On the neo in neogeography

Notes

neogeography is an inherently and narrowly instrumentalist project.

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distill the discipline to pure technics (and method), and in so doing, to reduce knowledge to information

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GIS as an apparatus of logical positivism that threatened to harken us back to the darkest recesses of spatial science

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Together, the rhetorical positioning of neogeography as fun and cool by virtue of being new, and the use of newness to dismiss disciplinary geography and GIS as paleo anachronisms, work to very effectively depoliti- cize spatial media. The first—discursively framing neo- geography as primarily fun—vacates its technological devices, information artifacts, and data practices of po- litical content. The second—the branding of a new ge- ography in opposition to an old geography—preempts political critique of new technologies or any attempts to mire neogeography in political considerations (of power, subjectivity, knowledge production, etc.).

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By “deny[ing] history,” the discursive framing of these technologies as new “remove[s] from discussion active human agency, the constraints of social structure, and the real world of politics”

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Apple stated that these serious concerns over privacy were the result of a lack of understanding, on the part of users, of the technical complexity of new technologies. Apple (2011) stated: Providing mobile users with fast and accurate location information while preserving their security and privacy has raised some very complex technical issues. . . . Users are confused, partly because the creators of this new technology (including Apple) have not provided enough education about these issues to date.

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As a discursive tactic, technological defeatism is used by corporate and other actors to not only justify but indeed also obfuscate their own actions. Google’s reasoning, which can be summarized as “It [invasion of privacy] is not our fault, it is a consequence of new technologies,” deflects from the fact that Google is itself part of this very technological advance

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less as an evolution of the Web than a series of business correctives to the dot-com crash

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Discursive-material leveragings of newness are embedded directly in the profit-oriented business model that underlies LBS

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asserted or purported newness of these technologies functions as a depoliticizing device, as a rationalization of the societal consequences of spatial media, and as a basis for proliferation and profit, all the while serving particular interests, be they those of technoscience or capital.

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We not only have no say or control over the introduction of technologies, which are framed as the inevitable results of linear scientific progress, but we simultaneously have no sway over their social consequences—we might as well give up on any semblance or expectation of locational privacy, for example.

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