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Space, place, and digital technologies

Lizzie Richardson

Résumé

This article examines the role of space and place in understanding digitalisation of society, drawing from debates in the anglophone social science discipline of human geography. It provides an indication of how approaches to the geographical dimensions of digitalisation have changed over time, beginning by setting out a central opposition that existed in earlier accounts of the spatial form of digital technologies. It then develops some of the present-day implications for understanding space and place through a focus on work and workplaces, before turning to some possible future directions of research.

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1Although initially a relatively minor area of social science enquiry, studies of how the internet is changing social relations have existed since the 1990s. In the last decade, however, the volume of digital devices and the intensity of their connectivity has made the question of the constitution and the implications of “digitalisation” impossible to ignore in all areas of social science research. This short text examines the role of space and place in understanding digitalisation of society, drawing from debates in the anglophone social science discipline of human geography. The text provides an indication of how approaches to the geographical dimensions of digitalisation have changed over time, through a focus on the constitution of the workplace. 

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1. The end of geography or the explosion of space? 

3This question, which formed the title of an article written some 25 years ago by human geographer Steve Graham, played on two poles of an academic and popular debate concerning the spatial implications of “information technologies” (Graham, 1998). Both sides of the debate agreed that these technologies – which are now typically labelled “digital” -– were altering the role of space in social relations by undermining or reconfiguring modern distinctions between, for example, inside and outside, or public and private. They disagreed, however, concerning what this implied for geography, for the meaning and materiality of place and space. Historically, place implied the effect of a specific location on social and cultural processes, meanwhile space described the form or structure through which social relations occurred. From one perspective information technologies meant that place no longer mattered because it was increasingly possible to connect with people at any location and at any time, particularly thanks to the growing uptake of the internet. This view is perhaps best characterised by the “everywhere or nowhere” approach to cyberspace in which the specificity of place is irrelevant (Graham, 1998), somewhat similar to Castells’ (1996) “spaces of flows” that allow certain individuals to exist without attachment to a particular locality. From the other perspective though, far from being aspatial, these same technologies were perceived to create new types of space for and spatiality to social relations. Such space was frequently characterised in the 1990s through rather utopian imaginaries of, for example, the “independence of cyberspace” (Barlow, 1996) or virtual worlds where it was possible to escape the constraints of embodiment (Turkle, 1997). These two views on new information technologies broadly aligned with an academic debate in anglophone human geography in the early 1990s on the conceptualisation of space and place in the “postmodern” or “global” era. 

4At stake in this discussion was the spatial constitution of globalisation, as produced in part through new information and communication technologies. Human geographer David Harvey (1989) used the term “time-space compression” to describe how space – for example boundaries and distance – was contracting or even disappearing because of these technologies. This compression was, he argued, an important element of the cultural condition of postmodernity that was underpinned by economic changes that new technologies were affording. When understood through the spatial experience of these technologies, postmodernity was integrally tied to increasingly flexible production and complex, globally extensive, just-in-time supply chains. Time-space compression as a key compositor of such globalisation resonated with other theories of speed and acceleration that were circulating in social theory around this time, organised around the claim of the annihilation of space by time through new technologies (Virilio, 1986). A nuancing of this argument was proposed by another human geographer Doreen Massey (1991) through her notion of “power geometry” that drew attention to the highly differentiated nature of the spatial and temporal experience of globalisation. Power geometry was intended to foreground how individuals were placed in very different ways in relation to the mobility associated with time-space compression: “some are more in charge of it than others; some initiate flows and movements, others don’t; some are more on the receiving end of it than others; some are effectively imprisoned by it” (Massey, 1991 : 26). 

5Thus, power geometry implied that globalisation and its technologies must be understood beyond characterisations of placelessness, time-space compression or territorialised spatial fixes for capital seeking out new markets. Massey demonstrated how experiences of space associated with new technologies of connectivity and mobility were highly partial, so that multiple constitutions of space co-existed, comprising dimensions concerning the degree of movement and communication, but also dimensions of control and initiation. It is through this lineage of thought that contemporary anglophone “digital geographies” should be understood, and thus their relevance for digital sociologies. Although digital geographies may certainly refer to computational processes for producing cartographic representations via “spatial media” (Leszczynski, 2015), such as mapping physical location, the study of digital geographies also implies examining how these technologies track and trace processes in a fashion that is not strictly geolocational, in doing so creating “a more abstract space which might have numerous “dimensions”, for example institutional parameters of a bureaucratic process (Agre, 1994 : 742). Within this context then, it is perhaps useful to understand digital geographies as the investigation of the spatial dimensions of the digital era. This definition implies varied implications for the study of society and social structures. To illustrate some implications, we can turn to work. In doing so, the emphasis lies less on the impact of digital technologies on work, and more on what is revealed about the social constitution of digital technologies through the changes to where people work and how mobility is built into a working activity. 

