AAG 2013 CFP: Digital Divides, Digital Domination, and Digital Divisions of Labour

Call for papers: Digital Divides, Digital Domination, and Digital Divisions of Labour

Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting

9-13 April 2013

Los Angeles, CA

Organizers:

Monica Stephens, Department of Geography, Humboldt State University
Mark Graham, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford

Alan McConchie, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia

The Web is massively uneven in terms of participation and representation. A small number of people are both powerful gatekeepers and produce the bulk of content, while the voices of the majority are largely left out. These phenomena are not unique to the geoweb; geographies of information and knowledge have always been uneven and have always been produced by (and have been producers of) power and privilege.

Although many speculated that the Internet would offer the potential for reconfigurations of these patterns, we increasingly see that digital divides often just reproduce, replicate, and reinforce earlier offline geographies. This unevenness increasingly matters as online information augments and is woven into everyday life.

However, the particular asymmetries in the representation and production of spatial information on the geoweb remain opaque and often hidden. This session will focus on the geographies, networks, and power relations of the digital inequalities of the geoweb. We hope to attract research at a range of scales (from the household to the national level) and contexts. Possible topics could include:

- Gatekeepers of digital information

- Demographic or geospatial inequalities

- Invisible exploitation of virtual labor

- Quantitative studies of geoweb representation

- Qualitative studies and virtual ethnographies

- Studies of normative assumptions built into geoweb tools and platforms

- Studies of racialized, gendered, or otherwise exclusionary geoweb spaces

- Differences in internet accessibility (i.e. mappings of broadband or wireless penetration)

Please email abstracts of 250 words to Mark Graham (mark.graham@oii.ox.ac.uk), Monica Stephens (Monica.Stephens@humboldt.edu), and Alan McConchie (alan.mcconchie@geog.ubc.ca) before October 10th, 2012.

Paper published! Augmented reality in urban places: contested content and the duplicity of code

A paper ("Augmented reality in urban places: contested content and the duplicity of code") that I wrote with Matt Zook and Andrew Boulton has just been officially published in the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.

Feel free to download a copy or send me a message if you would like me to email you a copy. The opening story (inspired by Stan Brunn) is below:

Amid the buzz and clatter of Dublin’s Temple Bar, Natasha checks her phone; she is getting hungry, and Stan should be here already. Maybe he has lost his phone? Or did he turn it off to save on roaming charges? It was over one hour ago that he used Facebook to check in at the café near their hotel. All of a sudden, a Twitter notification pops up from Stan: ‘waiting for @natasha_tcd at Ha’penny Bridge #watchingtheLiffeyflowby.’ Typical Stan!, Natasha thinks: right time, but wrong place.  Natasha pulls up Google Maps on her phone, types in ‘Ha’penny Bridge,’ and impatiently waits for the results. ‘Not enough signal strength here’ she thinks as she walks down the street in search for a better connection. After only a dozen steps she has full signal strength and repeats the search. She sees that ‘Ha’penny Bridge is only a couple of minutes’ walk away even if she takes the longer route past Eamonn Doran’s, a bar with a geo-tagged Wikipedia article that notes that the Cranberries used to play there. She is a huge music fan and can’t resist the detour. As Natasha inspects the façade of the bar and reviews the list of musicians who played there, she simultaneously has to dodge the crowds walking by. ‘Have they no respect!’, she thinks and instantly laughs at herself for criticizing people’s ignorance of a history she’s only just learning herself.  Before moving on, she notices a sponsored ad on her phone for a restaurant called Yamamori Sushi just on the other side of the river near Ha’penny Bridge. Clicking on the restaurant, she sees that it has sixty-six reviews, most of which are glowing and hopefully not just from the owner’s friends. Looks like a good place! Oblivious to the ‘Grand Opening – Half Price Sushi’ banner posted on the hopeful storefront of a different restaurant across the street, Natasha hurries over to meet the increasingly anxious Stan (he’s already sent three texts asking where she is) hoping that he is in the mood for sushi.

AAG CFP: Disruptive geographies: communication technologies and economic reconfigurations at the periphery

Disruptive geographies: communication technologies and economic reconfigurations at the periphery

Mark Graham, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford
Laura Mann, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford

Call for papers for the 2013 meeting of the AAG in Los Angeles.

“In the new millennium, the world’s poor are still at the bottom of the pyramid, but this time they are the fortune that can be mined, not the workers whose labor feeds all.” (Roy 2012)

Much has been written about the death of distance and the end of geography. The spread of the Internet and other communications technologies combined with booming practices of offshoring left many to talk about a techno-mediated new international division of labour and a global shift in economic flows. However, geography continues to matter as much as ever while global body shopping seems to be largely confined to low-end work.

Yet, the geography of internet and communications infrastructure has again radically changed in the last few years: potentially upsetting relationships of global production and consumption. There are now over two billion Internet users and five billion mobile phone users. Barriers to access still exist, but are less pronounced than ever before. As such, geographic barriers are potentially less relevant for many of the movements of codified information and services that happen around the world. This opens up possibilities for significant economic and social transformation and disruption: especially in the world’s peripheries.

For instance, ‘Bottom of the Pyramid’ capitalism has gained prominence among scholars of economic development and ‘social enterprise.’ Multinational companies are increasingly viewing the world’s poorest as willing consumers and part of profitable developing world markets. New technologies combined with old social networks are said to bypass old and cumbersome distribution networks, making new populations accessible to transnational capital and global consumption in unprecedented ways. In addition, many firms and entrepreneuers across the South are themselves building new transnational businesses that leverage the ease at which information can move across borders. Northern firms are also attempting to take advantage of the variable frictions between labour, capital, and information in order to engage in ‘bodyshopping,’ offshoring, and outsourcing.

In this session, we wish to interrogate these moments and strategies of disruption. We wish to focus, in particular, on those actors and institutions that have demonstrated an awareness of socio-technical networks and have leveraged themselves and their organizations successfully and profitably. Are these global reconfigurations changing economic relationships and livelihoods on national or society-wide scales or are such moments of disruption confined to highly visible and sophisticated strategies used by a few? If so, can such strategies ultimately be leveraged for broader change? Perhaps most importantly, are reconfigurations of connectivities linked to further empowerment or exploitation for the world’s poorest?

Please email abstracts of 250 words to Mark.Graham@oii.ox.ac.uk and Laura.Mann@oii.ox.ac.uk before October 15th, 2012.