Prompted by receiving – completely unsolicited I’d add – this month’s GIM International (the ‘global magazine for geomatics’), I thought I better get in a thought I had in the wake of this year’s Association of American Geographers (AAG) annual meeting in Los Angeles; an event for which the sun has definitely set, and soon enough will rise again in the east with session calls for next year’s occurrence in Tampa. Before I say anything, though, I should add the proviso that my AAG experience in LA was utterly bizarre. I was ill for much of the proceedings, experiencing much of the event through the perverse environment of Twitter backchannels. So my take on this was and is strange, all at once distant yet present.

In any event, what truly struck me this year was the sense that academic geography had crossed a certain, undefined threshold whereby ‘the digital’ has become a remarkably naturalised object and subject. Certainly, this was evident in the many sessions, papers and plenaries which dealt with such matters as critical GIS, geocode, the geoweb, social media, location-aware media, volunteered geographic information, ‘Big Data’ and ‘Small Data’. These new concerns for digitisation and computation extend well beyond the more technical fields of GIS or geomatics. It would be accurate to say that their concerns ultimately rest with broader social and cultural questions, particularly the enormous expansion of geographical data cultivated largely through user-generated contributions using digital, networked and often location-aware technologies. Recently, this expansion of geographical data has been framed as ‘neogeography’ (see this related special issue in Environment and Planning A; this conversation amongst involving Matthew Wilson, Michael Goodchild and Andrew Turner also provides a good overview).

Although it’s almost an academic cliché, I keep returning to the idea that this amounts to something of a ‘turn’ to the digital in geography. This idea was probably provoked by something Rob Kitchin said in his presentation (in the session ‘Whither Small Data?’), where he compared the way ‘digital’ has recently been experienced in geography with the humanities: for the latter, currently obsessing about a ‘digital humanities’, Kitchin observed that ‘digital’ has been experienced almost as the humanities’ own quantitative revolution; yet for geography, this is a revolution which happened in the 1970s. Of course, this might simply mean that claiming there is a ‘digital turn’ in geography is a wild overstatement, particularly for a discipline with a long and complicated engagement with digital technologies, and an even longer one with quantitative science.

Regardless, if there is some sort of ‘turn’ to the digital in academic geography, I would suggest that it amounts to more than a mere shift in purposeful attention. Moreover, it seems to be at least partly decoupled from geography’s quantitative revolution. The sheer naturalness of this turn seems to be grounded in a more general qualitative shift towards a digital or computational culture. By this I mean to say that ‘the digital’ as such seems to have only partly emerged as a distinct region of deliberate geographical inquiry. Instead, like other disciplines, geography is caught up in an environment which is always already digital. I realise this might seem like a grandiose claim, but writers on software and new media (such as Lev Manovich and N. Katherine Hayles) as well as some geographers (such as Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge) have long argued that our contemporary environments have become thoroughly backgrounded by the logics of code and computation. Though our everyday experience of digital media is primarily defined through meaningful, human forms (i.e. through increasingly sophisticated graphical and sensory user interfaces), as David Berry argues, in the process we also become the objects of computers, encouraged to think computationally.

So this turn to the digital, if it exists, seems to be in some contradistinction to a focus on something like the ‘geographies of media’, which could be characterised as a more deliberate attempt to construct a new area of interdisciplinary inquiry within geography. Indeed – and this is a bit of an aside – one sign of this more deliberate area of inquiry has, again, been within the funny world of the AAG, in the long-running ‘Geographies of Media’ sessions (which have run alongside a fledgling online journal of media geography titled Aether). Generally, I’ve had a conflicted relationship with both these sessions (in which I’ve presented on a few occasions) as well as the broader enterprise of media geography. On the one hand, I appreciate the attempt to create a sort of clearing in which such an emergent area might be discussed and debated. On the other hand, the construction of this area, at least within the AAG, can create a bit of a vortex. Though I don’t mean to sound harsh, it can have the effect of sucking in a lot of diverse work in geography, slotting it first within the broad umbrella of media geography, and then within often conventional-sounding sub-areas (papers at the 2013 conference included, for example, television, cinema, sound, music, comics, books, social media, video games and journalism). To be clear, I think these sessions do more good than harm. But it is also interesting and perhaps encouraging to see that geography’s current explorations of digitization or computation have largely eluded this vortex. Certainly, this has a lot to do with such work being connected to otherwise established areas in geography, such as GIS, critical GIS and studies of the geoweb; but also, arguably, it consists in the more general shift towards a computational culture that I outlined above.

Having had such an oddly present-yet-distant AAG experience this year, I’m slightly hesitant to start outlining things that should be considered as part of any digital turn in geography. But this is a blog post, not a journal article, so here goes. First, geographers interested in digital phenomena might do with some stronger engagements with debates in media and communication studies, in addition to the vibrant work already taking place in geography and more specialized areas such as software studies or digital media theory. For example, in the excellent AAG 2013 session ‘Whither Small Data?’ – which was specifically concerned with smaller-scale empirical studies of ‘Big Data’ – I had a recursive, nagging feeling that the discussion around platforms such as Foursquare or Twitter was rather adrift from quite well-developed debates and research in media theory on the social practices, affects and forms of publicness which surround emergent social media. Geographers have quite distinctive ways into these debates, not just via its expertise in spatial theory but also digitally-mediated mapping, but dialogues with media theory would benefit that sort of engagement in both directions. The second observation I would make is that geographers interested in digital phenomena might need to better think through their stance with regard to technological determinism. This is a double-edged sword. On one edge, there is a risk that studies of the distinct geographical affordances of for example Twitter implicitly drift into a naïve technological determinism around the effects or affects produced by these platforms, with little sense of how these mediums come to matter in practical use. On the other edge, however, the ‘naïve’ qualifier is important: it is important to take seriously the degree to which the architectures of these platforms do have determining qualities in a phenomenological sense, by providing the conditions of possibility into which practices are always already ‘thrown’.

But to wrap this overlong post up, and return to essay marking, I’ll end this by saying that, however distant my participation at the AAG was this year, I came away excited and interested in some of the directions geographical inquiry seems to be taking in relation to the digital. Certainly, it reaffirmed my ongoing, often tricky, balancing act in which I’ve tried to keep one foot in geography, and one foot in media theory.