Mike Duggan

I am a cultural geographer interested in how digital technologies augment our everyday experiences of place. It would be difficult to ignore the increasing pervasiveness of digital technology, which has populated everyday life over the past decade. In essence my research explores the ways in which these technologies have come to inform the cultural geographies of everyday practice, and everyday experiences of place.

Taking one particular set of digital technologies that have seen unprecedented growth in recent years, my research seeks to highlight how digital mapping technologies, which many of us use via our mobile devices on a daily basis, are coming to augment everyday sensory experiences of place in novel ways. In doing so it examines how these technologies contribute to the subjective constitutions of the places in which these daily events take place.

In order to address such questions and more, my research uses an approach based on a series of long form ethnographic engagements with a diverse range of participants. The purpose of this approach is to make a specific culturally led contribution to the growing body of work interested in how the entanglements of the real and digital worlds are coming to affect everyday geographies.

As more and more of our daily lives become bound up with digital technologies there is a greater to need to understand how such bindings are affecting everyday experiences of place. The concept of place is deeply routed within culture. Indeed, it is the notion of place that informs our everyday cultural geographies. To reveal how digital technologies – in this case digital mapping technologies - are informing notions of place is vital if we wish to build a deeper understanding how the geographies of culture are produced in the so-called digital world in which we now find ourselves.