Space and Time Online: Urban Theory Applied to Digital Experience
Jaclyn Onufrey
Recently, I learned that the dead-end street I live on used to be connected to the rest of the neighborhood, just on the other side of I-440 in Raleigh. My neighbors told me that when the interstate was extended in the 1970s, they were displaced. Where once they had an extended, broad street in a connected community, they now have a quieter, more secluded home. Walking around on Halloween this year, I noticed how long it took for us to reach those other homes; no children ventured down our street.
If you notice, you can see how the physical world operates on us and our relationships to one another. New highway construction through neighborhoods changes who our neighbors are. Public land sold to private developers dictates the stores available to us. These physical structures have visible consequences - that is, if you raise your head from your smartphone for long enough to see.
Today, we spend so much of our lives online, in the non-physical world. In some ways, it doesn’t matter that my community extends across the highway; the area Facebook group connects us. I’m even still connected to my home town, and to New York City, and to Seattle, because of the people I follow online. Many of us, if not most of us, have found similar communities in online spaces: we are connected by similar interests, rather than physical locations. And often, we think of the internet as a place; it’s divided into websites and apps, and groupings within those apps. This place we go to was an equalizer, connecting us to people around the world, regardless of where we live.
But like the highway constructed by the state of North Carolina, online connection is always governed and mediated. Someone, or something, is designing where and how we move among one another. Using the lens of urban theory, we can understand how digital interaction is mediated by technology companies with capitalistic interest; our relationships between one another in the online “city” is analogous to the physical world, but even more disconnected from citizen ownership.
Traditionally, cities were where people conducted commerce, and they were built to support the movement of material goods. People were condensed to support direct trade. But with the advancement of capitalism and the development of new technologies, cities were expanded and developed to absorb surplus capital and labor. Harvey describes this in his book Rebel Cities:
“For a capitalist to remain a capitalist, some surplus must be reinvested to make even more surplus…But the result of perpetual reinvestment is the expansion of surplus production.” [1]
The city functions as a primary absorber of this surplus, through the deployment of labor to re-design and develop Paris, through infrastructural transformations in New York, and through suburbanization across the world.2. What were once small-scale townships have exploded into large hubs of property investment, including in the Research Triangle. The urban landscape is constantly changing to accommodate exponential excess capital.
Through the advancement of personal digital technologies, commerce today is largely transacted through the glass box that is the smartphone. This phone, and the internet and apps within it, is our online city. In the box, companies are intentionally designing their interface to drive users toward certain actions that accumulate the surplus capital from tech investments. On nearly every social media app, we have seen a shift from a sequential feed of posts from people we know to an algorithmically driven feed of posts from people trying to sell us something. As a result, we are driven as users toward more influencers and ads that the company decides to promote, rather than the people we’ve actively chosen to follow. The user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) is built to intentionally guide the user toward what they would “want” to do next. The only way to continue accumulating the capital of our attention is to keep us transacting on their platform.
This manipulation is actually warping the way we interact with digital space. A common measurement of effective UX and UI design is the ease of use of an experience; how easy is it for someone to find the thing they are looking for? Take for example, Meta’s Instagram app. It takes three clicks for me to post an Instagram story. It takes ten clicks (and two days) to disconnect my profile from off-app activity tracking that I can’t recall giving permission for in the first place.
Profile >
Menu >
Privacy Center >
Review Settings >
Manage in Accounts Center >
Your Information and Permissions >
Your activity off Meta technologies >
Manage future activity >
Disconnect future activity >
Disconnect future activity >
It may take 48 hours to disconnect future activity.
The UX design of the privacy feature makes it difficult for me to manage and control that setting. Beyond clicks, notice relative size: are your saved albums the most prominent part of your Spotify screen, or do they share space with other features? Is your YouTube app making it easy to engage with commenters on the video you just watched, or is it directing your eye to the never-ending list of what to watch next? The space we interact with is mediated by the UX and UI design of the platform. This in turn is controlled by technology and media companies.
In Doreen Massey’s essay, “A Global Sense of Place,” she explains how the modern world has constructed unique physical places and community groups by layering cultures and built environments.
“Globalization (in the economy, or in culture, or in anything else) does not entail simply homogenization. On the contrary, the globalization of social relations is yet another source of (the reproduction of) geographical uneven development, and thus of the uniqueness of place.”3
An Arabic coffee shop on a busy through-street in Raleigh abuts the Italian sports bar just minutes from a traditional southern diner. These coincide to form a unique place. In digital places, this uniqueness can feel achievable, too. Joe Hunting’s New Yorker documentary “The Reality of Hope”4 follows members of a virtual reality community. In it, they describe how powerful it is to both design and inhabit otherworldly spaces that don’t exist with people from around the world. Their community is real and produces an act of generosity that affects a community member’s life. This is real emotional intimacy and friendship built in a digital place. The platform used in the documentary, VRChat, is an “endless stream of community-made worlds” for users to develop and explore.5 It is less constrictive than a physical space; temperature, weather, some laws of physics do not have to apply. Certainly one does not have to finance an investment into a plot of land to build a movie theater for their friends. But VRChat still has control over much of what is built: it offers certain features to builders, and can take them away. Its core experience is free, but it offers more features to a premium tier, VRChat Plus. It can take away existing features, like when it took away certain “ranks” for long-time users and replaced them with a different categorization system, or disabled the “Movie and Chill” worlds, which often shared pirated content.6 While these changes are often innocuous and justified, it proves that these places online are controlled by the development platform, even if its intentions are seemingly benevolent.
