TY - JOUR
AU - Proctor,, Devin
AB - Abstract The Internet has always been understood through spatial terminology—cyberspace, web addresses, sites, domains—but this article argues for moving beyond the metaphors to recognize the Internet as an embodied and socially-produced digital space. Building from a Lefebvrian framework of perceived, conceived, and lived spaces, the article proposes a new model for examining Internet social space, featuring three co-productive spaces: a space of affordance, a space of programming, and a space of virtuality. While our interaction with Internet social space is enabled through affordances, these actions are constrained by the limitations of the Internet's underlying programming. It is possible to subvert this power dynamic through tactical action when we realize that—unlike the spaces of affordance and programming—the space of virtuality is not tethered to any specific program or paradigm, but rather exists across platforms. Our Internet-based social lives are organized by and typically benefit large media interests; this has become an undeniable fact. Companies like Amazon, Google, and Facebook sell our private data to advertisers—and in some cases, political organizations—who then use it to influence other areas of our lives. They often do this with our permission, given via impenetrable terms and conditions agreements (which we must sign [i.e., click “OK”] or lose access to our email/social media/etc.). The above statements are not part of a polemical argument, but rather a simple recognition of the state of the contemporary Internet. So what do we, as users, do in this situation? We could follow Althusser (1971) and deem ourselves dupes at the hands of an ideologically all-powerful apparatus, our only mode of escape to completely cut ties with Internet technologies. Conversely, we could heed the revolutionary foundations of the Internet (Turner, 2008), and push further into the technology, utilizing open source software, VPNs, and shared code to reinvent our Internet social presence in a non-corporate paradigm. For most of us, though—neither willing to give up the technology nor skilled enough to circumvent its protocols—these do not represent realistic choices. How, then, are we to envision this contested terrain that takes up so much of our lives, and how do we reconcile our involvement? In viewing Internet engagement primarily as a losing game of surveillance and advertising, we ignore the fact that meaningful and generative sociality happens within these spaces. And much of what I will argue here rests on that assertion: that the Internet is made of spaces. Alongside a recent call for a focus on Lefebvrian theory in the field of communication (Fuchs, 2018), I approach the Internet as a series of interpenetrative and co-productive spaces arising from set of particularly situated social practices and relations. In Lefebvre's (1991) own words: “Social relations, which are concrete abstractions, have no real existence save in and through space. Their underpinning is spatial. In each particular case, the connection between this underpinning and the relations it supports calls for analysis” (p. 404, emphasis in original). It may seem odd to approach Internet sociality—immaterial by its very definition—from a largely materialist theoretical vantage point, but Lefebvre is arguing here that all social relations are abstractions. The bodies and the places and the tools are concrete, but the social remains abstract. In this sense, Internet sociality is a venue particularly apropos for a discussion of human-centered materialist spatial production. That said, why space? Why, if social relations are abstractions, do they not belong to the realm of time, or imagination, or some other such virtuality? In concrete space this conclusion seems simple enough: you can see and experience the space through its bodies, structures, and things; further, the space itself is what brings bodies and tools and practices into closer connection with one another, facilitating social relations. In the Internet, though—fundamentally devoid of this concreteness—why would we conceive of the social as the spatial? Or more to the point, why am I so determined to argue that it is? I am an anthropologist. I work in multiple digital field sites, from three-dimensional digital worlds to social media outlets and chat forums. In anthropology, there is a long history of “setting the scene” and inviting a reader into the space of inquiry, leading to lush imagery of jungle flora or stark depictions of what abject poverty looks, sounds, and smells like. These passages act as proof that the anthropologist was indeed “in the field,” but also serve to situate the content within a thick local context. This is its own type of virtuality: almost 100 years ago, Malinowski's (1922) foundational ethnographic account of the Kula begins, “Imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by all your gear, alone on a tropical beach close to a native village” (p. 4; see also Boellstorff, 2008, p. 3). Malinowski invites us to experience a virtual recreation of the Trobriand Islands through his evocative prose. As an anthropologist of the digital, my job in this respect is peculiar: in the Internet, there are (usually) sounds, and you can see things, but what does the Internet smell/feel/taste like? How do I richly describe being-in-social-media, without any recognizable physical approximations to latch onto? In environments that