People talk about the internet in spatial terms but the internet isn’t a place. It won’t be until it looks like a William Gibson novel. The internet is a conglomerate of (often interactive) media that is interpreted as a place by the brain. I think it’s interpreted as a place because people are there and social dynamics can crystallize there, and typically in the past, people have needed places in which to manifest these kinds of complex social dynamics. But on the internet, the place itself is no longer necessary.
Gibson is an interesting writer because he feels prophetic, but in a very specific way. He has an uncanny sense of what is and what will be fashionable, of what pop culture does and could look like. This may seem trivial, but what it really means is that he’s, on the one hand, very good at imagining the minute details of daily life in a world marked by the digital, and on the other, very good at letting all of these details coalesce into a large-scale image of this world. His prophetic quality, however, is most compelling because of what it sometimes gets wrong. Across Gibson’s novels, or at least the ones I’ve read, he utilizes a cyberspace that is perceived as physical by its users. Moving through cyberspace in the Sprawl trilogy is like moving through a neon city, where buildings made of data have real dimensions and where the person ‘jacked in’ to the digital world retains some semblance of a body (which can die!). In Idoru, even 14 year old girls are able to create immersive online worlds where they can interact with physical representations of their friends, in 3D. I’m not sure about his most recent novels, because I haven’t read them, but in his older novels set in the future, he assumes this physicality of cyberspace. All of the prescient cultural touches which make these books feel so eerie radiate from this fundamental error.
Gibson predicts heavily politicized fan cultures which generate their own media. Gibson predicts hyper-stylized fashion trends (what we might call aesthetics) and the never ending fragmentation of subculture. Gibson predicts the spirituality that inevitably creeps into any digital space, the desire for a ‘ghost in the machine’ that we often see in fringe online communities.These ideas all orbit a physically present cyberspace. And yet these are things that are all true of the contemporary world. I think that this is because, for us, they orbit the assumption of a physically present cyberspace. We insist upon the internet as a space, and we exhibit some of Gibson’s markers of internet-as-space. But I think that there is a tension between the assumption of internet-as-space and the reality of internet-as-text, and I want to identify some examples of people acting not as members of a physical space, but instead simultaneous characters and creators in a ceaseless multimedia text who speak and orient themselves as if they are interacting with a space.
Confusion occurs. In general, people would rather talk about communities and spaces than texts, because they understand themselves as participating in communities and spaces. This is natural. It’s complicated because real things are happening within these texts – but that doesn’t change the fact that they follow textual, aesthetic, and cinematographic logics. I think places are characterized by touch and by the ability to situate the body not just through sight, but also through touch. Spaces give us tactile information above all else. There is a tactile logic that is present in spaces that is not present elsewhere – the body feels cold, so it wraps a sweater around itself. The sweater is too rough, so it finds another sweater. There is no narrative logic in this.
Another quality of space is that it facilitates layered, multisensory communication with other beings. Your friends aren’t just images – they’re also physical beings that set communication norms as physical beings. I have friends whose shoulders I can put my head on when we’re traveling together and I’m tired; I have friends for whom a touch on the knee or the arm is a normal part of conversation. I have friends who hug me every time I leave their presence, and friends whom I’ve never hugged at all. I can think of one or two close friends whom I’ve never touched, not even a handshake. None of these norms were discussed – they were intuited based on some unspoken mutual accounting which, again, is subject to something other than narrative logic.
Texts are characterized by the absence of the body and the presence of narrative logic. If we look at a video game, probably the closest textual facsimile of space we have, we can see this. In a video game the player often sees through the eyes of the character, and by touching the controller, they can make something happen onscreen. Despite this intimacy with the character, though, there is still a layer of narrative abstraction between the body and the game. If the character feels hungry, a marker of some kind appears onscreen to indicate hunger to the player. If the character is hurt or dies, the screen changes to reflect this. The operating logic for the player is not the pre-narrative impulse of physical hunger, which instigates the search for food and only becomes narrativized if the hungry person reflects on it afterward; instead, it is based on narrative cues, whether, visual, textual, or auditory, which tell the player how to react. Following this, a disembodied social experience, like the ones that we have on the internet, must cohere to narrative cues and logic, because there is a layer of abstraction present in every interaction. I am not reacting to a person, I am reacting to what a person puts on a screen, and vice versa. This abstraction requires a few narrative leaps: most crucially, the idea that the texts or images onscreen are representative of another person, like dialogue and character description would be representative of a character in a book.
