Digital Globes: Layers of Meaning and Technology, Redefining Geographies and Communities

Abstract

This chapter aims to give an overview of some developments in digital maps and globes in the last decade, and some ways in which we, individually and collectively, experience and imagine ourselves, others and space through the use of digital maps and globes. We will focus on modes of imagination as ways of understanding collective experience, and overlaying as the technological and digital counterpart needed for constructing such experience. We also offer some examples of ways in which collective imagination is self-replicating and co-produced along with broad technological and social platforms, possibly also changing communities or generating new forms of community. Anything like a total overview is impossible, and so our selection is an eclectic one, in both diachronic and synchronic terms. The exposition is based in the work with one European research project, Technolife. During that project we have been reviewing academic as well as policy literature on GIS, and we have been carrying out a debate about the social and ethical aspects of GIS with a number of online participants (www.technolife.no). In an essayistic style we draw upon all these sources, including media and web content as well as arguments made by participants during the online debate. In order to introduce our argument, the first section will give a brief account of how, in time, geographical space has been codified into disciplines and political enterprises, thereby also feeding into different communities and world-views.