Conceptual  Framework  1:  From  cyberspace  to  hybrid  space  and  splintered  space  .  44

The scholar Adriana de Souza e Silva (2006) proposes the concept of hybrid space because, as she argues, cyberspace is no longer an appropriate term to talk about the changes of socialization brought by the use of smartphones in the urban space. As de Souza e Silva (2006) explains, “the concept of cyberspace applied to the Internet was responsible first for our view of physical and digital as disconnected spaces, second for our emphasis on the nodes of the networks instead is its spatial structure, and finally for the utopian view of the future in which social spaces would emerge mostly online” (p. 273). Mobile phones disrupt this view as they bring Internet connection to physical spaces. De Souza e Silva (2006) explains the need for a different perspective: “the concept of hybrid spaces arises to supply a gap opened when the Internet became mobile and when communities previously formed in cyberspace could be found in urban (hybrid) spaces” (p. 273). This scholar defines the hybrid space as “conceptual space created by the merging of borders between physical and digital spaces, because of the use of mobile technologies as social devices” (p. 265).

An interesting aspect of the hybrid space concept is that rather than thinking about immersion (e.g. feeling of entering the Internet or being in cyberspace) or identity creation in virtual worlds, users may be more concerned about how their smartphones help them in physical space and places through location awareness (e.g.

learn historical information, add to local memory or find services, such as looking at the nearest gas station or postal office). Thus, “hybrid space occurs when one no longer needs to go out of physical space to get in touch with digital environments” (de Souza e Silva, 2006, p. 264). Unlike many scholars (Gergen, 2002; Plant, 2001; Puro, 2002) who argue that mobile phones detach people from physical and public spaces, de Souza e Silva (2006) argues that, “in the hybrid-space logic, cell phones do not take users out of physical space” (p. 270). Following Castells’ “space of flows”, de Souza e Silva (2006) considers “space” as a concept produced and embedded by social practices in which the support infrastructure is composed of a network of

mobile technologies. She also draws on Lefebvre (1991) who defines social space as a social product rather than as preexisting physical space.

In his 2015 book, the locative and mobile media scholar Jordan Frith, who also draws on the concept of hybrid space (de Souza e Silva, 2006), explains that this concept is useful for understanding the social impacts of smartphones as locative media. Frith (2015) explains that hybrid spaces help conceptualize what happens as the Internet leaves the desktop and moves out into the physical world. In his words:

Hybrid spaces are not just places affected by the location-based information of the mobile Internet; hybrid spaces are also spaces that show how physical place shapes the meaning of mobile Internet. In a hybrid space, the physical location determines the information one receives, just as the location-based information influences how people move through and make decisions about their physical space. The smartphone screen then becomes a way for people to mediate their experience of space and movement by accessing spatial information (ibid, p. 23)

Frith (2015) also reminds us that hybrid space is not the only concept that addresses digital location-based information as intertwined with physical space. Lev Manovich’s (2006) concept of augmented reality and Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge’s (2011) concept of code/space also “provide similar analyses of the ways in which digital information is increasingly shaping how people experience physical world” (p. 147). In his 2015 book, when examining the future of locative media, Frith presents the correlation between the increasing adoption of locative media and digital inequality as a concern for future research in locative media. Rather than use demographic numbers (which populations own smartphones and which do not), Frith (2015) discusses how hybrid spaces may raise new issues of access and digital literacy.

By drawing on de Souza e Silva (2006), Frith says the hybrid spaces are not determined by technology and technological production, but are the outcome of social interactions and social production, although the author recognizes that without access

to the right technologies, there is no access to hybrid space. The key point of Frith’s argument is that without access to the hybrid space, “space remains unchanged for the millions of people for whom the additional digital information embedded in the physical space may as well not exist” (Frith, 2012, p.133).

The author highlights that different types of unequal access are not simply a matter of access to smartphones or not. Smartphone ownership is increasing rapidly worldwide and, as mentioned earlier in this dissertation, minority groups such as Latinos lead mobile ownership in the US. Frith’s main concern is with the types of digital literacy that will be necessary to understand the potential of location-based services to augment experiences of place. Frith (2015) calls attention to those groups or communities excluded from the new experiences of space. For this author, “the danger is that new issues of literacy are being introduced to public spaces, and as locative media becomes more important to navigating contemporary public spaces, those issues could have serious consequences” (p.139)

Departing from the concept of hybrid space, Frith (2012) proposes the concept of “splintered space,” which is a combination of the concept of “differential mobility”

and the “digital divide. “Differential mobility” refers to how people move through space (e.g. cities) and to how mobility is a resource distributed unequally among social groups. Frith (2012) points out the difference between someone driving a car to work with someone taking a city bus. As the author continues, the difference between these two types of mobility is the qualitative nature of mobility and how much control individuals have over their experiences while mobile (Frith, 2012, p. 134).

