Page 231 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

STEVE JONES AND STEPHANIE KUCKER

well when describing her first encounter with a MUD. ‘I was reminded of
kissing games’, she wrote, ‘in which it was awful to be chosen and awful not to
be chosen’ (1999: 206). In short, even in offline social situations lurking can be
the most desired choice, though proximity in real life borne of a lack of
mediation won’t allow it. Simply put, real life does not allow so many multiple
and immediate options with which to mediate social situations as does CMC.
The Internet, on the other hand, is entirely mediation, and the most com-
monly chosen social role is that of the lurker. Whether lurking and voyeurism
are linked (which we believe they are) and how they may be linked is a discus-
sion beyond the scope of this chapter. Su ffice to say that there are clearly
important issues to be considered in relation to lurking, voyeurism, surveillance,
the gaze, image, and metaphor (Foucault 1980). What is central to the argument
presented here is that culture is overlooked by those who study the Internet
because ‘overlooking’ is, if you will, the main activity of being online, being in
cyberspace. As we more and more textualize cyberspace we more and more
destabilize the relationships between space and culture. As Nye puts it, ‘What
appears on the computer screen seems a curious combination of space and
story’ (Nye 1997: 186). The story, however, is not that of a machine ‘imping-
ing’, as he puts it, on space, but is rather that of a narrative incursion into an
existing culture. In an important sense, if cyberspace is an ‘information super-
highway’, it is not built into and through space (be it cyber or otherwise). It is a
road built into and through a cultural landscape that before its construction
knew not of traffic.
Traffic is, in fact, antithetical to community. As Alexander, Ishikawa, and
Silverstein point out, ‘the heavier the traffic in an area, the less people think of
it as home territory. Not only do residents view the streets with heavy tra ffic as
less personal, but they feel the same about the houses along the street’ (1977:
82–3). We can glean an important distinction between the conception of a
highway, meant to carry traffic, and a road or path, meant to foster habitation,
from Milan Kundera’s novel Immortality:

Road: a strip of ground over which one walks. A highway differs from
a road not only because it is merely a line that connects one point with
another. A highway has no meaning in itself; its meaning derives
entirely from the two points that it connects. A road is a tribute to
space. Every stretch of road has meaning in itself and invites us to stop.
A highway is the triumphant devaluation of space.
Before roads and paths disappeared from the landscape, they had
disappeared from the human soul. [We] no longer saw life as a road, but
as a highway: a line that led from one point to another, from the rank of
captain to the rank of general, from the role of wife to the role of
widow. Time became a mere obstacle to life, an obstacle that had to be
overcome by ever greater speed.
(Kundera 1990: 223)

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