Barren landscape, reduced people: Digital non-place in a public bureaucratic organization
基于瑞典社会服务办公室的民族志研究，揭示数字行政系统如何成为固定不变的“非场所”，削弱员工的归属感，并可能引发对公众的冷漠态度。
Digital administrative systems are ubiquitous in modern bureaucracies, part of the ‘everyday’ that often goes unnoticed and creates the digital undertow. Based on an ethnographic study of a social services office in Sweden, we show how these digital systems can be understood as digital non-places, which appear as fixed and immobile to workers. This appearance masks the inherent precarity and fluidity of space that is often perceived to characterize digital spaces. By analysing the architecture, experience and social practices of a bureaucratic digital space, we show how it creates a barren, fixed world, where others are absent or reduced to ‘documentary persons’. Because the space does not allow for placemaking, in terms of physical transformation or social engagement, workers cannot transform it into a place, which would provide a sense of belonging. It is this lack of belonging, rather than a lack of meaning, that creates the non-place. Moreover, the barrenness and reduction in personhood provided by the digital non-place may nudge workers towards a ‘social production of indifference’ in the exercise of public authority. The study highlights how a place-sensitive approach can illuminate our understanding of modern workspaces, and the effects they may have on workers.