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Social? Governmentality and Globalisation’, in Refashioning Sociology: Responses to a New
World Order. Brisbane: QUT Publications, pp. 167–173.
1 Where the social exists outside the nation-state, it does so in ‘supra-national’ bodies
(WHO, UN, etc.).
2 Of course, all of these nominated contenders for community can be considered ‘imag-
ined communities’ in the Andersonian sense (Anderson, 1983). However, insofar as
they are made possible by mediated publicness, and it is only though this kind of pub-
licness that individuals gain access to these imagined communities, they are also lived
as the really real.
3 The discursive formation of community, as a kind of ‘intermediate’ level of social inte-
gration, would, within a levels argument, fit well within the secondary, agency-extended
levels of integration outlined in Chapter 5.
4 Anderson in Imagined Communities (1983) conjectures that one of the reasons for
the stability of the nation-state is the ‘remarkable confidence of community in
anonymity’ (40).
5 Whether it is about tuning in to the same radio or television time slot, or adopting the
newspaper as our ‘morning prayer’, as Hegel once suggested, or visiting the same book-
marks on our web-browser, the interface of which itself has a familiar and reassuring pix-
ilated architecture, or whether we are at home at the cybercafé, all of these places are
practised to the point of a uniformity which can be monumental in character. One can
relate to the standardization of media architectures like a web-browser or a news per-
formance in the same way as monuments might become references for a traveller.
6 For an analysis of the physical and architectural qualities of these spaces, see Holmes
(2001).
7 An alternative to the user perspective in self/technology relations is provided by Steven
Johnson in his idea of ‘interface culture’, which is measured by the degree that aesthetic
values are a part of a technological environment. It is not simply a matter of computers
and other hardware/software configurations being ‘user-friendly’. Rather, the ‘computer
must also represent itself to the user, in a language the user understands’ (Johnson,
1997: 14).
8 For example, educationalists are interested in whether classroom environments can
keep up with ‘cyberspace’. Moursund (1996) posed the question of the rate of change in
cyberspace to a sample of fifty administrators, who thought that changes in the dynam-
ics and modes of possibility in cyberspace were about eighteen times faster than in
embodied space (4).
9 Computer companies certainly are interested in developing their own historical
mythology and aura around their products. For example, every piece of software from
Microsoft Corporation is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity which is printed
on cloth that has the image of ‘Augusta Ada Byron, collaborator of Charles Babbage in
the nineteenth century’. Ada is also trademarked by the US Department of Defense.
Ada is the name of its Proprietary Programming Language (see Plant, 1998: 14–22).
10 From Plato’s Republic, to Saint-Simon, Thomas More and William Morris, this tradition
has been a powerful one in the West.
11 The grand discourse of the perils of the Internet is that of the super-panopticon, which
itself has a genesis myth – that of the Library of Babel – ‘of the universe as a repository
of information’ (Whitaker, 2000: 48) The use of the Internet as an encyclopedic basis for
surveillance presents ever greater risks to privacy the more information comes to medi-
ate all categories of activity. The accumulation of information also makes possible an
enlightenment in reverse.
12 Whilst he does not acknowledge the fact, Tofts is here replicating the point which the
philosopher Jacques Derrida makes about difference in language as constituted in the
last instance by language-as-writing, in which the mark or the gram within a signifier is
the minimal basis of conceptuality. Thus his invention of différance as a replacement of
the French différence, where the ‘a’ is silent when spoken and is noticeable only in its
written form. See Derrida (1986).