Space is a key feature of social life. But does the digitalisation of society affect its spatial dimensions, and if so, how?
In this podcast, Leverhulme Visiting Professor Theodore Schatzki discusses his work exploring digitality, different types of space and notions of virtual realities, such as cyber space.
With Dale Southerton and Leverhulme Visiting Professor Theordore Schatzki.
This podcast is brought to you by the Centre for Sociodigital Futures – a flagship research centre, funded by the ESRC and led by the University of Bristol in collaboration with 12 other Universities in the UK and globally. The support of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) is gratefully acknowledged.
The following transcript is automatically generated
This podcast is brought to you by the ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures, or CenSoF, a flagship research centre led by the University of Bristol in collaboration with 12 other universities, exploring sociodigital futures in the making. The support of the Economic and Social Research Council is gratefully acknowledged.
Hello everyone, I’m Professor Dale Southerton and I’m here today with Ted Schatzki, who’s Professor of Geography and Philosophy at the University of Kentucky. Ted is here on a Leverhulme Visiting Fellowship where he’s working with the ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures and the University of Bristol Business School. Last week, Ted gave a public lecture on digitality and space, which is part of an ongoing program of work that Ted’s engaged with. And today, we’re going to talk about some of that work, starting with space and digitality.
Thanks, Dale. It’s really great to be here in Bristol at the Centre. And I’m really happy to be able to talk to you about these matters. Yes, the world is becoming much more digital or it’s sometimes said it’s becoming ‘digitalised’ and that is a quite simple idea that digital devices and infrastructures and networks are rapidly disseminating through social life in practically all parts of the world and in most and in some places more or less all sectors of social life. So, it’s a very all-encompassing creeping phenomena that is occurring. And the word digital, I mean, that’s a widely used word today. In a lot of people’s hands it refers to a type of machine, one that runs on writings that are composed in what’s called binary code, and that’s the ones and zeros. the combination of which probably most people have seen that stands for, could be stands for language, could stand for things in the world. There’s a whole lot of devices, our computers run on these writings. And when digital is understood this way, it’s thought of as a phenomenon that arose in the middle part of the 20th century. There’s a broader notion of digital that it’s worth mentioning here that gives a different perspective on the phenomenon. On this way of thinking, for something to be digital is for it to involve using discrete elements to register and represent the world. So that’s what those ones and zeros are doing. They can stand for letters, they can stand for words, they can stand for a colour in a photograph that your computer can then produce on the screen in front of you. And the idea that a system of discrete elements can register the world is somewhat broader. If you think, in a way, a painting can be construed this way as a set of elements that, when put together, represent a scene. Some people construe language this way, that written language is a rendering in discrete elements of what’s said. And there are theories that will then push this way of thinking all the way back to cave paintings. And so on this way of thinking, digitality is a long-standing phenomena. And what today we think of as devices running on writings written in binary code is simply the latest phase of that, admittedly a very dramatic phase, which is why some people say digitalisation began middle of last year, 70 or 80 years ago, instead of thousands of years ago.
Okay that’s great and that’s interesting and I mean there’s plenty we could say about the idea of notation, which I know you’ve talked about before, and we’ll come on to think about what’s new or not in terms of thinking about space. But what is it then about the digital that makes it feel like it’s a new phenomena? You’re talking about different ways in which you write binary code is it just the binary code is new was it something to do with the spread of the way in which these things connect in with practices of daily life or the way the world operates or what?
What did the devices, and one reason they’re disseminating is there exceptionally useful, and we can accomplish all sorts of things, carry out this or that practice in new ways. And so, for instance, I’m sure many people listening to this have bought something using their computer before, which did not require, you know, finding your way down to a store and purchasing it, but simply a few clicks of your mouse. And so digital devices broadly are enabling new ways of not just individuals, but organisations, governments, businesses, militaries, you name it. There are new, highly efficient, effective ways of carrying out things. This is now pervasive in our lives, so as we move through different domains of our life, whether at home, then transportation, going to work, or whatever the tasks are you carry out during the course of your day, these devices inevitably become involved and of course the cell phone now accompanies many people in their peregrinations through their worlds on a daily basis and so it’s old hat in one sense to us now but if you cast a look backwards it’s new and it’s dramatic and it affects everyone and especially in the domains of communication I think, the ways we communicate and keep in touch with people, it just strikes new and novel and it’s the future happening in that sense. So I think that’s why it’s easy to think that something new began 70 years ago. And in a sense it did because computers have in fact disseminated everywhere and that is a novel fact.
