ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the role of the territorial imaginary in the construction of space, and how the metaphor of 'net' allows for the conflations of city/community, and virtual city/virtual community. Network analysis sponsors the notion of city as community. It does this by its enclosing of space, of regulating and rationalising that space, of seeing the city not as an anomic, amorphous sprawl, but as a structurally integrated whole constituted by the interdependency of the parts. At the level of human subjectivity the possibility of life in cyberspace can, at least in part, be construed as motivated by a resistance to the uncongenial, and ultimately as the manufacture of an illusion of self-possession. The seeming immensity of cyberspace made manifest by the possibility of 'always somewhere else to go', the anomic quality of cyberspace, and the absence of perception of hierarchy produces wonderment.
