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Although there are many arguments suggesting that ICTs have changed the perception of space and time²³ and traditional communication practices, these changes are not necessarily always negative. Accordingly, it is necessary to look at different theories (in relation to the sociological, philosophical and anthropological theories discussed in the previous sections) of space and place, and how they can be related to electronic and mobile communication technologies, with the intention being to come up with a different conceptualisation of space – cyberspace.

The introduction of the Internet into our everyday lives saw the arrival of the term “cyberspace” into common usage in Gibson’s (1984) cyberpunk novel Neuromancer. Gibsonian cyberspace is often defined using a quote from the novel:

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 the bank of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Line of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights receding (Gibson, 1984 cited in Featherstone and Burrows, 1995, p.6).

Some theorists have conceptualised the term cyberspace as ‘a means of realizing the disembodied (Cartesian) self’ (Young and Whitty, 2010, p. 217), and as such has been further defined ‘simply as the space produced by human

communication when it is mediated by technology in such a way that the body is absent’ (Stratton, 1997, cited in Young and Whitty, 2010, p. 217). Since cyberspace has been argued to be a meeting platform for bodiless minds (Young and Whitty, 2010, pp.217–220), it has found a place among many critiques of postmodern life, especially in the field of urban sociology; and has been further discussed as a new type of space that has become more important than physical space and has been framed as a space ‘on top of, within and between the fabric of traditional

geographical space’ (Batty, 1993 cited in Graham, 2004, p.6). On the other hand, it                                                                                                                

23 ICTs are usually regarded as tools for minimizing time, and in achieving this, also annihilating

has been celebrated in some ways as a means of transforming available information in computers and networks into a space that can be inhabited by its users (Bolter and Grusin, 2000, cited in Graham, 2004, p.6).

The notion that ICTs convert physical space into digital space, and vice versa, has been analysed by many scholars (Manovich, 1995; de Souza e Silva and Sutko, 2011; Gordon, 2010) and in terms of human-computer interaction (Harrison and Dourish, 1996). In the field of mobility and mobile communication

technologies, the works of de Souza e Silva have been used widely to define, understand and analyse this phenomenon, and throughout this thesis, her conceptualisation of mobile space in physical space, i.e. the “hybrid space”, is employed and incorporated to the main discussions on mobile and locative media.

The conceptualisation of mobile space as a “hybrid space” is described by de Souza e Silva (2006, p.261) as follows:

Hybrid spaces arise when virtual communities (chats, multiuser domains, and massively multi- player online role-playing games), previously enacted in what was conceptualized as cyberspace, migrate to physical spaces because of the use of mobile technologies as interfaces. Mobile interfaces such as cell phones allow users to be constantly connected to the Internet while walking through urban spaces.

Hybrid space, as a notion, is frequently discussed in relation to mobile communication technologies and sense of place, being the general definition of how the boundaries between the physical and digital space have become blurred and merged with the help of mobile technologies (de Souza e Silva, 2006). Accordingly, the theoretical ground on which existing studies of mobile and physical space are based may be best described by employing the notion of hybrid space as a framework.

Taking the notion of hybrid space one step further, de Souza e Silva and Sutko (2011, p.26) describe contemporary urban spaces as hybrid spaces:

Nowadays, the digital space on the mobile screen often augments the

physical city in which the user is located. Likewise, the physical space itself is a source for digital information (as with GIS and more popularly through

GPS, restaurant recommendations, and friend-location tools). So, physical and digital spaces can no longer be analysed as independent from each other.

A similar argument on the changing nature of the urban spaces when experienced through mobile technologies is made by Gordon (2010), who explains these changes (p.1) by depicting random scenes from the everyday life in Manhattan as an example:

On the corner of the Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, there are dozens of people looking at little screens, typing on little

keyboards, with plugs extending from their ears. Each of these people is having a different experience, customised through their personal media. The college student with his iPod selects his music to correspond with the weather and time of day; the businessman types an address into his GPS-enabled phone to find his next meeting; and the tourist stares through her mobile phone camera to capture the Empire State Building in the distance.

