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Key messages: Grounding practices within the materiality of geography is an important technique for studying the complexity of digital phenomena.The DIGO (Discourses, Infrastructures, Groupings, and Outcomes) framework uses these categories to guide data selection for locating digital phenomenon in material geographies.This article applies the DIGO framework to blockchain (using data about tweets, miners, firms, and ICOs) to show how this digital practice connects to and across material geographies. Digital phenomena pose unique challenges to social science researchers investigating the impact of new and changing technologies. In part, this challenge derives from the constantly evolving practices, actants, and geographies enrolled in the digital. When these phenomena are coupled with over‐the‐top expectations and media hype, initial impressions often mask the complicated and nuanced ways new technologies are put to use. Blockchain (and its original application Bitcoin) represent one of these new, unstable digital phenomena that simultaneously captures public imagination and generates powerful discourses of disruption and change. One way of clarifying the messiness of technologies like blockchain is to ground its practices within the materiality of geography. The DIGO framework proposed in this article uses four broad categories—discourses (measured via Twitter), infrastructures (indicated by Bitcoin mining), groupings (based on firms and exchanges), and outcomes (measured by initial coin offerings)—located in geographic space. Each category is meant to provide insight on blockchain as it unfolds across space and scale. The same framework can guide research on other digital phenomena, based on appropriate measures for each of the four DIGO foci. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information‐technologies are essential for global capitalism to function at speed across scale, space and complexity. The importance of software and algorithms in the governance of these systems is reflected in the attention of scholars to the ways digital code and materiality (re)combine to create hybrid digital/material spaces of economic activity, movement and everyday life. This paper extends this work in two key ways: first by emphasising the relational aspect of these code/spaces, and second by showing how the digital algorithms of code/spaces are hackable rather than hegemonic. Using the case study of frequent flyer programmes we demonstrate how networked knowledge‐sharing reshapes code/spaces to provide unintended opportunities such as low‐cost travel and access to spaces normally only frequented by global elites. Although this case highlights vulnerabilities in the code of global capitalism, it is primarily only those with significant lifestyle privilege who are able to fully participate in these subversions. Moreover, while much of the value captured by “airline hackers” comes from airlines’ profit margins, the relationality of code/spaces can impact citizens and consumers not directly connected to or interested in airline travel. Ultimately, this paper demonstrates that in contrast to characterisations of omnipresence and hegemony, the information networks and algorithms of global capitalism contain moments of uneven porousness and selective hackability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information has always had geography. It is from somewhere; about somewhere; it evolves and is transformed somewhere; it is mediated by networks, infrastructures, and technologies: all of which exist in physical, material places. These geographies of information about places matter because they shape how we are able to find and understand different parts of the world. Places invisible or discounted in representations are invisible in practice to many people. In other words, geographic augmentations are much more than just representations of places: they are part of the place itself; they shape it rather than simply reflect it. This fusing of the spatial and informational augmentations that are immutable means that annotations of place emerge as sites of political contestation: with different groups of people trying to impose different narratives on informational augmentations. This paper therefore explores how information geographies have their own geographic distributions: geographies of access, of participation, and of representation. The paper offers a deliberately broad survey of a range of key platforms that mediate, host, and deliver different types of geographic information. It does so using a combination of existing statistics and bespoke data not previously mapped or analysed. Through this effort, the paper demonstrates that in addition to the geographies of uneven access to contemporary modes of communication, uneven geographies of participation and representation are also evident and in some cases are being amplified rather than alleviated. In other words, the paper comprehensively shows one important facet of contemporary information geographies: that geographic information itself is characterised by a host of uneven geographies. The paper concludes that there are few signs that global informational peripheries are achieving comparable levels of participation or representation with traditional information cores, despite the hopes that the fast‐paced spread of the internet to three billion people might change this pattern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the increasing prevalence of both geographically referenced information and the code through which it is regulated, digital augmentations of place will become increasingly important in everyday, lived geographies. Through two detailed explorations of 'augmented realities', this paper provides a broad overview of not only the ways that those augmented realities matter, but also the complex and often duplicitous manner that code and content can congeal in our experiences of augmented places. Because the re-makings of our spatial experiences and interactions are increasingly influenced through the ways in which content and code are fixed, ordered, stabilised and contested, this paper places a focus on how power, as mediated through technological artefacts, code and content, helps to produce place. Specifically, it demonstrates there are four key ways in which power is manifested in augmented realities: two performed largely by social actors, distributed power and communication power; and two enacted primarily via software, code power and timeless power. The paper concludes by calling for redoubled attention to both the layerings of content and the duplicity and ephemerality of code in shaping the uneven and power-laden practices of representations and the experiences of place augmentations in urban places. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the politics of information and communications technologies (ICT) regions in a global economy. This global economy is characterized by an increasing flow of goods, services, capital, ideas, and to a more limited extent, labor, facilitated by information and communications technologies. Drawing on three empirically diverse cases from Silicon Valley, Ireland and Bangalore, India, the authors in this article present two key ideas. The three cases, while accepting the territorialization of social relations in regional agglomerations as an important aspect of adapting to demand uncertainty and technological change, also consider how the character of the major connections between each region and the global economy affect the regional industrial system. Thus, the cases are a study of the development of the local from within global connections, rather than a study of local systems of innovation that then go globally by selling in global markets.

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This paper assesses US metropolitan regions in terms of the adoption of e-commerce by businesses using a combination of data from Interactive Week, Alexa Research and Hoover's Online. This analysis shows that e-commerce is providing the impetus and means to reorganise the economic and geographic space in which businesses operate. Spatial divisions in the use of e-commerce are identified in which many cities in the South and Midwest appear to be lagging behind their counterparts in other parts of the country. Thus, rather than the destruction of place and geography predicted by some, e-commerce is reorganising the economic space in which businesses operate. Although not every place will become a major e-commerce hub, all regions will be shaped by the way in which firms adapt to this new commercial medium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses leaked U.S. diplomatic cables that provided information on foreign infrastructure and resources deemed critical to U.S. national security, public health, and safety. The cables were part of the Critical Foreign Dependencies Initiative (CFDI). The authors see this National Critical Foreign Dependencies List as a geopolitical map depicting U.S. susceptibility to various threats. Important aspects of infrastructure and resources found on this map include straits and shipping routes, mineral deposits, and gas and oil pipelines.