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2. Work, workplaces and digital technologies 

7Work is one of the usual suspects under examination when studying the impacts of technology on society. Indeed, a variety of hypotheses circulate concerning how technologies change the quantity and quality of work. Typical examples include suggestions that automation will result in deskilling and job losses (Braverman, 1974); that (digital) data provides a basis for upskilling through more knowledge-intensive work (Brynjolfsson & McAfee, 2014) ; or that domestic technologies save time on housework (Cowan, 1983). Such hypotheses, whether accurate on not, are suggestive of a rather linear model of action in which technology acts on work. This unidirectional emphasis in narratives of socio-technical change processes ignores the myriad of forces that structure working activity and therefore the manner in which work itself frequently shapes technologies (Suchman, 1987 ; Orr, 1996 ; Bowker et al., 1996), from the way it is taken into account in the design of technologies to the unpredictable modes in which they are used (or not) in practice. Examining how work takes place with digital technologies – that is investigating the geographies of digital work – is one way to nuance such a linear model of technology acting on society. As social studies of technology have long indicated, a social activity (in this case work) is not simply impacted by technology but also alters and constructs the meanings and usages of that technology, which offers a more precise account of socio-technical change. Here, the study of geography is not simply understood as an outcome of digitalisation, such as through the spatial distribution of jobs. Instead, geography is active from the start, with work space and place produced through the situating and situated actions of digital technologies. A very concrete illustration of this geographical approach is the analysis of the workplace.  

8There is a simplicity to the English term “workplace” that as a geographical category seems to straightforwardly describe the site where work takes place. Yet the “workplace” also frequently implies complex sets of legal, institutional, and economic structuring mechanisms that produce a given space as a place for work. Bound up in this latter meaning are all the mechanisms that allow certain sites to be recognised as workplaces – and thus certain activities to be recognised as work – whilst others are not. To begin with, the workplace is by no means a simple geographical category but instead a site that reveals how geography may construct and reinforce wider social norms; for example the division between production and reproduction has historically been organised under capitalism through a spatial separation of the workplace and home. It is exactly this function of the workplace as a geographical structure for social relations that is shifting with digital technologies. In highlighting the evolving way technologies interact with socio-spatial structures, description and analysis of this shift in the constitution of the workplace can also shed light on broader social relations in the digital era. In this regard, a first aspect concerns the geographical description of the workplace, which now with digital technologies is more of a flexible spatial arrangement rather than a fixed location, and this flexibility is constitutive of social relations more broadly (Richardson, 2020). From office work to food delivery, digital technologies have increasingly made it feasible to have no single fixed workplace for undertaking work activity. In turn, this flexibility in location frequently demands that work activity itself comprises processes of spatio-temporal coordination to create working spaces that can meets the needs of disparate actors. 

9A second aspect is important for understanding how these spatial processes of arrangement and coordination comprising digital work occur, and that is the role of infrastructure. Flexible work location, and the coordination practices necessary to produce and respond to such flexibility, are supported neither solely nor directly by the worker or the work-giver, but instead are enabled through a wider set of technical practices that create certain standards governing yet allowing flexibility. A simple example of such standardisation lies in the requirement for mobile workers (from office to delivery workers) to have handheld mobile internet devices that have standardised connective capacities and operating systems. Infrastructure, understood as such practices of standardisation for flexibility, therefore affords the study of the location of structure for action in work, and in social activities more generally in the digital era. As Plantin et al. (2018) highlight, certain platforms (but also infrastructural matters such as cables, data centres and so on) become the background basis for the majority of other (digital) activities, creating a relationship of dependency but without direct control, a situation in which it is impossible to work without these systems even as they do not determine the exact undertaking of working activities. At the same time, existing (modern) infrastructures are increasingly fragmented through the use of digital technologies, as new digital actors and layers of digital data are inserted into these socio-technical processes, frequently with the aim of increasing efficiency (or convenience), extracting value, or some combination of the two. It is this complex production and reconfiguration of agencies in the digital era that a focus on infrastructure can address. In the case of work, this focus enables a more comprehensive understanding of the different actors involved in the shaping of the workplace, as much as in the undertaking of work itself. In turn, this points to emerging regimes of valuation (Chiapello, 2015) that target neither exclusively labour nor its product, but instead aim at the technical infrastructures that promise the possibility for work to take place. 