Yeah, as you were talking then I was thinking we’re here doing a podcast. What’s the idea of a podcast is reasonably, relatively new. The idea of recording two people having a conversation and playing it back through some medium is not that new if you think of radio or anything like that. But is it the ones and the zeros or is it actually something to do with the infrastructures that are now in place that enable people to access this kind of recording in a particular form that’s going on here?
Well, I mean, the ones and zeros are crucial because they’re also a form of information storage. And so a podcast like this, and if it were a webinar where there were images as well, the amount of data is quite large. And so the ones and the zeros allow for an exceptionally efficient storage of that and access to it. And there are issues about corruptibility of data that are better. So I do think the ones and the zeros are crucial to it. There are other dimensions such as the fact that, you know, computers and phones can go with us wherever we go and that means our ability to accomplish various things. It’s omnipresent and that was different. Life used to be much more spatially segregated than before, that you would do certain things in certain places and other things in other places and now it’s all mixed up, and so the actual engineering of the device as well and its portability, I think, are crucial. I mean, there’s aspects of that too, but the ones and zeros do enable all this in the end. And the other thing they enable is, since the one and the zero also corresponds to, you know, computers are electronic devices that, you know, have electronic circuits, and the ones and the zeros correspond to a circuit being on or off. And so at the same time as the ones and zeros are an information medium and a medium, they are also a medium in which to affect things that is carried out through the electronic circuitry and the networks that it’s all part of that allow things to be accomplished. And so I think the ones and zeros are crucial to this.
Yyou made reference then to space in more than one way, and I know you’ve been working on space. So tell us a little bit, give us an introduction to why you’re thinking about space in relation to this idea of digitality.
Yeah, so the ultimate reason is, I mean, I’m a philosopher by training, and philosophers have always made a lot of time and space. And they are, in a sense, like essential parameters of what is. And that way of thinking actually is carried over into social thought, which is constantly probing the spatial and or the temporal dimensions of things. Space is a very important phenomenon. The phenomenon of distance, thinking in terms of the kind of objective space that we live in, distance is very crucial for all kinds of things, transportation, getting together with people, logistics and costs, but also things like as you go around through the course of your day, the objects around you, the physical objects, define how you can move because we generally try to avoid running into solid material entities. So the layout of the world becomes very crucial and what we can do at the various places of the material layouts, if you think about the concern and care that goes into how we lay out rooms, our buildings, our streets in the relative position, I mean it’s all with an eye towards what can be done, and so space becomes very crucial in organising our lives. Think, too, of the way that people think in terms of the notion of place. Places mean things to us. Some places are very important to us. For many people, their hometowns are a place that gives them a sense of identity. Other places, their daily lives can be structured in terms of places. I mean, there’s home and work, recreation or getting fit or, you know, place of worship or whatever. And so you’re thinking and navigating the world and who we are as people is very attached to the different places that we live in. So space is just simply an important phenomenon of human life, and for that reason, social theorists such as myself keep coming back to it. As intellectual fashions come and go, there are new ways of thinking about space.
Yeah, and maybe we can come on to some of those new ways. So you talk about physical space and you talk about places, but I know you’ve talked in your lecture, for example, about local regions as well. Can you just clarify a little bit? Because I think it’s important to the arguments that you are making about the relation between space and digitality, that sort of basic conception of the different ways you can think about space.
