ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we shall be concerned with the nature and significance of what are now commonly referred to as virtual spaces, the network spaces that have been created in and through new information and communications technologies. Generally, there has been a sense of emancipatory possibilities. Thus, Linda Harasim declares, in a very enthusiastic expression of the new techno-idealism, that the digital networks have instituted no less than a new ‘social environment’. ‘The network has become,’ she maintains, ‘one of the places where people meet to do business, collaborate on a task, solve a problem, organise a project, engage in personal dialogue, or exchange social chitchat’. There is an eager expectation of emerging new spaces of conviviality: ‘networlds offer a new place for humans to meet, and promise new forms of social discourse and community’.1 Even though he mobilises a rather different terminology-derived from actor-network theory —Stephen Graham seems to be making much the same point. In his case, it is a matter of the ways in which ‘new technologies become closely enrolled into complex, contingent and subtle blendings of human actors and technical artefacts, to form actor-networks’. Virtual culture is conceived in terms of new humantechnological-spatial linkages, characterised as ‘intimate and recombinatory’, and constituting what are called new ‘relational assemblies’. In this version of the new technological vision, virtual communities exist as a great multiplicity of
‘systems of sociotechnical relations across space’— systems that ‘link the local and nonlocal in intimate relational, and reciprocal, connections’.2 In their different ways, then, both of these accounts convey a sense of anticipation about the potential inherent in virtual technologies, which they see in terms of the potential for enhancing communication, opening up new and more creative ways of bringing people together, and expanding the forms of human sociality. We have a problem with such accounts, and that is what this chapter addresses. It is not that we doubt the efficacy of the new technologies-indeed, we accept that it is entirely possible, even probable, that virtual technologies will sustain such new patterns of communication and community. Our problem is, rather, with the kind of social space or spaces that the new technologies are bringing into existence —this comfortable space of collaboration, dialogue, understanding, intimacy, reciprocity, and so on. Informed as it is by a sensible imagination of mutuality and consensus, we regard it as a banal space. The new virtual space is a pacified space. This is Bill Gates’ managed world of ‘friction-free’ exchange. What it evokes, as Slavoj Žižek observes, is the ideal of ‘a wholly transparent, ethereal medium of exchange in which the last trace of material inertia vanishes’.3 It is an illusory space.
