Human life is increasingly mediated by digital interfaces. Computers, laptops, tablet PCs, mobile phones, video games and many other devices operate as the medium through which a variety of activity is undertaken. While a range of work has investigated the symbolic and representational logics of interfaces, little work has explored or theorised the material and affective nature of interfaces.Drawing upon trends in contemporary video game design, James Ash argues that interfaces produce envelopes of space / time that serve to focus users' perception on the present moment. In turn, he argues that these fields are deployed by video game companies in order to generate sensory-motor skill that are the basis of new forms of affective value. While these processes are currently limited to video game design, the conclusion points to how the generation of these narrow phenomenal envelopes is expanding into other settings. "The Interface Envelope "develops this argument through a theoretical engagement with a variety of thinkers such as Callois, Heidegger, Stiegler, Harman and Nancy to emphasize how a phenomenological encounter with technology shapes the temporal structure of action, cognition and the comportment of the body. This theoretical development allows a critical re-election between the concrete phenomenology of lived experience in gaming and a number of pressing concerns around problematics of attention, affect and the commodification of perception.

In Phase Media, James Ash theorizes how smart objects, understood as Internet-connected and sensor-enabled devices, are altering users' experience of their environment. Rather than networks connected by lines of transmission, smart objects generate phases, understood as space-times that modulate the spatio-temporal intelligibility of both humans and non-humans. Examining a range of objects and services from the Apple Watch to Nest Cam to Uber, Ash suggests that the modulation of spatio-temporal intelligibility is partly shaped by the commercial logics of the industries that design and manufacture smart objects, but can also exceed them. Drawing upon the work of Martin Heidegger, Gilbert Simondon and Bruno Latour, Ash argues that smart objects have their own phase politics, which offer opportunities for new forms of public to emerge. Phase Media develops a conceptual vocabulary to contend that smart objects do more than just enabling a world of increased corporate control and surveillance, as they also provide the tools to expose and re-order the very logics and procedures that created them.

As digital technologies have become part of everyday life, mediating tasks such as work, travel, consumption, production, and leisure, they are having increasingly profound effects on phenomena that are of immediate concern to geographers. These include: the production of space, spatiality and mobilities; the processes, practices, and forms of mapping; the contours of spatial knowledge and imaginaries; and, the formation and enactment of spatial knowledge politics Similarly, there are distinct geographies of digital media such as those of the internet, games, and social media that have become indispensable to geographic practice and scholarship across sub-disciplines, regardless of conceptual approach. This textbook presents a fully up-to-date, synoptic and critical overview of how digital devices, logics, methods, etc are transforming geography. It is divided into six inter-related sections introduction to digital geographies digital spaces digital methods digital cultures digital economies digital politics With illustrious instructors and researchers contributing to every chapter, Digital Geographies is the ideal textbook for courses concerning digital geographies, digital and new media and Internet communications, and the spatial knowledge of politics.

In The Interface Envelope, James Ash develops a series of concepts to understand how digital interfaces work to shape the spatial and temporal perception of players. Drawing upon examples from videogame design and work from post-phenomenology, speculative realism, new materialism and media theory, Ash argues that interfaces create envelopes, or localised foldings of space time, around which bodily and perceptual capacities are organised for the explicit production of economic profit. Modifying and developing Bernard Stiegler's account of psychopower and Warren Neidich's account of neuropower, Ash argues the aim of interface designers and publishers is the production of envelope power. Envelope power refers to the ways that interfaces in games are designed to increase users perceptual and habitual capacities to sense difference. Examining a range of examples from specific videogames, Ash identities a series of logics that are key to producing envelope power and shows how these logics have intensified over the last thirty years. In turn, Ash suggests that the logics of interface envelopes in videogames are spreading to other types of interface. In doing so life becomes enveloped as the environments people inhabit becoming increasingly loaded with digital interfaces. Rather than simply negative, Ash develops a series of responses to the potential problematics of interface envelopes and envelope power and emphasizes their pharmacological nature.

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As digital technologies have become part of everyday life, mediating tasks such as work, travel, consumption, production, and leisure, they are having increasingly profound effects on phenomena that are of immediate concern to geographers. These include: the production of space, spatiality and mobilities; the processes, practices, and forms of mapping; the contours of spatial knowledge and imaginaries; and, the formation and enactment of spatial knowledge politics Similarly, there are distinct geographies of digital media such as those of the internet, games, and social media that have become indispensable to geographic practice and scholarship across sub-disciplines, regardless of conceptual approach. This textbook presents a fully up-to-date, synoptic and critical overview of how digital devices, logics, methods, etc are transforming geography. It is divided into six inter-related sections introduction to digital geographies digital spaces digital methods digital cultures digital economies digital politics With illustrious instructors and researchers contributing to every chapter, Digital Geographies is the ideal textbook for courses concerning digital geographies, digital and new media and Internet communications, and the spatial knowledge of politics.