Digital Geography and Society最新文献

The term “digital ecosystem” has become ubiquitous through a seemingly endless stream of scholarship, punditry and hyperbole around digitalization, to the point that the metaphor is becoming dead. Considering “ecosystem” as a traveling concept straddling natural, social and technical systems, this article traces the extension of “digital ecosystem,” along with the adjacent “business ecosystem” and “entrepreneurial ecosystem,” in the fields of computer science, economy, governance and environmental policy. The origins of the concept as a form of circuitry applied to nature are outlined as a background against which to trace its role as a socio-technical metaphor for digital capitalism. Since the 1990s, various formulations of “ecosystem” have offered a naturalistic interpretation to phenomena ranging from economic interactions to digital infrastructure and the urban everyday. I conclude that by representing the internet and the market as complex, self-organizing processes, the metaphor prioritizes the imperative of adapting to—and downplays the possibility of challenging—our erratic digital capitalism. The article contributes by illuminating the ideological work of naturalistic models in the digital political economy. Evidence on using digital ecosystems in environmental policy is still emerging but points to a form of legitimacy exchange that reduces environmental problems to technical issues.

Growing concerns about children's sedentary behavior and health have drawn attention to their screen behaviors at home. However, this work leans on a deterministic and essentializing view of children, screen devices, and the home, such that it tends to equate any time spent on screens with being sedentary, device presence with increased use where children are passive receptors of screen influence, and the home as a place where parents control their children's screen use. This paper shows instead that children's screen use at home needs to be understood as a sociomaterial assemblage that is dynamic and contingent, and that affect is central to these assemblages. The paper draws on a mixed-methods exploratory study conducted with 6–12 year old children in their homes in Sweden, using accelerometry and observational data to note the children's movement behaviors as well as their screen activities. The findings show that children are both sedentary and active while using screens, questioning the idea of screen time as necessarily sedentary. Moreover, children's screen practice assemblages at home are composed of various elements that come together in dynamic and highly situated ways, challenging the device and parental influence narrative. The paper shows how we need to pay attention to the ways in which these assemblages come together and children's actual performances of screen practices in order to move beyond the predominant discourse surrounding screen time.

The growing influence of digital platforms on cities has captured the attention of urban scholars, marking a ‘platform pivot’ in digital geography and urban research. This article reviews emerging literature on platform urbanism, using the metaphors of the fix and the glitch as starting points from which to discuss two contrasting perspectives on the phenomenon. Rooted in Marxist political economy, fix-thinking highlights how platforms generate new opportunities for value-extraction through processes of disembedding, datafication and deregulation. Influenced by feminist, queer and Black media studies, glitch-thinking performatively underscores the breakdowns and openings in the working of platforms. Where fix-thinking highlights the role of platforms in furthering urban capitalism, glitch-thinking encourages us to envision how things could be otherwise. The review leads to two original insights that may further knowledge on this phenomenon. First, it points to a gap in research investigating instances when breakdown and disruptions turn into organised action and sustained social change. Second, it underscores the citational politics that limit engagements between the two strands, and the potential usefulness of drawing on earlier scholarship that softens or challenge the ‘fix-glitch divide’.

In developing countries, the emigration of rural youth remains a persistent phenomenon, attracting research on the rural mobility of the younger generations. Meanwhile, today's digital era allows the Internet to induce information accessibility. Rural youth covers the largest share of Internet users among the rural population, implying higher possibilities for them to use the Internet for various migration-related purposes. However, literature to date has not focused on Internet use among rural youth in developing countries in conjunction with the build-up process of their migration intention. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the impact of Internet use on the build-up process of migration intention among rural youth in developing countries. This research employs four statistical analyses (Mann-Whitney U, Kruskal-Wallis, Kendall's Tau, and stepwise regression) to examine socio-demographic profiles, common/specific Internet uses, other information gatherings, and migration intention in Tambakasri Village, Malang, Indonesia. The results indicate that Internet use enables rural youth to overcome remoteness by connecting to the outside world. Although common Internet uses appear to affect the build-up process of migration intention among rural youth negatively, specific Internet uses show positive impacts. Despite the opposite trends, the adverse effects are insignificant to the positive impacts. Therefore, Internet use maintains a generally positive impact on the intention to migrate. However, they favor the Internet less to search for migration-related information due to low network quality and the activities of active migrants. They rely heavily on migration-specialized companies as their primary source of migration-related information. In general, rural youth have not utilized the Internet's full potential, suggesting a more vigorous promotion of digital literacy for rural areas in less developing countries. It should induce the awareness of rural youth on opportunities in their villages, encouraging them to develop their rural origins and promoting a better-managed flow of workforce.

