I am working on a new book, now under contract with Routledge, entitled Spatial Narrative and the Technologies of Placemaking. The aim of this is to build on A History of Place in the Digital Age (2019, also Routledge), with a more applied, and less methodological, analysis of how “technology” shapes our sense of place.
Humans have always relied on technology to navigate their way through the world, and to locate themselves within it. However the symbiotic association between “technology” and communication (and information) has provided opportunities for appropriation by agencies and corporations which own, develop and control technology in its commonly understood sense. And this technology – founding on the internet and the World Wide Web – is fundamentally about connecting machines, data and people, not about mapping or cartography.
My argument in the book is that attempts to understand technology-mediated relationships between humans and place through time – a fundamental activity of spatial history and of spatial humanities – rarely move beyond such a relatively modern understanding of the term “technology” itself. In the spatial history/humanities context, this definition foregrounds the form and function of the machines, instruments and processes with which we map, locate and wayfind. Highly mechanistic framings of technology lead to similarly mechanistic questions: how does GPS work? How do you take a bearing? What type of map projection is most appropriate for a particular task? Such questions are the consequence of the modern view of technology encapsulated by the definition in the Encylopaedia Britannica: “the application of scientific knowledge to the practical aims of human life or, as it is sometimes phrased, to the change and manipulation of the human environment” – a conception that is entirely at home in Silicon Valley. This functional, scientific framing with an emphasis on practical applications and useful tasks, is encapsulated by the German Technik, rooted in the nineteenth and twentieth century views of progress in industry and science.
The Ancient Greek term τεχνολογία is broader however, referring to the systematic treatment or study of a subject. The new book will start from this broader definition of technology to consider geotechnology as an enabler of spatial narrative, in both a systemic and a mechanical sense. This, I hope, will bring a new and empowering perspective on “bottom up” ways of creating space. I believe there is a need to articulate historically and archaeologically informed ways of challenging the intellectual hegemony of official and commercial mapping narratives.
Stuart Dunn 