Eero Tarik wrote: <snip>
A curious thing has happened in our class.... 50% of the class firmly believe that the internet is a magnificent communications tool, but refuse to believe the romantic hallucination that there is a cyberspace, we have been labelled the "nocyberspacers". 20% of the class firmly believe there is a cyberspace and the other 30% drift in between the two groups. <snip some more> For my first web article, "There is no cyberspace, Mr Barlow", which summarises my views on this subject.... http://www.tarik.com.au/university/ETbarlow.html
Thanks for this great post Eero and welcome! You certainly seem to have nailed a very important issue. I will read your article with interest later this week, when the first classes of the semester are over and done with. Let me just quickly say this (without having read your paper, so I don't know if you deal with this more in depth there): In my experience the issue of there being a cyberspace is at least in large part a contextual question. If you partake in a MUD, MOO, MMOG (Massively Multiplayer Online Game, think Everquest), or chatroom/channel, then the online experience is a much more spatially oriented one. Note that these environments have a strong (mostly explicit) game element in them and most of these games revolve around playing/performing a more or less fictive character/persona. If you surf the web, join web-based forums, webrings, or start weblogging, you may certainly encounter notions and feelings of community, but the experience IMHO is much less spatially oriented. Although there is plenty of playfulness in these environments too, the interactions revolve much more around the "real" people behind their online presentations. These online presentations, while sometimes pseudonyms, are much more stable because generally people have a certain stake, investment, and thus accountability in those environments. It's interesting to see that this aspect seems to be amplified in a relatively small linguistic and geographical locale such as the Netherlands. Your point that Internet romantics such as Barlow cast a warm, utopian blanket of cyberspace over the whole of the Internet is well taken :) So, is there _a_ cyberspace out there? I'd say there are definitely _cyberspaces_ out there, but exactly what they look like and what their implications are for society at large, that just depends on where you stand when you look at them... cyberspaces have a tendency to look flat and featureless from the outside and huge, bright and detailed from the inside :) Anyway... just a couple of cents, YMMV :) Frank. -- Barst [NL] http://fragment.nl/barst/ Fragments [EN] http://fragment.nl/fragments/