Being at Home on the Web
August 27th, 2008
Elexander van Elsas wrote a post several weeks ago on having a home on the web, and I have been reflecting ever since on the idea of what it means to have a home or to be at home on the internet. I may return to some of the directions this thinking has taken me, but I realized last night that there may be a more fundamental problem with thinking about home on the web that must be confronted before we I can even begin to address the kinds of issues that van Elsas is raising: that is, the internet is not actually a virtual space at all.
Let me explain my logic here. The temptation to think of locality on the web in terms of home is a direct result of understanding the internet as a whole in terms of locality and spacialization in the first place, complete with metaphors of domains, homepages, navigation, and hosting. The web, however, is not a space that I can inhabit, not even virtually, because the web is a physical space, not a virtual one. It consists of physical networks that relay physical patterns of energy between physical machines. The web as virtual space does not actually exist apart from this physical infrastructure, not until the point where a machine uses the information it has received over this network to create the illusion of a space on a monitor. This virtual space that the machine creates can exist only on the monitor. It exists nowhere else except the monitor. Even seemingly interactive spaces like social media sites and massively multiplayer gaming environments do not exist as virtual spaces on the web, but only in the physical space of the web and in the virtual space of the monitor. The web’s existence as a virtual space is always and only a product of the monitor.
What this means is that the current language of the internet, which relies heavily on metaphors of space and territory, is in fact highly misleading. It implies that the web is a virtual space that I enter and explore, concealing the fact that the web is actually a physical space that I cannot enter but that I use as a tool to create a virtual space at the point of the monitor. I cannot inhabit the web, even and especially in a virtual sense, because it does not exist as a virtual space except as I construct it for myself as such. Rather than entering the web in any way, I always remain essentially external to it, requesting information from it, creating virtuality with it.
To speak of a home on the web is, therefore, strictly speaking, impossible. I can only speak of a provisional and temporary home that I create for myself at the point of the monitor so that I may make use of the physical infrastructure of the internet, but this home will always remain entirely distinct from the web, however much it may depend on the web to construct itself. Understood in this way, the primary change that the web enables in regard to home is not the ability to maintain a personal space within a larger virtual sphere, but the ability to replicate, to recreate, my virtual home wherever I have access to the necessary technology. My home on the web, recreated for me each time I sit down at my monitor, is now capable of appearing in my physical home, in my workplace, or, as at this particular moment, at a public library in rural Ontario. Far from creating a stable though virtual home that I can access from anywhere I go, the web forces me to recreate my virtual home everywhere I go, which is perhaps another reason why van Elsas should feel like a refugee.
August 28th, 2008 at 6:01 am
Hi Luke. Nice response to my thoughts !
I’ve been thinking about what you said. I’m not so sure I agree with your thought train that thinking about a home on the web is strictly impossible. It (obviously) depends on what you would call a “home”. Home can be very physical place, but when I wrote the post I was thinking of a combination of both a virtual personal space, as well as something that makes you ” feel” like you are home. This feeling is very personal, and therefore each individual will have a very different opinion about what this virtual personal space should look like.
As it is virtual, it will be available to you wherever you are physically, and it will most likely have a screen-like interface (monitor, mobile, handheld), although it might later also have other types of interfaces.
Bottom line for me is that the virtual space I would like to call a home is something that is mine, it’s a place where I can invite friends over, have a good time, relax, rest, decorate, etc.etc. No advertisement there, no one is watching me, there is no terms o fuse that says that all data or actions belong to someone else than me. No Google crawlers etc. Just like in the physical world. Your home is where you feel best
September 1st, 2008 at 10:38 am
Alexander, thanks for your response.
Yes, I agree with much of what you are saying here. I was not at all disregarding your concerns, especially those that involve the imposition of commercial interests in the space that we create with the web. My notebook on the subject of home and the web is filled with many of the ideas you are raising here:
What does it mean to be “at home on the web” in the sense of being familiar and comfortable in the spaces that I create or in my ability to create them?
