The Dictionary of Human Geography (38 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

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explicitly ?spatial materialism' that also builds on Deleuzian thought to argue that the concept of culture needs to be changed from that of ?the field in which power is sym bolized to a set of practices which apply power'. This is related to a shift from the interpretative apprehension of meanings to a consideration of the production of relations, and recasts cultural studies as ?a theory of contexts'. There is considerable potential here for geographical research, as there is in the closely related reorientation of cultural analysis away from narrowly construed issues of meaning towards embodied practices of feeling, shame and compassion (e.g. Berlant, 2004). The third area of growing interest lies in moves to rethink culture as a field of per Formance and action (e.g. Hastrup, 2004). Here, again, there is a move away from holistic accounts of how culture symbolizes and inte grates other social relations, towards an emphasis on the specific powers of cultural practices, and suggesting new models of rela tions and agency in the process (Strathern, 1995). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The odyssey of the concept of culture in human geography is likely to continue awhile yet, but do not expect anyone to arrive at a singular, ontologically robust definition. Duncan and Duncan (2004a) recommend the self consciously eclectic combination of theories of culture backed up by empirical analysis, and this seems more in the spirit of the traditions of cultural studies and anthro pology from which human geographers have drawn so much inspiration. Flexibility is one of the reasons why ?culture' can serve as a useful lingua franca between otherwise dis parate and disconnected fields. But the continuing influence of cultural analysis in the discipline depends on the acknowledge ment that there is more to culture than mean ing and representation; and more to culture than the reproduction of or resistance to power relations constituted by more funda mental processes. Above all, it requires a greater degree of concern with what cultural studies can teach us about how to do theory itself that theory is not about arriving at essentialist criteria or the vain search for onto logical clarity, but is about appreciating the essentially contested qualities of concepts, and analysing what is most at stake in these dis agreements. cb (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Frow (1997); Johnson, Chambers, Raghuram and Tincknell (2004); Mulhern (2000); Robbins (1993); Williams (1981); Yudice (2003). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
culture area
A geographical region over which homogeneity in measurable cultural traits may be identified. Contiguous zones identified within a culture area are core, over which the culture in question has exclusive or quasi exclusive influence, domain, over which the identifying traits are dominant but not exclusive, and realm, over which the traits are visible but subordinate to those of other cul ture groups. The classic study is Meinig?s (1965) identification of a Mormon culture area centred on the Great Basin of Utah. Today, the concept is little used in geography, as culture is identi fied more closely with process, connection and network than with the areal boundedness of mappable cultural markers. Dco (NEW PARAGRAPH)
cybernetics
Derived from the Greek ?kyber netes?, meaning ?steersman?, it sees systems as learning and self regulating. The term ?cyber netics? was first used by the information the ory pioneer Norbert Wiener in his 1948 book Cybernetics: or control and communication in the animal and the machine. The term has often impacted on geography through compound forms such as ?cybernetic organism?, abbrevi ated to cyBorg, and ?cybernetic space?, abbre viated to cyBerspace. However, two specific inflections of the term in geography are worth noting in themselves. (NEW PARAGRAPH) First, the term has literal and metaphoric resonance with work that has used moDeLs and algorithmic programming to simulate geo graphical phenomena. The weaker version of this is an epistemoLogicaL inclusion of FeeD back in models. algorithms as series of calcu lations or procedures can be sequences where each step depends upon the previous ones. Sophisticated agent BaseD moDeLLing thus has co dependent multiple calculations. The stronger version is an ontoLogicaL statement that sees the world as operating as, or analo gous to, a neuraL network. Thus the world can be seen as operating like information pass ing through a system. Cybernetics focuses upon the relationships of these parts to see how the whole system is controlled or gov erned. This has the virtue of moving away from a cartesian division of thought and the world, by insisting on seeing the world as a thinking, reFLexive entity. However, it also risks redu cing thought to a communication system and providing a mechanistic view of the world. