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Telecommunity 201
So, once again, we find a central characteristic of the second media
age being introduced here as an agent of the return of flânerie. Electronic
flânerie is also an improvement, in speed, mobility and reach, on the urban
flâneur.

The urban flâneur typically sauntered around, letting the impressions of
the city soak into his subconscious. The electronic flâneur is capable of
great mobility; his pace is not limited to the human body’s capacity for
locomotion – rather, with the electronic media of a networked world, instan-
taneous connections are possible which render physical spatial differences
irrelevant. (921) 19

Featherstone does, however, tend to reduce such non-linearity to ‘the
Internet’ as an exclusive environment for such mobilities. For example, he
argues that ‘with the Internet there has been a massive speed up of the
rate at which new perceptions are brought in front of the eye’ (921–2),
whereas, as we know from Simmel (1971), the ‘mental life’ of the metro-
politan person is before all else distinguished by ‘information overload’.
The second media age thesis dilutes also when we compare the largely
textual experience of the ‘World Wide Wait’ with the frenetic culture of
music television, which institutionalizes channel surfing, or image surf-
ing, into a genre, as Featherstone himself observes: ‘we can recall the
much-vaunted postmodern channel hopper, MTV, or music video viewer,
who is bombarded with fragments of images and information removed
from their context so that he is incapable of chaining together the signi-
fiers into a meaningful message’ (922). This quote would insinuate that
the mass media do not generate such passive participants as Featherstone
earlier suggests.
An added counterpoint of Featherstone’s second media age argument
is his assertion that virtual forms of association preceded the Internet by
many years. The difference between today’s ‘city of bits’ and the industrial
city is one of degree only. The industrial city was always ‘an information
city in the sense that the urban landscape was continually inscribed and
reinscribed with information, with cultural meanings in the aestheticised
façades of buildings, advertisements, neon signs, billboards’ (922). And
we could add to this observation the fact that nineteenth-century tech-
nologies of simulation were already providing alternatives to the mutual
agora. The panorama, the diorama and cinema prefigure television and
the Internet by providing virtual spaces to ‘travel’ which give the illusion
of being part of worlds that do not require physical involvement.

Problems with dominant definitions of virtual community

The fact that cyberspace may provide a milieu for electronic flânerie con-
flicts with two very prevalent views of virtual Internet community. The