ALLIE ❤ HARTHas anyone done a good theorizing of modern social internet space? I attempted an Ahmedian reading in college but it's hard enough just deciphering internet *location*. I know danah boyd does good work with internet affordances but I don't remember her speaking so much on space in particular.
For example: Two people can go to the same internet *location* (facebook.com) but have mutually unintelligible experiences—literally, not in the same language. Are these the same spaces? Different spaces? Where is that space located: The URL? The server location? Do we consider the Facebook page for NYC as belonging to NYC-as-space, or is it distinct? What about photos posted at a party? Are those posts also "at" the party, even though they can be viewed by non-attendees?
"You do you" is Eu-gen-ics.@u2764 Perhaps these very questions are an invitation to examine whether the very tool of "space" as metaphor for non-physical environments is the best we can do in thinking these experiences?
@beadsland I like the metaphor of "space" because I consider it a prerequisite for "body." But of course there are other models.
@u2764 There's a reason my critique, the other day, of "space" (as a model) hinges on an interrogation of "embodied membership". Our Lakoffean urge to anchor in metaphors of embodied cognition can lead us astray.
Which is not to say there isn't an embodied metaphor that will better grok and grapple online whateverthisis, but perhaps that metaphor rests in something bodies do, rather than where bodies are.
Annemarie Mol might be helpful here.
@beadsland I'm not so worried about cognition as affect: pain, trauma, violence, and the prevention thereof. There is no violence which is not embodied, imo. So if we want to address violence, we must address bodies. And if I want to talk about how a text might touch me, there must be, at some level, a site of that touch.
@beadsland At the bare minimum, space provides a delineation of what my body can do, and who/what is capable of affecting it. But furthermore we can talk about imagined spaces, imagined communities, nations, states, politics—can one conceive of a nation without giving it a location and borders? So the spacial metaphor does much for us there.
@u2764 Space most definitely provides a delineation! On this we are in resounding agreement.
Is space, however, the only possible source of such a necessary delineation? Unfold that indefinite article.
That is provides "a" delineation does not indicate that it provides "the" delineation, or even that it provides "the most useful or productive" delineation.
Do we not want such tools (here, metaphors) as will most clearly and powerfully delineate our object of inquiry?
I give very little truck to theoretical appeals to an "imaginary". (And yes, I saw your Freud toot earlier.) What if one doesn't conceive of a nation by giving it location and borders?
What if in enacting, in doing, location and borders, as such, bodies conceive a nation? To ape Ricoeur, bodies thus preconceive, conceive, and reconceive a nation?
Borders are not merely lines on a map. Rather, linemaking in the course of mapmaking is one of a bundle of practices by which bodies do borders.
@beadsland Right. And I'm not arguing that the spacial metaphor is the only tool or approach we should use. But I think, from at least a practical perspective, it is inescapable, and so a robust theory would be useful—even if only to point at its own flaws. I don't think you can really get away from internet-as-space when so much of our terminology—URL, website, homepage, navigate, *visiting* a page, having an account *on* a site—stems from that core understanding.
@beadsland We think of ourselves, in the vernacular, as going to, and being on, Twitter, Facebook, Mastodon. But it is unclear to me what exactly that travel or being entails.
@u2764 Yep. And to concretize the model that affords such statements meaning in a historical moment is a worthy endeavor, just so long as we don't, in so doing, serve to further rarify that model already so sublimated to the popular episteme.
What does that travel or being mean? I don't know. Perhaps the better question is, what do such practices of speaking and thinking strive to index in our phenomenological world, and how do we name those percepts that are our referents?
@u2764 Uniformitarianism in geology was inescapable, until it wasn't.
Per Kuhn, the one fundamental impediment to any paradigm shift is the absence of a more powerfully explanatory paradigm to shift *too*.
We can spend all the time in the world trying to bolster the robustness of the plumb pudding model of the atom, but when Rutherford breaks out those thin sheets of gold, it may be time to let Thomson's proposal go, no matter how useful it may have been until now.
@u2764 That said, yes, there is no better way to hang lanterns on the flaws of an implicitly and commonly held model clear than to first make that model robustly explicit.
As for the vernacular? Who cares? We still talk of the sun rising in the morning, even though we know that it is the Earth that moves. Are we to let popular, dare I say it, imagination dictate how we dare to theorize? Especially something as ubiquitous, fraught, and transformative as online whateverthisis?
Kate@u2764 @beadsland I'm following this conversation with an interest in media geographies and the space part of social space. Nothing to add, just reading and agreeing. Also @Tdorey's images of streets and parks yesterday as ways of thinking about this community space.
