online deviance across post-Soviet space.

In terms of digital inclusion, a global gender gap has been widely documented with women more likely to face digital exclusions, particularly in rural areas and especially in the Global South. Digital inclusion initiatives (DIIs) aim to address these disparities by providing hard-to-reach groups with access to digital infrastructures and/or competencies. In this paper, we heed calls for contextualised DII research that centres the oft-neglected experiences of socially and digitally marginalised women. As such, we contribute a case study from a women's project in Zimbabwe and elaborate a feminist framework of empowerment as an approach to qualitative evaluation. The study involved online Digital Storytelling workshops co-facilitated by and for women, using WhatsApp as the main communication platform. Thirteen participants were interviewed on WhatsApp following the workshop programme. Beyond supporting the development of digital competencies, we found that remote storytelling fostered relationship-building and a sense of solidarity to develop between participants. The paper shares findings around the practicalities of using WhatsApp to mediate online digital storytelling initiatives, which has transferable practical applications in other hard-to-reach contexts. Furthermore, we argue that the feminist framework and approach elaborated in the paper could be deployed more widely, as a tool for both co-designing and evaluating DIIs with communities to enhance the empowerment gains of digital inclusion projects.

COVID-19 changed the way we care. Scholars have long argued that care often requires proximity, especially when it comes to care for, with, and by older adults. With lockdowns and the imposition of widespread public health guidelines aimed at curbing the spread of COVID-19, such as physically distancing and sheltering-in-place, in-person care practices became increasingly difficult. Yet, unlike disasters catalyzed by hurricanes or other natural hazards, physical and communications infrastructures remained largely intact during the pandemic. This situation opened the possibility for shifting care into digital spaces. In this paper, we study how older adults (aged 65 and up) in Canada and the USA navigated this abrupt turn towards digital spaces for care. Our findings are drawn from our larger mixed methods study investigating the everyday COVID-19 pandemic experiences of older adults, children, and teens, examining vulnerability, mobilities, and capacities. Not only are older adults frequently characterized as the recipients of care, but they are also typically (and erroneously) homogenized and stereotyped as vulnerable and tech-unsavvy. Exploring the ways in which older adults have provided, sought, received, avoided, and been denied care during the pandemic thus reveals the complex negotiations, contestations, and emancipatory possibilities of digital spaces of care. Our attention to the accessibility needs of diverse older adults serves as a vehicle for exploring issues of intersectionality in shaping digital care. We describe a range of digital care practices, ranging from telemedicine appointments and app-based communication to web-based volunteering and online social gatherings. We explore digital communication and connection between generations; the potential for such communication during the COVID-19 pandemic is unprecedented, in part due to the massive uptake of digital communication options such as online video conferencing programs. We discuss the mismatch between the possibilities made available through digital architectures and care practices, relations, needs, and desires of older adults. Drawing on feminist theorizations of care, we situate older adults as both givers and receivers of digital care and unpack the intertwining of their agency and vulnerability. Their innovations, spurred in part by diverse experiences with the ageing process, the pandemic, loneliness, joy, and frustrations with care in the digital sphere, suggest radical practices and spaces for inclusive care during and after the pandemic. What is radical about such care is that it is based on everyday, even mundane, elements that often go unremarked, rather than any flashy (monetized) innovations developed by technology companies.

Digital tools and practices are transforming societal relationships with non-human worlds—whether through smartphone apps that city dwellers use to navigate urban forests, robotic bees that pollinate crops, or webcams that livestream rare birds' nests. Recent academic and popular interest in the coming together of digital and natural worlds has generated both creative and critical reflections on what the digital means for the very concept of nature, troubling the latter's ontological stability. In this Introduction to the special issue Digital Natures: Reworking Epistemologies, Ontologies and Politics we claim that the digital, when considered beyond an epistemological register, is a productive and political force that is unsettling, rather than reinforcing, the boundaries between society and nature. We review the extensive body of work from across geography and the social sciences that is actively engaging with digital–nature intersections, and historicise current debates through reference to the figures of the cyborg, technonatures, biomimicry and digital organisms. Asking whether digitalized practices of sensing, abstraction and algorithmic recombination simply mirror a pre-existing and external Nature, or whether they advance a reconceptualization of nature, we set out to trace the progressive political potential of a digitally-entangled ontological redefinition of nature. We discuss how, within emerging digital natures, agencies are entangled in a reimagining of what both nature and society are about. Here, we argue, lies the transformative potential of digital natures—precisely in challenging and subverting the ontological place of an external Nature. The introduction finishes by simultaneously outlining a research agenda for digital natures and presenting the six papers that comprise the special issue.