Cyberplace: From fantasies of placelessness to connective emplacement

Digital place and placelessness

Gibson’s (1984) cyberpunk classic Neuromancer – published before the rise of the modern commercial Internet – popularised the concept of ‘cyberspace’, which in the novel is a global virtual reality ‘matrix’ that ‘console cowboys’ a.k.a. computer hackers ‘jack in’ to by means of skin interfaces called ‘dermatrodes’ and a ‘cyberspace deck’. Gibson’s cyberspace is characterised by its placelessness and a sharp division between ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ (Kneale, 1999: 216): when users jack into the matrix, the ‘meat’ of the body in the physical world falls away and they enter an alternative, virtual realm where they float free from their bodies and their physical locations amongst a sea of geometric digital representations of global data flows.

Early scholarly treatments – in part influenced by Gibson’s vision – tended likewise to depict the emerging Internet as a boundless, amorphous, and placeless virtual realm divorced from the offline world. Extreme versions of this thesis imagined that the Internet made borders, geography, and physical space irrelevant (Barlow, 1996; Benedikt, 1991; Negroponte, 1995; Thrift, 1994), as reality itself was eroded or rendered immaterial (Boyer, 1996; Slouka, 1996) and users withdrew from or escaped the ‘real’ world into a cyberspace where experimental, mutable and disembodied identities could flourish (Featherstone and Burrows, 1995; Wiley, 1995). More moderate thinkers maintained that the digital ‘space of flows’ would continue to coexist with and impact upon the ‘space of places’, but nevertheless predicted the declining importance of territory and traditional physical power centres and the radical reconfiguration of localities (Castells, 1989, 1996; see also Appadurai, 1996: 195–197). These visions found expression in both utopian and dystopian terms, pitting the ‘cyber-utopians’ (Levin, 2002: 81) or ‘cyber-visionaries’ (Robins, 1995: 139) who envisaged digital placelessness in terms of greater freedom, enhanced democratic/civic participation, and global solidarity, against the ‘cyberpessimists’ (Light, 1999: 109) who feared a placeless immateriality and unreality leading to decline in civic life and face-to-face community.

By the 2000s, as the nonfictional Internet became ever more pervasive, the writer so often cited by these early visionaries – optimists and pessimists alike – had changed his own vision of cyberspace. In Gibson’s Spook Country (2007), a community of artists geohacks Wi-Fi and GPS networks to create locative art pieces, enabling enthusiasts wearing VR headsets to view augmented reality displays tied to particular geographic locations, illustrated in the book through in situ re-creations of celebrity deaths. Later, in The Peripheral (2014), Gibson depicts an age of mature connectivity in the early 22nd century when people are perpetually embedded in a stream of digital data overlaid on their vision by electronic implants, the rich can live out alternative existences through cyborg avatars known as ‘peripherals’, and only eccentric and reclusive ‘neo-primitives’ opt out of the connective society. The placeless cyberspace of Neuromancer had given way to an everted and connective cyberspace entangled with the physical world.

Academic literature has followed a similar trajectory, albeit at different paces in different (sub)disciplines. Scholars began to challenge the ‘myth of placelessness’ (Cowan, 2005) and the ‘exaggerated death of geography’ (Morgan, 2004) by pointing to the distinctive geographies of the Internet (Crang et al., 1999: 9; Graham, 2014: 3; Zook, 2006: 53). Anthropological and ethnographic investigations, in particular, revealed how Internet usage is decisively shaped by local contexts, and how digital technologies are embedded in everyday life rather than free-floating (Hine, 2000: 5; Hjorth and Chan, 2009; Ito, 2003; Liu, 2011: 3; Miller and Horst, 2013: 4, 11; Miller and Slater, 2000; Pink et al., 2015: 123–146). Miller and Slater (2000: 5, 7), for instance, found through ethnographic work on Trinidad that uses of the Internet were always firmly rooted within ‘mundane social structures and relations’ and framed by users’ identities as Trinidadians, rather than producing a ‘self-enclosed cyberian apartness’. Contrary to earlier hopes of a borderless global community, the Internet was also revealed to be strongly marked by geopolitics, geoeconomics, and social constraints (Herrera, 2007: 74; Warf, 2010: 52; Witteborn, 2014; Zook et al., 2004: 162–164), by nationalism and territoriality (Aouragh, 2011; Diamandaki, 2003; Eriksen, 2007; Mills, 2002), and by the physicality of Internet infrastructure (Jungnickel, 2017; Gibson et al., 2012; Tawil-Souri, 2012; Zook, 2006: 59). Tawil-Souri (2012), for instance, has shown that in the Gaza Strip the capacity for the Internet to offer virtual mobility to a community whose spatial mobility is severely restricted is undercut by Israeli control over Palestinian IT infrastructure. Yet, digital technology also created new opportunities for place-making, both in the physical world (Diamandaki, 2003; Goodspeed, 2017; Mills, 2002: 81) and in new virtual places (Boellstorff, 2008, 2013). Goodspeed (2017) has argued that even though Internet usage might erode people’s ties to their physically proximate neighbourhoods, it simultaneously allows them to belong to multiple other and geographically dispersed places; whilst Boellstorff (2013: 48–49), in his work on the immersive virtual world Second Life, found that landscape and sense of place matter in digital environments, exemplified by users’ concerns about new structures being coded on plots adjacent to their own that might spoil their virtual view.

