快猫短视频

BOOKS about cyberspace are like television shows about food. Their authors can give us a sense of what the excitement is all about, but they can never provide the experience of the real thing. So in Mark Nunes鈥檚 new book Cyberspaces of Everyday Life, where he examines the multifarious ways in which people interact with communication technologies, he is unable to include the hyperlinks and search facilities that abound in cyberspace.

Yet the word cyberspace first appeared in a book: William Gibson鈥檚 1984 novel Neuromancer. Gibson invented the word, inspired no doubt by the term cybernetics, coined by American mathematician Norbert Wiener. Gibson also supplied the now-famous definition: 鈥淎 consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions鈥� a graphical representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system.鈥� When the web, browsers and search engines came along a decade or so later, the word was there waiting. Shrewdly reworking religious and philosophical conceptions of transcendence, Gibson then set up a vivid contrast between cyberspace and 鈥� as he provocatively put it 鈥� 鈥渕eatspace鈥�. Disembodied in cyberspace, we are liberated to fly around a virtual world like Superman, while back in the material world all that鈥檚 left of us is an obsolete bundle of organs.

At the time, many people saw this as a revolutionary promise. Yet the relationships between cyberspace and our surroundings, physical bodies and social practices have turned out to be more complex, subtle and interesting than Gibson proposed. We are often exposed to multiple streams of data simultaneously, through computer screens, mobile phones, MP3 players and a growing array of other interactive gadgets. As I type this text in one window of my laptop, emails arrive in another. A third window shows live video of Australia playing England at cricket. From time to time, I break away from the screen to pay attention to the demands of children, dogs and bodily functions: the here and now is just another open window.

We live in a world in which time and space are fragmented and our attention is divided, continually switching back and forth between different streams of sensory inputs. Furthermore, we have the ability to weave these streams together. I glance up from my hard copy of this review to Google a concept the author has introduced. In my car, I experience the urban here and now through the windshield, while my GPS navigation system locates me in a map, and I attempt to mentally coordinate the two.

鈥淭he here and now is just another open window鈥�

In his book, Mark Nunes attempts to understand the complex ways in which cyberspace and physical space intermingle. He has the inspired idea of putting these 21st-century scenarios in the context of work by the 20th-century French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre. This work, in particular his monumental 1974 text The Production of Space, has been hugely influential among certain geographers, urban planners and cultural critics. As the title of the book suggests, Lefebvre argued that social space 鈥� the social environment in which people interact with and relate to each other 鈥� is neither neutral nor static, but is actively 鈥減roduced鈥� by our everyday behaviour. Nunes effectively extends Lefebvre鈥檚 thesis by exploring the way our behaviour defines cyberspace.

Nunes鈥檚 treatment is thorough and scholarly, although sometimes lacking in sparkle. It provides a very useful antidote to the frothy pop theorising of Wired magazine and other such hangovers from the dotcom era. As it is, it is a valuable read, but it will probably become more interesting when 鈥� like every other book 鈥� it is sucked into the web through the digitising and indexing projects that both Google and Amazon are running. From there it can be given new contexts through cross-links to other texts and assimilated into its subject matter.