A sense of place - Geography matters as much as ever, despite the digital

1970-01-01 02:00:00

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THERE WAS SOMETHING odd about the black car at the junction of Sutter and Hyde

Streets. It was an ordinary saloon. Its windows were clear, and it looked in

good condition. And yet, as the lights changed and the car pulled away into the

bright San Francisco morning, a question remained. Why was it sporting a

luxuriant pink moustache at its front?

The moustache is the trade mark of Lyft, a ride-sharing service that began in

the city this summer. Its drivers are private individuals who, in effect, rent

out seats in their cars for a few dollars a time. Lyft s cut is 20%. It works

through a smartphone app. When you register as a customer, you supply your

phone number and credit-card details. When you want a ride, you open the app

and see a map with the locations of the nearest moustachioed motors. You tap to

request a ride, and the app shows you your driver s name, his rating by past

passengers (out of five stars) and photos of him and his car. He will probably

greet you with a friendly fist-bump. Afterwards you rate him and pay through

the app. He rates you, too, so if you are poor company you may not get another

Lyft.

So that Lyft cars can avoid being classed as taxis, with all the attendant

regulation, technically the drivers do not charge fares but receive

donations from their passengers. You may consider that distinction too fine to

survive legal scrutiny: a regulator has sent Lyft and two rivals, SideCar and

Tickengo, cease and desist letters. But John Zimmer, chief executive of

Zimride, the firm that runs Lyft, seems confident that it will. Mr Zimmer

explains that Zimride, which also runs commuting and inter-city car pools, is

named not after him but after Zimbabwe, where his co-founder, Logan Green, saw

people sharing minibuses.

You might also ask whether people will be willing to accept Lyfts from

strangers, or to let strangers into their cars. But Mr Zimmer says the rating

system allows both sides to establish a reputation as friendly and trustworthy.

A driver averaging less than 4.5 stars will be dropped. The company vets

potential drivers carefully, requiring higher standards (for example, on

criminal records) than some taxi companies. Lyft has also arranged insurance of

up to $1m for its drivers.

The ride-sharers spied an opportunity partly because in San Francisco taxis can

be hard to find. Uber, which provides black limousines at the tap of an app,

saw a similar gap (though its cars are pricier) and has since rolled on to 16

other cities.

But the opportunity would not exist had the physical and digital worlds not

become tightly intertwined. Every ride using Lyft involves not only a physical

trip but also several much longer digital journeys: between the passenger s and

the driver s smartphones, via Wi-Fi and cellular base-stations, along telecoms

carriers networks and through switches and routers to and from the servers of

Lyft as well as, ultimately, the passenger s, the driver s and Zimride s banks.

But it also demonstrates the importance of physical location to today s digital

realm. It is central to services such as Lyft, connecting a passenger in one

place with a driver in another so that both can travel to a third. Geography

still matters.

Obvious? Not necessarily. In the couple of decades since the internet began to

expand from academic to widespread public use, there have been three main ways

of thinking about its relationship with the physical realm. The first, which

reached its peak in the late 1990s, emphasised how the digital world would

reshape the real one. People everywhere would have access to the same

electronic libraries of information, news and comment. Many companies would be

freer to choose their location, as better communications meant they would no

longer need to be near their suppliers or customers. Setting up businesses

would become easier, as would the outsourcing of services that could be

supplied electronically. Staff could work just as well at home as in expensive

and noisy offices, communicating with colleagues by e-mail or video link.

A good deal of this has come to pass. Amazon has shifted book-buying from the

high street to the computer, leaving many empty shops in its wake; now it is

leading the move from the printed page to the e-reader. Mechanical Turk, a

division of Amazon, offers companies an on-demand, scalable workforce ,

available around the clock, to carry out online tasks for a few cents a time.

Today s worker may leave the office physically but never digitally: he is

attached to it with invisible tethers through his smartphone and his tablet. He

can take part in videoconferences so realistic that he might be in the same

room. Even medical examinations can be carried out online.

