Awakening the Technological Unconscious

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Chapter 2: Awakening the Technological Unconscious

A Critique of the Conventional ICT Narratives

“Many people… see a society of isolated people, stuck indoors, glued to a screen, losing the taste for real human contact and experience. They worry about the exclusion of the poor, the old, and those too inept to lean how to plug in their modems. They imagine a new class of technological have-nots… They see an Orwellian world of lost privacy… In fact, the main impact of the death of distance will be to make communication and access to information in all its forms more convenient. On balance, that will surely be good for societies everywhere… it should, overall make people’s lives easier and richer… The home will reacquire functions that it has lost over the past century. It will become not just a workshop, but a place where people receive more of their education, training, and health care. New kinds of community will develop, bounded electronically across distance, sharing work, domestic interests, and cultural backgrounds” (Cairncross, 1997: 233-234)
This statement is indicative of the type of conventional ICT narratives I wish to critique. Cairncross (1997) begins by rebuking the common dystopian take of social exclusion and isolation, however, in presenting her argument for what will come from the death of distance she succeeds in presenting the opposite utopian perspective which is just as erroneous. As Chapter One introduced, both of these perspectives are found scattered throughout the literature.
Whether ICTs will equate to freedom of the individual and society through the removal of the geographic constraints (Negroponte, 1995), or are responsible for a loss of social connection and an increasingly fast paced life in which both the past and future become blurred (Virilio, 1997; Eriksen, 2001) is held by many to come down to predicting the ramifications of technological change. Nonetheless most researchers also agree this is an inherently difficult task. The basic mechanics of such innovations can be projected with accuracy once the foundation has been set (Albright, 2002). What is more difficult to gauge is how they will be received by the public. Factors such as the timing, the impact of policy and human behaviour are variables that need to be taken into account. As Nardi and O’Day (1999) identify predicting the cause and effect relationships among humans and their institutional, social and economic contexts, all of which change over time, is very difficult. Conventional ICT narratives are also replete with metaphors from ones that attempt to convey the transitory nature of such technologies including the information superhighway and information age to ones that focus on their dynamism such as cyberspace and the digital divide. While often accused of obfuscating issues without due consideration for the consequences (Graham, 1998; Kirsch, 1995) such metaphors do have the ability to capture the uncertain and often transitory nature of technological impacts which is why they remain so prevalent (Adams, 1997; Dodge and Kitchin, 2000; Graham, 1998; Lakoff and Johnson, 2003; Nardi and O’Day, 1999; Sawhney, 1996; Thrift and French 2002).
The greatest danger of attempting such predictions and something that is common to both the utopian and dystopian accounts is the tendency to be technologically determinist; the perspective that technology is the primary determiner of social conditions and social change (Graham, 1998). It is well recognised that such determinism is a significant risk when dealing with ICTs, a recognition that Heidegger usefully summarised in his Question of Technology, where he argues that so long as we regard it as neutral we are “utterly blind to the essence of technology” (1977: 4). I argue that this risk has unfortunately manifested itself as a fear, something to be avoided at all costs, a fact that has greatly restricted the range of research being conducted in this field.
Cairncross (1997), provides one of the most well recognised and vilified technologically determinist accounts, stirring up considerable contention among geographers (in particular see Gorman et al., 2004; Graham, 1998; Morgan, 2004). As Janelle identified in his review of the book, Carincross has the ability to “identify and interpret the key trends” (1998:485) but fails to think critically about her clearly determinist attitude to the positive attributes of technology. Cairncross is not alone however. Some prominent geographers have also shown this tendency including Harvey (1990) whose work on time space compression is imbued with a feeling of technological determinism. He emphasises the increased pace of life and argues that this is reducing individuals’ capacity to deal with their everyday lives, “terror of time-space compression which ultimately dissolves everything into ephemera and fragments such that the devil takes not the hindmost but the global totality… the pace of change has suddenly accelerated. Geographers cannot escape the terrors of these times. Nor can we avoid in the broad sense becoming victims of history rather than its victors.” (Harvey, 1990: 433)
The degree of determinism can vary greatly, as Graham (1998) identifies even the use of the metaphor impact when discussing the consequences of ICTs could be considered determinist. An increasing body of work is now recognising and developing means to negate such determinism. Much of this is emerging in the field of media studies (see Silverstone, 2005 and Morley, 2006). For geography, the continuing prevalence of determinist thinking is in fact symptoms of a much greater dilemma – the prevalence of dualisms. Geography has a surfeit of dualisms and debating the merits and difficulties these pose contribute a significant amount of theoretical and empirical discussion. The dualistic treatment of space and time is probably the best recognised and interrogated of these and this theory chapter contests that its continuing prevalence is limiting the scope of geography’s research into ICTs.

