Spaceless? Not if you have a little imagination...

While I am enjoying Chun's book and finding it thought-provoking, I was a bit surprised by her discussion of "space" in chapter 1, in particular her apparent lack of imagination or willingness to move beyond the physicality of space.  To give her the benefit of the doubt, she is clearly very knowledgeable about and concerned with the hardware of fiber-optics and the movement of packets, etc.  These are things I know nothing about and it was good to be reminded that my computer is constantly communicating with other computers and that the internet is much more complicated and much less transparent than I tend to think it is.  And in chapter 1, she does move beyond physicality to talk about cyberspace as "a metaphor and a mirage," but then she concludes that sentence by saying, "for cyberspace is not spatial" and later, "cyberspace is spaceless" (39).

It certainly isn't "spatial" in the way that we are accustomed to thinking about space and spatiality, but it seems to me we lose a lot by claiming that the internet is not spatial at all.  I have been studying the concept-metaphor of thirdspace, which radical postmodern critical geographer Edward Soja defines as a "real-and-imagined" space of possibility that arises from but is other than firstspace — real, material — and secondspace — imagined, conceptual (Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places).  While I don't think cyberspace is a perfect representation of Soja's thirdspace, I do think that we can conceive of the internet as a space that builds upon and is equal to the spaces with which we are more familiar but is itself a whole new kind of space.  Must we define the spatiality of the internet in terms of "the sender's and recipient's computer" (39), fiber-optics, etc.?  Cyberspace might be placeless, given her definition of place as "a finite location," but it certainly isn't spaceless if we take space to mean "an interval" (45).

Chun writes that cyberspace is "fundamentally unmappable and unlocatable" (43) and that as we surf we "teleport rather than travel from one virtual location to another, and the backward and forward icons do not move backwards and forwards between contiguous locations" (47). This made me think that it is mappable:  It's just that we all build our own maps — just as we build (or Amazon builds) our own stores, as Weinberger showed us in Everything is Miscellaneous.

I do really like Chun's assertion that the "Internet is as much about time as it is space." Perhaps that is a feature of the spatiality of the internet:  Though digital stores and encyclopedias and maps are less constrained by physical space in digital environments, perhaps they are more constrained by time.  As we get more and more impatient and want everything at our fingertips in an instant, users are less likely to wait for a long download or upload, to pay attention to an outdated website, to participate in asynchronous chat, or to read large chunks of text (I better wrap this post up soon!).  If space is "an interval," then perhaps in the "thirdspace" of the internet, space is represented as time and/or time is represented as space (see Chun's example of a "page that emerges bit by bit on the screen" [22]).

One other quick comment about space:  If memory serves, Chun never talks about space in terms of interface.  It's interesting to think about the use of space in web pages and the fact that a programmer can't fully control how space and spacing is represented on a user's screen.

I won't take the space and time to discuss this, but I was really interested by what Chun contributed to the conversation we've had intermittently this semester about how operating systems and software "interpellate" and "produce" users (20, 21).  Also, thinking back to Nakamura:  "[S]oftware corporations...tell you that you are behind, and not in front of, the window" and "It is impossible to resist subjectivity by doing nothing...if we jack in or are jacked in" (Chun 21-22).