Spaces physical and digital

Our understanding of environment has changed in recent decades. The very word environment has become almost exclusively associated with physical and ecological concerns (rainforests, oceans, and polluted skies) while we increasingly spend our lives in digital environments constructed purely of information.

When we enter a physical place (I was recently walking along the High Line park in New York ) we encounter both its physical spaces and its symbolic dimensions: its history and cultural meanings and, in the case of the High Line, the way it embodies something "essential" about what New York means to both New Yorkers and tourists. Physical environments affect our emotions through these connections as well as sensory elements like color, light, and texture.

Spring has not quite sprung on the High Line

Digital environments flatten this dimensionality. For example, information spaces eliminate resistance (they are designed to be easy to navigate) and negativity. Even when we come across a paywall, it is not there to *prevent* us entering, but to *tempt* us to enter - and be willing to pay for the privilege.

Physical places, with their inevitable uneven textures, demand a different kind of engagement from us. There are flower beds on the High Line we cannot (or should not) walk on, some bridges or constrictions which make us squeeze past each other, steps to get up and down and, of course, other people in our space: stopping suddenly in front of you to take pictures.

Physical spaces cannot be infinitely reconfigured to match our needs or desires like digital environments. Especially on the High Line, the constraints are the point.

Constraints and resistance

I think there's a fundamental tension here between the unlimited flexibility of digital environments and the physicality of human beings. Human beings aren't obvious or easily discoverable, even to themselves, and physical environments reflect this physicality and opacity in productive ways.

When we enter a physical place like a temple or a lecture hall, or a council chamber, we encounter a space that was designed with specific intentions, but they also contain countless historical accidents and resistances. These spaces don't simply mirror back to us what we want them to be: they often resist what we want them to be.

That resistance can be, but is not necessarily physical. There are fenced in (or out?) areas of the High Line, but there are also signs telling you not to step on the planted areas. The signs don't physically prevent you, but they create an ethical landscape of appropriate and inappropriate behaviors.

Digital spaces mostly lack this link between the physical environment and almost ritualistic dimensions of behaviour. When you enter that church or lecture hall or council chamber, the environment itself communicates behavioral expectations.

Do information environments ever provide this same grounding?

Sometimes they try. There are boundaries in social media applications - character limits for posts, for example, or the number of images that can be attached. These create some sort of resistance, which we either accept or work around.

But I wonder if something essential is lost in this translation.

Unresisting and unconstrained

In novels, for example, physical places create microcosms of the world with their own internal logics. The country house murder mystery, the desert island castaways, a ship or spaceship, even a frontier town. These logics aren't arbitrary; they emerge from the physical constraints and historical contexts of these places as we encounter something that resists our will and wishes.

Digital environments, in contrast, are increasingly designed to eliminate friction and resistance. They are personalized to our preferences, optimized for our convenience. As a result, we may lose the capacity to encounter genuine difference.

Jorge Arango, in his excellent book on this theme Living in Information, has suggested we can approach digital design as a form of placemaking rather than merely as product or service design. He gives the example of Wikipedia as both a publication and a place, a shared context with its own norms, rituals, and governance structures. It's a form of digital placemaking that goes beyond mere information storage.

Wikipedia has its own ethics and values: the communal effort to accurately represent the world, to continually refine descriptions based on evidence, represents a form of collective attention. The place itself embodies, or wants to embody, a kind of virtue.

But I do worry that Wikipedia, with its emphasis on decentralization, neutral points of view and verifiability, performs the same "flattening" of digital spaces that I described before. The irreducible complexity of knowledge is reduced to mere information.

And let's not forget that digital spaces are just as constructed as physical spaces. Who designs these them? For what purposes? Brick-and-mortar retail spaces, for example, engage all our senses: the tactile quality of materials, the ambient sounds, the scents, the spatial relationships between objects. These sensory experiences are harder to replicate in digital environments, which primarily engage vision and occasionally hearing.

If the High Line embodies something of New York, what does Wikipedia embody? The construction is less visible, but the politics and power relations, and by now the history, still exist.

I’m going to explore these ideas over the next few posts. I’ll look at a very special kind of physical space, near the High Line again, and the idea of digital “public spaces” or “town squares” and how they compare to the real historical experience of such places … here’s a clue: they don’t, really.