This machine-generated volume showcases how digital technologies are having deep transformative impacts on geographies and temporalities of social, political, economic, and personal lives. They are altering perceptions and physicality of space and time. They are giving birth to digital communities and societies, where distance remains of little significance. Virtual spaces and ICT have disrupted state sovereignties, often liquidating their physical national boundaries. The rise of digital economy shows that new important raw material for the future is information rather than usual coal, oil and minerals. Digitalization is also leading to several contradictory processes of democratization, rising welfare of the citizens, as well as exclusion, surveillance, peripheralization and exclusion.
As a departure to, and in addition to the usual understanding of digitalization, society, and space, the present volume engages with some of the critical questions while reviewing existing literature: What are the space relations of digital technologies? What are the forms and consequences of changing physical space–human relations to digital-space-human relations? How is the sense of time and space changing with pervasive performatives of ‘in real-time’ and ‘virtual realities’ or with perceptible or portable spaces? How do the cities, democracies, economies, mobilities, and knowledge and power relate to digitalization and digital divides? How are digital neighborhoods and digital communities shaping the new territorial expression and how do they relate to marginalities and exclusions based on, among others, gender, race, ethnicity, and class? What are the possibilities of re-configuring the man-environmental relations with digital technologies in view of rising pollution and impending climate change?
The present volume will be useful for teachers, researchers, and student engaged in this new area of digital geography especially in social science and its subfields of sociology, economics, political sciences, anthropology, psychology, development studies, policy studies, social work, urban studies, and planning.
