RE: [Air-l] Re: first post (An Internet without Space)
Regarding the place - space conversation, a question comes to my mind. When we invest of ourselves in cyberspaces or cyberplaces, are we investing in the space/place, or are we investing in the people that occupy that space/place. As a researcher/practitioner in the development of cyber**aces that can encourage and support the interaction between the people of a geographic locality, it seems to me that an understanding of such things lies in the perceptions of the people that appropriate them as part of their lives. Similar to the concept of community (dare I use such word in educated company), it is not the infrastructure that makes the community, it is the people that make the community. The community is then supported by the infrastructure. Using the term place in the vein of "third places", I prefer to focus my lens on the people that make up space to see if it is a place. But more importantly I like to examine how and why people are willing to turn a cyberspace into a cyberplace. To put it in more layman's terms, space is the final frontier, a place is somewhere you go. ;-) BTW, this is my first post to this list. But with recent conversation on this list, I am prepared and my flame proof suit is now on, so fire at will. That's Will --> 8-) Regards, Kevin W. Tharp
From: "Kevin Tharp"
Regarding the place - space conversation, a question comes to my mind. When we invest of ourselves in >cyberspaces or cyberplaces, are we investing in the space/place, or are we investing in the people that occupy >that space/place. As a researcher/practitioner in the development of cyber**aces that can encourage and >support the interaction between the people of a geographic locality, it seems to me that an understanding of >such things lies in the perceptions of the people that appropriate them as part of their lives.
i think (imho) that it is always worth looking at Lefebvre's ideas here - ie that social space is created thro social action - hence we can talk about particular landscapes of the internet that are 'social spaces' because people are investing in each other in that space denise carter
just some more information on the subject of space... esp. socio-spatial metaphors of Cyberspace... (and excuse the shameless selfadvertisement... ) My paper from IR 3.0 can be found online and dealt with the mataphors and their problematic use http://www.uni-muenster.de/PeaCon/zurawski/ueberwachung/space_metaphors.html and ANette Markham has written on the subject and presented it in Toronto... http://ascend.comm.uic.edu/~amarkham/writing/MarkhamTPWwebversion.htm she was asking if the Internet was a tool a place or a way of being... and then another ineresting article for this disusssion.. http://www.ul.ie/~philos/vol5/cyberspace.html by rebecca brant.. what kind of space is cyberspace... more later, I have to re-read the post now.. best nilz -- Dr. Nils Zurawski Universität Hamburg Inst. für kriminologische Sozialforschung Allendeplatz 1 20146 Hamburg Germany tel. +49 (0) 40 42838 6185 fax. +49 (0) 40 42838 2328 Projekt zu Videoüberwachung: http://www.uni-muenster.de/PeaCon/zurawski/ueberwachung
Forgive the techno-reductionism here, but the Internet is not an entirely intangible, ethereal cloud of disembodied ideas either, possessing only a fictive geography. It does have a "real" physical dimension as well, always implied in the concept of "digital divide", i.e. actual machinery distributed throughout geographic space--computers connected by telephone lines and cables to servers in turn connected to other servers and computers, and so on. That is as much of a real space as any other space that I can think of, and it certainly does take up space. And that "where" is also its "when", to the extent that temporality is connected to the traveling of messages, data, images, whatever, throughout that hardware space. What makes "cyberspace" real for me then is that, unlike another mechanical tool (such as a jackhammer), this machine has something going on within it, human communication. That people create spaces for meanings within another space of enabling hardware only seems to validate the use of both spatial and temporal visualizations of the Internet. Cheers, Maximilian C. Forte Anthropology & Sociology University College of Cape Breton
participants (4)
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Denise Carter -
Kevin Tharp -
Maximilian Forte -
Nils Zurawski