Navigating sociotechnical spaces: Comparing computer games and sat navs as digital spatial media

Abstract

Digital media increasingly mediate everyday spatial and navigational practices. From in-car satellite navigation (sat navs) to computer games, overpowered gadgets are combining multiple sources of abstract information to give users spatial guidance and experiences of movement. For example, open world computer games such as Grand Theft Auto IV render rich fictional spaces, and include intricate maps and indicators that allow players to navigate large gamespaces. Sat navs such as the TomTom Navigator follow similar practices of automated navigation in helping to guide cars through actual spaces. Their calculated routes display on personalized maps, including live data and visualizations that complement, or even override, what the driver sees through the windscreen. Games and sat navs are harbingers of historical shifts in technosocial space, suggesting that Henri Lefebvre’s (1991) influential critical analysis of space deserves to be revised. Digital spatial media open up abstract relationships to space, but not from the distance that Lefebvre associates with ‘conceived’ spaces. Instead, they work in ‘lived space’, which is becoming dominant. They calculate space in real time, and open up new political and aesthetic questions. The article examines three characteristics of navigation with digital spatial media: (1) they reify routes as persuasive data and procedures; (2) their maps become subjective and privatized; and (3) they offer an array of spatial information that become incorporated into the user’s ‘perceived’ space. These examples show that critical understandings of social space need increasingly to incorporate readings of digitally mediated spatiality.