[Air-l] Re: first post (An Internet without Space)

[Jillana Enteen]

I second Michelle.

Particularly when she writes:
Computer representations can also justify the
> perpetuation of physical but certainly not necessary or natural 
> conditions
> by mirroring material circumstances. I believe that such spatial
> vernaculars are having a significant effect on our cultural situations.

I'm currently working on an essay about this topic, so I'll quote a 
brief couple of paragraphs that outline my argument:  (Please don't 
quote without my permission and proper citational credit):

		In its current state, the internet may be understood as a dynamic, 
shifting network of computers and other electronic signal receptors 
transmitting and/or receiving bits of digital information. Popular 
conceptions of the Internet, however, depict this exchange of 
information as delimiting virtual space. Privileging certain 
conceptions of cyberspace over others is not a 'disinterested' 
aesthetic strategy; the envisioning of space, like all forms of 
rhetoric, inscribes particular relations of power (Foucault, 1979; 
Soja, 1989; Davis, 1992). In this brief essay, I argue that current 
procedures for identifying the location of electronic data, Uniform 
Resource Locators in particular, situate the internet and the World 
Wide Web (www) as geographically based systems with corresponding 
geopolitical reference points in the physical world. Rather than 
recognizing the networks formed through on-line data exchange, the 
prevailing archeology of the I\internet and World Wide Web ties 
individuals, not to mention data, to physical locations.
	Space is relevant to the internet when considering that vast sequences 
of binary code are physically stored on hard drives and other 
containers. It is the transfer of information, however, that 
fundamentally characterizes the internet; connections between computers 
are initiated. Code is exchanged. Data summoned. These connections are 
rarely direct or one-to-one; a request for data by a user at a computer 
will initiate responses from an unpredictable number of other computers 
and information exchange portals in order to complete a process as 
simple as viewing a text document or a personal home page. Janet Abatte 
relates the reliance of the internet on packet switching; "Since the 
nodes in a message switching system act independently in processing the 
messages and there are no preset routes between nodes, the nodes can 
adapt to changing conditions by picking the route that is best at any 
moment" (Abatte 1999, 13). In fact, “best” routes are often 
miscalculated based on previous paths of exchange, so predictions based 
on efficiency or availability cannot chart actual data transmission. 
The internet's "shape" is thus permanently in flux and illogical. It 
performs movement without encapsulation, without borders, and with 
neither concrete interiors nor exteriors.
	So why continue to think about the internet as space? Journalist 
accounts, versions of computer-mediated communication in popular 
culture, and foundational tracts by new media theorists such as Michael 
Benedikt and Howard Rheingold. Each employs architectural and 
territorial metaphors (Benedikt 1993) (Rheingold 1993). In Cyberspace, 
Some Proposals, Michael Benedikt compiles a series of essays that 
endorse the spatiality of electronic exchanges. Benedikt's own 
contribution envisions connectivity as another form of architecture, 
providing complex graphs and metaphors about movement in space and 
fields. In the same collection, Marcos Novak defines cyberspace in this 
same collection as "a completely spatialized visualization of all 
information in global information processing systems" (Novak 1993, 
225-254). Still considered a visionary, Howard Rheingold refers to the 
internet as a frontier. As the title of Howard Rheingold's influential 
1993 and recently reissued text The Virtual Community: Homesteading on 
the Electronic Frontier [emphasis mine] suggests, Rheingold redeployed 
America's sense of entitlement and masculinist spirit of conquest that 
was outlined in manifest destiny and redeployed by NASA to garner 
popular support for the space program, a rational that had 
correspondingly fueled exploration, domination and colonial 
exploitation by European nations. These images of colonization rescript 
territorial incursion as an invasion at the expense of whom/whatever 
pre-existed. These spatial metaphors translate into social subjugation.

	Much has been made of the affects of mapping on subjugation in terms 
of the colonial project. Neil Smith and Cindi Katz report: “In so far 
as mapping involves exploration, selection, definition, generalization 
and translation of data, it assumes a range of social cum 
representational powers, . . .the power to map can be closely entwined 
with the power of conquest and social control” (Smith and Katz, 70). In 
addition, Anne McClintock's account of the genealogies of imperialism 
reveals the historical precedence and will to dominate inherent in the 
project of mapping (McClintock 1995, 23). She writes: "The map is a 
technology of knowledge that professes to capture the truth about a 
place in pure, scientific form, operating under the guise of scientific 
exactitude and promising to retrieve and reproduce nature exactly as it 
is. As such, it is also a technology of possession, promising that 
those with the capacity to make such perfect representations must also 
have the right of territorial control" (27-8).

best wishes,
jillana
Jillana Enteen
jillana at jillana.net
http://jillana.net

On Feb 3, 2004, at 12:25 PM, Michele White wrote:

> Dear Colleagues,
>
> I am resistant to the continued use of the term "space" and spatial
> metaphors when writing about the Internet and related technologies. In
> fact, part of my ongoing research practice is to address this issue. I
> believe that the employment of such terms as "space" and "cyberspace" 
> in
> popular and academic writings about the computer and Internet 
> technologies
> makes it seem like representations are a kind of material environment.
> This writing repeats and even enhances design strategies that describe
> synchronous settings as "rooms," Internet maps that produce unnecessary
> and fictive geographies, and programming that makes users' progression
> through sites seem like bodily movement. Such visceral renderings
> discourage critical interventions into Internet representations because
> sites seem tangible. The conflation of space-producing discourses with
> user investment in particular sites and identities threatens to make
> stereotypes "real." The represented bodies of Internet settings are
> "fleshed out" because there seems to be an environment that can support
> varied bodily processes. Computer representations can also justify the
> perpetuation of physical but certainly not necessary or natural 
> conditions
> by mirroring material circumstances. I believe that such spatial
> vernaculars are having a significant effect on our cultural 
> situations. I
> also continue to ponder other ways that we can write about and 
> experience
> technologies. I would be interested in continuing such a dialog.
>
> All my best,
> Michele
>
>
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>
Jillana Enteen
jillana at jillana.net
http://jillana.net
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