Geography lives

In other respects, however, reports of the death of distance (the title of a

1995 special report in this newspaper) have been much exaggerated. As this

report will explain, many internet start-ups head for San Francisco, New York,

Berlin, London or other hubs to be close to like-minded people. Talk of the

end of geography (another phrase from the mid-1990s) is about as convincing as

the end of history when the digital presence of different places varies so

much. Forecasts of the death of cities have turned out to be even wider of

the mark: over the next two decades the United Nations expects the world s

urban population to grow by 195,000 a day.

A second line of thought puts digital and physical life in separate spheres.

Internet idealists declared cyberspace to be independent of governments of

flesh and steel . In online games people thousands of miles apart can battle

their way through the ruins of the same imaginary cities even though they will

never meet on Earth. More peaceful souls can have a go at virtual agriculture

without getting their hands dirty. Their avatars can live out their dreams in

the virtual online worlds of Minecraft . But these two worlds were never

really separate. Governments have wielded power over the internet as well as

over their physical domains, blocking sites and bashing bloggers. Weapons in

online war games, virtual cows in FarmVille and playing Minecraft with

others cost real money. Cyberbullying is just bullying. What happens online

does not stay online.

This special report will emphasise the third option: that the physical realm

also shapes the digital one. One big reason for this is that nowadays a lot of

people are online wherever they go. More and more people are connected to the

internet in more and more places at ever higher speeds. They carry powerful

computers, in the form of smartphones or tablets, which are continuously

updated with new information. By 2017 the volume of mobile data traffic will be

21 times greater than it was in 2011, according to Ericsson, a big maker of

telecoms-network equipment. The number of mobile-broadband subscriptions

(mostly for smartphones) will jump from 900m to 5 billion. Local information

(where the nearest chemist is; whether there is a taxi nearby) is more valuable

to people when they are on the move than when they are sitting at a desk.

For the companies racing to provide local services over the internet, maps are

an essential foundation. In recent years there has been an explosion of

investment in creating online representations of the real world: maps in two

dimensions and in three, indoors as well as out, and in ever finer detail. It

is possible, once your fingers get the hang of the controls, to fly around

New York, San Francisco and several other cities, noting the street names and

the landmarks and stopping off to learn about places as you go. Giant

technology companies notably Google and Apple, which has just dropped its

arch-rival s maps from its mobile operating system are locked in a struggle to

create the best maps and embed the best information into them.

Smartphones are only part of the story. By 2020, reckons Cisco, another big

equipment-maker, 50 billion devices of various kinds will be connected.

According to Wim Elfrink, Cisco s head of globalisation, at present only 0.2%

of such devices are. The Earth is beginning to be electronically mapped in many

dimensions. John Manley of HP Labs in Bristol envisages a central nervous

system for the Earth , a planet-wide network of tiny, cheap, tough detectors

that will see, hear, feel (by detecting vibrations), even smell and taste (by

analysing the chemistry of their surroundings), and report back.

All this will be especially good for the growing numbers of city-dwellers. Even

the devices in use today are already producing huge amounts of data. Most of

these data are, and will continue to be, generated in cities, because that is

where the phones, cars, buildings and infrastructure to which they relate are

concentrated. If those data are combined and analysed, they will make cities

better places to live. Cities are already smart , in that people are more

productive when they live in close proximity than far apart. Big data can make

cities smarter still.

Geography is also important to where the internet s output is produced. Young

techies are still drawn to Silicon Valley and similar hubs. And although more

and more digital information is kept in the cloud , the remote servers that

make up the cloud are resolutely earthbound, with their location chosen mostly

for its climate, its existing infrastructure and its tax regime.

The digital and the physical world are interacting ever more closely. The

rapidly declining cost of communications and computing power has already

wrought huge changes in the way people go about their daily lives. Digital maps

and guides will affect the way people behave in the physical world and bring

about yet more changes. The digital and the physical are becoming one.

from the print edition | Special report