The Dualistic Treatment of Time and Space

Unwin describes how “from antiquity to the present day this concern with space and time would seem to be one of the core characteristics… of geographical enquiry” (2000: 17). This section explores geography’s more recent discourse on time and space which emerged from the radical geographies of the late 1960s and 1970s (Peet, 1977). Peet’s review identifies how this field went from “an attempt to engage the discipline in socially significant research to an attempt to construct a radical philosophical and theoretical base for a socially and politically engaged discipline” (1977: 17). This shift was strongly influenced by geographers’ increasing engagement with Marxian theory which among other things allowed critiques of late capitalism to emerge (Peet, 1977). It has been argued that this period rescued geography from a fragmented and isolated existence (van Passen, 1981). Others however believe that “the past twenty five years have often emerged in critical opposition to the current ways of seeing… [but] they have also become yet more temporary dogmas” (Gould, 1982: 2). Two of the leading theories that dominated the radical geographies reworking of time and space, Hägerstrand’s (1973) time geography and Lefebvre’s (1991b) production of space, are the primary focus of this section due to their formative role in geography’s subsequent engagements with ICTs.
It must be noted that a conscious choice was made not delve into the various different metrics often used to describe space and time including absolute, relative and social. This decision was based on two factors. Firstly, it has already been done very effectively and in great detail elsewhere (see Kellerman, 1989; Johnston, Gregory, Pratt and Watts, 2000). Secondly, this thesis wants to avoid treating time and space dualistically and therefore breaking the discussion down into the various forms seems epistemologically flawed. As will be discussed in the subsequent section on new understandings to progress we instead need to embrace the concept of a multiplicity of timespaces.
Hägerstrand’s time geography emerged in the 1960s from his work at Lund University, Sweden. Developed in response to the increasing criticism of regional science throughout the 1950s it was intended to show the importance of considering individuals’ spatial movements through time rather than the aggregate. Based on individual actors, time geography was intended to demonstrate the need to treat space and time interdependently. It raised a number of issues concerning process, particularly the various constraints acting on the individual that affects their ability to attain goals through the completion of projects3. Time geography has provided some significant contributions to they way geography conceptualises time and space. It was one of the earliest attempts in geography to approach space and time as interdependent and signalled a change of approach in geography, a move away from its spatial bias (Parkes and Thrift, 1980). Kellerman (1989) describes how Hagerstrand was one of the first to recognise that geographers had been overemphasising the spatial and that it provided a means as Pred suggested to “cease taking distance itself so seriously” (1977:218). Davies (2001) identifies the value of time geography’s ability to insert a spatial framework pointing out that it was Hagerstrands vision to illustrate “individuals’ activities in space and time so that complex interconnections become visible” (2001: 134). Crang (2001) discusses how the idea of rhythm and pulsing cities emerged from time geography and the potential of what he describes as “Hagerstrand’s provocative term of ‘project’” (2001: 193).
It should be noted that discussions of time geography, such as those outlined above, have tended to identify potential rather than actual applications. One of the key criticisms of time geography is its inability to deal with lived experience and diversity (Buttimer, 1976; Kellerman, 1989; Parkes and Thrift, 1980; Rose, 1993). Kellerman identifies that Hagerstrand’s treatment of time and space as limited “movement resources” (1989: 12) is contextual as it regards the individual “as a series of time space points” (1989:2) and therefore there is little consideration of power or social settings. Rose furthers this arguing that it erases “the emotional, the passionate, the disruptive, and the feelings of relations with others” (1993:28). Parkes and Thrift (1980) disagree arguing that “time geography does not deny a role for intention and experience” (1980:276) but that it finds them “rather difficult to handle at the moment” (1980: 276). Decades on these criticisms are still being applied to Hagerstrand’s work (see Davies, 2001). Despite these criticisms time geography has undergone a recent renaissance (see Gren, 2001) and its presence is felt in much of the recent work conducted on geographies more recent reconceptualization of space and time. The most important aspect to be derived from time geography for the benefit of geography’s understandings of ICTs is its emphasis on individual  actors, moving the focus away from space and to the nature of the individual’s interactions with it, something the thesis strongly abides by. Taking a phenomenological approach Lefebvre’s ‘production of space’ questioned the multiple meanings of space and argued that it was a fundamentally social concept (Shields, 2004). Lefebvre’s work offers a good starting point because so much of our thinking both on everyday life and the production of space originated with him. Kirsch identifies that Lefebvre “see[s] space as the product of social processes” (1995: 531), and that through viewing its production one can examine the endless transformations of space, particularly those mediated by technology without perceiving space as shrinking or being annihilated. This is significant in a literature that is dominated by the Marxist perception of the annihilation of space by time. Furthermore, in the phenomenological tradition Lefebvre forces the reader to challenge their understandings of space and, I would argue, time. The ubiquitous nature of ICTs in everyday life creates the need to renew this challenge, something that this research using Thrift’s work and others, discussed shortly, begins to do. Lefebvre (1991b) also challenged the use of spatial metaphors concluding that they were examples of the spatial fetishism. He argued that such metaphors assumed various definitions of space without ever identifying them (Massey, 1992).
Lefebvre’s primacy of the production of space over the idea that both time and space are socially produced (Unwin, 2000) reveals that despite his acknowledgment of their interdependence, at its heart the argument is dualistic in its treatment of the two. This could be attributed in part to what Unwin identifies as Lefebvre’s “deep commitment to Marxism” (2000:15) which favours this dualistic treatment. Recently Elden (2003) have challenged this pointing out that the publication of a preface to the third edition of this work in 1986, which was never translated into English, Lefebvre clarifies many of his ideas including that both space and time were social products, the principles of a second nature. Much of geography’s understanding of Lefebvre’s Production of Space, however, comes through Harvey whose work is strongly influenced by Lefebvre, and the persistence of this dualism is revealed in much of Harvey’s work for example the following quote from his discussion of the experience of space and time, “And if it is true that time is always memorialised not as flow, but as memories of experienced places and spaces, then history must indeed give way to poetry, time to space, as the fundamental material of social expression” (Harvey, 1990: 218 my emphasis).

