Digital ruins

Abstract

In recent years, Geography has seen a rebirth of interest and appreciation of ruins, abandoned and neglected spaces of industrial modernity. This work has often emphasised the sensuousness of the material contextualisation of industrial ruins largely in terms of the phenomenological experience of decay, disorder and blight, or the affective elements of these spaces through concepts such as ‘ghostliness’ and ‘haunting’. This article is an investigation into ruins or abandoned spaces which do not have materiality or temporality: digital ruins. Existing in a kind of eternal present, such spaces do not decay, yet still demonstrate many of the affective, phenomenological and existential experiences of what we understand to be ruin, abandonment or blight. Using autoethnographic research of a variety of abandoned and nearly abandoned virtual worlds, this article will reconsider the notions of ‘ruin’ within the increasingly important context of digital spaces, the utopian rhetoric which framed the development of these worlds, and situate the digital ruin within a wider critique of digital prosumerism.

Virtual Reality Methods

“…This would provide material for subsequent content analysis of how different VR genres evolve over time and the kinds of discourse embedded within them. Such an approach has commonalities with Miller and Garcia's (2019) work on 'digital ruins'. They examined online 3D worlds that, having fallen out of fashion, no longer had a significant user base to animate their virtual spaces.…”

Cloud ruins: Ericsson's Vaudreuil-Dorion data centre and infrastructural abandonment

“…Another trope spins back on the understanding of digital objects as immaterial and identifies the formation of virtual digital ruins in the form of abandoned, yet fully-functioning spaces of mediated sociality, such as online virtual worlds and game environments. Connecting such virtual spaces to discussions of post-industrial ruination, Miller and Garcia (2019) suggest that digital ruins are to be understood as an absent presence, not easily found in everyday life. Marginalised from the flows of algorithmicised traffic on the web, they exist in a temporal stasis, 'an eternal presence' (Miller & Garcia, 2019, p. 440), saturated by the material abundance while remaining unwanted, depreciated, and abandoned.…”