Mediated by little devices, these people are shaping their experiences to the city.

Every single individual experiences and perceives the urban space

differently, which in turn, helps them to assign meanings to places and build their own sense of place. As discussed earlier (de Certeau’s perspective of the

transformation of a physically constructed place into a space by pedestrians), it is the users of these mobile technologies who transform the physical space into one that is digital and mobile, and vice versa, thus creating a hybrid space, containing both physical and virtual entities. It is both offline and online, and dependent on such symbolic associations as avatars or different characters in MUD gaming (de Souza e Silva, 2006). Hybrid space is also a metaphorical space in which the humans dwell and inhabit themselves in their social interactions, and as such is defined in this thesis as a centre point between the mind and body, as Heidegger’s approach to place. By placing the hybrid space between the body and mind, we automatically perceive it as something both real and virtual, which constructs the foundations of our perception of space and sense of place.

On the other hand, it is also important to note that the hybrid space differs from other conceptualizations of digital space, such as the “augmented space”, as discussed by Manovich (2006), whose conceptualisation of space (1995) assigns a different meaning to digital media, in that he argues that with the new information and communication technologies, space has for the first time become the media (p.

251). Manovich (pp. 251–252) also argues that:

Just as other media types – audio, video, stills, and text – it can now be instantly transmitted, stored, and retrieved; compressed, reformed, streamed, filtered, computed, programmed, and interacted with. In other words, all operations that are possible with media as a result of its

conversion to computer data can also apply to representations of 3-D space.

Manovich thus conceptualises digital media in general as a “navigable space”

(p. 252) in which the inhabitants of the virtual world can move freely. Although in this navigable cyberspace users are free to move from one site to another, they are not necessarily physically mobile. In a similar vein, Featherstone and Burrows (1995, pp.10–11) also associate cyberspace as a simulation of an urban environment, in which the digital domain intersects with the “technology of the street”. Although not referring to any mobile technologies in their discussions, they talk about an intersection that can also be understood as a form of hybridity.

While the ‘hybrid spaces are mobile spaces, created by the constant movement of users who carry portable devices continuously connected to the Internet and therefore to other users’ (de Souza e Silva, 2006, p.262), the augmented space is the physical space (Manovich, 2006), and is discussed as the combination of the physical and the data-space. It is ‘the physical space which is “data dense”, as every point now potentially contains various information which is being delivered to it from elsewhere’ (Manovich, 2006, p.223). In this regard, Manovich’s augmented space, it can be said, presupposes a division between the physical and digital spaces (de Lange, 2009, p.59); although when talking about hybrid spaces, this distinction between the physical and the digital begins to diminish due to the mobile nature of this defined space. Either the physical spaces move into mobile spaces, or the mobile spaces occur in the physical contexts in the form of hybrid spaces.

On the other hand, as argued by Kabisch (2008), the physical world, it can be argued, is already embedded in hybrid spaces . Kabisch (p.223) argues that

‘pervasive computing technologies not only produce new forms of hybrid space but also can be used to illuminate and shape the existing hybrid qualities of our world – including its substrate of geo-located digital information’. Similarly, in Crabtree and Rodden’s (2008) work, another conceptualisation of hybrid spaces is presented that they give the name “hybrid ecology”. As Crabtree and Rodden (2008, p.481) argue,

‘the emergence and growing shift towards ubiquitous computing has seen digital technologies become increasingly embedded in the physical world that we inhabit’.

They go on to argue that those resulting environments are geographically distributed and that they merge interaction across physical and digital environments, which form the hybrid ecologies (Crabtree and Rodden, 2008, p.481). Their conception of hybrid ecologies is also quite close to the understanding of augmented space.

Although it is important to understand all of these different conceptualisations and depictions of the relationships between the physical, virtual and mobile

environments, they all point to the same phenomenon, which is the incorporation of (mobile) communication technologies into our everyday lives.