I want to look at subculture vs. aesthetics as a case study for spatial logic vs. narrative logic. In Gibson’s worlds, super-stylized ways of dressing and acting that are obviously influenced by media and even theory are markers of youth subcultures. These subcultures are influenced by cyberspace and situate themselves (at least partly) in cyberspace, but they also have legible shapes in the real world, often taking the form of gangs or factions. They have real world infrastructures as well as digital infrastructures, and real world cultural and political heft that is, again, legible even when not viewed through the prism of cyberspace. I think this is because, for Gibson, cyberspace is like a room or a town or a city that one can enter and leave. It’s a (very strange) extension of physical reality which, while still being subject to certain of its dictates, deepens and enriches it. In relation to subculture, physical cyberspace would be analogous to a physical clubhouse or meeting room.
In contrast – something I see often today is a group of young people walking down the street dressed in fashions that are obviously influenced by the internet. You have one girl dressed as an e-girl, another dressed in some kind of cottagecore style, etc. They’re all articulating something very different. The way they look is not homogenous but the way they talk is homogenous meme speak. One would not imagine that they are part of the same subculture, but it’s clear that they have the same communicative norms, despite their wildly different ‘aesthetics’. Last year I spent a day with a group of friends that I now mostly interact with on the internet. It was easy to tell who was embodying what internet aesthetic, and who went on which parts of the internet, by what we were all wearing. A Gibson character, if they were to look upon this scene, might assume that we were all parts of different subcultures, but in truth, we all spoke the same ‘language’, had the same references, the same cultural touchstones. We didn’t look like we were all members of the same real-life social group. I’m imagining a TV show, or a YA novel, where the characters all inhabit the same world, but all have some sort of distinguishing set of gimmicks that makes them visually unique. We looked like that. We were characters in a manga.
Because we spend most of our time together on the internet, certain of my friends and I are characters to each other. The rule of our lives is differentiation, not assimilation. This doesn’t happen in spaces. This happens in texts. We inhabit the same textual world and, because we are stripped of our bodies and limited to representation in words and images in this world, we have to distinguish ourselves from each other. There is no special, indefinable ‘essence’ to a digital persona, nothing analogous to the inherent individuality that each person wears in ‘real life’. People who are ‘too online’ are often accused of having ‘main character syndrome’. I would think that this is at least partly because online, one has to build one’s character up from nothing, to define it more clearly than one would in the real world, and it’s easy to let this textual logic slowly take over one’s life. For a while, a couple of years ago, a lot of people I know used to describe certain outfits their friends wore, or things their friends did, as ‘iconic’. Iconic moments were just snapshots that affirmed a person’s persona – affirmed the thing that makes someone legitimately human on the internet.
Yet there is a cognitive dissonance in all of this, a fundamental dissatisfaction which expresses itself in two ways. The first is that textual logic feels kind of uncanny valley in the real world. We’ve all seen the person who uses a lot of meme speak in a certain way, or who uses mimetic poses in real life. It’s unsettling and can make a conversation feel smaller. The second, more troubling problem is that the assumption that the internet is a space makes demands of the internet that it can’t fulfill. This results in a lot of alienation and loneliness.
In my life, I’ve moved between four countries. I have friends that I used to see all the time that now live hundreds of miles away from me. I can talk to them on the internet, but when I remember them, when I miss them, I don’t miss the content of their conversation. I miss their voices, the nearly imperceptible expressions that flit over their faces and don’t appear in photographs. I miss the ways that they decorate their homes. I miss the way that a close friend of mine would always buy the same cheap wine, and would heat up a chocolate chip cookie in the oven for me when I visited him so that I wouldn’t have to eat it cold. I miss listening to music with my best friend in her car. These are necessarily spatial experiences – something analogous (although not identical) might be possible in the world of Idoru, but not the digital space we have now.
I think we would all be a lot healthier if we let go of the assumption that the internet is a space, and instead embraced it for what it is – a text. How does the internet change if we acknowledge that we are simultaneously its characters, its creators and its audience members, and that this applies just as much to a casual group chat between friends as much as it does to explicitly performative content, like a youtube channel? What are the possibilities and limitations of this? Personally, I don’t know, but I do know that life has gotten a lot more interesting since I’ve started looking at various parts of the internet as more similar to a book or a tv show than my friend’s living room.