home cooked theory

Twitter makes me a lazy blogger

That much should be obvious, but I hope the updates on the sidebar are explaining why I’m not posting much. I found myself emailing a colleague yesterday saying that I had a heavy writing schedule over the next 6 months, with every week already planned. In retrospect it’s an odd thing to have said, ridiculously [...]

Sign of the times

Caught on campus:

Not the most uplifting sight on my lonely walk back to the carpark this evening! I have to teach next week, too – sigh.

Communicating nomadism

A key objective of Mark Nunes’ Cyberspaces of Everyday Life is to stipulate that cyberspace is heteromorphic. Drawing on Lefebvre, he wants to demonstrate that these “virtual topographies do not coordinate into an overall system, but rather interpenetrate each other, producing spaces in conflict” (xxvi). For instance, in one passage he writes:
As a space of [...]

Quotes I can’t fit in my review, contd.

Email occupies a paradoxical relation to space… marking distance as both necessary and irrelevant; dispatch and destination must be noncoterminous, but the distance between termini must be more virtual than actual. (86)
While simulating a network of determinate, point-to-point contact, email also sets up a social space that is more distributive than connective. (87)
To the extent [...]

Quotes I can’t fit in my review

The situation of cyberspace as a real space, mapped in relational terms, is perhaps clearest in instances where the networks of communication explicitly relate to the networks of everyday life. With a “buddy list” or AOL Instant Message, for example, the network of computers reinforces the idea that at the same moment that I am [...]