CHANGING DIGITAL GEOGRAPHIES: Technologies, Environments and People

This monograph explores the many ways that the World Wide Web, cloud computing, and the Internet-of-things are forcing us to reframe our thinking about cartographies of the world around us. Like Aladdin’s lamp when gently rubbed, the genie is out, never to return to the world we knew before. While the author provides no explicit definition for the term “digital geographies,” it is commonly understood that digital geographies are produced using digital technologies that expand our prior understanding of the “real world,” and the cartographies and geographies thereof. Given the widening roles of social media as platforms for expression and influence, it seems quite worthwhile to explore how digital technologies are changing the way spatial representations of phenomena, both real and imagined, are displayed and used in contemporary society. This monograph follows in the footsteps of James Ash, Rob Kitchin, and Agnieszka Leszczynski’s edited volume on Digital Geographies, but rather than focusing on how digital technologies are transforming subfields of the discipline of geography, Jessica McLean examines the ways in which digital geographies contribute to larger themes reflecting the future of human society and planet Earth as a habitat for humans as well. Using primarily qualitative research methods, McLean provides separate chapters focusing on human rights and technology, digital rights and justice, indigenous peoples, changing climates and environments, greening and sustainability, the “digital Anthropocene,” feminism and digital spaces (with a special focus on the Australian context), and disability activism. Many of the chapters explore aspects of the “more-than-real,” a concept initially explored in the brief introduction to the monograph and interwoven through most of the chapters that follow. The book concludes with some broader thoughts about the more-than-real and its implications for our understanding of digital geographies. The author employed a variety of qualitative research methods to collect and analyze data about digital geographies, and how they are influencing lived experiences, transforming conversations and understandings of environments of populations. The author collected data through semistructured interviews, participant observation, content and discourse analysis of social media materials, and examination of digital archival material. A group of 15