What does it mean to be “at home in the web” in the sense of being available in a space where I can be consistently found and approached?
What does it mean to be “at home on the web” in the sense of maintaining a balance between the personal and the private, particularly when the web produces almost by its nature a kind of publicity?
What does it mean to be “at home on the web” in the sense of offering hospitality?
All of these things are among the “other directions” that I mentioned, but it occurred to me that my understanding of these questions would be shaped by my understanding of the web as a space as such, and so I began where I did.
October 2nd, 2008 at 5:32 pm
[...] book Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics, and she confirms an argument that I made several weeks ago, that the web is not actually a space at all and is misrepresented by the spatial metaphors that we [...]
February 19th, 2009 at 7:55 am
Hello Luke and Alexander.
There is even further evidence that the web is not a kind of utopic private/public space in Wendy Heung Chun’s book _Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the age of Fiber optics_. In it, she points out that the internet is a model of management and control par excellence, and that any time one is “jacked-in,” one has voluntarily submitted to that “virtual” panoptic site of surveillance–a fact that points to the extremely ambivalent hosti-pitality (to use Derrida’s term) of the web.
I think you can THINK the space of the internet (or globalization, for that matter) as a kind of virtual home that can accommodate an infinite spaciality of acts of hospitality and friendship. However, the wider, structural meta-panoptics of the global communications network–which is in fact the very physical and technical architectonics structuring such “friendships” as well as their conditions of possibilty–means that 1) the face-to-face political encounter (to borrow from Levinas) in the “space” of the web is always preconditioned by the technical and physical limitations of this wider global communications network, 2) is always potentially interruptable according to the legal and surveillance structures built into this system of surveillance, particularly after 9/11, and 3) this “virtual” space is always already limited and exclusionary–like physical space–precisely because of the spacial and technical limitations of this wider physical and legal global communications network which is the former’s condition of possibility and structuring principle. Also, the web costs money to maintain, so you can bet in the age of turbo-capitalism, there is always a capitalist underlying principle secretly structuring the times, places, durations, forms, features and political impressions of the faces encountering each other on the web–faces and forms whose “political” existence always exceeds–or even contradicts–their own conceptualizations as true hospitable encounters. And can we–the fish surrounded by the water of the internet–even possibly detect such contradictions and limitations at a certain level?
But are acts of virtual hospitality nonetheless still possible in this physically, technically and legally limited and always potentially hostile virtual space? I think that it may be in the massive numbers of people using the internet, the, at least in principle, “net neutrality” of those encounters, and the fact that even though the web is a physically, technically and geographically limited “virtual” environment–limited and exclusionary; a virtual consentual hallucination to democratic public space–it is still not a “power structure” that exists so much as one that is only exercised by everyone who uses it. Everyone who participates is subjectified by this power dynamic in relation to it, however, each intervention–or act of hospitality–on the web is singular to a certain extent, within and inspite of the conditions of possibility enabling these encounters. In other words, there are likely MUCH much fewer differences to the public space of the internet as other types of public space, and yet there are certainly some extreme advantages. I.e. speed, the rearrangement of geographical space, the ability to accommodate multiple, heterogeneous alterior spacio-temporalities at the same time, etc.
Thanks for the discussion, guys, and I hope I added to it somewhat.
With warm regards, Don.
February 20th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
Don,
I would say that acts of hospitality are, by their very definition, never virtual. The internet permits hospitality, therefore, only to the degree that its virtuality can be overcome, in precisely the same way that the dinner conversation and the meeting at the cafe permit hospitality only to the degree that their respective virtualities can be overcome.
In this sense, at least, I would say that the internet is not essentially different from the other forms by which we are mediated. This is precisely why we need to understand it, not as a space, but as a medium, even if the ways that I interface with this medium happen to be spacialized at the point of the monitor. The primary difference between the internet and other media, as you have already noted, is in the qualities of its mediation, in its construction of time and space as a virtual and visual immediacy. It in these things, I think, that constitute the central novelty of the web.
