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consequences. In practising places, it makes no difference whether they are
global or local senses of place, corporeal or electronic spaces. Indeed
‘cyberspace’ is a place that we can become just as attached to by way of our
routines of navigation as we can by the repetition of meeting people when
we go into the street.
As I have argued in Virtual Globalization (Holmes, 2001), de Certeau’s
formulation is a very useful one for thinking across physical and virtual
spaces. In The Practice of Everyday Life (1988), de Certeau explores how we
can relate to our physical environment by practising routines of traversal
in our daily existence and observation which can equally be applied to
5
how individuals navigate media spaces. Any medium which can extend
experience necessarily brings together local and global kinds of settings,
to the extent that it is globally accessible or extant. Indeed, as local worlds
become subject to accelerating flows of messages, bodies, styles and
commodities which course through them, attachment to electronic global
spaces can become more attractive, to the extent that they offer a stable
uniformity that can no longer be found on a local basis. 6

Sociality with mediums/sociality with objects

The centrality of ‘communities of practice’ for understanding the inter-
relation between local and global community also requires a differentia-
tion between the corporeal and virtual means of engaging with such
spaces. When we turn to the question of media spaces, there are two
dimensions of interaction involved in all media: interaction with medi-
ums; and sociality with the media technologies which give us gateways to
such mediums.
As we saw in the previous chapter, interacting with mediums is
explored by ritual perspectives of communication, whereas intersubjec-
tive communication is explored by transmission accounts.
The argument that, in information societies, individuals increasingly
interact with a medium rather than with other interlocutors is one which
is well supported not only by ritual communication views but also by
neo-McLuhanist and abstraction views. Moreover, the fact of interacting
with mediums is apparent whether we are discussing broadcast or network
integration.
Whether we choose to single out television or the Internet, interact-
ing with mediums tends to have two consequences: ritual forms of attach-
ment to an electronic assembly are usually accompanied by a parallel
tendency to fetishize the personalization of media technologies. In the
case of mediums, it is not that they ‘mediate’ our relationship to others;
rather, it is the medium itself which is worshipped. In the case of the per-
sonal media technologies, the relationship to objects with which commu-
nication is enabled can become more intense than to other persons.