[Air-l] first post

[Charles Ess]

And now that civility has returned (thanks, Randy!), let me add here:  I've
long been impressed with the stubbornness of the spatial metaphor, beginning
with early efforts in hypertext.  Despite the radical intentions of
poststructuralists (such as my friend and mentor George Landow and others)
and affiliated postmodernists to overcome what were argued to be artificial
boundaries of space and time, spatiality just didn't seem to go away.

In addition to the points Jonathan makes, I would add an epistemological one
that has yet to surface.  Dear ol' Kant argued in the Critique of Pure
Reason that human beings are basically built in such a way that we shape all
of our sensory impressions through the frameworks of space and time.  He
argued this on the basis of simple thought experiments (inspiring Einstein
and Bohr a century or so later), e.g.
a) can you imagine a space with items in it? (sure)
b) can you imagine a space with no items in it? (sure)
c) can you imagine items with in no space, with no space to "contain" them?

If you have trouble answering "c" with yes, be comforted.  In quantum
mechanics, for example, where there _are_ entities that exist in a 'space'
of zero dimensions, no one claims to be able to imagine what they might
"look like".  (Nicely enough, the physicists can simply trust the
mathematics at that point...)

Presuming your answer to "c" is no - then this suggests that space is indeed
a necessary condition/framework for our constructing/imagining our knowledge
of the world.  (Contra the jabs of some postmodernists against putatively
excessive rationality in Kant, the old Chinese of Königsberg developed a
sufficiently strong account of imagination in human knowing as to inspire
the foundations of German Romanticism.)

The stubbornness of spatiality as a metaphor, despite some of the best
efforts by some of the best people to go beyond it, has seemed to me to be
to at least be consistent with Kant's point.
But consistency, of course, is not confirmation. Has anyone reviewed the
literature - not just in CMC but also cognitive science, etc. - to see if
anyone has tried to examine this issue from an empirical point of view,
i.e., to study controlled efforts to test whether or not most of us are
indeed equipped with such spatial and temporal frameworks as necessary
conditions of our knowledge?  Whatever the outcomes of such studies, they
would directly contribute to this discussion as well.

Cheers,
charles ess



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jonathan Marshall" <Jonathan.Marshall at uts.edu.au>
To: <air-l at aoir.org>
Sent: Monday, February 02, 2004 10:31 PM
Subject: Re: [Air-l] first post


>
> Good series of questions.
>
> I guess the interesting thing to me is why the hell people
> need to construct using the Internet as a spatial thing
> in the first place?
>
> We don't talk of 'phone space' or 'TV space'.
>
> So if I can cheat here, I'd say Cyber'space' is affected
> by the intersection of at least four factors.
>
> Firstly, by the use of offline space
> Secondly, by the use of the 'locale' for the reduction of
> communicative ambiguity.
> Thirdly, by the structures of communication employed online and
> Fourthly, by the use of space metaphors as a topos for persuasion,
>
> Offline space effects online space in that it gives the routes for
> wires, and the relevant social boundaries which affect the
> composition of the different types of offline groups (ethnic,
> class, politcal or subcultural, etc) which influences the composition
> of online groups, and the ways that people interpret each others
> messages.
>
> These offline space factors determine ease of access, delay, time
> of day people are online etc and therefore also affects the
> population composition of online groups which in turn gives the
> sense of the group's space through the emails or message they emit.
> (ie this is a way of saying onine groups develop cultures, and these
> cultures are not independent of the offline world)
>
> Offline the 'locale' often gives indications of expected behaviour,
> (ie bank, public park, person's home etc) which allows interpretation
> of communication, and a similar idea becomes important in the
> construction of Cyberspace, as is the distinction made between
> locales of public and private action - and the behaviour allowed
> and expected there.  The ambiguities which arise are part of the
> dynamics of onlilne life.
>
> Online 'space' is also created by the structures of communication
> (ie whether the online forum is a Mailing List, MOO, Newsgroup etc)
> and the patterns of naming and exchange which eventuate.
> For example, people on a List define list locale by the volume
> and style of their posts and this might be quite different from
> other lists - giving it a sense of place and hence (to us) a sense of
space.
>
> The involvement of communicative organization in the construction
> of space means that List space differs from MOO space and from
> Web space and has consequences for the kinds of social action
> and conflict which can easily eventuate.
>
> Online social space in many ways revitalizes the metaphorical
> similarity between topic and place which features in the
> rhetoric of Aristotle (ok :).  Topos determines the method of
> persuasion, or poetic figuration which determines the nature of
> place which in turn determines topos.  Topos (topic) is a tool
> of persuasion in rhetoric theory.
>
> People making political arguments about the Internet, or commercial
> organisations trying to exploit the Internet, often try to define
> it as a particular type of place to mobilize the persuasive topos
> associated with that locale. ie whether it should be free or
> controlled, or how people should behave.
> For example I was on a list once where people were arguing whether
> the list was like a lounge room or a pub, in order to say what
> kind of behaviour was appropriate or allowable.
>
> to self promote.  I wrote about this at length in:
>
> "Cyber-space or Cyber-topos: the Creation of Online Space",
> Social Analysis, Special Issue on the Cultures of Cyberspace,
> No. 45(1), pp81-102.
>
> which may be completely irrelevant :)
>
> jon
>
>
>
>
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