Yeah. So in probably most people’s book, the most important concept of space and also, when thinking about social life is physical space. I mean that is physical spaces that are defined by the physical layout of objects. And as I was just saying, we attend a lot to that in how we set up our worlds. Regardless of who you are, you have to cope with phenomena like distance and area all the time. So that’s one very important category of space. There’s another category that we could call something like spaces of your lives. And these are spaces, the thing about physical space is that if you set up your room, it stays the setup it is regardless of what you do or where you are or whether you are at all. It’s still there. So it’s objective in a sense. But there are other spaces that you could think of that we dwell in or that we live through that are tied to our ongoing lives. One such space is place. University of Bristol is a place, and we can relate to it as a whole, and it can have certain meanings for us, and it can structure how we think about our lives or how we conduct our lives. But that notion of place, you know, is sort of like an inhabited region. that has meaning as a whole for us and that we relate to as such a meaningful whole as we proceed. And such places do not exist independent of our dwelling in them. So in that sense, it’s a space of our lives. It doesn’t have the kind of objectivity that the layout of your room does. So, you mentioned there’s another type of such space, which both these notions come ultimately from the analysis that Martin Heidegger gave of human existence in his book of about a century ago, Being in Time. There’s another kind of space that I call local regions, and the idea there is that as we go through our day, we proceed from one setting to another. And each of these settings is a certain assemblage of objects. And these objects anchor places at which we can do certain things. So for instance, when I gave the lecture, I gave the example as I was standing in front of a podium, there were people at chairs, at benches, who had come in through a door, some windows were letting in light, and all those objects define places where you can do things, like take a seat, or give a lecture, or enter the room. All the settings we go through anchor arrays of such places where we can, whether it’s a restaurant, or going into a bus, or entering a store, or just going out into the street. And we proceed sensitive to these. And this is a type of spatiality that we proceed in terms of and live within. And it’s a very important one, and we’re actually very sensitive to this.
From that basis then, in your lecture you argued that essentially we don’t need any new categories of space in order to understand the digital, which given words like cyberspace and I sit and watch my kids, now grown up, but they still play computer games and it feels like they disappeared into a new space to cyberspace or whatever that might be can you just run this through why you arguing that we don’t need new categories of space in order to understand the digital.
Yes so the argument I made was on the positive side of it was that type of spatial reorganisations occurring with digitalisation or the dissemination of digital devices, these can be understood using the types of space that we’ve been talking about. So physical space, place, and local region. That’s the positive side. And the negative side was there along with digitalisation, people have come up with concepts of space that are new types of space that accompany digital devices, especially digital devices with screens. And so some people have thought that the grasp digitalising societies, societies that are becoming more digital, new concepts of space have to be brought into bear. And of course, you mentioned one, perhaps the most common, because it both fuelled the imagination of academics, but also caught on in popular culture. And that was cyberspace. And the notion of cyberspace is due to the author William Gibson, who introduced the notion in a 1982 short story, but then he published his book in 1984 called Neuromancer that just caught the world by storm. I remember it was stunning how people, suddenly everybody was using this word cyberspace. And in Gibson, cyberspace is kind of like a quasi-physical space, but it’s composed not of material objects, but of information packets and walls of information and things like that. This is a space you can enter and move around in, and that’s why it’s quasi-physical, because it’s modelled on a physical space where what’s defining it are not material objects, but information. But very quickly, the idea became something bigger, and it’s the idea that we access a new kind of space that is distinct from or apart from the spaces of the actual world through our computer screens. And this way of thinking suddenly was everywhere, in video games, in TV shows, on talk shows, in serious intellectual work. Everybody was taken by this idea. And it was also fuelled by the way we talk, all of us talk about, for instance, navigating between websites. Where would that be except in cyberspace? But of course, the cyberspace is an illusion. So take, for instance, the idea of navigating through it. What’s actually occurring when you navigate through cyberspace is you’re sitting at, let’s say, your desk, in front of your computer with a mouse in your hand and you move the mouse so the cursor moves on the screen and you click it and lo and behold a different set of images and words and graphic design appears on your screen. And so navigation is simply that. It’s a very material, physical thing which results in changes on what’s your screen. And of course, one of the marvels of digital technology is that the software coordinates what appears on different people’s screens, you know, internationally, globally, or just the person, you know, at the computer next to you. And so that coordination is the marvel thing, and the magic, if you will, not the entering into another realm or another space. And so I think, luckily, this notion of cyberspace as a space apart is slowly disappearing. Well, I shouldn’t say slowly. It has fairly strongly now, at this point, disappeared from academic work, but it’s still alive in popular culture. The cartoons on Saturday morning in the States still talk about going through, you know, through cyberspace.
