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This paper examines work in cultural and human geography that theorises temporality in terms of events. Moving from humanist phenomenology, to non-representational and assemblage theories and current geographies of encounter, it suggests these accounts of events tend to analyse the past and future through the lens of the present. Building upon these literatures and the work of Tristan Garcia, the paper argues for an expanded notion of the event, where past and future events can be considered as both distinct from, and linked to, the present moment. Here, time comes to be defined as the ordering and stacking of events, where events are understood as sites of comprehension, in which entities are differentiated. The paper suggests this position is useful in order to trace temporal causality across and between entities and events. Tracing the causality of entities and their ordering and stacking across events enables a closer analysis of what the paper terms the temporal power of non-human things. To illustrate this argument, examples from an ESRC project on digital gaming and in-game purchasing are analysed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws upon the example of High-Cost Short-Term Credit products accessed via digital interfaces and devices to examine practices of interface design and the operation of digitally mediated power. Utilising interviews with High-Cost Short-Term Credit website designers and users of these products, the paper shows how these interfaces are designed and tested to manage frictions: practical, affective or emotional contestations that interrupt or stop users from applying for these products and entering into credit and debt. We suggest that the key role of interface design is to manage these frictions by guiding action in such a way to minimise negative affective states at key thresholds of the application process. The management of friction is enabled by practices of data-driven design, where the contingency of human response is engineered through analytics in order to increase rates of application. Working through the example of High-Cost Short-Term Credit, the paper complicates a notion of control as a smooth or automatic operation of power, instead emphasising the necessity of both continuity and discontinuity as key to modulating action in a digital age. To understand the specificity of interface interactions and move beyond existing work on control, we offer a vocabulary of friction, thresholds and transitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geography is in the midst of a digital turn. This turn is reflected in both geographic scholarship and praxis across sub-disciplines. We advance a threefold categorization of the intensifying relationship between geography and the digital, documenting geographies produced through, produced by, and of the digital. Instead of promoting a single theoretical framework for making sense of the digital or proclaiming the advent of a separate field of ‘digital geography’, we conclude by suggesting conceptual, methodological and empirical questions and possible paths forward for the ‘digital turn’ across geography’s many sub-disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital interfaces, in the form of websites, mobile apps and other platforms, now mediate user experiences with a variety of economic, cultural and political services and products. To study these digital mediations, researchers have to date followed a range of methodological strategies including the modification of pre-existing qualitative research methods, such as content analysis, discourse analysis and semiotics, among many others, and an experimentation with new methods designed to make visible the operation of data aggregation, analytics and algorithms that are hidden from users. Building upon, while distinct from these strategies, the article sets out a post-phenomenological approach to studying interfaces, websites and apps that explicitly interrogates how they appear as objects. In doing so, the article provides a response to a problem that animates contemporary cultural geography: that new cultural objects are emerging which place in question the habits and practices of analysis that composed the ‘new’ cultural geography. To do this, the paper develops the concepts of unit, vibration and tone to unpack interfaces as sets of entities that work together to shape the experiences and responses of users. As such, the article provides a methodological vocabulary for the analysis of how interfaces operate to modulate user response and action on a series of habitual and un-reflected upon levels and thereby to create outcomes that suit their owners and operators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines geography’s engagements with phenomenology. Tracing phenomenology’s influence, from early humanist reflections on the lifeworld to non-representational theories of practice, the paper identifies the emergence of a distinct post-phenomenological way of thinking. However, there is currently no clear articulation of what differentiates post-phenomenology from phenomenology as a set of theories or ideas, nor is there a clear set of trajectories along which such difference can be pursued further. In response to this, the paper outlines three key elements that differentiate phenomenology from post-phenomenology and that require further exploration. First is a rethinking of intentionality as an emergent relation with the world, rather than an a priori condition of experience. Second is a recognition that objects have an autonomous existence outside of the ways they appear to or are used by human beings. Third is a reconsideration of our relations with alterity, taking this as central to the constitution of phenomenological experience given our irreducible being-with the world. Unpacking these differences, the paper offers some suggestions as to how post-phenomenology contributes to the broader discipline of human geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I develop the concept of 'technicity' to theorise how technology shapes spatiotemporal perception. This concept of technicity is applied to the development of skilled play in the fighting videogame Street Fighter IV. Drawing upon a larger research project consisting of participant observation, interviews, and video ethnography with professional and nonprofessional competitive players, I develop an in-depth analysis of how information about the animation system for the game is compiled and used to develop new sensitivities to time. In doing so, I argue that this is one example of the ways in which a variety of technologies shape users' capacities to sense space and time through the habitual development of skill. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I develop a nonrepresentational spatiality of screened images, in which space does not refer to the way space is represented in images or the spaces in which images exist, Instead it focuses on the spaces that images themselves produce. Drawing upon the technology of the screen as a contemporary site at which images are experienced, I argue for a dual conception of the 'space' of screened images: an existential space constructed through the background context of a user's relation with an image; and an ecological space constructed through the expressive relationship between body and screen. I use video games as an exemplar of these spaces to show how screened images reconfigure the relationship between touch and vision and how this alters users' spatial awareness of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]