Space, technology and attention structures

Sociologists, geographers, and philosophers have long made a distinction between ‘space’ and ‘place’ (see, for example, Entrikin, 1991; Lefebvre, 1991). ‘Space’ is something ‘objective’, independent of human consciousness, whereas a ‘place’ is more ‘subjective’, something that is ‘discursively constructed’. The danger with this distinction, however, as Merrifield (1993) points out, is that it traps the analyst into a Cartesian dualism which separates the ’objective’ from the ‘subjective’, the ‘material’ from the ‘cognitive’. What is needed is an understanding of how consciousness interacts with the physical world to create ‘places’. Mediated discourse analysis (Norris and Jones, 2005; Scollon, 2001) addresses this dilemma by focusing on human action. According to Scollon (2001), all actions take place at sities of engagement, which he defines as ‘moments when particular people, particular cultural tools, and particular social practices converge in such a way as to make certain actions possible. In other words, what makes a space a ‘place’ is what we are able to ‘do’ in it, the way it functions as a field for human action.