Thesis Title: Subtitle

The internet: A Space and Place?

From the beginning, the internet has been conceptualised as a space and spatial language has been used to describe its qualities. Since William Gibson coined the term ‘cyberspace’ in his novel Neuromancer and described it as a “consensual hallucination”, the internet has loomed large in users’ collective imaginations as a tangible, accessible object (Bell 2007: 16-17). Early work by Benedikt (2007) uses spatial language to discuss the architecture of cyberspace arguing that it is a physical space within which people interact in similar ways as they would with any other place with architectural constraints. Similarly, other early work concerning online communities, such as Rheingold (2000), reflects a conception of the online sphere as a place. While this place does not exist in the traditionally defined corporeal world, the language Rheingold uses to describe interacting in virtual communities is the language of movement, of coming and going and of destination; a language that does not seem ill-fitting when describing the nature of the virtual. In this chapter I argue that Facebook is a place on the internet and as such, it is beneficial to examine it and its users’ activities, using theories that explore the intersection between architecture and social life.

A useful way to conceptualise this form of space is de Certeau’s theory of spatial practices. De Certeau, when examining spatial practices, specifically refers to walking in the city, which he argues is a “human text” (1984: 92) that is read from afar by city planners and cartographers, but is written by the walkers on the street. Walkers write the text of the city without being able to ‘read’ it with the distance and abstraction of a planner. The planner experiences the city as a concept, while the walker experiences it as a practice of everyday life. Similarly, Facebook can be understood, from afar, in terms of its architectural properties; the code through which it is constructed. This is Facebook as a concept, an object. Users on the other hand, like the walker in the city, experience it as a practice. Space exists as a layer over place, over architecture and for de Certeau the social act of walking brings space into being. Space is the social manifestation of physical places, which are, in part, shaped by their architecture (de Certeau 1984; Lofland 1998).