[Air-l] first post

[Frank Schaap]

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.

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