[Air-l] Space and territoriality

[jeremy hunsinger]

On Sunday, February 3, 2002, at 10:26 AM, Chris Heckler wrote:

> Jeremy Hunsinger wrote:
>
> what is the extent of your idea of territoriality?   are you interested 
> in mental territory or only projected spacialities?
>
>
>
> Mainly I am interested in how online non-verbal behavior is used to 
> indicate either.  How are you defining projected spacialities?

we project space in many ways, projected spacialities are those 
phenomena that we interpret as spacial, but might be understood in other 
ways.  We project spaciality onto the net as much as it exists there, by 
creating its useful places in terms of space be that pages, rooms, 
dungeons, etc.  You could alternatively appreciate them as interstitial 
entities, transient and amorphous in which interaction occurs.  Then 
given what you have below the nature of territoriality changes from less 
about space, and more about occupation, the descartesian "I am" restated 
over and over, combined with the consistent 'this is mine', which occurs 
often on the net.  I don't see many people going that way though in the 
end.  But the idea of a projected spaciality is that the space is 
created and maintained in the perception of participant, and is 
projected onto the domain in question, very Kantian in a way.

However, i think you are probably going for something different.  For 
mental territory, i might suggest a brief glance at
http://www2.cddc.vt.edu/digitalfordism/2digdeterr.html

In other senses space is very real on the net.s



>   An example of the types of things I am looking at is the flame war 
> phenomena.  I feel that flaming is a great example of how humans defend 
> territory online.  In comparative gender studies, men typially take up 
> more physical space during face-to-face type interactions.  An 
> analogous online study reflects that on message boards men will 
> typically post more frequently and write longer posts.  So what I would 
> be looking at in that instance is how people use their posts to 
> establish that a certain message board is part of their cyber territory.

I worry that the latter analogue is not analogous due to other factors. 
For instance, is the message board medium, like say usenet, amenable 
toward certain kinds of writing over others, are there questions of 
history? are there counterexamples?  I know that in general i post more 
frequently, but then I work behind a computer screen the majority of the 
day, perhaps it is partially related to the way men and women's lives 
are structured, what populations exist, etc. etc.  Too many possible 
intervening variables for me to list or account for.

This is not to say that cyber territory is not a factor really, just 
that I don't know how much of a factor it is say over something else, 
like habit, and while they overlap in interesting ways, i don't know 
that it would be held the case across cyberspacial entities.


jeremy hunsinger
jhuns at vt.edu
on the ibook
www.cddc.vt.edu
www.cddc.vt.edu/jeremy
www.dromocracy.com
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