Paranoid Cyber-droid (Chun)

I would like to spend this post on Chun's first chapter, "Why Cyberspace?" I'm increasingly interested in the blurring definitions of "space" and "place" as we migrate back and forth between the physical and the synthetic. I looked up Barlow's declaration and was fascinated by his ethos (right term?): "Governments of the Industrial World...I come from Cyberspace...You have no sovereignty where we gather" (web-cite). And, then again at the end, "We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before." Out there, but limited because, I believe, that as we flow between the physical and synthetic spaces everything will change.

More precisely, I'm interested in Chun's assertion that cyberspace "freed users from their bodies and their locations" (Chun 38). She describes cyberspace as space-less because it lacks "all reference to content, apparatus, process, or form, offering instead a metaphor and a mirage, for cyberspace is not spatial" (39). I'm not so sure about that. What does "space" really mean? How are we interpreting space/place in synthetic environments? And, how do these interpretations reconfigure who we are and how we view physical spaces/places? Personally, I define "space" as potential; whereas "place" is what is done within space, or more ethereally as meaning.

Deeper still, her comments about Manovich's "databse complex" and how that limits our conceptualization of cyberspaces further dissolve our definitions. "The metaphoric use of place," she says," blinds us to the Web's fluidity" (46). So, if we're spending all our time ascribing "place-ness" to cyberspaces, we're missing out on its fluidity, its innate ability to be many cyber-places all at once. Also, Chun is addressing here non-games cyberspaces, or typical websites: Amazon, ebay, etc. The previous post on PMOGs (passively multiplayer online games), I think, is right in the middle of this discussion. Later she talks about navigability defining "new media" and our navigation of non-contiguous URLs/cyberspaces, therefore, defining who we are in these space-less spaces.

As Cheney said recently, "So?" Does this discussion about spatial/platial fluidity have any bearing on physical spaces/places? The notion that cyberspaces/cyberplaces are defined by their lack of indexicality would imply no. But, as these cybers become more ubiquitous and nested in our various physical spaces (technology and new devices are key), then I would contend that the indexicality of our physical spaces are becoming blurred. The space-ness, the potential, of a physical space is losing the reference of its physical characteristics when we can be on the phone and on the bus, or cross-nationally video-conferencing online in a university union. Or...maybe the dispersion of cybers actually increase the potential of our physical spaces, adding to their meaning, adding to the capacity of place-ness we are able to ascribe to them.