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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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