Digital Geography is the study of digitalised geography through the media. This theme looks at how media and mobility are used in everyday life and can be made up of three different concepts which are:
Geographies produced through the digital this is the idea that using a digital tools to produce and share a range of geography research. The use of digital technologies in the production and understanding of space in everyday life is examined in geographies produced by the digital. With using geography methods to make sense of the digital and post-digital world would be how geographies produced of the digital would studied.
Digital geography is also involved with the idea of the mobility side of geography as well. This involves how the world has become more highly digitalised and therefore mobilised. Everyone with a technological device can simply travel anywhere, can technically traced where ever they go and can research, and witness cultures from other countries using the their device.
Globalisation is a major part of digital geography as it brings movement of human, goods and cultural conventions. This could be done using technologies, often networks have some form of maps such as Google maps that can allow the user to experience a virtual world and seeing the virtual scenery, this is also enhanced using 3D imagery to create scaling.
Hybridity, which brings shared meanings, takes a role within a lot of different places within the world, within their cultures, identities and even languages.
McDonaldisation doesn’t not really allow a person to experience the culture of another country and gives this idea that you have the ability to not change anything or effect anything, including environments, even if you travel.
The idea of digital geography has many different concepts and one of the main ones is Mediascapes. Mediascapes makes up a large portion of digital geography as it is the representation of space and place in terms of media. This allows consumers to connect with different spaces and places using media such as people can virtually visit other countries and their cities like South Korea’s Seoul or Paris the capital of France.
This can allow people to try and experience places without traveling to these places and having the ability to not change anything. However, it could most likely end up giving them a completely different experience to those who go to a country and place to experience these different cultures or to the people that actually live there and have created deep attached meanings to the location.
Users of digital technologies are subject to, and participants in creating, innumerable digital changes, while corporations continue to render devices and software obsolete to increase profits, and governments are slowly becoming involved in regulating the digital.
(McLean, J. 2020)
Mobility combines physical movement, representations that give meaning, and the experience that embodies mobile practices.
There is the idea that within this almost digital world and with a lot of the current world issues, such as the pandemic, we are starting to depend more on aspects of digital geographies to experience some of the cultural geographies that we are missing out on. An example of this would be going to see a movie that had a lot of culture within it or researching and looking into other cultures or places to see what the location is like such as using Google Maps to look at other locations.
Technology has created a range of ways to try and experience a place and space without actually being there and they have done this using a range of different technologies from mapping out the streets to digital satellites taking photos of the Earth. ‘Digital technologies are providing new opportunities for communication and connection, while simultaneously deepening problems associated with isolation, global inequity and environmental harm, contributing to shifting digital geographies’ (McLean, J. 2020), McLean suggests that despite technology advancing and being a positive change it increases the chances of isolation and less communication within peoples everyday interactions and life in general.
Place appears to involve some notion of stability
(Cresswell. 2014)
and permanence while mobility appears to necessitate constant change and process.
References:
Cresswell, T. (2014). Place in a Mobile World. Cresswell, Tim. Place : An Introduction. https://files.coventry.aula.education/63ca2b91f31de63aeef0af64d48fb8ffcreswell___place_in_a_mobile_world.pdf
McLean, J. (2020). Changing Digital Geographies. Changing Digital Geographies: Environments, Technologies and People. https://files.coventry.aula.education/6b966d8e9e1d5ee15cc2156a08977bbdintroduction___changing_digital_geographies.pdf
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