Societies and Cities in the Age of Instant Access

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Editor

Harvey J. Miller, a geographer specialising in transportation, geographic information science and time geography. At the time of publication he was at the University of Utah; he later held the Reusche Chair in Geographic Information Science at Ohio State University.

Publication Details

Societies and Cities in the Age of Instant Access. Dordrecht: Springer, 2007. GeoJournal Library, volume 88. ISBN 978-1-4020-5426-6.[1]

Description

The collection takes as its premise what its contributors call a second information revolution: not the arrival of computing, but its detachment from the desk. Handheld communication devices, the editors argue, are becoming portable and eventually wearable remote controls for both the social and the physical world, and access to information is flourishing alongside an explosion in the volume of data those same devices collect and distribute — information about people, delivered to more and more people, in new ways.

The book's organising question is comparative and historical. The railway, the telephone, the automobile and the internet each reorganised settlement patterns, daily rhythms, social networks and economies in ways that were not obvious at the time. What, the contributors ask, is the equivalent reorganisation under conditions of instant, mobile, location-aware access?

Chapters by an international set of geographers, planners and information scientists address transportation and activity patterns, urban form, social and economic networks, community, education, and — in a chapter that has aged particularly well — locational privacy.[2]

Key Ideas

  • Instant access as an urban variable. Accessibility has classically been a function of distance and transport. When information access becomes near-instantaneous and untethered, the relationship between physical proximity and opportunity is broken and has to be re-theorised.
  • Time geography under mobile conditions. Torsten Hägerstrand's space-time prisms — the volume of places a person can reach and return from within given constraints — are recomputed when many activities no longer require co-location.
  • DigiPlace. The chapter on the transition "from cyberspace to DigiPlace" argues against the two-worlds model: information does not constitute a separate space but is layered onto physical place, altering visibility and access within it.
  • Locational privacy. The volume treats location data as a distinct category of personal information with its own dimensions and harms — an argument made here several years before it became a mainstream policy concern.
  • Data exhaust as urban infrastructure. The observation that devices generating positional and behavioural data at scale would become a primary instrument of urban measurement.

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

Where much writing on mobility is speculative, this volume is empirical and disciplinary — geography and planning applying their existing methods to a new condition. It provides the measurement side of arguments that cyborg anthropology usually makes qualitatively, and its locational-privacy material connects directly to practices such as geocloaking.

References

  1. ↑ Societies and Cities in the Age of Instant Access, Springer.
  2. ↑ See for instance the volume chapters "The dimensions of locational privacy" and "From cyberspace to DigiPlace: Visibility in an age of information and mobility."
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