ABSTRACT
To speak about mobility of necessity means speaking about space – whether the material spaces of the actual world through which we move and negotiate daily life, or, increasingly, those Web-based virtual spaces through which we feel we navigate, visit, or flow when online. It is also the case that any form of mobility or materiality that is not understood as an extension in space is very difficult to imagine or write about. In order to live, human beings need to interpret the world through and in relationship to a series of fixed and moving objects. We see the material before we see the cultural. This is reflected in the reliance on spatial metaphors to situate Web practices – “sites,” “under construction,” “browsing,” “visit,” Active Worlds, MySpace, Netscape, and so on. These spatial metaphors and the sense of affective materiality to which they point also speak to a new discursive positioning of active digital subjectivity, one connected to a 3-D spatialized sense of doing resonant with, while also repositioning, Hannah Arendt’s concept of homo faber. To speak about online mobility is to implicitly suggest that one buys into the idea that virtual space is sufficiently extensive and equivalent to material space so that one might achieve something akin to geographic and social mobility within it.
