Splintered Space: Hybrid Spaces and Differential Mobility

Abstract

Early theories of the internet imagined that individuals would begin living most of their lives online, decreasing the importance of physical mobility and urban spaces. With the development of internet-enabled mobile phones, these early predictions have been proven false. The internet has not decreased the importance of physical mobility; instead, the digital information of the internet has begun to merge with physical space, leading to new types of hybrid spaces. These hybrid spaces are becoming increasingly common, and they may change the way physical space is negotiated and understood. At this early juncture, however, it is crucial to critically examine the development of hybrid spaces and how they may lead to issues of exclusion and exacerbate issues of access. This essay takes a critical approach to the development of hybrid spaces, arguing that what is often lost in discourses about these new understandings of space are questions of who gets to experience this convergence of the digital and the physical.

Developments and key issues in tourism mobilities

“…However, it needs to be emphasized that the convergence of tourism and technology and the hybridization of virtual and physical spaces have further exacerbated the exclusion of large numbers of people. Beyond the exclusion due to lack of access, noted as the ‗digital divide', with the hybridization of space these individuals are also excluded from fundamental ways of understanding and experiencing the places they inhabit (Frith, 2012). This results in further inequalities that are important to understand within the context of tourism, particularly for host-guest interactions and the operation of the tourism industry within the ‗developing world'.…”

“…Some researchers have suggested that these advancements allow for tourists to be more creative (Richards, 2011) and spontaneous (Wang, Park, and Fesenmaier, 2012). Positioning Systems (GPS) and a wide range of mobile ‗apps' to locate and provide location specific information for people (Frith, 2012). These technologies allow for differentiated forms of personal mobility, personal experience of mobility, and personal control over mobile experiences, as Frith (2012:145) suggests, -by bringing the ‗searchability' of the internet into the information contained within physical places, hybrid spaces afford new ways of organizing and filtering experience, transforming the physical city into a database city of sorts, ready to be reordered and personalized.‖ All of these geo-based technological advances have been suggested to help tourists to have more meaningful (Tussyadiah and Zach, 2012) and, even more playful experiences.…”

Make a sound garden grow

“…An important, related criticism of individual mobile auditory media is that people use them to ignore the physical spaces they move through (de Souza e Silva and Frith, 2012). Writing about the Walkman, Bull argues that 'Public spaces are voided of meaning and are represented as ''dead spaces'' to be traversed as easily and as pleasurably as possible ' (2000: 79).…”

“…They retreat into their individualized 'mobile media sound bubbles' and the 'spaces habitually passed through in daily life increasingly lose significance and turn progressively into the ''nonspaces'' of daily life' (Bull, 2004: 189). While some have criticized these arguments as too extreme (de Souza e Silva and Frith, 2012), it is important to recognize that mobile auditory media have often been viewed as both intensely individual technologies and technologies that negate the importance of physical space.…”

“…The auditory narrative becomes a part of that place's soundscape, but the place also becomes a part of the narrative. For the participants, the two become inextricably linked in ways fundamentally different from how people use the Walkman and iPod to introduce an auditory layer separate from, rather than connected to, the physical context (de Souza e Silva and Frith, 2012).…”