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Second, cybernetic space has been used in distinction to the abridged cyberspace to emphasize the way in which electronic commu nication and information processing capacities interact with the real world (Mitra and Schwarz, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . Far from creating a separate virtual realm, information processing capacities are regularly embedded in everyday devices so that they are able to respond and either be pro grammed or learn about patterns of use offer ing the prospect of a world of ?ubiquitous computing? (sometimes abbreviated to ?ubi comp?). Increasingly, life in the urbanized west depends on these embedded processors, which regulate temperatures, elevators, traffic and an array of taken for granted processes. With the variety of wireless technologies, devices can communicate with each other without the user necessarily being aware that an automated elec tronic conversation is occurring. They use ?soft? adaptive computational processing that creates ?a technical substrate of unconscious meaning and activity? embedded in the environment (Thrift and French, 2002, pp. 312, 322). These devices would create ?smart? environments or ?ambient intelligence? that can keep track of users and will tailor interactions to suit the users. Thus they will communicate and remember past purchases, preferences, previ ous visits and past actions. This, the designers believe, will be used to provide customized menus or facilities. Cybernetics points out that this builds adaptive, reflexive capacity into the very environment, rather than vesting it solely in human agents. mc (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Andrejevic (2003, 2005); Cuff (2003); (NEW PARAGRAPH) McCullough (2004); Thrift (2004). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
cyberspace
A term that has followed a rapid arc from subcultural obscurity to media ubi quity, and is now often seen as academically misleading. It was famously coined in the novel Neuromancer by William Gibson, first published in 1984 (see Gibson, 1986). In his novel, he offered a futuristic vision: (NEW PARAGRAPH) Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding into the distance . . . (NEW PARAGRAPH) Gibson was writing (on a Remington typewriter, before the first widely available Graphical User Interfaces even appeared on desktop com puters) about the emergence of a networked and immersive environment. Gibson?s vision is replete with spatial metaphors and imaginaries for interactive fora created out of data and information. In other novels, he models online worlds on the walled city of Kowloon (Idoru) or a variety of urban dystopias. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The use of cyberspace in this phase was connected to dystopian cyberpunk science fiction that broke from conventions of seeing technology as promising an ever brighter and cleaner modernity (Burrows, 1997; Featherstone and Burrows, 1997; Kitchin and Kneale, 2002), to one that saw it as con nected to or enabling social and personal frag mentation, woven amidst Landscapes striated by effects of power and innovation, but also decay and dispossession. (NEW PARAGRAPH) This gave impetus to seeing flows and exchanges of data and information not merely through space but as creating online worlds where data were manipulated as virtual arte facts (see also virtuaL reaLity). The represen tations and maps of cyberspace created by programmers and writers did indeed precede the territory in Baudrillard?s sense (see also simuLacra) they were vital in its creation, in giving information specific forms and idioms for use. The mapping of cyberspace spawned new technologies to locate and understand data, and set up an intriguing dialogue with cartographic concepts now applied to imagined objects (see Crampton, 2003; Dodge and Kitchin, 2001a). (NEW PARAGRAPH) From this beginning, cyberspace entered wider academic and popular parlance, along with a string of other spatial metaphors for infor mation networks. Thus the 1990s saw the rise of discourses imagining what Kitchin (1998) called the ?world in the wires? through spatial metaphors such as ?chat rooms?, informational highways, ?electronic frontiers? and ?cybersa lons? (see virtuaL geographies). Indeed, new virtual worlds were designed where ?avatars? or online representations ofusers could interact in virtual realms (see, e.g., Anders, 1998). The possibilities for new realms of interaction attracted a great deal of attention in the mid 1990s. The possibilities of playing with iden tities such as gender ascriptions were pursued alongside questions of the formation of online communities without spatial proximity in the real world. Far from the cyberpunk chaos ofearly accounts, many online worlds developed in the new millennia became mainstream, and quite suburban and conventional (with popular online environments such as Second Life having more than seven and half million users in 2007, and a slogan ?Your world. Your imagination' suggest ing that most users had fairly conventional imaginations), while others retained a focus on gaming. Meanwhile, online sources of informa tion have become as usual and familiar as trad