The rise of mobile technology and Web 2.0 bring the everyday, embodied and emplaced aspects of digital technology into even sharper focus. Social media and the portability of digital devices are leading to ever-increasing interpenetration or blurring of online/offline and private/public (Cumiskey and Hjorth, 2017: 15, 36; Garde-Hansen et al., 2009: 6; Reading, 2009: 81–82, 90–91; Van Dijck, 2013: 4), creating what Adriana De Souza e Silva (2006: 262) calls ‘hybrid space’ characterised by an ‘always-on’ ethos and the enfolding of proximate and remote places. Cyberspace is everted: we carry digital connectivity around in our pockets and the digital becomes palimpsestically layered over or meshed with the physical world. Locative services strengthen this emplaced connectivity (DeNicola, 2012; Hjorth and Gu, 2012; Nitins and Collis, 2013; Özkul and Humphreys, 2015; Wilken and Goggin, 2013). Smartphone users ‘check in’ to places they visit and geotag the content they share, connecting with other users and creating a self-archive or ‘memobile’ (Reading, 2009: 81) of their spatial trajectories. Moving through space becomes a hybrid experience, as the patter of our footsteps on the ground merges with that of our fingers across a touchscreen displaying Google Maps, as we call cars or takeaway food to our current location, or as we alter our routes to meet the demands of augmented reality games. Even services devised to deceive location awareness technology fall short of realising the everywhere-nowhere (Barlow, 1996) dreamt up by the cyber-visionaries. Users of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) can in one sense digitally escape their current location, for instance to evade national censorship laws, but they are never nowhere, and as often as not it is the location rather than the non-location of the new server to which they connect that matters, as they seek, for example, to access geoblocked content such as streaming services normally only available to users in particular physical locations. Place and space may well have been transformed in the digital era, but they continue to matter.

In this special issue, we apply this perspective to the study of digital memory by explicitly foregrounding place, space, and geography in relation to the construction and contestation of connective memories on Web 2.0. Much of the existing literature focusses on the apparent shapelessness, diffuseness, and radical novelty of digital memory. Whilst this approach helps capture the disorientating experience of the digital age (see Relph, this issue), it may simultaneously risk obscuring the distinctive local contours of digital memory, its ongoing relationship to more enduring and situated place-making and place identity, and the geographic and social unevenness of the connective society. To borrow words from Susannah Radstone (2011: 111), we need to focus ‘on the locatedness of engagements with memories on the move, rather than with their “non-location”’.

A connective turn?

For some theorists, digitisation constitutes a paradigmatic shift in human history, ushering in a ‘postdigital’ era in which it becomes (or will become) nonsensical to distinguish between the digital and the non-digital (Berry and Dieter, 2015). Within the field of memory studies, this perspective is best represented in the work of Andrew Hoskins. According to Hoskins (2011a, 2011b), the ever-increasing accessibility, volume, and pervasiveness of digital technology has triggered a ‘connective turn’, a transformation in the nature of remembrance so fundamental that it invalidates much of the existing conceptual canon of memory studies. This digitised memory is immediate and accessible, contingent and revocable; yet also distributed and diffused, fluid and evasive, disposable and promiscuous, and always potentially overwhelming (Hoskins, 2009: 41, 2011a: 19, 2018).

