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

[Michele White]

Dear Colleagues,

Thanks for the interesting posts on space. One of my concerns is the ways
that the concept of Internet space often leads to the idea that there are
people on the screen or inside the interface. While there are certainly
people engaging through varied technologies and they are very invested in
their connections, the mediated aspects of engagement and the deeply
constructed interfaces and identity representations are sometimes not
addressed. This mediation significantly shapes what we see and experience.
With increasing computer processing speed and connectivity, ubiquitous
computing, and more detailed simulations it becomes easier and we are
often encouraged to forget the technologies and representations. My hope
is that we can address both user interests and the ways that traditional
ideas of age, class, gender, race, and sexuality (which are conveyed
through visual and textual representations) are reinscribed through
technologies, practices, and depictions. I know that Ulla has asked me
about alternative terminology and I often try to model this in my writing.
I employ such terms as "setting" instead of space. Admittedly, sometimes
thinking through our ways of speaking the Internet removes further words
from my vocabulary and leads to a spluttering or form of unspeaking.

As I researcher, I believe that one of my responsibilities is to consider
the ways that individuals view and speak about Internet settings,
contemporary technologies, and other social experiences and to suggest the
problems, promises, and (as Ulla prompts) the other ways that individuals
and societies can represent and produce these technologies and cultural
practices.  I sometimes rework a vocabulary from the
humanities—particularly film and media studies, photography theory,
literary studies, and art history to write about such depictions as the
rectangular or body-shaped images of synchronous graphical settings or the
photo-like images of webcams. 

We might also look to writings about past technologies to understand our
representations of the Internet. Television and other media have been
understood as live, alive, and a space. Thomas Hutchinson indicated, that
with television "the outside world can be brought into the home" (ix) and
Charles Siepmann argued that television was a way of "'going places'
without even the expenditure of movement" (340). More recently, Rhona J.
Berenstein has noted that television also had the reputation of "being a
medium of immediacy: an apparatus that, more than film, offers its viewers
live access to the world around them and hence it was assumed, to reality
" and that television resonates "in spatial terms, suggesting a physical
proximity between the viewer and the performance rendered" (26). 

In any case, it seems to me that each vocabulary and way of understanding
the Internet produces a set of cultural perceptions that shape our
understanding of these technologies and social practices, what they are,
and what they can be.

All my best,
Michele

Rhona J. Berenstein, "Acting Live: TV Performance, Intimacy, and
Immediacy," Reality Squared: Televisual Discourse on the Real, ed. James
Friedman. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002.

Thomas H Hutchinson, Here Is Television, Your Window on the World. New
York: Hastings House, 1948. 

Charles Siepmann, Radio, Television, and Society. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1950.