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200 COMMUNICA TION THEORY
inside becomes the basis for connection. There is no longer any calling to
physically associate as a goal in itself.
In exploring this de-physicalization of flânerie, Featherstone (1998)
asks, ‘How far can the new forms of electronic communication such as the
Internet and multimedia also facilitate flânerie?’ (919). A number of com-
mentators (including Featherstone, 1998; Jones, 1995; Mitchell, 1996;
Smith, 1999) have insisted that cyberspace is a unique replacement for the
geographic agora. As Steven Jones has suggested of CMC,

Like the boulevardiers or the denizens of Nevsky Prospect described by
Berman (1982), the citizens of cyberspace (or the ‘net’ as it is commonly
called by its evanescent residents) come here to see and be seen, and to
communicate their visions to one another, not for any ulterior purpose, with-
out greed or competition, but as an end in itself. (Berman, 1982: 196, cited
in Jones, 1995: 17)

For them, broadcast cannot offer a meeting place of this kind. Instead, it
gathers audiences together but leaves them with little to discuss save for
what is offered as spectacle. Indeed, the sub-media of the Internet are able
to offer the same kinds of opportunity for interaction as did the spaces of
flânerie which featured in the early period of modernity.
For Featherstone (1998), the most important characteristic of Internet
sub-media in this regard is that they are non-linear – they move away from
‘the linear physical construction of the book with its sequence of pages, or
the film with its one-way movement through time’ (9). Such forms of asso-
ciation were not possible with television until the development of video
cassette recorders/players. But the database, whether it is a CD-ROM or
the Internet’s ‘Library of Babel’, enables instantaneous information asso-
ciation, which, according to Featherstone, encourages electronic flânerie.
But unlike the deliberate ambling of the traditional flâneur, hypertext
allows the virtual traveller to jump to other places in texts or in the Web
of pages. Such flânerie presupposes the ontology of the disembodied-
extended, discussed in the previous chapter, the individual who is ‘lifted
out’ of the constraints of embodiment, or, as Featherstone puts it, does not
have to ‘wait to reach the street-corner to change direction’.

Indeed, the jump, to continue the metaphor, can be to another city. Not only
is the flâneur’s city a world, but the world has become his/her city: with
everything potentially accessible, potentially visible. Hence, hypertexting
brings to the fore the problem of navigation, of movement within text or
work. There no longer is a correct sequential way of reading or proceeding;
the work has become directly activated by the particular purposes, or
whims, of the user. This is one of the defining characteristics of the new
electronic media: interactivity. It encourages engagement and two-way inter-
action on the part of the user which contrasts to the one-way mode of com-
munication, which encouraged passive reception, which we find in the
traditional age of mass media. (921)