spaces and distance

This page looks at questions of space, distance and place in the digital era. 

It covers -

• introduction
• death of distance?
• location
• death of the office?
• lost in cyberspace?
• digital nomads

     introduction

Early theorists about cyberspace and the 'internet economy' often suggested that the online world was radically different from life offline, somehow no longer subject to traditional constraints of distance, location or time.

Cyberspace was pictured as a sphere in which distance was immaterial, national borders were meaningless and the location of individuals or business facilities no longer mattered.

Enthusiasts thus claimed that email (lately replaced by VOIP and web-conferencing) would replace face-to-face contact and decimate the travel industry. Online interaction would severely erode traditional retailing but offer benefits such as telemedicine (eg Boston surgeons performing open-heart surgery at a distance on patients in the Paraguayan jungle). Cities (decried as "parasitic" by zealots such as George Gilder) would wither, as the digerati enjoyed life in a teleworking arcadia.

Life has proved somewhat more complicated than the fantasies from Harvard Business School Press, WIRED magazine, newspaper IT supplements and pronouncements by sundry government spokespeople.

     distance

Does distance matter?

From the perspective of 2004 it is difficult not suggest that many of the enthusiasts mistook reduced telecommunication charges - an acceleration of the trend throughout last century - for a more fundamental 'death of distance'.

Geoffrey Blainey's The Tyranny of Distance (Sydney: Sun 1966), like Harold Innis' Empire & Communications (Toronto: Uni of Toronto Press 1972) and Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press As An Agent Of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformation in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1979), highlighted the implications for society when communications is a question of transporting 'atoms' rather than 'bits': a communications economy of scarcity rather than abundance. We've explored some of those issues in our profile about past communications revolutions.

One view of the global information infrastructure is provided by Frances Cairncross, senior editor at the Economist, in The Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution Will Change Our Lives (London: Orion 1997). It is lucid and entertaining but, like much writing for the Economist, remorselessly upbeat and inclined to focus on infrastructures - the pipes and peripherals - rather than how they are used. 

Saskia Sassen, a US academic, has not produced such a panoramic view of the new "infospace". However, many of her writings are of considerable value in considering what the death of distance means for government/businesses structures and how citizens perceive the world. 

Her Globalisation & Its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People & Money (New York: New Press 1998) for example builds on James Beninger's Control Revolution: Technological & Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1989) and Joanne Yates' Control Through Communications: The Rise of System In American Management (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni Press 1993) in exploring how the death of distance both allows management-at-a-distance and encourages concentration of elites within the 'latte belt'.

Complementary analyses are provided in Annalee Saxenian's classic Regional Advantage: Culture & Competition In Silicon Valley & Route 128 (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1996), The Dynamic Firm: The Role of Technology, Strategy, Organization and Regions (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 1998) edited by Alfred Chandler, Peter Hagstrom & Orjan Solvell, MoneySpace: Geographies of Monetary Transformation (Routledge: London 1997) by Andrew Leyshon & Nigel Thrift, and in Tendencies & Tensions of the Information Age: The Production & Distribution of Information in the United States (New Brunswick: Transaction 1997) by Jorge Schement & Terry Curtis.

There are graphical representations of that concentration in several of the studies highlighted in our Metrics guide, in particular the Geography of Cyberspace (GeoC) project and the US Urban Research Initiative (URI). 

Matthew Zook's 1998 paper on The Web of Consumption: The Spatial Organization of the Internet Industry in the US is a striking demonstration of how supposedly 'spaceless' new economy industries clustering in specific geographical locations, in particular New York, LA and San Francisco.