Yeah, I mean it’s really interesting because, and I know you’ve written about this before and mentioned it in your lecture, but then the range of meta- spatial metaphors that get used both in everyday life and to mobilise academic concepts and arguments is there. So the word navigation, the navigable space of the website, as you’ve just described is not actually you’re not navigating space as such it’s the relationship, well it’s the hyperlinks that are moving you and even then language like moving is there in your paper you make a some a really nice distinction in terms of thinking about screens and video games linked into those more fundamental categories of space so I was wondering if you could just sort of talk a bit about screens and a little bit about how you can explain video games without the need for new categories. Because it’s video games that intuitively, I think, feel like something that could be cyberspace, although I completely take your arguments.
Yeah, so screens are interesting. They are the dimension of the digital devices, as you say, that seem to suggest new possibilities, new worlds, that something very different is going on. The first thing to remark about screens is they’ve been around for a while. After all, there were televisions, which were not digital until the digital revolution took place. There was cinema. And the question is how far one wants to push the notion of a screen even earlier than that. A canvas is a screen in some sense or other. So screens are what has intrigued people, certainly. And so what I want to claim about screens is that fundamentally they resemble other types of what I call representational artifacts. So these are artifacts in which when a suitably skilled person looks at them, they see a representation of something. Beginning, at least, with perspectivism in the Renaissance, people could see things on canvases or on walls and you see a scene in a picture and what is going on in screens is fundamentally similar to this. So whether it’s what you see in a picture or what you see in a television screen or what you see in a film or what you see on a computer screen, in each case you’re seeing something and so the role of perception remains very strong, and so screens need to be brought into a lineage, I think, of representational artifacts that display what many people would call as virtual entities. And so with a video game, whatever the scene is in the video game, it’s almost inevitably spatial. It’s usually a three-dimensional space, though there are two-dimensional games. People will remember Pac-Man and Pac-Lady. And usually the three-dimensional, they’re often, they are physical spaces, though not always. They are spaces, of course, that characters and avatars that we see move through. So they clearly resemble, in some ways, the worlds we live in. And in many cases, you know, it is a version of physical space that one sees where what makes it physical is it obeys the laws of physics, basically, that has been programmed into the software that generates the scene and the gameplay in it. But what I argue in the paper also is that notions of place and local region also apply to video games. Anyone who’s played or watched someone play a video game will see the action switch from one place to another, where the places are holes with a certain meaning, often a certain name. For instance, one very popular type of game is a labyrinth, where you enter a labyrinth and you’re pursuing something or avoiding being pursued or something, but you had to enter it. And so there’s an initial phase of the game, and the labyrinth becomes a place with sub-places, which have names that are known that certain things go on and certain dangers are present. And then outside the labyrinth, there might be a sanctuary or in safety. And so if it’s a social game when you’re playing it with someone, you might even talk about, let’s get over to that place. Let’s get out of this place. And so, I mean, we conceive the game. The game is structured narratively as well in terms of places. But there are also local regions. Because when you’re in that labyrinth, in the room of doom or whatever it’s called, within that room there’s a place to escape. There are places where other game characters might suddenly appear. There may be places you can go to get some reward or to get some power that you need or whatever the parameters of the game are. So the same notions of space, physical space, more broadly, for instance, three-dimensional space, place, and also local regions are easily found in games and it’s not surprising because what is a game, after all, than human action now transpiring in computer-generated world? But it’s human action, so the ways in the meaningfulness of the worlds through which we pass for us remain the same, as it’s still humans doing it. All these notions carry over to the virtual spaces that appear on screens.