utilize three-dimensional graphics like Second Life or a Massively Multiple Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) it is somewhat easier, as people have coded the program to resemble a world within which a body can exist and move, and which I can describe as if I were in physical space. In these graphically rendered contexts (entirely built from and run on code), we tend take for granted that we are in some sort of space, but why do we not feel this way about other, less seemingly three-dimensional Internet spaces like social media or chat? People will leave their computers during group forum chats without signing out, sometimes for hours at a time, and few members notice, whereas a non-communicative avatar in a game is cause for annoyance. How is it that the space of Second Life and the space of a chat forum is experienced differently? And when we are not there to experience it (leaving unanswered chats and empty avatars behind) is it even a space at all? What creates Internet space—code, graphics, avatars, or the users themselves? Drawing from Lefebvre, I view Internet space as social space. To be clear, I am far from the first to apply Lefebvrian theory to digital space: this article stands as a continuation of a long line of theorists who have grappled with the connection. As early as the mid-nineties, Michael Benedikt (1996) postulated that cyberspace1 could be thought of as a social space, and a couple of years later, Anne Cicognani (1998) pushed this further by specifically bullet-pointing aspects of Lefebvrian spatial theory that could be applied to digital space. Julie Cohen (2007) describes cyberspace as more than simply metaphorical, but as “a nexus of social practice by embodied human beings (…) and a catalyst for impressionistic reimaginings of sociospatial practice” (p. 236). Stine Gotved (2006) calls upon Lefebvre as part of the spatial layer of his own triangular construction to look at “cyber culture” through both time and space, and Sophia Drakopoulou (2013) examines digital spaces interjecting into physical space through augmented reality devices, also deploying Lefebvre's triad. Contemporarily, Masoud Kosari and Abbas Amoori seek to reconfigure the concept of “thirdspace” to include a trilateral relationship between “virtual space, real space, and the users themselves” (2018; see also Soja, 1996). Of all Lefebvrian treatments of the digital, though, this article owes the most to Mark Nunes's (2006) excellent Cyberspaces of Everyday Life, and insights such as “cyberspace is not where these relations take place, it is the “where” enacted by these relations” (p. 28). Indeed, the space of the Internet is only spatial in the sense that people occupy it in the course of social practices, and as long as these practices continue, so remains the space. All of the above studies take a view of cyberspace that prioritizes user practice as constitutive of the space itself—truly a social space. This article aligns with that fundamental assertion, and also with a trajectory set forth by the majority of these studies—Gotved and Kosari & Amoori notwithstanding—specifically the blurring of online:offline, virtual:real dichotomies in favor of a view of these spaces as interpenetrative and networked. Thus—though the construction of a spatial trialectic may seem bounded and relegated to The Virtual as opposed to The Real—I understand these spaces to be quite fluid and mutually influencing (i.e., co-productive). This article diverges from the past scholarship in where it places its focus. Much of the work mentioned (Benedikt, Gotved, Kosari & Amoori) uses Lefebvrian constructions to more fully understand Internet spaces in a metaphorical sense. Conversely, the others (Cicognani, Drakopoulou, and Nunes) seek to trace how Internet spaces (as socially constructed) affect the concrete, non-digital world through the aforementioned networks. This article concentrates on a middle road between the two: I am interested in Internet spaces themselves (more so than their effects elsewhere), and not as a metaphorical concept, but rather as inhabited and experienced. I argue that the Internet is made of interpenetrative social spaces. Specifically, I propose that Internet social space is comprised of three mutually co-producing spaces: those of affordance, programming, and virtuality. The Internet is not a material physical space wherein concrete things can be pinpointed; neither does it contain tangible bodies that can socialize with each other. It is not a place exactly, because it is not locatable in any concrete sense; you cannot point to it on any map. It is a space largely because the ways we describe and comprehend it would stop making sense if we thought of it any other way. It is a space in the same way money has value, or letters spell out words that have meanings—it is a social agreement that must be upheld because so much is based on it. The spatiality of the Internet is a metaphor that we live by (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) as much as it is a social fact (Durkheim, 1895). I contend that the Internet is both social space and socially-produced space, by which I mean that it only exists as a product of our inhabitation and constant re-creation through everyday practice. The fact of our existence within the Internet and our interaction with it and each other is what continually makes and remakes the space. And because space is here defined by the sociality of people rather than