[Air-l] first post

[Paul Bevan]

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 at aber.ac.uk