Ostwald, Michael J. “Virtual Urban Futures.” Virtual Politics: Identity and Community in Cyberspace. Ed. David Holmes. London: Sage, 1997. 125-144.
Ostwald’s piece sounds a little like a comment on the Grand Theft Auto debate: “Overt virtual technologies, including the Internet, were blamed, like television before them, for the breakdown in the family unit, the rise in street crime and the decay of conventional Cartesian urban spaces” (125). Although Ostwald does not mention it, one could also say that this debate about “new media” and society goes all the back to youth being “corrupted” by the novel in the 19th century. It is interesting to note the presumed threat that each of these mediums (the Internet, TV, and the novel) posed for this greater sense of the “community” at large. Community, for Ostwald, is the common denominator that he uses in his discussion to span the gap between physical and virtual spaces.
Ostwald’s argument is actually spelled out in his first endnote: “The aim of this chapter is to remove the boundaries that separate the ‘physical’ from the ‘virtual’, it is doubly ironic that such ambiguous terms must first be created and then used alongside the equally ambiguous terms ‘physical’, ‘virtual’ and ‘real’” (143n1). Personally, I am all for challenging and examining boundary conditions between physical and virtual spaces, but removing the boundaries? I like the idea of unpacking what is “real” and I do not believe that this has to be limited to physical space. But does that mean that distinctions like physical and virtual no longer have any meaning?
In relation to the community aspect that Ostwald sees as connecting physical and virtual spaces, he spends time discussion the agora. “Similarly the complex interplay of communal, spatial, cultural and political forces at work in the agora renders it an appropriate model with which to consider critically those spaces formed through the agency of virtual technologies” (134). For all his talk about community, he does not spend time on the individual community member. Leaving out any connection to the individual in favor of the community-at-large is too much for me. It seems to erode the term space too much. By this logic any place that community happens can be considered a space.
“There is a strong and growing need,” says Ostwald, “to consider that zone where the boundaries between the physical and the virtual are completely blurred” (128). Here is where Ostwald, for me, veers off the map. The blurred spaces that he uses as case studies, which represent both characteristics of physical and virtual spaces, are the shopping mall and the theme parks (127). Returning to his unifying idea about community, he says that, “spaces are linked and defined not though technology but through the way that communities form and interact in them” (127). And it is this sense of community that removes the distinction between physical and virtual spaces loses some of its importance. Ostwald works to show that malls, while physical, exhibit many of the same conditions as virtual spaces. First, malls are simulations; his example is a recreation of Bourbon Street that many mall goers, he says, think is as real as the one in New Orleans. Second, malls are forever temporary; their interior stores and layouts are readily changeable. And third, malls operate in the same sort of panoptic surveillance that we have seen in our discussion about the Internet. Malls blur the physical/virtual boundary because they have some of the same attributes as virtual space.
One point in the essay that really speaks to my project/interests is when he says, “The technological revolution is changing how information is used and global communications networks have reduced the perceived effect of spatial displacement” (128). But what are the implications of this? The reduction in spatial displacement here seems less convincing than what he was saying earlier about community’s role in equalizing the physical and the virtual. In my view (and this is my argument in my project) the whole idea of communication networks is directly related to spatial nesting, which is most certainly about (an increase in) spatial displacement. That said, this whole notion of spatial displacement is where I am in my own work and something that I have not yet been able to tease out. Ostwald, obviously, sees displacement diminishing and boundaries evaporating. Boundaries or no boundaries? A sense of displacement or spaces merging into one loose conglomerate? I am just not sure yet…
3 comments:
The discussion on malls seems interesting, as I'm a fan of boundary-blurring.
The idea you bring up at the end about communication networking immediately made me think about transparency. It might make sense that web site creators want this boundary-blurring to occur in order to make the viewer forget that he or she is virtual. (Kind of like casinos not having windows or visible clocks.) The more transparent a virtual space is, the more likely we will engage with it. Anne did some work on transparency, and the one article I discuss (is it Hocks?)talks about transparency as one of four agents she and another web site creator focus on. Anne's work purposely aligns with book page layout, but then through links and viewer choice challenges it. The point of the author is that educators need to make students aware of transparency in order to have them critically look at the spaces they use. (She doesn't say it this way, but that is her gist.)
In Ostwald's endnote that you discuss, could he be suggesting (although it's hard to tell from just that little bit of text) not so much that we shouldn't recognize any boundaries but that we should examine the ways in which the physical doesn't stop when the virtual begins? He does use "remove," and maybe a word like "question" would be more productive... Is there any sense that these spaces shape each other, and have ramifications on each other?
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