some understanding of three-dimensional spatiality, then an active Facebook group or chat forum is just as spatial as Second Life or an MMORPG, provided people are doing things within the space. An explication of Internet social space follows, proceeding in five sections. The first examines why we engage with the Internet as a space to begin with and the second explains Lefebvre's social space theory in detail. The third through fifth sections lay out my proposed triadic spatial framework: spaces of affordance, programming, and virtuality, analogous to the Lefebvrian practiced, conceived, and lived spaces. This is followed by a conclusion that raises more questions than it can answer. Cyberspace The concept of “cyberspace” comes from William Gibson's (1984) novel, Neuromancer, defined as “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions(…) a graphical representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system” (p. 51). The novel follows Case, a “computer cowboy” who quite literally surfs through cyberspace, in search of secrets to sell. It launched the cyberpunk genre of science fiction, as well as introducing the world to the idea that this web of information had dimensional properties, and that things happen in those dimensions. The use of virtual space to store and retrieve information, however, predates Gibson by a few thousand years, dating as far back as ancient Greece, and the practice of loci, which involves linking detailed information to an invented space in your mind (Yates, 2014). These mind-spaces came to be called “memory palaces,” deepened in complexity, and, by the sixteenth century, they had “become a way for ordering all one's knowledge of secular and religious subjects” among monks and missionaries (Spence, 1985, p. 3). Gibson's cyberspace applied this already-established tradition of virtual space to computer technologies. Thus, when the Internet became publicly available through the World Wide Web, the concept of an Internet “environment” already held imaginative weight. In its early days, the Internet was envisioned as a liberatory space that would look like Neuromancer, with users entering into cyberspace via virtual reality suits. Movies like The Lawnmower Man took advantage of new computer graphics to suggest these cyberspace realms. Due largely to cost and practicality, virtual reality interfaces did not see much public success at the time, leaving the typical user's experience of the Internet composed of a body in corporeal form sitting in front of a flat screen. Despite the experiential differences, the spatial imagery held, and, by the late-nineties, spatial terms had become cemented in the Internet lexicon: users “surfed the Net” like Case, or cruised the “information superhighway”; they saw the digital as a “frontier” (Adams, 1997). The original Netscape Navigator browser illustrates the spatial metaphors of the early Internet doubly—web use is a type of “navigation,” and the Inter-Net is a “scape,” like a landscape or seascape. While some of this early web-lingo may seem a bit passé, users still speak of the Internet in these spatial terms. We type in web “addresses” to go to web “sites.” Even the laws of Internet ownership are deeply tied to spatiality. As Hine (2000) warns us: Complex interlinking structure, together with the lack of clues to the physical location at which documents were produced and are stored, that has led people to suggest that the web is aspatial. This view, however, deletes the intense awareness which web developers have of the territory of their own web sites, and the spatiality which stems from the differential connectedness of sites. One of the key dimensions of spatiality on the WWW is that of territory (p. 105). Users engage with all facets of the Internet as a spatial construct, including business. Website ownership is a legal reality, and the language of this reality is spatial. The US Supreme Court cemented this in a 1997 decision that legally defines the Internet as “an international network of interconnected computers that enables millions of people to communicate with one another in ‘cyberspace’ and to access vast amounts of information from around the world” (Reno, Attorney General of the United States et al. v. American Civil Liberties Union et al., 1997). Recalling Hine, the right of ownership within this “cyberspace” is described as a “territory.” The term already has legal precedent that goes back as far as laws themselves—it is about land ownership. Those who own the “addresses” and “territories” of Internet “domains” are “cyberspace” landowners. Their rights as landowners (a historically privileged position) are protected, even if the land itself is completely immaterial. Concepts of cloud architecture and the onset of wireless connectivity have created a change in the spatiality of the Internet. It is no longer conceived of as space in the same linear, expansive sense as a landscape, but rather as an amorphous volume. In her call for media-specific analysis, Hayles (2004) argues that the Internet depends on certain “specificities of electronic hypertext: (…) they have depth and operate in three dimensions; [and] they are spaces to navigate” (p. 68). The Deep Web is mysterious not only because of its lack of commercially searchable IP addresses or regulatory bodies, but also because of the feeling of obscurity that comes with depth, and like the unexplored depths of the world's oceans, the Deep Web contains imagined (and