itional media with online versions of conventional media and alternative media rescaling audiences, while the ?blogosphere? pro vides alternative fora (see, e.g., Chang, 2005). Other new media are woven into our everyday lives as part and parcel of our normal, material lives (see, e.g., Morley, 2003; Yoon, 2003): (NEW PARAGRAPH) The 1990s were about the virtual. We were fascinated by the new virtual spaces made possible by computer technologies. Images of an escape into a virtual space that leaves physical space useless, and of cyberspace a virtual world that exists in parallel to our world dominated the decade. . . . By the end of the decade, the daily dose of cyber space (using the internet to make plane reservations, check email using a Hotmail account, or download MP3 files) became so much the norm that the original wonder of cyberspace so present in the early cyberpunk fiction of the 1980s and still evident in the original manifestos of VRML evangelists of the early 1990s was almost completely lost. The virtual became domesticated. (Manovich, 2006, p. 220) (NEW PARAGRAPH) By the millennium, even as these online worlds expanded their users, the notion of an immaterial or ethereal set of worlds as a model for informational landscapes seemed to miss many dynamics. Most especially, it missed the increasing mixture of the virtual into both everyday life and also everyday spaces. Far from entering a world online, the informational world began to permeate our lived environment. Increasingly, processing power was located in the environment around us, not just in discrete artefacts called com puters. As mobile telephones, ?smart' devices and electronic sensors led automated responses, the separation of an online and off line world seemed anachronistic. mc (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Adams (1997); Crampton (2003); Dodge and Kitchin (2001a); Kitchin (1998); Nunes (1997). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
cyborg
The shackling together of ?cyber netic' and ?organism' in the term ?cyborg' is designed to convey the combination of animal (usually humans) and technology. Initially drawn from science fiction, it has been taken on to critique technological futures based on a cartesian division of mind and body. It was popularized and developed by Donna Haraway (1991a) to criticize what she called a masculinist fantasy of second birthing in technological utopian writing. This techno logical fantasy suggested an ideal of a tran scendent union of human and machine, with people uploading their consciousness into machines. The aim would be eternal life in a disembodied state in the realm of cyberspace. In cyberpunk writing, this was often depicted as fusion of hardware and software escaping the limits of the ?meatware? (aka the human body). (NEW PARAGRAPH) This imaginary builds on deep seated div ides of mind and body. Cartesian philosophy had powerfully divided thought and world (res cogitans and res extensa, respectively). This compounded medieval Christian tradi tion, which had developed the model of the Manichean divide of the spirit and the flesh, the former being divine and the latter earthly, sins being located with the body and virtue with the mind. Feminist critics (see feminism) have long pointed out that these divisions become gendered to associate women with the body and the material, while men were associated with logic and thought. The tech nological fantasies of escaping the body simply restaged these debates. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The concept of the cyborg linked flesh and body to emphasize the materiality of lives and technological transformations, and to show that humans are always part of the world and entangled in technologies. The perspective links with posthumanism in challenging an autonomous and foundational humanity. It implies that human intelligence and con sciousness shape, but also are shaped by, tech nologies. While ?such fEEDBACk loops may be reaching new levels of intensity as our environments become smarter and more infor mation rich, . . . the basic dynamic is as old as humans' (Hayles, 2002, p. 303). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The term is also used to point to accelerat ing vectors of technological development in technoscience and biotechnology that are directly fusing technical implants with animals, often to restore lost capacities. In benign ways, this is seen as augmenting the capacities of bodies. Rather than trans cending the body, it is about prostheses that expand our reach or capacities. More critical accounts point out that work on ?human aug mentation' has been most enthusiastically (NEW PARAGRAPH) supported by the military industrial complex, in efforts to create advanced soldiers (Gray, 1995, 2003). The figure of the cyborg is thus often used to highlight the powerful myths of technology and humanity, and the investments in them by medical and military discourse. mc (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Gray (1995, 2003); Haraway (1997). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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