IB Digital Society 2.5A Spaces and Digital Society Notes

2.5A Spaces and Digital Society

Space as a Concept

1. Space = how humans organise, construct, and represent the environments where life happens, and how digital systems reshape them. It means more than a map: where interactions occur and who can reach them.
2. Castells (1996), space of flows: in a networked society what matters is less the fixed place you sit in than the flows of information, money, and people moving through digital networks.
3. Digital systems reshape space in three ways: organise activity (where work, shopping, friendship happen), construct places (a game world or group chat is built, not found), and represent space (a map app decides how a city looks). Runs across scales, from a room to the planet to virtual worlds.
4. Anchoring question: do physical and political borders still matter? Evidence supports both a yes and a no.

Physical, Virtual, and Hybrid Spaces

1. Three kinds: physical (geographic, embodied), virtual (apps, feeds, games, worlds), and hybrid (the blend).
2. Different rules: physical space is bound by the body (one place at a time, presence carries rights like standing in a public square); virtual space is territory with borders, rules, and gatekeepers set by the owner. A person may have influence in one space and none in another.
3. Hybrid space is where most people now live: walking a street while following a phone map, ordering online to collect in store, joining a class that meets in person and on video. The online/offline line has largely dissolved.
4. Naming which kind of space is in play sharpens analysis: a rule for physical space (a queue) may not translate to virtual, and a hybrid space can inherit the strengths and problems of both.

The Death of Distance and the Space of Flows

1. Distance once set hard limits on what people could do together. Cairncross (1997), death of distance: once communication is near-instant and nearly free, being far apart matters far less.
2. In the space of flows a team works across three continents, a creator reaches the far side of the world, and money moves between countries in seconds. People far apart can now work together as if they were in one office.
3. Distance never fully died: time zones, language, and culture still divide, and some things (surgery, a hug) demand physical presence.
4. The death of distance is real but uneven: it benefits most those with fast, affordable connections and the skills to use them, so the space of flows can widen the gap between connected and unconnected people.

Digital Systems Reshape Physical Space

1. Digital systems also reach back into physical places and change how they work, so the physical world itself becomes a hybrid space.
2. Smart homes respond to voice and sensors; smart cities use networked cameras and data for traffic, lighting, and policing; navigation apps reshape which streets get busy; delivery platforms reorganise warehouses and roads. The built environment is increasingly run by software.
3. Trade-offs are the systems concept at work: a smart city that eases traffic builds a record of who went where; a navigation app that shortens your drive floods a quiet neighbourhood with diverted cars. The same system delivers the benefit and the side effect, so identify who gains and who bears the cost.
4. Power meets space: whoever controls the sensors, maps, and platforms that run a place gains influence over how people move and behave there, often without them noticing or agreeing. A public square rebuilt around surveillance is still open to all but now monitors everyone in it.

Do Borders Still Matter?

1. Early enthusiasts hoped the internet would erase borders into one open global space. The reality is more complicated, and borders have partly returned inside the network.
2. Splinternet: governments and companies split the single internet into bordered zones, so what you can see and do online depends heavily on where you are.
3. Examples: China's Great Firewall blocks many foreign platforms and filters content; EU data-protection rules can require data to stay within a region; streaming libraries change country by country.
4. Borders return for reasons beyond censorship: data sovereignty (data about citizens should sit under their own laws), market-carving for local licensing, and language and culture. The result is many overlapping spaces whose edges you notice only when something is blocked.
5. Borders both fall and rise: both. Digital systems dissolve some borders as flows cross the planet, and they raise new ones like national firewalls and the digital divide. Say which fall and which rise in a specific case.