Death of distance

I would like to post a fragment about the concept "death of distance" I found very interesting in one of my last reads, The City of Tomorrow written by Carlo Ratti and Matthew Claudel.

 

The city of tomorrow by Ratti & Claudel

 

A prevailing opinion at this crucial moment in humanity's cultural history was that distance would die. Physicality, it seemed, would lose all relevance as it was subsumed by the connective fabric of the Internet.

The argument held that if information can be instantaneously transferred anywhere, to anyone, then all places are equivalent. If I am connected, why does it matter where I am? "The post-information age will remove the limitations of geography. The digital living will include less and less dependence upon being in a specific place at a specific time, and the transmission of the place itself will start to become possible," wrote the MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte. Work is a simple example: why commute to the office when the office will come right to your home?

 

The internet was expected to neuter place in every dimension of human habitation, from entertainment to employment. Many of the tools for interaction, commerce, and information management were digitized and dematerialized. They became efficient, accessible, and aspatial. The economist Frances Cairncross followed his trend to its logical conclusion with an overt hypothesis that she called the "death of distance." The Internet would usher in a " communications future... in which distance is irrelevant."

 

These are resounding predictions, but history (so far) has proven them wrong. Over the past two decades, cities have grown as never before. Urban space has flourished across the globe as humanity rushes headlong into an urban era. Some calculations suggest that the urban population is increasing by a quarter million per day, amounting to a new London every month. [...] More than ever, cities are human magnets. Why? it seems that in the collective frenzy of the network, the death-of-distance theorist forgot something crucial to human experience: the importance of the physical interaction between people and with environment. [...]

 

"Traditional urban patterns cannot coexist with cyberspace. But long live the new, network-mediated metropolis of the digital era." Today's reality is a powerful collision of physical and digital that augments both, a triumph of atoms and bits. In short, the digital revolution did not kill urban spaces, far from it, but neither did it leave them unaffected. The introduction of the Internet, the space of flows, the connective tissue that theorist from Cairncross to Negroponte expected to kill physical proximity, has indeed had a profound impact on cities. Instead of flows replacing spaces an bits replacing atoms, cities ar now a hybrid space at the intersection of the two. Physical and virtual ar fused through a productive collision, where both propinquity and connectivity play an important role.

(Ratti and Claudel, 2016, p. 18-20)

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