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3. Histories and futures of technology through the workplace 

11This promise of workplace technology frequently functions as an affective and discursive structure that shapes technology uptake, encouraging the implementation of new tools and systems on the basis that they will in some way improve work in times to come. In addition to this orientation, epitomised in “future of work” discourses (Frey & Osborne, 2017), the workplace and its technologies offer insights into the multiple temporalities constituting digitalisation as a social change process, for example in the histories of workplace technology development or in digital work that takes place through specific dispositions of temporal control. Regarding the development of workplace technologies, a central insight from these histories is the non-linear and partial nature of technological change, both in the possibilities afforded by the technology to improve work quantity or quality, and in its role in the social relations of work. Empirical, and specifically ethnographic, studies of workplace information systems have indicated the disconnect between the planned intentions in the design of technologies and how they are used in practice (Suchman, 1987). In doing so, such studies have shown the role of intuition and improvisation in the development and application of technical skills, together with the importance of “talk” in making sense of technical problems (Orr, 1996).  

12The research movement of Computer Supported Collaborative Work, which tried to combine insights from the social sciences with computer sciences in the design of workplace technologies (Grudin, 1994), further indicated how the study of team-based working has shaped the broader design of digital devices for communication beyond work, echoing longer histories of the role of social and human sciences as a driver for the development of technical problem-solving (Geoghegan, 2023). As well as the unpredictable and sometimes recursive route from technology design to uptake, the implications of the implementation of workplace technology are frequently non-linear and socially differentiated. For example, feminist histories of workplace technologies such as the typewriter and the computer have demonstrated how these have afforded new positions for women in the workplace at the same time as these positions were frequently organised along the lines of existing gendered labour hierarchies in which women’s work was systematically devalued and viewed as low-skilled (Gardey, 1999 ; Light, 1999 ; Wajcman, 1991). Workplaces serve as symptomatic sites for the ways in which a “new” technology often mimics, or even further reinforces, existing social inequalities or norms. Contemporary examples of this include the gendered burden of socially reproductive labour in the home office during the pandemic (Lambert & Cavouette-Remblière, 2021) or the disproportionate number of migrant workers in the platform-based delivery work (van Doorn & Vijay, 2021).  

13Together with historicising contemporary digital transformation and thus challenging narratives of novelty, workplaces also serve as sites where the temporal ordering mechanisms of digital society are particularly keenly played out and manifest. The flexibility of work associated with digital technologies in fact requires and results in techniques of anticipation that can produce the right place at the right time. This is perhaps most apparent in forms of logistical work, such as in the urban food delivery sector, where software is necessary to anticipate both demand at a given future time and the worker best geographically positioned to be offered a particular delivery order. Equally though, similar requirements for anticipation also emerge in mobile forms of office work, for example in increasingly automated scheduling or personal productivity software that allows for individualised management of complex work/life choreographies (Gregg, 2018). Flexibility, in other words, requires anticipatory techniques that allow for the intricate coordination often required for the appearance of individual choice (e.g. when and where to work). If anticipation seeks to alter the present in the name of managing a future scenario, speculation is another future-orientated temporal logic shaping the digital workplace. Digital workplace technologies and infrastructures have frequently emerged from or continue to exist due to modes of financialised valuation and investment in which the value of a company is based on its claim to generate future revenues. As with anticipation, such speculative logics are modes of temporal structuring for the social relations of digital technologies beyond those of work and workplaces. 

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4. Futures of digital social research 

15Although a debate that still lives on today, the insufficiencies of the “end of geography or the explosion of space” binary become clear through geographies of work and the workplace with digital technologies. Instead of place being irrelevant, it is the geographical flexibility of the workplace that shapes the social form of work and thus can expose the power dynamics at play in arrangements of working activity. Rather than a separate “virtual” space, the flexibility of the workplace is territorially realised through complex infrastructures that render digital space highly material. In addition, the study of work and the workplace demonstrates the long histories and complex present of social science research engagement with (digital) technologies, investigation that has sometimes critiqued technology use and sometimes supported technology development. Anglophone human geography, as a social science, has its own disciplinary history of interaction with digital information and communication technologies, which speaks to the broader challenges of studying digital society. The two-pronged democratisation and privatisation of capacities to map through Geographical Information Systems, and the later proliferation of geolocational data in particular, are important evolutions for the role of digital technologies in geographical knowledge production (Wilson, 2012). Equally, the constitution of sociological knowledge has been similarly altered through digitalisation, as “digital devices and the data they generate are both the material of social lives and form part of many of the apparatuses for knowing those lives” (Ruppert et al., 2013 : 24 ; Savage & Burrows, 2007). Within this contemporary context of the co-constitution of (social) science and technology, it seems important that a role for a social science is upheld in which the language of technology development is treated critically, and which affords opportunities for careful description and analysis of change process associated with these technologies, using disciplinary histories where relevant but also diversifying from them when necessary.  

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Lizzie Richardson, « Space, place, and digital technologies »RESET [En ligne], 13 | 2024, mis en ligne le 10 juillet 2024, consulté le 24 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/reset/5070 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/12cn1

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Lizzie Richardson

Institute of Human Geography, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main

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