Hoskins (2011a: 23, 2017b: 95) argues that this ‘on-the-fly’ memory, precisely because it is in a state of ‘perpetual becoming’, cannot adequately be analysed through the binary concepts of collective and individual memory that have long dominated memory studies. Instead, digital technology creates ‘the memory of the multitude’ characterised by ‘hyperconnectivity’, a term Hoskins developed alongside John Tulloch to refer to how digital technology ‘collapses past and present’ (Hoskins, 2017a: 2, 2017b: 92; Hoskins and Tulloch, 2016). In the hyperconnective era, the once settled and distant past becomes destabilised and restless, such that we are all haunted by a ‘shadow archive’ of media data that might emerge into the present at any moment with unpredictable effects (Hoskins, 2017a: 4–5, 2017b: 92, 2018; Hoskins and Tulloch, 2016: 7, 9, 297, 309). This leaves us with ‘a feeling of connectivity of self to everything: all of our pasts, altogether, available all-of-the-time’ (Hoskins, 2018). The result is that the present moment and the world around us slip out of focus and memories of broader social significance – the collective memories of the previous era – struggle to form (Hoskins, 2018). People increasingly engage in ‘sharing without sharing’ – using social media not so much because it offers a genuine participatory community but more out of obligation and habit – and ‘watching without seeing’ – a compulsion to record present moments that becomes more important than actually experiencing the moment in question, which itself remains ‘greyed’ and ‘unlived’ (Hoskins, 2017a: 1–2, 2017b: 103; 2018). Hoskins (2018) calls this ‘grey memory’, which he characterises as ‘an always already ambiguous state of memory without discernible origin, chronology, shape’. What we are left with, according to Hoskins (2017b: 102), is an ‘emptied present, emptied of meaning’.

Hoskins’ characterisation of digital memory as grey memory echoes in interesting ways Edward Relph’s earlier critique of ‘placelessness’ in the modern world. Relph (1976) felt that, under the influence of commercialism, mass communication, mass transportation, and tourism, distinctive place identities were being eroded and replaced by a formless, hollow and superficial placelessness. Although Hoskins does not use the term placelessness, and although the two are dealing with different moments of historical upheaval, Hoskins has in common with Relph a concern that technological change and related socio-economic developments may create a present stripped of meaning and shape, a creeping disconnect from one’s surroundings and a loss of meaningful relationship to the world around us. Hoskins’ (2017b: 101–105) discussion of the ‘sharing without sharing’ social media addict – for whom the recording replaces the experience, the medium supplants the memory, and the emptied present has ‘little of value worth lingering on’ – echoes Relph’s (1976: 83-87, 93–103) description of the tourist moving through a Disneyfied and museumised landscape who ‘travels with no real sense of either place, or past, or future’ and for whom the destination is less important than ‘the act and style of going’. Almost foreshadowing Hoskins’ argument, Relph (1976: 85) writes, ‘[i]t seems that for many people the purpose of travel is less to experience unique and different places than to collect those places (especially on film)’, which we might think of as ‘travelling without experiencing’, a pre-digital variant of Hoskins’ ‘watching without seeing’.

In contrast to Hoskins’ generally critical appraisal of the emergence of a shapeless and meaningless digital landscape, others have adopted a more optimistic perspective, reminiscent less of Relph’s work than of the brand of placelessness described by one of his predecessors, Melvin Webber (1964), who foresaw the replacement of places based on proximity and territory with more liberating ‘nonplaces’ in which interactions would take place – and communities would form – on much broader, perhaps even global, levels. These scholars share the conviction that there have been major changes in the way we remember, but see these in less bleak and more progressive, or even utopian, terms. Indeed, the participatory nature of Web 2.0 triggered something of a revival of earlier ‘cyber-optimism’, in particular the hope that interactivity, collaborative engagement, and user-generated content would see a decisive shift from ‘gatekeeping’ to ‘gatewatching’ and from ‘production’ to ‘produsage’ (Bruns, 2005, 2008). The online encyclopaedia Wikipedia has often been the centrepiece of these celebratory claims. Pentzold (2009: 266) argues that Wikipedia constitutes a ‘global memory place’ free from national boundaries and the inequalities of traditional knowledge production, a forum in which users from diverse locations can debate different interpretations of history and arrive at a ‘shared and valid version of the past events’. Comparable claims have been made about web memorials (Hess, 2007), online museums (Grincheva, 2014), Internet forums (Lee, 2014), and YouTube (Gibson and Jones, 2012), the latter heralded as ‘less conventional, messy and filled with flaws’ but nevertheless ‘polyphonic’ and ‘democratically promising’ (Knudsen and Stage, 2013: 429–430).

