Digital Geography and Society最新文献

In recent years, smart city programmes have focused on innovation and technology to transform cities into resource-efficient, liveable, and inclusive places. Children's and young people's positions in smart cities are unstable and, depending on a project's agenda, ever-shifting – at the centre of a bottom-up movement, on the fringes of top-down planned programmes. This article revolves around the everyday experiences of children and young people and explores how they encounter life in a smart city district. It draws on observations from a qualitative case study with children and young people in a Viennese neighbourhood where an EU smart city lighthouse project was implemented from 2016 to 2019. Drawing on ethnographic research with children and young people in a school, an afterschool centre, and an open child and youth care programme in a city park, I develop three dimensions of encounters: how children and young people move through, interact with, and take care of the city. My findings show that many children and young people perceive crises with the same urgency as smart city programmes and are equally interested in technological innovation, environmental protection, and social inclusion. They demonstrate responsibility and care about socio-ecological challenges and approaches to solutions. However, young people's discourses and practices also show that urban life cannot be limited to certain issues, nor do young people's urban lives end at structural or administrative boundaries. Participants also emphasise that focusing on human beings alone does not lead to sustainable urban development, and they express frustration with measures that bypass the reality of their lives and divert much-needed attention away from pressing issues.

The homogenization of place through chain stores and restaurants, most evident in the USA over the last 50 years, has spurred a wave of neolocalism. Neolocalism can be seen as an anthesis to mass production wherein there has been an increased interest in and search for ‘local’ and ‘authentic’ goods and experiences often built on notions of nostalgia. In turn, companies selling place-specific items, particularly food, have recently become extremely popular. One of the most successful American entities offering such products is Goldbelly. Goldbelly – an “online marketplace for regional and artisanal foods” - markets itself as an authentic purveyor of nostalgic and local food components and frames purchasing from them as a way for customers to support local hospitality businesses (e.g. restaurants, bakeries, etc.) in an era of industry uncertainty. The popularity of these digital food marketplaces in the age of neolocalism suggests that consumers' notion of ‘local’ is evolving. Thus, this study aims to deconstruct the idea of ‘local’ relative to food sold in a digital space. It does so by comparing eateries deemed ‘iconic’ and ‘classic’ by popular sources with the products, eatery descriptions, locations, and marketing images of items sold representing the same location on the Goldbelly platform. In doing so, it highlights the “fetishization of local” in modern society and outlines how the framework of narratology could be useful in exploring how the stories told about food might contribute to how individuals perceive local foods.

Investment in ICTs has not always yielded the expected results due to inadequate usage of ICTs by extension staffs. Our study aims to present a more general account of the use of ICTs and preferences of extension and advisory workers at the grassroots level. Following the technology acceptance model (TAM) and Dillman survey method, a google form was used to collect data from 131 sub-district level extension officers covering 48 (out of 64) districts of Bangladesh. Descriptive statistics and structural equation modeling was used to analyse the data and test the complex causal relationship of TAM components. Results revealed that the extension and advisory workers obtained ICT tools from the extension organization but received insufficient organizational supports to purchase internet packages, maintenance costs, and training to continue the use of it. Factor like perceived usefulness of ICTs positively influenced the extension workers' intention to use ICT-based information systems. A better understanding of the underlying reasoning behind the intention to use ICTs could aid future intervention design and facilitate ICT adoption in extension services in Bangladesh and beyond.

Digitally-mediated forms of services are increasingly normalized and rapidly transforming working and everyday lives creating new digital-social-spatial relations. The platform economy, in particular, offers new ways of work and new means of consumption. These changes challenge welfare states, both in the operations of institutions and to their foundational social goals and values. In Sweden, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, social and labour market segregation intersected and amplified inequalities resulting in media covering and querying the nature and role of platform-mediated work within the Swedish welfare context. Located within an intersectional perspective, this study explores how media articulations of platform-mediated work shape theoretical understandings of the platform economy during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Sweden. This was conducted through an ethnographic content analysis (ECA) of Swedish-language newspapers between January and September 2020 (96 articles). We show understandings of the platform economy are active and shifting in temporal and spatial contexts. We highlight how work and working forms tie closely to ideas of equality and welfare in the Swedish context. Intersectional perspectives reveal the central role of power structures in local context – a specific time/place- and decenters normative economic perspectives of the platform economy. This study reinforces the need for more studies on the platform economy that foreground social relations to understand inequalities produced in and through social-technological activities.