Chapter One: Encounters with ICTs: Reassessing Geographic Approaches
Prologue
Defining Information and Communication Technologies
The Thesis: Reassessing Geographic Approaches to ICTs
Why Auckland, New Zealand?
An Archipelago of Situated Experiences
Conclusion
Chapter Two: Awakening the Technological Unconscious
Introduction
A Critique of the Conventional ICT Narratives
The Dualistic Treatment of Time and Space
Changing Strategies: New Approaches to Building Knowledge
Emerging Understandings
Timespace – a new take
The trans attitude
Grounding the Technological Unconscious in Everyday Life
Framings: Geographical Treatment of ICTs in Urban Environments, Transportation, Migration and Ed
Urban Environments
Transport and Transportation
Education and E-learning
Migration and Transnationalism
Conclusion
Chapter Three: New Zealand’s Changing Policy Context: Neoliberalism, After Neoliberalism and the Role of Emerging ICTs
Introduction
New Zealand’s Neoliberal Reform Process
The Changing Telecommunications Landscape
The Changing Transport Landscape
The Changing Education Landscape
The Changing Immigration Landscape
Auckland’s ICT Institutional Landscape
Chapter Four: Methodological Approaches: accessing the in between through an Archipelago of Situated Experiences
Introduction
Retrospective Decisions
Accessing Unactualised Possibilities
Positionality
Research Methods and their Value to the Thesis
Auckland’s ICT Platforms: the Local Government Experience
Experiences of the RTPISP System
E-Learning Experiences at the University of Auckland
The Experiences of Transnational Migrants
Conclusion
Chapter Five: Auckland’s ICT Platforms: the Local Government Experience
Introduction
A Question of Presence and Absence
A Fait Accompli? Local Government’s role and relationships with Auckland’s ICT Platforms
Reactions to the Telecommunications Legislation and Policy Developments
Relationship Tensions
Some Progress – Elements of Regional Coordination
Emerging Initiatives: what Auckland’s Local Government Sector is doing
Infrastructural Initiatives
Economic Initiatives
Social Initiatives
Constructing Emerging Timespaces in Auckland
Conclusion
Chapter Six: Experiences of the Real Time Passenger Information Signal Pre-emption System
Introduction
RTPISP System: the Ramifications of a Troubled Start
Surveillance and Signal Pre-emption: the RTPISP System as a Coded Space
Altered Perceptions of the Bus Service
The Role of Trust
Changing Behaviour: Constituting Emerging Timespaces at the Bus Stop
Conclusion
Chapter Seven: E-learning Experiences at the University of Auckland
Introduction
Introducing the Two Courses
Students’ Understanding of and Exposure to E-learning
Blended Learning: What Possibilities May be Emerging?
Traditional and E-learning Mechanisms: a Balancing Act
What the Students Considered to be the Useful Aspects of the E-Learning Mechanisms Applied
Problems identified by the students with the e-learning mechanism used on both courses
The Emerging Timespaces of Digital Worlds
The Changing Nature of Communication between Students and their Tutors and Lecturers
Conclusion
Chapter Eight: The Experiences of Transnational Migrants
Introduction
Imagining a New Home
Negotiating the Migration Process
Conclusion
References List
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