Hoskins’ view of a shrinking present with a vanishing capacity for active remembrance is also implicitly challenged by studies arguing that mobile and locative technologies create new opportunities for dynamic creation of place-memories (Hess, 2015; Hjorth, 2018: 64–65; Hjorth and Gu, 2012; Nunes, 2017; Özkul and Humphreys, 2015). Özkul and Humphreys (2015: 354–355), for instance, argue that mobile phones can be thought of as ‘containers of memories’ that enable users to make place memories on the go. Some caution is required, however. Özkul and Humphreys (2015: 357) suggest that ‘checking in’ through location services helped their research participants to create familiarity with new places and to endow them with personal and social meaning, but the two examples they cite to substantiate this argument would rather seem to support a more superficial or ephemeral sense of place appropriation or ‘checklisting’. One participant characterised checking in to a new place as ‘like putting a flag on the moon’, whilst another remarked that ‘[i]t is like a list. Places visited, tick’, so that when they return home they can say (for example) ‘“I know London”’ (Özkul and Humphreys, 2015: 357). These examples in many ways align more closely with Hoskins’ ‘sharing without sharing’ and Relph’s earlier critique of collecting rather than experiencing places than they do with the more optimistic and dynamic claims made by the authors of the study. Whilst it is thus important to be sensitive to the significance of place where it might be obscured by the apparent fluidity and immateriality of digital data, it is nevertheless critical to keep in mind that locative technology is not intrinsically place-making (see also Hoskins in conversation with Halstead, this issue).

The notion of a postdigital or connective turn that, for better or worse, has fundamentally transformed remembrance, has, however, not gone unchallenged. Van Dijck (2013: 6–7) and Pink et al. (2015), though both acknowledging how digital technology changes the playing field of social interaction, nevertheless recognise continuity between online and offline sociality, for example (to expand some of Van Dijck’s examples) between Facebook chat and face-to-face talk, between tweeting and gossiping, between showing photo albums and sharing digital images, or between popping round to check on someone’s well-being and ‘poking’ someone online. Larissa Hjorth likewise identifies notable commonalities between postcards and texting as acts of co-presence (Hjorth, 2005), and between traditional mourning practices and online memorialisation (Cumiskey and Hjorth, 2017: 37), and for her the ephemeral archiving of daily experience through social media closely resembles the fleeting character of face-to-face everyday interactions (Hjorth, 2012: 148). Erll and Rigney (2009: 7) similarly question whether the fluidity and transferability of media described by Hoskins is really new or simply the most dramatic incarnation of a much older phenomenon; in Erll’s (2011: 132) words, ‘there is no such thing as a pure, pre-media memory’. Perhaps the strongest advocates of this continuity thesis are Miller and Horst (2013: 3) who argue that ‘humanity is not one iota more mediated by the rise of the digital’.

Recognising these continuities raises important questions about both pessimistic and optimistic visions of digital memory. The presentation of Wikipedia as a deterritorialised ‘global memory place’ is challenged by studies demonstrating the persistence of pre-digital inequities and asymmetries, notably that the Global South and particularly Africa are severely underrepresented on Wikipedia both in terms of articles and contributors (Graham, 2014: 13–16); that women as subjects of and as contributors to Wikipedia articles are likewise hugely underrepresented (Ridge, 2013); that national censorship laws often restrict the accessing and editing of Wikipedia content (Gustafsson, 2019); and that there is very little overlap between different language editions of the encyclopaedia in terms of what are the hotly debated topics (Yasseri et al., 2014), undermining the notion of Wikipedia as a shared and global memory place. YouTube’s status as a democratising forum for the exchange of diverse ideas is likewise called into question by the prevalence of antagonism, incivility, one-upmanship and hypermasculinised nationalistic discourse, and by the relative absence of significant introspection, flexibility and sustained dialogue (Benzaquen, 2014; Drinot, 2011; Goode et al., 2011). A growing number of studies occupy a middle ground, acknowledging the potential for Web 2.0 platforms to open up discussion, democratise access to resources and support counter-hegemonic narratives and transcultural exchange, whilst also emphasising their capacity simultaneously to act as incubators of nationalism and bigotry and to be shaped fundamentally by powerful political and economic forces not dissimilar to those that dominated pre-digital media (Danilova, 2015; Garde-Hansen, 2011: 82–84, 107, 117; Halstead, 2018; Haskins, 2007; Makhortykh, 2020; Miller and Horst, 2013: 8–11; Van Dijck, 2013: 12, 159).

