Scales of Place and Networks

Abstract

Much has been made of the spacetransforming and spacedefying characteristics of information and communications technologies. This focus tends to separate the spatial characteristics of these technologies from those of the Euclidean world; it also takes the spatial characteristics of the Euclidean world for granted. Yet anthropologists have shown that place making in any spatial context is a complicated process, always involving an entanglement of imagination, politics, and social relations. This paper, by focusing on the promotion of the development of information and communications technologies through the public sector in Europe, shows that these technologies have become as much a part of political place making as other transportation and communication technologies in the past. Using our ethnographic research on several European Unionfunded projects based in Manchester, we argue that many of the perceived difficulties experienced in projects which envision these technologies as holding the potential for social change derive from a tension between imagined communities and imagined networks as two different forms of place making. The paper illustrates this tension by tracing the political, institutional, and social development of what we term an imperative to connect, which constitutes a moral and social imperative as much as an economic one.