Other examples of this might be more familiar: “poking” one another on Facebook had actual social norms; Spotify used to have a direct message feature where I once shared music with high school friends; AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) is totally defunct. The digital places where we spend our time are only managed by our social community for as long as the features of that platform are available to us. They can be taken away overnight. The “sense of place” online is nearly impossible to maintain because it is manipulated by the priorities of a technology company. In Rebel Cities Harvey proposes that the movement should demand “greater democratic control over the production and use of the surplus” to gain control over the city as a public.7 Is this even possible online? In the physical city, surplus is controlled by land developers and governments. In the online spaces we inhabit, it’s controlled or at least mediated entirely by private interests. There is no way for a coalition of people in community with one another to gain enough power to re-organize or control existing online spaces; it is always dictated for you, unless you have the capital to create a new app and somehow bring the global community there.
We have talked of space; what about time? Surely this has happened to you: one moment you’ve checked a text, the next you realize you’ve spent twenty minutes scrolling through successive minute-long videos. Somehow we stare at glass, nearly motionless, and end up minutes or hours in the future of our own lives without awareness. Massey’s theory of power geometry can help us understand this phenomenon. In it she argues that we experience time and space differently depending on how we move through the world. Corporate travelers are connected via metropolitan hubs, appearing in new cities hundreds of miles away in an hour or two, while bus commuters ride from their nearest stop to their local downtown in the same amount of time. The power over our own time and space is socioeconomic.8 Being online does equalize us in this sense: on the same device using free media, each of us has our time stolen in the same way. But the framework can help uncover the divide of where we spend that stolen time, or its geometry.
In the physical world, people can encounter or be confronted by other people. We can walk into a coffee shop and see one another and the books we read; we can see the faces of those working on our roads; we can hear languages being spoken around us. We can look one another in the eye. In an algorithmic, unlimited feed environment, we can’t easily see who else is in our space, and we can’t actively choose what space we go to. In my neighborhood, I can choose to walk the long way around the block to notice the new holiday decorations, or a For Rent sign, or a magnolia tree in bloom. Online we can’t meander down a new road of our own volition when we are chasing successive dopamine hits. Our space is not self-empowered when we can’t direct ourselves into or out of a place. On TikTok, sub-communities like “BookTok” are connected by hashtags, at best, and getting “on” a sub-community means trying to interact with the algorithm to express your continued interest. This feed siphons us into groups that we don’t always choose. Our time is being spent at the behest of an unseen power that we can’t influence. In our cities we are stratified by the amount of rent we can pay or the locations of transportation centers. Online, we are stratified (supposedly) by what we are interested in, but we are totally secluded from the power - the developers of the algorithm and the company that controls it - that creates the stratification. Of power geometry, Massey writes,
“Different social groups have distinct relationships to this anyway differentiated mobility: some people are more in charge of it than others; some initiate flows and movement, others don't; some are more on the receiving-end of it than others; some are effectively imprisoned by it.”9
Users are not in charge of how a user experience is developed, and users are only on the receiving end of flows and movement online. The imprisonment of this power dynamic affects every user nearly equally, creating a stark divide between the builders of experiences online and the non-builders. In the same way that the goal of a city could be to make people drive their cars, purchase items for their single family home, or spend time in big box stores, the goal of a free social media company is to keep our eyes on the screen to generate ads. The time-space compression in digital space is acute.
Phantasmagoria, a term used by Walter Benjamin to describe the uneasy and fantastical facades of the Parisian Arcades, is apt for our online worlds. Unseen workers fulfill online delivery orders; the UI is re-skinned every couple of years; we spend time on our phones we forget about; artificial intelligence is rampant in our already duplicitous rivers of content. We are gazing into a kaleidoscope of our worst fears and biggest dreams across time and space. Everywhere we look there is disorientation. We can’t even see the ruins of our own past online without the benevolence of archival non-profits.10In a physical city the old construction sometimes coexists with the new. Online, seemingly everything and yet nothing persists. Our sense of place online and our right to our digital cities is out of our hands.
Endnotes
1. David Harvey, Rebel Cities (London: Verso, 2012), 5.
2. Harvey, 7-10.
3. Doreen Massey, “A Global Sense of Place” in Space, Place and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 156.
4. Joe Hunting, “The Reality of Hope,” The New Yorker, August 11, 2025, video, 30:19. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-documentary/how-the-bonds-among -virtual-reality-furries-saved-a-life-in-the-reality-of-hope.
5. “Press,” VRChat, accessed November 19, 2025, https://hello.vrchat.com/press. 6. “Removed Features,” VRChat Wiki, accessed November 19, 2025,
https://wiki.vrchat.com/wiki/Removed_Features.
7. Harvey, 22.
8. Massey, 149-150.
9. Massey, 149.
10. The Internet Archive is a California-based 501(c)(3) non-profit established in 1996. It manages a web archive that can be accessed on archive.org.
