hi, I am a middle aged student, currently tangling with the Curtin University BA(Internet Studies) course and studying online - so my classroom is an online discussion board and my class mates spread Australia wide. It appears that the majority of my fellow students are older than I am so I suspect we are not the average university class :-) After reading a years worth of the archives for this list I thought I would relate the experiences of my odd group to those interested in our ongoing academic battle. 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. It has made for some very interesting discussions, especially given that our lecturer is also of the "there is a cyberspace" camp. Discussion levels in this class are three times the level of discussions in my other two classes - it has been a lively debate !! In reading articles from this list and from other academic areas I have noted that there are some who don't go along with the general cyberspace idea but that the thrust of academia appears to be heavily pro cyberspace. I am interested in the thoughts of those in either camp on this issue. And what do I believe??? I suspect that there are a group of people who entered this field in the preWeb era who, generally, saw the internet as some kind of saviour that would create a benevolent global community and cure humankind of all its ills, and in this text only dawn they got a little carried away. These people are the driving force behind all these notions of virtual realities, cyber communities and cyberspace and want to believe that the internet has changed, or will change, human society. These people also tend to be overly concerned about privacy issues and the intrusion of government into their "playground". Then there are the "no cyberspacers" who see the internet in a less romantic manner. These people will tend to be from the Web era, they see the internet as a tool that enhances an individuals life in the same way that the phone, or car or electricity enhance our lives. They see the internet as something to be used, not something that will change human society. They don't expect the internet to bring about political or social reform and tend to be aware that the internet is used by a small part of human society and that it is a rich mans tool. 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 I look forward to your views on this topic. Since this is my first post, you will of course be gentle with me :-) see ya, Eero Tarik (aka ET) Adelaide, South Australia
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/
Eeros, thanks for provoking a great discussion! I for one have never doubted the spatiality of cyberspace - so I guess I'd fit in to Eero's 20% (although I am firmly from the 'web era'). In my own research with web designers I've found a distinct production of spatiality within websites - whether they be 'trivialised' spaces with specific uses or sites of interaction, employing large scale landscapes (such as the MUDs etc which Frank mentioned). I wholeheartedly agree with your rejection of the utopian idealism which Barlow espoused but even at a practical level spatiality is employed, and reworked within the web (particularly). Think of the routes which allow users to explore hypertext - taking pathways from page to page following both their own judgement and pre-disposed routes of passage which are embedded by the page's designer. Similarly, think of how you *get* to a webpage - a URL in the address bar? A search engine? A link? - all these redefine the spatiality of the website and the ways in which you interact with it. Sites must draw their spatial boundaries by putting disclaimers like "We are not responsible for the content of external internet sites", and most commonly brand themselves with distinct colour schemes, layouts and style sheets (not to mention the issue of domain names). I would never seek to suggest that cyberspaces are the same as what you term 'real' space (although offline metaphors are of course employed - and broken - just as Jonathan's paper suggests) - but that doesn't negate their spatiality. Just as Walter Benjamin noted how the electric street lights were at first fashioned in the form of older gas ones, cyberspatiality is increasingly beginning to reject the bounds of offline spaces. This spatiality is inherently linked with the offline; again, so-called 'cyberbole' says "the is no matter here" (Barlow) or "we leave our bodies behind" (Rheingold) but more recent work has showed us otherwise, the online *is* affected by the offline. On the flip side, the offline is becoming increasingly affected by the online. Yes, this is uneven (and isn't everything?) but it is happening, through URLs on advertising, mobile devices and so on. Just as Frank said, there are cyberspaces just as there are 'real' spaces (although, social constructionism has a fair amount to say about that term!) - how do you group 'real' spaces together? Rooms into a home? Homes into a street? Streets into a city etc - the same applies for cyberspace's) - text and images become pages, pages become a site, sites become a web. Don't forget that even the 127 character ASCII subset (from which all pages are ultimately coded) is inherently located within the socio-spatial networks that created it. One final thing, I've gone on a bit long and perhaps I should confess that I have a geography background here, you sent your post to an international list, on Australian time, and I picked it up here on a wet Welsh morning - the temporality of the space(s) in which this (asynchronous) conversation takes place is surely a distinct illustration of it's (cyborgic) spatiality? In engaging with space and place, we *do* look at media(ted) spaces such as Television, letters, or phone space - they have changed society, even though you may not regard them as 'real'. But then, perhaps it would be easier to think in terms of Simulacra and Simulation. :) Paul ---------------------- Paul Bevan Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences University of Wales Aberystwyth Ceredigion Wales SY23 3DB Tel. +44 (0)1970 622653 Fax. +44 (0)1970 622659 eml: ppb98@aber.ac.uk
participants (3)
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Eero Tarik -
Frank Schaap -
Paul Bevan