Cultural Interaction and a Sense of Place in a Digital Environ

The question of what is ‘place’ plagues nearly all the social sciences. One thing that should be clear is that the old communication model of culture requiring only a sender and receiver of data is inadequate. Culture has a setting and this setting is enabled through a perceived sense of place. As culture requires a setting, it must be “embedded in real-life situations, in temporally and spatially specific ways.” (Crang 1988, 1). While unique, place is further an “integration of elements of nature and culture...linked to other places by circulation” (Lukermann, referred to in Relph 1986, 3). Crang argues culture is not just “high culture” but “sets of beliefs or values that give meaning to ways of life and produce (and are reproduced through) material and symbolic forms.” Hence culture requires artifacts. Cultural setting involves not just two or more people sending and receiving information to each other, but also artifacts that are used to direct cultural behaviour. The artifacts act like a library of memory cues to remind people how to behave according to certain events or locations, (Johnson, Crang, Relph). Not just objects but also the wider environment can act as an artifact. Others argue that place is also a collection of symbolic cues for inhabitation, and for territorial possession, (Rapoport 1982, 22-26). The interactions between these objects and their setting may be quite complex, (Cantor 1976, 69). Culture is a feedback loop. A visitor perceives space as place, and inhabits (modifies the place), place “perpetuates culture” and thus influences the inhabitants in turn. Crang argues cultural geography is interested in place via both “difference” and “coherence” of ideas between people. Hence we might say that social behaviour is behaviour between two or more people, cultural behavior is a subset of social behaviour, where behaviour is governed by or understood in terms of a cultural setting. For the cultural geographer Dorothy Massey, place is: • not static, a series of social interactions that also are processes, so not just the embodiment of one community • not necessarily a collection of boundaries, not simply a contrast between inside and outside • "...full of internal conflicts" so the identity is not single but a blend of various identities • unique of but not with a "long, internalised history" (Massey 1993). A place is evocative yet often fluid in definition, a record of social processes and conflicts, and full of mementos from other places. To view a place as a container of x y and z dimensions is to deny it a cultural content. A place is more like a nexus, or a web. And the strands that conspire to create a sense of place are never set in stone.