not-so-imagined) monsters. This water metaphor also helps translate the amorphousness of Internet space: “terms such as ‘flow,’ ‘depth,’ and ‘stream’ get recruited to myriad tasks by devotees and dilettantes alike. No one knows quite where it begins or ends” (Dent, 2016, p. S113). While these images conjure feelings of boundarylessness and imply an aspatial turn, I would propose that the reason this lack of boundary produces so much anxiety is that in a cultural, linguistic, psychological, and legal sense, we fundamentally conceive of the Internet as spatial, despite that fact that it does not exist anywhere in any physical form. Space as a social product Mark Nunes (2006) explains in his book, Cyberspaces of Everyday Life, that Internet sociality takes place “neither here (at the computer screen) nor there (at some other location), but rather within the medium itself” (p. 3, emphasis in original). In the Internet, our communication “employs a language of entry and travel that positions the user within the medium, such that the user and not the device becomes operationalized” (p. xiv, emphasis in original). Not only is communication occurring within the space, but the user is within the space as well, as the operational aspect of the medium. In positioning users into the production of their own spaces, Nunes recognizes cyberspace as representative of Lefebvrian social production: the idea that, “a space is not a thing but rather a set of relations between things (objects and products)” (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 83). In other words, spaces come into existence when they are included in some sort of sociality. Space is a social product. Lefebvre's intervention speaks directly against what had been the prevailing Cartesian-Kantian understanding of space: that it is a void waiting to be filled with res extensa (people and things) and is completely separate from res cogitans (signs, thought, discourse). In a sense, he was re-asserting an Aristotelian spatial paradigm of space as a “continuous quantity” defined by a “common boundary” with solid objects (Aristotle, 2001, p. 15). Influenced by Hegelian and Marxian dialectical thinking, Lefebvre (1980) resurrects the idea of space as a quantity, but seeks to disrupt the dualism of space/object with a third aspect, asking, “Is there ever a two-term relationship, except in representation? There are always Three. There is always the Other” (p. 143). To locate the spatial Other and categorize how we experience it, Lefebvre (1991) puts forth a “conceptual triad” model of spatial practice, representations of space, and space of representations, which he lays out thus: Spatial practice, which embraces production and reproduction, and the particular locations and spatial sets characteristic of each social formation. Spatial practice ensures continuity and some degree of cohesion. In terms of social space, and of each member of a given society's relationship to that space, this cohesion implies a guaranteed level of competence and a specific level of performance. Representations of space, which are tied to the relations of production and to the “order” which those relations impose, and hence to knowledge, to signs, to codes, and to “frontal” relations. Representational spaces, embodying complex symbolisms, sometimes coded, sometimes not, linked to the clandestine or underground side of social life, as also to art (which may come eventually to be defined less as a code of space than as a code of representational spaces) (p. 33, emphasis in original). What follows in this section will augment and further explain those three points. A society's spatial practice “secretes that society's space; it propounds and presupposes it, in a dialectical interaction” (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 38). It is “presented as both medium and outcome of human activity, behavior, and experience” (Soja, 1996, p. 66). Simply put, this dimension encompasses the daily routines involving people and things, and how those routines block off spaces into categories like work and leisure over time. In terms of a person's experience, Lefebvre designates this a perceived space, because its elements—things and people—are fairly out in the open and easily perceivable to those involved. Importantly, Lefebvre (1991) is speaking here about people who are accustomed to and proficient within these spaces—recall: “a guaranteed level of competence and a specific level of performance” (p. 33)—so not everyone “perceives” the space in the same way. For example, eating and waiting tables offer very different perceptions and types of competence within the same restaurant-space. A server (more so than the diner) would engage with this restaurant-space as primarily one of spatial practice: with an ordered and proficient set of actions informed by intimate knowledge and experience. Lefebvre's (1991) second dimension, representations of space, concerns the “conceptualized space” of experts: geographers, social scientists, planners, and “technocratic subdividers.” Usually the “dominant space in any society,” it employs “a system of verbal (and therefore intellectually worked out) signs” (pp. 38–39). These can include maps, definitions, scientific theories, and other concepts that hold epistemological power about the nature and purpose of the space. This is a conceived space, planned out and established beforehand, but also present in the space. The conceived purposes and practices of