User:Yiorgos Bagakis/Essays/outline essay1

How do we inscribe traditional notions of space during the process of understanding The Internet? What are these spatial metaphors most commonly used?

http://manetas.com/txt/websitesare.htm “… the Internet is not just another “media”, as the Old Msedia insists, but mostly a “space”, similar to the American Continent immediately after it was discovered – anything that can be found on the Web has a physical presence. It occupies real estate. To encounter a logo, a picture or an animation in the Internet is a totally different experience than to find the same stuff in a magazine or on the television. “Things” in the Internet exist in a specific location, while in magazines and on TV contents are mostly bullets of information. Online they constitute a body: they are parts of a new genre. They are Web Entities.”

Network Topologies:

• Centralized networks
• Decentralized networks

Internet as a Distributed network

• Deleuze & Guattari paradigm of the rhizome

Spatial analogies for the internet

• What is space – place – location. The URL locations. The relevance/ irrelevance of geography
• Cyberspace = internet?
• Maps as interfaces to understand complex entities
• The Internet as public sphere (new media: critical introduction, Lister, Dovey, Griddings, Grant, Kelly) – a new agora? Construction of political identity and ideology

The internet as a gallery space

• The Speed Show. A place for internet art
• Buying the URL Location of net.art

The user in the internet space:

• Individuals as part of Virtual communities (where rape, or political debate is possible..)
• Users assume that they can overcome the tyranny of geography through cyberspace
• Users as: Digital Natives/Digital Immigrants.

Marc Augé coined the phrase "non-place" to refer to places of transcience that do not hold enough significance to be regarded as "places". Examples of a non-place would be a motorway, a hotel room, an airport or a supermarket

• The internet as a place with non-places

The Mythological utopia of the internet

• The Mythology of Technology: The Internet As Utopia
• The myth of progress. And the miraculous capabilities of the internet. karim On ellul

Spatial metaphors help make sense of what we experience as the internet Wertheim notes that many characterizations of the Internet are drawn from biblical descriptions of heaven (1999: 256–61) karim On ellul, page 6/22

It comes to embody the sense of mystery that was once the province of religion (1964: 141–2). This is manifested presently in the mass amazement expressed towards the capabilities of the Internet; it seems magical, even miraculous, in enabling activities that were supposedly impossible. The superlatives attached to the capabilities of electronic networking are generally considered to be beyond question, quite like religious attitudes to divinity. karim On ellul, page 9/22