Digital Geographies and Everyday Life: Space, Materiality, Agency

Within the ‘digital turn’ in geography, this chapter explores scholarship on the ways processes of technological change are differentially produced, experienced, and contested in the spaces of everyday life. Questioning the evolving role of digital systems in everyday life requires rethinking ontological and epistemological assumptions around the production of space and place, the im/materialities of digital life, relationship between technological and (post)human agencies, and multiple forms of inequality and difference in relation to or produced by digital systems. Geographers combine and experiment with a range of methodological approaches to “open the black box” of the internal logics of particular digital systems, or to follow those systems as they come to have effects in the world. Genealogical research can highlight the development of digital technologies in their social, political, and economic context, while ethnographic and participatory research aims to understand how individuals and communities experience or may contest processes of digital change in the spaces in which they live. This chapter explores how combinations of multiple methods can allow geographers to better understand the complex, entangled, and emergent nature of digitally-mediated life, offering as an example Lynch’s (2020a) experience conducting ethnographic research with community-based technology collectives in Barcelona.