Saskia Sassen: Towards a Sociology of Information Technology

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Saskia Sassen: Towards a Sociology of Information Technology

The conent on the left is reformatting the content on the right (plus new content from the reading). Hopefully the content on the left is more organized for you to add to.

Historically excludedgroups can find cyberspacean enabling environment

non-political actors

local communities/city neighborhoods

Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO)

women both locally and globally

4. Citizen Networksin Global Digital Age

Non-Elites

Create insider groupsat scale

Support

Communicate

Notion of local

Neighboring Communitiesaware of each other

Local inititives become part of global network

strategies

political work

Information

3. Women's Cyberpresence/Cyberopportunities

new opportunities

possibilities

Long-Tail, niche markets can findtheir people

access to situations with NGO'sthey neve had before

can be local yet open to largergroups beyond physical neighborhood

potential to change local 'micro'environments through connectivity

enable women to pursue projectsnot easily accomidated in localenvironment

socio-political implications

support

solidarity

coallaboration

lateral/horizontal communication

home settings

women & e-business

contradictory features

limits of cyberspace to bringabout change in exisitng hierarchies

underrepresentation

rapidly rasiing their share

account for less than halfof all internet usage

2. New Interactions Between Capital Fixity and Hypermobility

3 aspects of interactionof mobility and fixity

Spatialities of Center

‘center’ can assume several geographic forms,

centrality being constituted in electronically generated spaces.

highly specialized circuits connecting sets of cities

center can extend into a metropolitan area in the form of a grid of nodes

operating simultaneously at the macrolevel.

no longer a simple relation btw centrality & geographic areas as downtowns, or the central business districts

not simply a continuation of older patternsof spatial concentration

Locational Patterns

firms rather than large corporate headquarters which are at the core of economic global city functions.

specialized service firms more place-bound than the hypermobility of their products

headquarters to locate anywhere so long as they can access a highly specialized networked service sector somewhere

highly standardized products/services see an increase in their locational options

Social Connectivity &Central functions

urban centers provide the mix of resources and the social connectivity

meaning of information

technical infrastructure can be reproducedanywhere, but no the social

non-standardized data sets

requires social infrastructure

datum

strengthen importance of central coordination and control

geographic dispersal of economic activities

no fully virtualized companies

a back and forth betweendigital and real-space

Information technologies have not eliminated the importance of massive concentrations of material resources

digital activites still "weave back and forth between actual and digital space"

economic activites are both centralized, e.g. Franfurt market and dependent on global networks e.g. Frankfurt market

Saski notes that the digital is bound with the material;the example she uses is finance, a discipline that is largely digital but needs buildings infrastructure, material stuff to "finance"

ok im fairly lost in this map but...the effect of digital on material is to amplify liquification. that which is material is made somewhat less material...saskia's example is real esatte

1. Embeddedness of Digital Technologies

Destabilizing of Older Hierarchies of Scale

Mediating Practices

Digital/Material Imbrications

intro

This section is from the first couple pages, whcih seem to act as an intro. Maybe it is good to keep it this way, my thought is that at the very least it could use some reordering.

powerdynamics

internet, powerful mediumfor non-elites to comm.

infrastructure and access

social structures

public space

non-comm. work dominatesteh internet

e-space is crucial for new formsof civic engagement

private space

financial inst.

technical features and standards of software/hardware

the Internet is a space produced and marked through the software that shapes its use and the hardware mobilized by the software

trends

less production of software aimed at strengthening the openness and decentralization of the Net

Internet software design focuses in the last few years has been on firewalled intranets for firms and encrypted tunnels for firm-to-firm transactions.

indicator of transformationsbtw e-space and physicalinstitutions

distributed networks

properties

decentralized access

cheaper the delivery ofaccess the more access tolower income peoples

network power is notinherintly distributive

simultaneity

interconnectivity

Cyberspace canaccomodate a broad range of social struggles

Subtopic

Digi Tecnologiesare embedded, notpurely technological

destabalizing of existinghierarchies of scale

other scales gain importance

cross-border network of global cities

loss of formal authority

National scale loses significance

To continue to think of this as simply local is not very useful.

mediating cultures btwtech and users

expressed by embedded values, cultures, power systems, and institutional orders

complex overlapping btwmaterial and digtal

deeply influenced by culture

lack any meaning or referents if we were to exclude the world outside cyberspace.

Hypermobility or de-materializationhave roots in production:capital mobility v. fixity

Today material world hashypermobile components

financial markets

real estate

100 years ago place-boundedness = form of immobility.

Digitization = amplification ofliquifying of what is not liquid.

Cyberspace isa concrete place

national political system

digital is not exclusivelydigital or non-digital

no complete virtual communityor corporation

no pure digital economy