Introduction

This chapter explains how and why digital technologies have become a central concern across the social sciences (Kitchin & Dodge, 2011), before describing a chapter structure for the book. For geographers the entanglement of digital technology in our everyday lives has become so ‘pervasively quotidian, mediating tasks such as work, travel, consumption, production, and leisure’ (Ash et al., Digital Geographies. Sage, 2019, p. 26) that it warrants a ‘digital turn’ (Ibid.). Media scholars go further, labelling it a post-digital age (Taffel, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 22(3), 324–338, 2016; Mazierska et al., Popular Music in the Post-Digital Age. Popular Music in the Post-Digital Age. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc., 2018) where online and offline are deemed no longer discernible. Meanwhile, those with a sociological bent place critical onus on how digital technologies gather, store, secure, sort, order, filter, mutate, curate, story, and render data available—and the various power dynamics involved. Also, what that means for the constitution of everyday life (Kitchin, Data Lives: How Data Are Made and Shape Our World. Bristol University Press, 2021). By outlining these fields of thought, the chapter introduces a set of definitions and terms whilst contextualising the importance of understanding the social consequences of digital map use. It then explains how later chapters work cumulatively to generate both a practice-orientated digital sociological framework and new theory about how and to what extent digital maps anchor everyday life.