We’ve lost our sense of space. Here’s why.
It's safe to say that we are living on our mobile devices now.
Moving through different parts of Delhi on a rather busy day, I realised that I did not really remember the route my Uber took to drop me to a friend’s house. I was going into an area I was unfamiliar with. If you ask me what part of Delhi the house is located in, I couldn’t tell you. West? North-West? East? What places were close to it? I do not know. I could not remember navigating through different parts of the city because I was too engaged on my cellphone, and the map anyway took care of where I was going. All I kept track of was the shortest route and the decreasing time.
In my interviews with Uber users in Delhi, I remember a driver distinctly telling me that he did not remember where he dropped the last rider, as his attention was simply focussed on the screen (Google maps), the road, and controls of the car. We have given our movements up to platforms like Uber and Maps that help us go around. This, coupled with the fact that one can go across a metropolis like Delhi with almost zero human interaction using just their mobile phone is nothing short of unimaginable even a few years ago.
Life, Automated
Activities that required people to go to different places in daily life- shopping for groceries in the neighbourhood market, negotiating prices of a bag you like, getting a plumber to fix your leaky faucet or calling out to the flower seller early morning with a special request- all get done at the click of a button on your smartphone. Dining table conversations are fast becoming gadget hubs where everyone is on their devices, waiting to finish eating. Bedrooms and living rooms are now the same, not places for different activities, thanks to the immersive experiences Netflix or a PUBG provides.
This is not the same as a simple gaming console. The smartphone with each second spent on it- is pulling you to stay on. All apps, games, websites, social media, chats, entertainment come together to pry for your attention. Devices like TV were still not individuated. But mobile phones are personal devices, which make them far more intrusive. While we fought and built consensus on what movie to watch on the Home TV every Sunday, today a family streams three different movies across the parent, the child and the toddler.
This is fundamentally shifting the way we think about our lives, leisure, work, and relationships, ultimately changes our life experience. Thanks to the ubiquitous use of the smartphone, we have lost our sense of space.
All spaces are not the same
We generally think of time as a moving entity while space is seen as static. Massey wanted to break this myth of flat, inert space, and establish that space was dynamic and moving. Space, she told her fellow geographers was constituted of human experience. It is not a blank upon which we place people and objects. Space is deeply alive, lived and constantly changing.
Sociologist Henri Lefebvre in his book The Production of Space argues that space is socially produced.
Spaces have meaning that people create and give, and reshape and re-contour as they go. This is what gives each of them their different feel and flavour, making them distinct from each other. All spaces, therefore, are not the same.
According to Lefebvre, space is produced through the triad of the perceived, the conceived and the lived. We have an idea of a space, a mental image of what it looks like and ultimately, the behaviours and experience of the space as it is lived in. Spaces are, therefore, also lived in socially and psychologically.
Technology and Space
With this understanding, technological devices are not just objects which we use. Placed in social environments, they actively change social and political relationships. They affect human behaviour, experience and the idea of space as it is conceptualized in our minds.
As human beings, we shift our behaviour and thought based on where we are- our behaviour in a workplace is different from that in a school or with friends or at home. This is because each space contains its own set of norms, attitudes, values and meanings that are socially constructed. With the smartphone these attributes change as each person carries their own device, on their person at all times. When you walk into your home, do you really know where your partner is in their head?
Feel the Ground Beneath your Feet
Much like glasses that colour the reality we see, smartphones have come to be lenses through which we see the world. The reality we operate in becomes mediated by our smartphone apps and screens. Think about it. We no longer choose the routes to take on the road anymore.
We do not really know. Home, office, friends, one city, another- all of them just feel the same. When we can do anything anywhere, every space loses its own meaning. It’s a McDonalisation of all places. When this realisation dawns we will zoom out, and keep the phone away for a while to truly inhabit that space. Even at the cost of boredom.
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