Quotes I can’t fit in my review

Posted on | May 2, 2007 | No Comments

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 typing at my computer, somewhere else another person is doing the same thing. This logic of contemporaneous use certainly emphasizes that time and space are not separable features here, but are part of what gives space its eventlike structure. This relational network produces a space that, while enacted by individual use, is likewise caught up in emergent global structures, both on- and offline. The network space enacted between individual users via CMC is in a very real sense inseparable from the globalized networks of traffic, tourism, and industry that bring individuals in physical proximity for both work and play. Protocols such as buddy lists and instant messaging reinforce the enactive nature of these networks, that one’s own set of connections is always virtually in place and actualised at any given moment within a globally distributed network. In this figuration of lived practice, however, the “global” network matters less than the representation of cyberspace as a familiar terrain in which the material form of CMC serves to strengthen the “ties that bind.” Cyberspace becomes my cyberspace. These topographies reinforce the sorts of social spaces in which preexisting connections are strengthened: a virtual world fashioned as a walled-in city, in which all the digital landmarks are familiar.

– Mark Nunes, ‘The Problem of Cyberspace’, in Cyberspaces of Everyday Life, p. 28

Category: Reading, Research, Web(log) Stuff

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