The above titled article by Ananda Mitra and Rae Lynn Schwartz from Wake Forest University caught my attention.It argues persuasively, in my opinion, that we claim to be inhabiting presently two worlds which should be seen in terms of space as one world. We inhabit geographical and cyber spaces. However posthumans (my term here) in reality glide seamlessly from the one to the other. There is a dichotomy which need not be. On the one hand we require maps or GPS to know precisely where we are on the earth’s surface yet on the other hand we visit and inhabit cyberspace without giving it a second thought. Since the term ‘cyber space’ is already taken they propose to call their newly defined area ‘cybernetic space‘.
It is the seamless movement from one part of our space to another which interests me and which I believe permeates the everyday life of posthumans.
I’d like to touch upon two examples of this. Firstly at home my wife and I often chat in my study where she will sprawl on her couch and I will spin round on my revolving chair to face her. As soon as we touch upon a musician one of us hasn’t heard or an item of news the other hasn’t read about, it’s normal practice for me to spin round, locate it in cyberspace and play it or even read it aloud. The net is integrated ’seamlessly’ into our routine. My second example comes from my university students who always have their notebooks or netbooks present (business economics students) and who go straight to a reference I mention or use Leo to translate a word they haven’t quite understood. When they write dialogues as reinforcement many of them automatically type them or even take computerized notes as I talk. We and they are not in one space or the other; it’s cybernetic space we occupy.
Reference:
From Cyber Space to Cybernetic Space: Rethinking the Relationship between Real and Virtual Spaces
Ananda Mitra and Rae Lynn Schwartz
Department of Communication
Wake Forest University
‘we claim to be inhabiting presently two worlds’
Hi Arthur,
How do they differentiate between these worlds? I would have thought also that space-wise, it is one world that we inhabit, which can be broken down into different aspects that make it up.
John
Hi John,
Of course I and they agree with you but the fact is normal talk is about being in an everyday (geographically- locational) world on the one hand and being in a virtual world on the other. There is a significant difference though; in cybernetic space you can disguise your identity much more easily and that appears to be important for some people as the reactions to the ethnographic research on virtual Dublin showed.