Page 232 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

COMPUTERS, THE INTERNET, AND VIRTUAL CULTURES

The speed with which we move from place to place online itself renders any
traditional notions of community obsolete (Jones 1997b). Online community
is usually considered as spatial or cyberspatial, but temporality is rarely a matter
of analysis. For that reason, a useful concept may be that of ‘habitation’, the
commitment not only to being in the same place as others but to staying there
for some length of time. We experience where we visit and where we live very
differently both spatially and temporally.
However, habitation is a key element in current industrial discourses about
the Internet. Terms like ‘community’, ‘portal’, ‘stickiness’, all point to the same
issue, namely that it is increasingly difficult, in a medium built (and continu-
ously imagined) for movement, to develop the relatively stable communities
desired by marketers and advertisers (and, may we add, by most people). Or, to
put it another way, it is increasingly a concern to content providers that they
cannot puzzle out how to deliver audiences to advertisers. Community online
seems an accident, even in its earliest incarnations. Salus tells the story of Brian
Redman, a pioneering developer of UUCP, who ‘began “sending electronic
mail on a regular basis”, leading to a community’ (1995: 133).
This is not a new phenomenon. In Marshall Berman’s insightfull book All
that Is Solid Melts into Air, a description of Georges Haussmann’s nineteenth-
century Paris should hold particular interest for Internet scholars:

When Haussmann’s work on the boulevards began, no one under-
stood why he wanted them so wide: from a hundred feet to a hundred
yards across. It was only when the job was done that people began to
see that these roads, immensely wide, straight as arrows, running on for
miles, would be ideal speedways for heavy traffic ...
The archetypal modern man, as we see him here, is a man alone
contending against an agglomeration of mass and energy that is heavy,
fast and lethal. The burgeoning street and boulevard tra ffic knows no
spatial or temporal bounds, spills over into every urban space, imposes
its tempo on everybody’s time, transforms the whole modern environ-
ment into a ‘moving chaos’. The chaos here lies not in the movers
themselves – the individual walkers or drivers, each of whom may be
pursuing the most efficient route for himself – but in their interaction,
in the totality of their common movements in a common space.
(Berman 1982: 158–9)

One can easily mine this passage of Berman’s solely for the multiple parallels
to Internetworking. But the important point Berman makes later is that
twentieth-century architects did all they could to leave the metropolis behind,
to create ‘supercontrolled environments’ (1982: 246) and, ultimately, malls and
gated communities. Only by controlling access – tra ffic – does it become possible
to control trafficking, be it in conversation or commodities, as those in the
Internet business who have been in the process of creating ‘portals’ know well.

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