How do ICTs fit into physical space?

Gillian: So, on the simplest level you can observe that ICTs often take an important or special place within the lived environment. They are held close to the body, they are often given an important place within the home that speaks both to how frequently these devices are used but also how their placement is used to communicate things to others. You can also see, in the way that cell phones are treated as physical objects, the relationship between a person and their phone and that this is more than just about the functionality of this device but also about a personal relationship with that object and the functionality that it enables.

Tom: Yeah, I mean agreed, but I do think that you also have to go much, much deeper than this. I think ICTs are objects but we also have to look at these objects linked together in relationships with other objects and we have to understand that this phone, the way the phone acts, actually, it's in relationship with say the QQ space that it's in, the clothes the person is wearing or the table that it rests on and for many people their QQ space might well be the most exciting environment in which they interact during the day and, really you know, it's just a real as this table or the table that the cell phone is placed on.

And that leads me to another point, which is there is a really prominent discourse in the West that there is a split between the online and the offline or the virtual world and the real world and I do feel that this idea is far less prominent in China and in this town and even thought aspects of the Internet, such as Q-zone, are incredibly fantastical in their nature, often, and full of mythology and fantasy and amazing graphics, there isn't the same, people don't speak about it in the same way as one thing being in the virtual and the other thing being real.

Gillian: Yes, that's a really interesting point and I guess this question and the way it has been address in this section has been sort of dictated by the choice of using and engaging with photographs, which lend themselves to capturing and analysing ICTs as these sort of black boxes. It's much more difficult to photograph all the things that are, arguably much more important, these spaces and places that the ICTs allows users to place themselves in and to access. And you are absolutely right, we shouldn't be drawing this line between the ICT and the physical world in which it exists and some sort of virtual world that it allows people to enter. You are seeing many, many more of these technologies that blend the real, physical world with the so-called virtual and this is only going to continue in the future.

Tom: Right, I agree completely, and I think the other thing to remember is this process it's ongoing and it's always changing. We tend to think of these kind of things like ICTs and phones and computers as intrusions into the living space, and we have this idealized notion that the living space or the house is some kind of pure form that has always been there, and that it was that way for a reason, and then we think about ICTS and their place in the environment. I think we need to acknowledge the fact that these environments have always been negotiated and fought over and that they change from minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day, month to month and that we need to think about these things both in the short term, of course, but also in the long term.