The term “splintered space” was derived from the book Splintered Urbanism by Graham & Marvin (2001), which refers to the many ways the infrastructure of urban areas splinters access to services and mobility (paid fast-lanes, privatized skywalks, restricted access to places). For Frith (2012), a new form of splintered urbanism is the “divide between those who have access to hybrid spaces and those who do not” (p. 137). A good example applied to the context of Austin would be the use of the Real Time Capital Metro (public transportation company) mobile application, which enables bus riders to visualize the location of the scheduled bus on the map while it moves on real-time, thus decreasing waiting times. Because Austin is considered a car-oriented city for most of the residents, one may assume that most of the people who commute on the bus in Austin are low-income individuals who may

be excluded from the hybrid space of Real Time Capital Metro, which would be very useful in making their bus rides more predictable and efficient.

Thus, the service only reaches a select subset of people. Capital Metro also serves its riders by supplying a QRcode at every bus stop -- also part of the hybrid space. The smartphone user can scan the code and find out schedules and timing for buses at that location. This example shows how the City of Austin may already be attempting to deal with issues of inclusion and exclusion of hybrid space, but we wonder how many bus riders know how to use the QRcodes. Frith (2012) states that those “who have access to mobile technologies are able to experience mobility in a qualitatively different way than those who do not. With the spread of smartphone technologies, this divide will only widen as the technological elite are able to occupy new forms of hybrid spaces” (ibid, p.134). The author argues that in the early stages of development of hybrid space, issues of differential mobility and exclusion must be critically examined.

Frith (2012) considered hybrid space as the merging of: 1) a space augmented by digital information, 2) the mobility of the users, and 3) the socially constructed nature of digital information. In this sense, the author believes hybrid space raises concerns about how we move through space. For example, while there might be a group of people who move through “malleable, personalized, and digitally infused streets, other groups might experience streets that remain as impersonal as ever” (p.

146).

This impersonality of space becomes even more prevalent when one talks about a segregated space. There are a couple of interrelated issues that complicate the splintered space. First, segregated spaces typically deal with a drought of digital information, as the inhabitants do not own the skills and knowledge to produce digital user-generated content. Second, when location information regarding the segregated space is available, it is often produced by an outsider; indeed, the production of storytelling tends to be more about than among. After all, the inhabitants of that segregated space a priori do not have the knowledge to access it. This scenario leads to hybrid spatial segregation, deepening the effects of historical segregation.

By tying these concepts together, it is important to remember that it is not within the scope of this dissertation to analyze segregation per se, albeit this is an

important issue from which we depart to establish the relevance and contribution of this work. Rather, the topic of segregation serves as a backdrop that helps to set up the research context of this study and the relevance of locative media. Furthermore, we are aware that there is a distinction between segregation and concentration of ethnic groups (Johnston, Poulsen, and Forrest, 2014). While segregation implies a pattern imposed by others, as segregation of African-Americans was in Austin, in 1928, through the exercise of economic, social, cultural and political power, concentration implies choice by the involved (p. 14). Johnston, Poulsen, and Forrest (2014) discuss the definition of segregation proposed by the Oxford English Dictionary: “the separation or isolation of a portion of a community or a body of persons from the rest.” That said, it is important to clarify that in this dissertation, I deal with the history of formal segregation in East Austin and concentration in Southeast Austin, because the latter was not formally segregated as was the East side of the city.

Spatial segregation leads to the segregation of hybrid space

The connection between segregation and hybrid space is created by the concept of “where” which is at the core of locative media. As Johnston, Poulsen, and Forrest ( 2014) point out, segregation matters because “where you live matters to your future” (p. 14). These authors make the point that "where" matters because "where"

determines how people learn attitudes and behaviors patterns, because those things derive from socialization and mobilization through social networks. Johnston, Poulsen, and Forrest (2014) argue that this dynamic is spatially structured with a focus on local neighborhoods.

Similarly, a recent study by Harvard economists Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren (2015) explores how community can influence a child’s future income. The authors found that a child’s chances of stepping out of poverty can improve depending on where they are raised. It is clear that for a segregated space this situation is even more complex, as racial segregation, mainly for blacks, is “part of a vicious cycle wherein spatial isolation increases the odds of being poor, and this in turn leads to deteriorating neighborhood resources, such as schools, which hamper the ability of future generations to escape adverse economic circumstances” (Wright,

Ellis, and Holloway, 2014, p. 115). One may argue against this rationale by saying that with the diffusion of social networking websites and mobile apps, people are able to extend their social ties and social capital (Ellison, Steinfield, and Lampe, 2007);

however, if many inhabitants in segregated spaces are excluded from the hybrid space, they are less likely to expand their social networks through digital channels.

Additionally, as Straubhaar et al (2012) found in Austin, digital exclusion still tends to follow the historical lines of racial segregation.

In addition, Cresswell (2008), when talking about place, makes a point that complexifies the notion of "where" and physical place. For this author, the relationship of humans with place becomes more complicated as a third dimension is added: the interaction between material place and the rise of a digital landscape. This author discusses how the mediated place and the 'real' place are interlinked.

These examples show how physical place is important in shaping one’s identity and even more important in how place can determine the future of a child. As in a hybrid space, the physical location determines the information one receives, just as the location-based information influences how people move through and make decisions about their physical space. Hybrid space is a useful concept to understand how locative media may help to alleviate the effects of historical segregation. After all, smartphones as as locative media (Frith, 2015) may help residents to learn historical information, local memory, or services in the place where they live and also elsewhere. Again, this study is focused on the production of stories, rather than the consumption of storytelling on the fly.

