Abstract
This paper explores the ways in which technologies reshape everyday activities, adopting a mobility perspective of the digital environment, which is reframed in terms of the constitutive/substitutive element of corporeal mobility. We propose the construction of a Digital Mobility Index, quantified by measuring the usage typology in which the technology is employed to enable mobility. Through a digital perspective on mobilities, it is possible to investigate how embodied practices and experiences of different modes of physical or virtual displacements are facilitated and emerge through technologies. The role of technologies in facilitating the anchoring of mobilities, transporting the tangible and intangible flow of goods, and in mediating social relations through space and time is emphasized through analysis of how digital usage can reproduce models typical of the neoliberal city, the effects of which in terms of spatial (in)justice have been widely discussed in the literature. The polarization inherent to the digital divide has been characterized by a separation between what has been called the “space of flows” (well connected, mobile, and offering more opportunities) and the “space of places” (poorly connected, fixed, and isolated). This digital divide indeed takes many forms, including divisions between classes, urban locations, and national spaces. By mapping “hyper- and hypo-mobilized” territories in Barcelona, this paper examines two main dimensions of digital inequality, on the one hand identifying the usage of the technological and digital in terms of the capacity to reach services and places, and on the other, measuring the territorial demographic and economic propensity to access to ICT as a predictive insight into the geographies of the social gap which emerge at municipal level. This approach complements conventional data sources such as municipal statistics and the digital divide enquiry conducted in Barcelona into the underlying digital capacities of the city and the digital skills of the population.
Highlights
The term digital mobility is used to label the bundling of transportation services to users through information technology platforms
This creates a vicious circle in which this section of the population gains evermore opportunities to move precisely because they have done so previously, having seeded the global field with harvestable connections which fit their individual needs over time. This is the figure of the networker proposed by Boltanski and Chiapello as “mobile, streamlined, possessed of the art of establishing and maintaining numerous diverse, enriching connections, and of the ability to extend networks” [20]. In this sense the hypothesis of a deepening long-term digital divide in which the normalization curve theorized by Norris [75] tends toward a stratification model prevails, providing a scenario in which groups that are already well networked via traditional forms will maintain their edge in the digital economy
A further extension to the previous approaches to the digital divide is comprised of the process of digital inequalities, with mobility as the starting point
Summary
The term digital mobility is used to label the bundling of transportation services to users through information technology platforms. It is key to refer to the issue of the “digital divide”, even if this is a controversial and much discussed term [1,2], which describes a gap in terms of access to and usage of information and communication technology. This gap refers to the inequality between people who have access to and knowledge of new technologies and those who do not. The OECD [3] (p. 5) defines the “digital divide” as “the gap between individuals, households, businesses and geographical areas at different socio-economic levels with regard to both their opportunities to access
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