a space inform and order the perceived spatial practices, just as these practices reinforce and re-produce the space as it has been conceived. Thus, the perceived and conceived spaces mutually co-produce one another. In our restaurant example, for instance, servers take orders and bring food in a certain fashion, just as diners order and pay in a certain fashion, seemingly because it is the logical or most efficient way to go about their daily activities of obtaining sustenance or wages. All of these practices, however, have been planned and implemented beforehand by managers, owners, and government regulators, and these plans are reinforced by both the servers' and diners' actions. Table 1 Lefebvre's Triad . Physical . Mental (savoir) . Social (connaissance) . Spatial Spatial Practice Representations of Space Spaces of Representation Experiential Perceived Conceived Lived . Physical . Mental (savoir) . Social (connaissance) . Spatial Spatial Practice Representations of Space Spaces of Representation Experiential Perceived Conceived Lived Open in new tab Table 1 Lefebvre's Triad . Physical . Mental (savoir) . Social (connaissance) . Spatial Spatial Practice Representations of Space Spaces of Representation Experiential Perceived Conceived Lived . Physical . Mental (savoir) . Social (connaissance) . Spatial Spatial Practice Representations of Space Spaces of Representation Experiential Perceived Conceived Lived Open in new tab The space of representations is “dominated—and hence passively experienced—space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate” (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 39). It is “redolent with imaginary and symbolic elements, they have their source in history—in the history of a people as well as in the history of each individual belonging to that people” (p. 41). As the inverse of representations of space, a space of representations makes symbolic use of its objects, referring to what is physically in the space in terms of their localized cultural meanings: the state, gender, religion, class, resistance. While representations of space are created through structured institutions of knowledge (savoir), spaces of representation are driven by understanding (connaissance), a less formal and more locally embedded form of knowledge. Back in our restaurant-space, the diner engages with this space in terms of the context and her own background experience: Is she in a “fine-dining establishment” or a “dive bar” (and what communicates that distinction)? Is she on vacation? Is it a business lunch? What day is it? What meal is it? What did she order? How much of the order was drinks? What part of town is this? Does she come here often? How does this place feel to her? And how do these factors influence the culturally fraught practice of tipping? All of these decisions are purportedly based on subjective, conjured pieces of information, but are nonetheless co-productive with the perceived and conceived aspects of the space. How, for instance, would the managers and servers of (what could be locally considered) “fine-dining” or “dive bar” establishments adjust their plans and practices to fit these designations? Thus, the three spaces constantly reinforce and re-produce one another through social practice. Table 1 projects a “unitary theory” (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 11), that is, a “totality between physical, mental, and social space” (Elden, 2004, p. 190). What Lefebvre means by this is that—though the components of the triad operate in a dialectical fashion—the separate pieces cannot be understood or function without the context of the whole. Accordingly, he explains that these spatial dimensions are simultaneous and entwined, but wholly messy: that the “realms should be interconnected, so that the ‘subject,’ the individual member of a given social group, may move from one to another without confusion—so much is a logical necessity. Whether they constitute a coherent whole is another matter” (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 40). Table 2 Lefebvre's Triad with Linguistic Foundations . Physical . Mental . Social . Spatial Spatial Practice Representations of Space Spaces of Representation Experiential Perceived Conceived Lived Linguistic Syntagmatic Paradigmatic Symbolic . Physical . Mental . Social . Spatial Spatial Practice Representations of Space Spaces of Representation Experiential Perceived Conceived Lived Linguistic Syntagmatic Paradigmatic Symbolic Open in new tab Table 2 Lefebvre's Triad with Linguistic Foundations . Physical . Mental . Social . Spatial Spatial Practice Representations of Space Spaces of Representation Experiential Perceived Conceived Lived Linguistic Syntagmatic Paradigmatic Symbolic . Physical . Mental . Social . Spatial Spatial Practice Representations of Space Spaces of Representation Experiential Perceived Conceived Lived Linguistic Syntagmatic Paradigmatic Symbolic Open in new tab Though the theory is fundamentally about space, linguistics is also vital to its construction. Lefebvre's (1991) spatial triad is actually built on the foundations set by a three-fold theory of language—syntagmatic, paradigmatic, and symbolic (see Table 2)—that he had developed earlier in his career (Lefebvre, 1966) in a dialectic refutation of Saussure's (1959) structuralist semiotics. Perceived space is syntagmatic because it “organizes a sequence of actions with a certain ‘objective’ (…) [and] imposes a temporal and