The real question for me, therefore, is not whether the internet can be a space in which it is possible to offer hospitality. The question is how to employ the medium of the internet in such a way as to disrupt its virtuality and enable the possibility of hospitality. In precisely the same way that I must find ways to be open to the possibility of encounter with the other in my home and in my neighbourhood, I must make myself open to the possibility of this encounter through the web. This requires of me, in ways that I have not yet been wholly able to discover or to describe, that I actively disrupt the virtualities that are particular to the web, those that characterize its operation, in order to permit enocunter throught it.
February 21st, 2009 at 11:18 am
I wonder if a quest to achieve a kind of hospitable overcoming of “virtual” impediments to friendship is possibly also to set up a kind of dualism between the virtual and the real, or the virtual and the material, depending on the way in which one defines virtuality. I wonder if such a binary is more permeable and ambivalent than that–the one, of course, being the enabling oppositional term making the other both possible and intelligible (the basic lesson of Saussurean linguistics).
Thus, to disrupt the virtuality of the potentially hospitable space of the internet is, therefore, to concomitantly disrupt its reality and/or materiality, the orienting oppositional condition enabling its virtuality in the first place. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, if to disrupt the virtual space of the internet also necessarily disrupts our illusions of some pure, hospitably “material” public space outside of its equally virtual properties of perception, panoptics, the constructedness of our perceptions of other’s faces and intentions, and thus the danger of being hostile to the other even at our most hospitable moment. I think that is the real point for me. How does the space of the internet not so much differ from, or raise issues of mediation that must be overcome in order to get back to, a more pure, utopic space of hospitality. But how does it make us reflect on other more traditional or “normalized” public/private spaces in much more self-reflexive ways.
Be interested to hear your thoughts on this. Yours, Don.
February 24th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
Don,
I am not at all proposing a distinction between the virtual and the real. This is why I compared the disruption of the internet’s virtuality with the disruption of the home and the neighbourhood’s virtuality. I would say that my experience of all these things is virtual, though their virtualities are never identical. I would even say, perhaps, that the realit of these things is in fact their virtuality, though this might be easily misunderstood.
What disrupts virtuality, therefore, is not a reality, which could only ever appear to me virtually in any case. What disrupts virtuality is what fails to appear at all, neither as the virtual nor the real, the Other that is ontologically prior to the other, to use Levinas’ language, or the gaze of the Other that envisages my own gaze, to use Marion’s metaphor. These are not things that I actively see or experience, not things that I can therefore assign a mode of being, whether virtual or real. They are the things by which I am encountered in my passivity, things for which the binary of reality and virtuality is not even proper.
February 25th, 2009 at 5:49 pm
Could you be talking about what Levinas calls the “third?”–that radical other outside of my experience of the other which, tacetly, conditions my relations with the other. The possible other of the other, and the other of the other of the other, ad finitum. In that case, is what your saying that the space of the monitor, or even the more conceptual virtual space of the internet, only “hospitable” to the extent that these encounters, like the encounter over coffee in the cafe, are radically contingent upon the third that conditions them, and thus makes the distance which must be overcome in order to achieve such an “encounter” an infinity? The third, in other words, is, in the case of the monitor, part of the wider tele-technological matrix behind the monitor and part of the monitor that is monitoring and mediating–in unforeseeable ways–the image to image encounter via the internet?
February 26th, 2009 at 6:33 pm
Don,
No, I am not referring to Levinas’ idea of the third, though it might be interesting to follow this idea in some of the ways that you are suggesting.
I am thinking of his idea of the Other, the infinite and unthematizable Other that proceeds the other, not temporally, but ontologically. It is this infinite Other, which always approaches before the specificity of the other with whom I am face to face, that makes my responsibility to the other infinite. I can see the passage in my mind, and I will hunt it up from my notes for you when I get the chance.
March 2nd, 2009 at 9:02 am
[...] Moore’s recent series of comments on one of my older posts has had me digging through my notes on Emmanuel Levinas, and I have rediscovered several things [...]