Energy infrastructures are on the cusp of digitalisation processes. This paper builds upon scholarship on prepaid meters and debates on conflicting rationalities within urban studies to provide a more nuanced examination of the ways in which different actors contribute to the deployment, appropriation and use of digital prepaid systems. We focus on Kibera, Nairobi, to examine Kenya Power's “rationality” for the deployment of the digitaltechnologies, and the ways in which actors incorporate social relations into these systems and negotiate them through these systems. Specifically, we consider the politicians, donors, residents of Kibera and informal power distributors. We show how upon the deployment of the digital systems in Kibera, residents and informal power distributors enact rationalities that conflict with those of the utility provider, donors and politicians. These conflicting rationalities make the formalisation of electricity provision in slum areas through “technological fixes” a particularly daunting task. Ultimately, we contend that this study of actors' conflicting rationalities in the deployment of digital prepaid electricity systems is an important contribution to studies of digital geography as it explains the complexities relating to digital interventions and offers critical perspectives on their hybrid outcomes and politics within contested urban geographies in the global South and elsewhere.

On-demand delivery services are experiencing a moment of expansion, which the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to foster. For cities in quarantine, these services allow the supply of food and other primary goods without moving from home, making riders move and access them on behalf of the clients. During a pandemic, working as a rider potentially increases the risks of an already precarious job given the contractual arrangements and the algorithmic control that characterize this gig economy sector. We argue that platforms have generated forms of injustice that are reproduced and amplified by digital platforms encoded in the Global North, which are governed by regulations and optimization criteria that do not dialogue with the precarious reality of Global South cities. Focusing on the case of Santiago de Chile, our analysis draws on the triangulation and complementarity of two instruments: interviews before the COVID-19 pandemic and surveys involving riders during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings show that platforms generate specific forms of injustice that affect riders and their mobility in particular. The COVID-19 pandemic worsened such forms of digital injustice, increasing the pressure for constantly working and the exposure of riders to threats such as accidents, criminality and health risks.

In this paper, we discuss the geography of a new digital governmentality. In recent years, and extending Foucauldian analyses of different modes of governing, several studies argue that the digital transformation is fundamentally changing the way people are governed and govern themselves: a new, digital governmentality is emerging and replacing (neo-)liberal forms of governing. Two core characteristics are described as the basic nexus of this shift: on the one hand, a change in knowledge production through the capture and analysis of behavioural data; and on the other hand, a change in the governing of subjects by influencing subconscious behavioural patterns. We show that the perspective of a digital governmentality can sensitise geography to this new mode of digital governing. Furthermore, the digital governmentality debate enables geography to explore interconnections within the power/knowledge nexus between different aspects of the digital transformation that have so far been analysed in rather isolated ways. At the same time, geographic inquiries in turn offer impulses for the digital governmentality debate: Firstly, scholarly debate on a digital governmentality has rarely addressed the geographies in and through which this new governmentality operates. Addressing this research desideratum, we conceive two interconnected geographies of a digital governmentality and combine them into an analytical perspective: a new micro-geography of hybrid, sensing, and adaptive environments and a new macro-geography of digital platforms. Secondly, this perspective contributes to unearth the complex, often contradictory and contested relationships of a digital governmentality to other modes of governing. We use this perspective on geographies of digital governmentality to understand the development of digital outdoor advertising by Europe's largest out-of-home advertising company.

This paper interrogates the role that spatial media such as maps and Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) play in the construction and mobilisation of representations of nature. Drawing on poststructural political ecology, critical cartography, and GIScience, this article engages maps and VGI as discursive mechanisms that solidify and convey meanings and representations of nature tied to broader strategies of commodification. Particularly, we explore how spatial media reproduces and legitimises discursive strategies that rationalise the reconciliation of economic development and conservation through nature-based tourism by producing new ways of nature commodification. Drawing on evidence from Patagonia-Aysén, Chile, this paper examines the intersections between the discourse of nature encoded within institutional tourist maps and advertisements, and within the VGI platform for travellers, TripAdvisor. This illustrative case shows, firstly, how tourist maps and advertisements have contributed to normalising a discursive construction of nature as pristine, grandiose, sublime and wild that has not only secured aesthetics as ontological qualities of nature, but also as embedded values that protect ‘nature’ as a commodity to consume. Secondly, our findings evidence that TripAdvisor emerges out of this context as content that mobilises individual perceptions of and narratives about Patagonian nature that is already mediated by this dominant discourse. This dynamic suggests that VGI constitutes a new form of discursive power that digitally reproduces and mobilises a dominant discourse of nature, (re)producing what we term ‘discursive digital nature’.

The paper focuses on Facebook's shaping of communication regarding the European migrant crisis in the Czech Republic. Topological spaces in communication with entanglements of inclusion and exclusion were produced by practicing the communication, with the mutual influence of two kinds of the collective unconscious, the technological and the Orientalist unconscious. The paper is based on a participant observation of Czech-language Facebook groups and pages where discussions about the European migrant crisis proliferated. Due to the technological unconscious, algorithm-induced “filter-bubbles” helped to separate discussions of different opinions about migration so people with anti-immigration attitudes could be building European free-thinking people identities who distrust mainstream media, and people with pro-migration attitudes were excluded and considered trustful “sheeple”. Due to the Orientalist unconscious, European free-thinking people identities were strengthened by the sharing of ideas about uncivilized, irrational, and barbaric imaginative spaces of migrants' origin, which were entirely Other to Europe.