The growing datafication of the world continues to be a pressing concern for critical geographers. Indigenous scholars are also challenging western research paradigms for under-representing the social effects that datafication imposes on Indigenous communities. This paper adds to these conversations by closely examining the problematic of carbon datafication in Indigenous places using the author's positionality as an Indigenous-Naga geographer. The author simulated carbon maps of Nagaland (northeastern India) to demonstrate the datafication of Indigenous places into carbon commodities, and then used the maps and his emic perspectives to interview Naga tribesmen and tribeswomen about carbon datafication. Selected interviews are highlighted in this paper to contextualize the social effects of carbon datafication on Naga epistemologies of forests, material reorganization of space, and carbon enclosures for global marketization. The paper also examines the limitations of alternative non-digital mapping, as well as the opportunities for locally repurposing GIS applications to involve and benefit Indigenous communities. Elements of local agency and the speculative effects of carbon markets are also discussed in the inter-tribal sociopolitical context of Nagaland.

Historically, individuals' rationales for vegetarianism have fallen into one or more of five categories: personal health; empathy towards animals; identity and group belonging through foodways; long-term environmental concerns regarding animal agriculture; and economic reasons related to the expense of meat. With the advent of COVID-19 and its associated social and economic changes across the globe, a sixth rationale for vegetarianism has emerged: lessening meat consumption out of a concern for the immediate health impacts on other people. We examine this emergent discourse in the digital realm through the comments in online newspapers from four countries at different levels of economic development and with variable historical engagements with vegetarianism: Argentina, France, India, and the USA. While the new argument for vegetarianism augments historical rationales of meat avoidance, discourses on vegetarianism related to the spread of COVID-19 in slaughterhouses and meat-packing plants are interwoven with pre-existing worldviews on migrants, health politics, capitalism, and market systems.

This contribution focuses on the recent introduction of a digital addressing system in Ghana. Initially developed in the slipstream of the restructuring of the Ghana Post, the oldest public service institution in the country, the digital addressing system has recently been tied into the country's broader digital identification agenda. The article examines how innovations in geospatial (population) data infrastructure alter the Ghanaian state's view on the spatial distribution of the population as well as on individuals by associating them within certain spatial categories, and eventually, (re)formatting the way in which the national space is produced and disciplined. In view of the limitations of earlier paper-based registers, particular attention is paid to the integration of various population registers thus afforded.

Digital platforms play an increasingly important role in the everyday work practices of creative entrepreneurs and contribute to how their ventures take shape. Taking this observation as a starting point, this paper aims to explore the entanglement of entrepreneurial, artistic, and creative practices and processes with digital platforms. Drawing on interviews and online observations, the study traces the work practices of two creative producers, a textile designer in Berlin, Germany, and a filmmaker in Bengaluru, India, who both extensively use the social media platform Instagram for their work. Based on the two in-depth case studies, we advance the term creative digipreneurs to reflect the close relationship between the platform, the entrepreneur, and the artistic venture. Creative digipreneurs represent a novel hybrid role that includes the work practices of independent cultural producers, artists, independent entrepreneurs, and creators. This novel perspective allows us to 1) analyse how creative digipreneurs build up a creative venture while relating to people, the local creative scene in the respective cities, and to digital technologies such as Instagram. The platform-mediated situation of the creative digipreneurs allows us to reflect on the entanglement of online and offline spaces in the entrepreneurial artistic process. 2) We demonstrate that while Instagram presents an important opportunity for the creative development, marketing, and sales of the creative product; it also introduces novel constraints.

Environmental change is giving rise to more-than-human thinking/practice about cities. At the same time, ‘smart’ thinking/practice about cities driven by technocratic approaches, have been critiqued for reinforcing human exceptionalism. That is, nonhuman nature in cities is increasingly perceived and governed via digital technologies that rarely account for limits to human perception. Here, we offer an alternative and address how digital technologies and politics can potentially be reconfigured to care for the more-than-human world within cities. In this paper, we critically review technocratic approaches to smart urban governance and explore the more-than-human turn across the triad of cities, digital technologies and data, and politics. We outline the contours of a new more-than-human approach to smart urban governance.

In the late 2010s, publics in the UK encountered new kinds of street furniture: Strawberry Energy Smart benches in London and InLinkUK kiosks in Glasgow, with smart features such as phone charging, free Wi-Fi, free phone calls, information screens and environmental data. This article analyses how smart street furniture is socially constructed by relevant social groups, each with different interests, forms of power and meanings. Smartness became associated not only with advanced technologies, but with a neoliberal agenda of private-public partnerships promising urban transformations, such as free devices for councils and citizens in exchange for access to advertising or sponsorship space in public places. The research examined the design, use and governance of new types of smart street furniture using mixed methods, including document analysis of promotional and regulatory texts, site observations of these devices, and interviews. We found that the uses and meanings of these devices were discovered at different moments by technology companies, local councils, and the public. Few members of the public knew about the devices, and showed little interest in them, even if they were the assumed users. An exception was gig workers and people experiencing homelessness who found uses for the smart features and a community activist who campaigned against these as surveillant and intrusive. Businesses and councils embraced smart city visions but took multiple approaches to agreements for the implementation and governance of smart street furniture. Notably, these more powerful groups discovered and negotiated the meanings of smart street furniture well before these were publicly encountered. This article reveals how a social construction of technology (SCOT) approach is strongest when it accounts for the relative power of social groups in struggles over meanings and resources. It provides empirical information on everyday sociotechnical encounters that provide nuanced evidence for wider critiques of smart city agendas.