Yeah, for me, I can see why that links back, and we’ll come back to physical space in a second, but through the categories of place and local regions. And I think the way you’ve mentioned the word a few times as sort of proceeding through, so proceeding through space, and you’ve also say proceeding through material arrangements. Can you just say a bit more about your motion of proceeding through?
Right, so one question is, some people will say space just is physical space. That’s the only kind there is. And so these other notions, place, local region, why are these notions of space at all? Here we need to take a step back and ask, well, what’s space in the first place, such that even physical space is space? This is a step back into philosophy. Philosophers don’t agree about what space in the first place is. I mentioned that the notions of place and local region come from the philosopher Heidegger. Heidegger is possibly the most significant philosopher of what could be called spaces of our lives, the human type of spaces in the 20th century. And Heidegger thought of space in general as the aroundness, the amidstness, the surroundedness of human experience. That is, we proceed amidst something. So that can be the layout of the physical world. We proceed through it. It could be places. We dwell in a place. We proceed through it on our way to a different place. And also the local regions, as I put it, we proceed through them. So this wide, very intuitive pervasive sense of an amidness, a surroundedness to human experience that can be thought of as a very broad notion of space that comes in different modalities. There’s a second concept of space that is extension or spread outness. This will be familiar to some people. Euclidean space, which we all learn and know is a type of space where extension defines space. It’s also, this is a more theoretical space often associated with science, and there are these two different notions, and the one that you’ve picked up on that then is being employed to talk about physical space and place and local regions as spaces is all this notion of the immersedness of human life.
To sort of move towards a final question, I understand the argument that we don’t need new categories of space, that cyberspace is no more than a rhetorical flourish, if you like, that the idea of virtual or virtuality is not new. So what is, and I’m not going to say new because that’s a futile word, what is significant then about digitality and spaces? Is there something that’s significant, you’ve sort of used the word, digital revolution that implies there is something significant afoot so how would you come back to that question
So I would come back to where we started because what’s significant here is our capacities to do things have been significantly reorganised And space is an important dimension of that. So for instance, think about your workplace or think about wherever you carry out a variety of tasks of everyday life. For many people, they now sit at a desk in front of a computer screen. But then if you get tired of working, you can just go meander in cyberspace and all while you’re sitting in your chair. And so this is a significant fact of many people’s lives. Workplaces in more general have been reorganised. And so what we can do, where, and when have been quite rewritten in recent years. And this is the result of the spread of these devices. And it has led to a spatial reorganisation in all those three senses of physical spaces, place, and digital place. Think about, you know, a really good example is COVID and the type of reorganisation of your home space, but that’s not so tied to digitality, but something similar is going on in perhaps a less somewhat slower less dramatic fashion and also places are being revised think for instance of libraries. Libraries used to be a place you would go get a book and you’d study and now they’re of course been explicitly redone as information centres, where you go do different sorts of things, which you probably could do sitting at home as well. And so as a result, people go, at least in the States, students go and socialise in the library. So libraries become a place to socialise, since when you’re sitting by yourself at your desk, you’re not so much socialising, except you are through social media, which is a whole new way. Now, you can get together with your friends, never leaving your chair. There’s a lot of stuff like that, I think, in the realm of communication, in the realm of commerce, in the realm of all the different kind of organisations that we meet with. And we see it also in the struggles right now about whether people have to be in the office and so forth and so on. So digitalisation is making for, again, a lot of changes in how our practices are carried out, how they’ve evolved, and as a result, in connection with the dissemination of digital devices. And space just becomes an important dimension to that.
Great, thanks Ted for your time today and thanks everybody for listening to this podcast.
To find out more about the Centre for Socio-Digital Futures, visit the University of Bristol’s website where you can read about our research, follow us on social media and sign up to our mailing list. Thanks so much for listening.
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