There is a more extended analysis in Joel Kotkin's The New Geography: How the Digital Revolution is Reshaping the American Landscape (New York: Random 2000) and Jon Teaford's Post-Suburbia: Government & Politics in the Edge Cities (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni Press 1997). Mysteries of the Region: Knowledge Dynamics In Silicon Valley is an incisive paper by John Seely Brown & Paul Duguid, considering the regionalism and globalisation debates discussed in our Economy guide. US 'Edge Cities' are briefly examined in Living on the Edge: Decentralization Within Cities in the 1990s (PDF) by Alan Berube & Benjamin Forman.

     location

Gertrude Stein complained, in writing about the US, that "there's no There, there". Sounds like cyberspace?

For us Margaret Wertheim's much-hyped The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet (New York: Doubleday 1999) is markedly inferior to James O'Donnell in Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1998) and Rob Kitchin's Cyberspace: The World in the Wires (New York: Wiley 1998).

Among other studies of space, cyber- and the vanilla variety, we recommend Michio Kaku's Hyperspace (New York: Oxford Uni Press 1994), Jeff Zaleski's The Soul of Cyberspace (San Francisco: Harper Edge 1997) and Cyberspace: First Steps (Cambridge: MIT Press 1992) edited by Michael Benedikt.

The Electronic Space Project (Espace) at Michigan State University complements the Geography project. We recommend Information Tectonics: Space, Place & Technology In An Electronic Age (New York: Wiley 2000) a collection of papers edited by Mark Wilson & Kenneth Corey and the associated maps of hosts and access to telecommunications, and Martin Dodge's incisive Mapping Cyberspace (London: Routledge 2000), which has a companion site.

Manuel Castells' The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring & the Urban-Regional Process (Oxford: Blackwell 1989) and his three volume The Information Society (Oxford: Blackwell 1999) consider the wider implications of the networked economy for cities, suburbs and regions. Strongly recommended. Telecommunications & the City: Electronic Spaces, Urban Places (London: Routledge 1996) by Stephen Graham & Simon Marvin explores some of those ideas.

     death of the office

The International Facility Management Association claims that personal work space in office buildings in the West has been shrinking over the past two decades, a shrinkage that reflects the need to cram more equipment (servers, copiers and printers) into expensive accommodation and vogues in 'collaborative' or shared workspaces, hotdesking and 'nomads'. In 1987 the space allocated to an executive office was supposedly an average of 291 square feet. By 2007 that figure had dropped to 241 square feet. What IFMA describes as 'senior professionals' have an average 98 square feet for their space in 2007, with call center employees typically enjoying less than 50. Most office workers are situated in cubicles (59%), 34% have private offices and 7% work in open areas with no partitions.

     lost in cyberspace

Patricia Wallace's The Psychology of the Internet (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1999) is a useful introduction to how people behave online, with chapters on group dynamics, role playing, pornography, gender, trust and other issues. It is complemented by Adam Joinson's Understanding the Psychology of Internet Behaviour: Virtual Worlds, Real Lives (Basingstoke: Palgrave 2002).

Connections (Cambridge: MIT Press 1992) by Lee Sproull & Sara Kiesler retains its value as an incisive study of email and identity.

Sherry Turkle's Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1996) is a more anecdotal account - with dollops of French structuralism - of online role-playing and gender-bending. Similar themes are explored in Allucquere Rosanne Stone's The War of Desire & Technology At The Close of the Mechanical Age (Cambridge: MIT Press 1995). Online no-one knows you're a dog, but there's a bit too much tail-sniffing by some sociology professors.

     digital nomads

Notions of 'digital nomads' or wireless 'road warriors' have had a largely uncritical reception in the mass media and some parts of industry - in particular vendors of connectivity services - and academia.

Those notions have centred on suggestions that particular elites will be able to conduct business without a fixed base, operating from laptops, mobile phones, PDAs and other facilities 'on the road', in conferences or upmarket hotels.

Millennium: Winners & Losers In The Coming Order (New York: Times 1992) is a particularly delphic meditation on digital nomads by Jacques Attali, former head of the European Bank for Reconstruction & Development. For us there is more value in Digital Nomad (New York: Wiley 1997) by Tsugio Makimoto & David Manners. We have questioned some hype about cosmocrats here.



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