Alex Pang said today:
Another thing I hadn't thought through is the way that the discourse about "netizens"-- people who think of themselves as citizens of cyberspace-- helps build the idea of cyberspace as place. People are citizens of places, after all: for all the value of the argument that nations are "imagined communities," countries are places.
Deep in the Netizen link is a brief mention of netiquette. Netiquette used to be a pervasive set of social standards that the Cyberspace of today has nearly tossed out the window. The days of Usenet-dominated cyberspace was rather like a Victorian-era society. People were welcome to join, if they could conform to a certain set of criteria. One of those criteria was, more or less, not to be an idiot.
One reason for this was that then there was little one could do to protect themselves from the ill manners of another. So the netizens had to protect themselves via social convention more than via technological fix.
We sort of fast forwarded from the Victorian era to the Punk Rock era. Today, we rarely hear of netiquette. Today we hear that we can block spam, splogs, phishing, and so forth using our technological wizardry. That we can keep our little corner of cyberspace safe from the Net-Huns.
This act of protecting ourselves adds to the concept of a space. While traveling in Cyberspace one needs to be innoculated from diseases that can be found there.
As Cyberspace has grown, the protective measures of the Netizen have transitioned from cultural to technological (medicinal?). As those have become more ubiquitious, and practitioners of Netiquette have become more rare, the original culture of the location known as Cyberspace has drifted away.
Are there still pockets of well behaved Netizens? Certainly. But they don't inhabit the entire area of Cyberspace. They are zoned and permitted. Or worse, located in walled, gated communities that rely on exclusivity and barriers to entry to ensure their smooth operations.
The more walls and barriers, the less likely someone will happen by, read a bit, become interested and join in the discussion.
Usenet allowed this by being entirely (or nearly so) open. Browsing the information was a low-penalty act.
Creating community on-line in fact requires these barriers in order to systematically define both the space and the purpose of the group. In order for a vibrant group to form and flourish, you need to have a modest barrier for entry, general group rules and a genearally mild but penalizing penalty for infractions.
This, in turn, reinforces the "space" in Cyberspace.
So, another way that Cyberspace may be dead is in its assumption that all of Cyberspace is Cyberspace. What we may now have a platform that has a great many Cyberspaces. The web points to the Cyberspaces, but the whole may be something very different.
T-rati: Cyberspace Netizen
Comments