@katebowles @Tdorey @u2764 Looking to analogues between online whateverthisis and physical spaces, or perhaps more properly, physical *places*, is always useful.
The question is, are such analogues simultaneously univocal? Or can we say that online whateverthisis is, quite usefully comparable to space, while also holding that online whateveritis, itself, is not best understood as space in any meaningful sense?
@beadsland @u2764 @Tdorey The theory that helps here is placemaking. Space isn't what's "out there", the passive backdrop to our agency. Even more so, place is social, co-constructed, relational. So it's what we make together. And then there's the path we make together, by walking it.
@Tdorey @u2764 @beadsland But yes, some elements of online whateveritis can't just anchor in metaphors of offline space. Some are their own thing. Metaphors limit us as well as expand our thoughts.
@katebowles @Tdorey @u2764 Yes, place gets us closer to online whateverthisis than does space as a theoretical construct, and there's been a lot of work done dealing with enactments of place that don't map easily to our intuitive understanding of space, even without complicating matters by involving a bunch of jupped up Analytical Engines.
Nonetheless, I would argue that this is still an analogical, rather than a univocal, approach to online whateverthisis.
travis holland@beadsland @u2764 @Tdorey @katebowles to return to and build on your earlier point about the equivalence or otherwise of a digital referent space to a physical space, I think ideas about doubled places are helpful, cf Shaun Moores
@travisaholland @Tdorey @u2764 @beadsland Can you sling in a reference? Because yes, I think this is what we need to think about.
@beadsland @u2764 @Tdorey @travisaholland Also good always to keep in mind navigational paths, not just the spaces they connect. We all weave differently.
@travisaholland @Tdorey @u2764 @beadsland I had a laborious way of getting to mastodon through a Twitter search and then catching a ride on a link. Serendipitously it took me to all sorts of other things in that search timeline. So I'm thinking about how what looks like a navigational fail also takes you through odd neighbourhoods by chance.
The bodega is there, but you walk past it in different directions, and with different destinations in mind, and in different moods.
@katebowles @beadsland @u2764 @Tdorey I have equated layered places with geology: ...some elements overlap others, while various processes act to make underlying strata visible in certain circumstances. Occasionally, deep layers will erupt or sub-duct others, causing massive interruptions to the surface as human interlocutors experience it. Similarly, competing and alternate conceptions of place exist layered upon one another, sometimes multiply visible and sometimes less so.
@Tdorey @u2764 @beadsland @katebowles The point of this isn't as obvious as it might be (and after this I'll stop flooding all of your timelines). My work in this area is in the context of media contributing to this layering of place, the gradual build up over time that comes from various representations of a given place referent, including those on the net like Facebook pages, etc.
@Tdorey @u2764 @katebowles @travisaholland I sense some encounters with the thought of pedestrian philosopher Manuel de Landa in the above.
@u2764 @Tdorey @travisaholland @katebowles Different moods, yes. The inattention to moods in current social media models is a topic I'm looking forward to unpacking further with @zatnosk in the coming days.
@katebowles @beadsland @u2764 @Tdorey Moores, S. (2012). Media, Place and Mobility. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
@katebowles @Tdorey @u2764 @travisaholland Nice.
Compare Lawlor's synthesis, in Implications of Immanence, of Derrida's "moment of blindness" with Foucault's "miniscule hiatus".
Granted, Lawlor might more properly be said to be pointing toward a dislocation in time, rather than a doubling of place, but nonetheless, both contemplations of media grapple with a decoupling of subject-of-media from subject-in-relation-to-media.
@beadsland @travisaholland @u2764 @Tdorey This is also where I think Nick Couldry is heading with discussion of media practice, rather than media consumption (or even presumption). Broadcast media make pop-up social space appear; social media spin out networked pathways.
Human bodies, lives in the moment of being lived, anchor both.
You are all where you are; where I am a bird is singing outside the window.
@katebowles @u2764 @Tdorey @travisaholland The key takeaway, here, for any attempt to arrive at a theory of Internet "spaces", even if only as strawman, is that any such theory must surely be grounded in a theory of media spaces or places, generally, from drawing and paintings to print and television.
No matter how ubiquitous the vernacular of Internet "spaces", the phenomenology, IMHO, is at best a speciation of that for the genera of media, as such, not an exceptionalism.
@u2764 There is absolutely not one word in your above toot with which I disagree. Is that site necessarily a container? Where is the space I went to to acquire a paper cut?
c.f., Deleuze's short text, Pure Immanence.
The relevance of cognition, BTW, is not that it is our object of inquiry, but that it is the instrument by which we so inquire. A cell biologist is only as good as their understanding of the physics of microscopes.