This special issue

Hoskins’ writings provide a compelling and nuanced account of the unsettling, bewildering, and temporally destabilising implications of digital technology, and accordingly act as an important corrective to more utopian visions of a participatory digital haven. Relph, in his contribution to this special issue, echoes many of Hoskins’ concerns, describing a ‘digital disorientation’ in which the overwhelming abundance of data flowing through our devices spawns a more ephemeral, insubstantial, and untrustworthy sense of place that erodes distinctive places and place-based sociality and, at its worst, fosters extremism and xenophobia. In a conversation with me that closes out the volume, Hoskins discusses the disjuncture between the sense of participation and control afforded by digital media and the reality that we have surrendered much of our mnemonic autonomy to the algorithm. Locative technology may seem to make digital memory more emplaced than ever before, but, Hoskins suggests, it does so in ways that are frequently beyond our comprehension, generating a ‘new grey’ in digital memory in which our smartphones know more about our locatedness than we do.

Yet, it is important to consider Hoskins’ shapeless, diffuse, and grey digital memory alongside Miller and Horst’s (2013: 11) injunction to recognise that when digital technologies are applied to any given context the ‘subsequent consequences are created in the context of each place, not given in the technology’. Christoph Bareither and Silvana Mandolessi’s contributions investigate cases in which place memories are made distinctive, or perhaps only made possible, by digital technology. Bareither demonstrates how the particular ‘emotional affordances’ of digital media enable smartphone users to enact a relationship to place at the Berlin Holocaust Memorial, for instance discussing how a staged self-portrait depicting thoughtful contemplation – which if observed purely in physical space may appear a superficial act – takes on affective significance when shared through social media as a means to express and communicate the visitor’s emotional engagement with Holocaust remembrance. Mandolessi likewise explores how the particular affordances of digital technology allow the research agency Forensic Architecture to perform place through digital media fragments, which is of particular significance when the places concerned are – for various reasons – invisible, intangible, ephemeral, or non-existent.

Similar place enhancement through digital technology is evidenced in the contributions by Larissa Hjorth and by Anna Reading and colleagues. Taking the examples of the 3/11 disaster in Japan and the current COVID-19 pandemic, Hjorth demonstrates that in times of crisis and disruption – when physical co-presence is rendered difficult, dangerous, or even, through death, impossible – the affordances of mobile media allow for sense of place and community – ‘intimate cartographies’ – to be reconstituted virtually. She notes, for instance, that when networks failed during 3/11 people nevertheless held tight to their disconnected devices as a symbolic connection to physically distant loved ones. Anna Reading, Jim Bjork, Jack Hanlon, and Neil Jakeman similarly explore how the use of Extended Reality (XR) in migration museums can create new ‘mnemonic multi-places’ combining and layering the place of origin of migration memories with the places in which these memories are produced by curators and engaged with by viewers. They argue that XR’s particular value is not to precisely replicate a singular (sense of) place, but rather to foreground (dis)connections and ruptures between multiple places, which may in turn foster more productive, democratic, and dynamic empathy with migrant storytellers. Both these contributions also exemplify the productive entanglement of memory studies scholarship with artistic and/or activist practices in forging innovative ways to make and unmake place through digital media.

Interrogating the contextual emplacement of digital memories, however, also requires us to revisit Graham’s (2014: 17) concern that digital technology, for all its radical and mutating novelty, ‘simply reinforces old global patterns of visibility, representation, and voice’. In his article, Daniel Willis investigates how apparently deterritorialised digital memories run up against existing place politics and social geographies, and how variability and contingency of access might replicate the exclusions found in offline contexts. Critiquing an initiative of the memory museum Lugar de la Memoria in Lima, Willis argues that efforts to democratise knowledge construction about Peru’s internal armed conflict by establishing a digital archive cannot completely circumvent the country’s ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ geographical divides that precipitated the conflict in the first place. Leonie Wieser likewise finds that efforts to diversify public memory by uploading Black and minority women’s personal memories of migration to North East England onto Historypin’s online map are subject to – and limited by – offline hierarchies and barriers. In my contribution on digital transcultural solidarity and apology amongst former Ottoman ethnic communities, I find that whilst Web 2.0’s temporal and compositional promiscuity allows its users to construct fantasies about place that may sometimes function progressively to facilitate reconciliation or a more inclusive shared sense of place, these fantasies nevertheless remain rooted in enduring disputes and anxieties over exclusive place identities and future territoriality. In this sense, we emphasise that digital technologies are always accessed by users operating in, or in relation to, physical settings, and that this shapes the inflections of the identities and memories that they (re)produce.

By shifting the focus from non-location to locatedness, this collection aims to put some of the shape back into the shapelessness of digital memory: revealing the local contours of Web 2.0 and how connectivity is moulded by placeness, social geographies, and territoriality as well as by technical infrastructure and expertise. We hope that our contribution will at least pose the question as to whether there might after all be some colour in the grey of digital memory.