User:Lieven Van Speybroeck/Reading/Theory/Fernback The Individual within the Collective

Notes on Jan Fernback's The Individual within the Collective

1. Central questions:
   • How is collectivity in cyberspace jusxtaposed against individuality?
   • How is cyberspace used as a public space and what does this mean for the collectivity?
   • How are anarchy and dissent dealt with among the collectivity of computer-mediated communication (CMC) users?
2. On (cyber)space:
   • [...] space is not matter, but a set of culturally bound relations as well as an empirical construction. Urry (1985)
   • The development of electronic communication technologies has abrogated space and time such that we live in a boundless "global village" with "no sense of place". (~McLucah & Meyrowitz)

   -> widespread use of CMC made re-examination of our concept of space necessary.

   • Cyberspace is popular culture: a pixelated mirror of everyday life and all it's 'features'
   • CMC as an example of
3. Users as consumers:
   • Our participation in public life has been reduced to our media consumption
   • Television as the main tool for mediaconsumption (passive consumption)
4. Openness of cyberspace: only rules are social propriety and "netiquette"

   -> Flaming and virtual harassment ("dark side of CMC")

5. Nature and limits of public space ~ seventeeth-century coffee houses of Britain/salons Paris/...
6. Cyberspace offers a surrogate for an authentic socially democratic public realm that in the 'real' world exists nowhere
7. Cyberspace is both public and private