1.9. Conceptual Framework 2: Place and Space

Place and Space are central concepts in the literature about locative media. Several mobile and locative media scholars build on human and cultural geography research to understand the impact of smartphones in how we socially interact in urban spaces (Wilken & Goggin, 2012; Frith, 2015). After all, while versions of cyberspace on the computer could happen anywhere, locative media available on our smartphones are place-specific (Cresswell, 2008, p. 138). This study then embraces these notions, as they are fundamental to this work, because they

provide us with conceptual tools to understand how Latinos/as dealing with the effects of historical segregation may better understand the space and place where they live through locative storytelling. In this sense, it is important to have as a departure point the distinction between place and space, which is the leading idea of all scholars who touch on this topic. For the human geographer Tuan (1977), "space" is more abstract than "place.” While space is related to room, size, and time, place is related to meaning. As this author puts it: “space is transformed into place as it acquires definition and meaning" (p. 136) or "place itself offered little outside the human bond" (p. 140). Another interesting notion about place is that it is not scale specific; it can be small as a table and as large as the Earth (Cresswell, 1998).

While Cresswell (2008) says that a place has a sense of place because it is imbued with meaning, Massey (1994) argues that 'places have no single sense of place which everyone shares" (p. 151). Massey explains that people's routes between here and the rest of the world vary enormously. Moreover, the central idea of Massey's argument is based on the notion of "time-space compression,” which "refers to movement and communication across space, to the geographical stretching-out of social relations, and to our experience of all this" (Massey, 1994, p. 144). Drawing on this notion, Massey raises the question of "how, in the context of all these socially varied-time-space changes do we think about 'places?’ In an era when it is argued, local communities seem to be increasingly broken up, when you can go abroad and find the same shops, the music as at home, or eat your favorite foreign-holiday food at a restaurant down the road- and when everyone has a different experience of all this - how then we think about locality?" (p. 151).

The interesting point of Massey (1994) that is key for this dissertation is the idea that the time- space compression "has produced a feeling of disorientation, a sense of fragmentation of local cultures and a loss, in its deepest meaning, of a sense of place" (p. 162). Even more striking for the purpose of this work is also the notion that as "the local high street is invaded by cultures and capitals from the world over;

few areas remain where the majority of industry is locally owned" (p. 162). The notion of local is much more complex in our contemporary and plural society, as immigrants also become part of the discussion of place and mobility (what is ours?

what is theirs?) and locality becomes networked (Gordon & de Souza e Silva, 2011).

In addition, Massey (1994) also argues, "what gives a place its specificity is not some long internalized history but the fact that it is constructed out of a particular constellation of social relations" (p. 169). Thus, in Massey's vision, the identity of a place is much more open and provisional. Similarly, for Agnew (1987), place is a setting for interaction, nevertheless, place is also location. Agnew argues that there are three elements of place: locale, or place as a setting for social interaction; location, or place located in geographical space; and sense of place, or attachment between people and place.

As Massey (1994), Agnew (1987) states that modern communication and transportation allowed social interaction to take place between locations. Shelley (2003), who commented the work of Agnew (1987), highlights how “an Internet chat room, consisting of people from throughout the world with some shared interest, is a much more meaningful venue for social interaction for many persons than is as set of people who happen to reside in the same neighborhood, parish or territorially defined political unit" (p. 606).

After straying to the discussion of what place is, we may go back to the distinction between space and place, as there is massive confusion about the two concepts. For Agnew (1987), while space is the 'top-down' impact of institutional schemes of spatial organization and representation, place is the 'bottom-up' representation of the actions of ordinary people.

Malpas (1999) also contributes to the distinction of place and space. He argues that place is not a concept that can be severed from notions of extension and spatiality. The author turns to the etymology of the word to clarify it. 'Place', with related terms in other European languages such as the German 'Platz', the French 'place,' and the Italian, 'piazza,' derives from the classical Latin platea meaning 'broad way' or 'open space'. In addition to this etymological background, it is also insightful to compare the usage of the word “place” in English with Portuguese, the mother language of the researcher. Portuguese speakers use “lugar” (place) to refer to a venue that only indicates a location. However, in English the meaning of place may be extended to “home” conveying a notion of familiarity and emotional attachment.

For example, one may say “let’s get together at my place,” which conveys the notion of place, and everyone understands it as an invitation to go to a private and homey location. In order to understand this comparison, we may take into account that

"location" refers to fixed geographical coordinates, while place has to do with emotional attachments with a location. de Souza e Silva & Frith (2012) exemplifies the difference by saying that “heaven and hell are places, but cannot be located” (p.

10).

In addition, Malpas (1999) says that place cannot be divorced from space, just as space cannot be divorced from time. The author says: "space can be taken to mean simply 'room' or extension, whether physical or non-physical. In this respect, 'space' seems to be tied, first and foremost, to a quite general notion of dimensionality" (p.

23). The author also explores the notion of space as "temporal duration" as well as

23). The author also explores the notion of space as "temporal duration" as well as