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

[Phillip Thurtle]

Hello friends,

I think Charles's summing up the exchange is very useful. I only 
disagree with the final conclusion.

There is a good deal of literature that challenges the Kantian 
tradition. Much of it, however, is from the Marxist, phenomenological, 
or postsructural perspective. For my money, the most useful 
articulation of space is in Merleau-Ponty's _Phenomenology of 
Perception_. In this piece he explicates space as a type of "depth" 
dependent on our connections to each other (as opposed to our distances 
from each other). Under this conception, the internet is a real space 
but it has a specific material manifestation in the ways that it 
connects us.

This has been extremely fruitful in my work because it then allows one 
to interrogate what exactly are these connections? What type of 
communications do they allow for? Do the promote weak or strong ties 
(please note, this is not equivalent to determining)? What types of 
"noises" are prevalent? How can we design more social equitable spaces?

Other thinkers that have been very useful in thinking about space:

LeFebvre is useful for thinking about how social spaces are created.
De Certeau is useful for thinking about how individuals navigate spaces.
Elizabeth Grosz's work has been useful for thinking about space in 
relationship to embodiment.
Alphonso Lingis's "Introduction" to Merleau-Ponty's _Visible and 
Invisible_ is very useful as well.

A good introduction to different ways to thinking about space can be 
found in Crang and Thrifts _Thinking About Space_.

Also, I would like to plug Rob Shield's work in this area. He wrote one 
of the best secondary works on Lefebvre and now edits the journal 
_Space and Culture_.

Yours because the internet is a space-
Phillip

Phillip Thurtle
http://www.carleton.ca/~pthurtle/