spatial order upon related operations whose results are coextensive” (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 71). In this way—and like the syntagmatic linearity of language—the space coalesces disparate activities and material objects into directed practice (e.g., taking diners' orders drinks first, then appetizer, followed by main course, etc.). Conceived space is paradigmatic because the ideological and institutional structures controlling it can be substituted with similar structures (e.g., servers and managers can be replaced by other servers and managers). Lived space is analogous to Lefebvre's linguistic third (Other) designation, the symbolic dimension of language: “the basis of the social imaginary that is different from the individual imaginary” (Schmid, 2008, p. 36). So, in our restaurant-space, local and contextual social understandings of different types of establishment, food, and ambience will affect spatial production as much as the planning and practice. Moving forward, I will apply this spatial triad—in both its experiential and linguistic modes—to Internet space, through my proposal of the spaces of a perceived space of affordance, a conceived space of programming, and a lived space of virtuality. I do this in hopes of locating ourselves and our actions within the Internet, and perhaps figuring out where, exactly, that is. Table 3 Lefebvre's Triad, with the addition of the Digital Spaces of Affordance, Programming, and Virtuality . Physical . Mental . Social . Spatial Spatial Practice Representations of Space Spaces of Representation Experiential Perceived Conceived Lived Linguistic Syntagmatic Paradigmatic Symbolic Digital Space of Affordance Space of Programming Space of Virtuality . Physical . Mental . Social . Spatial Spatial Practice Representations of Space Spaces of Representation Experiential Perceived Conceived Lived Linguistic Syntagmatic Paradigmatic Symbolic Digital Space of Affordance Space of Programming Space of Virtuality Open in new tab Table 3 Lefebvre's Triad, with the addition of the Digital Spaces of Affordance, Programming, and Virtuality . Physical . Mental . Social . Spatial Spatial Practice Representations of Space Spaces of Representation Experiential Perceived Conceived Lived Linguistic Syntagmatic Paradigmatic Symbolic Digital Space of Affordance Space of Programming Space of Virtuality . Physical . Mental . Social . Spatial Spatial Practice Representations of Space Spaces of Representation Experiential Perceived Conceived Lived Linguistic Syntagmatic Paradigmatic Symbolic Digital Space of Affordance Space of Programming Space of Virtuality Open in new tab The space of affordance Affordances are the ways in which certain technologies communicate to users how they should be used. James Gibson (1977) coined the concept as a psychological term: “the affordance of anything is a specific combination of the properties of its substance and its surface taken with reference to an animal” (pp. 67–68). Or, as George Herbert Mead (1962) had earlier observed, “the chair invites us to sit down” by being knee-height (p. 280), but Gibson (1977) stresses that affordances are always contextual, and that even in the case of chairs “knee-high for a child is not the same as knee-high for an adult” (p. 68). This is a crucial aspect of affordances, that “they only exist as affordances relative to the properties of some other perceiving and acting entity” (Keane, 2014, p. 7). Despite psychological origins, the term is most often used now as an aspect of design—as introduced by Donald Norman (1988)—describing how an object communicates the available ways it can (or should) be acted upon. Examples include curved door handles for pulling vs. flat plates for pushing, or icons on a computer screen that resemble buttons to be pushed or boxes to be checked. Hutchby (2001) brought the terminology into use concerning computer technologies as a solution to (what he saw as) the extremist poles of technological determinism (e.g., Poster, 1995; Toffler, 1984) and social constructionism (e.g., Grint & Woolgar, 1997). Hutchby (2001) frames affordances as relational processes: “functional and relational aspects which frame, while not determining, the possibilities for agentic action in relation to an object” (p. 444). Otherwise put, affordances “make possible—and, in some cases, are used to encourage—certain types of practices, even if they do not determine what practices will unfold” (boyd, 2014, p. 10). The relational aspect emphasized by Hutchby is central to the concept of affordance because it avoids a deterministic view of technology. Aagaard (2018) illustrates this with a simple example: a pencil affords writing as its suggested “canonical” use, but it could also be used as a back-scratcher, or a bookmark, or even to stab someone. Further, when the tip breaks, it no longer affords writing or stabbing, but can still be used in book marking and back scratching (or, for that matter, as a projectile, acoustic percussive instrument, or small-scale construction material). To push Aagard's example even further, the “canonical” use of an un-broken pencil (i.e., writing) is only afforded to users who have a means of holding a pencil, who have some sense of language, and who have something to write on. Thus, the use of a pencil is determined in contextual and relational ways between the user, the environment, and the technological object itself. Much of the current scholarship on the relationality of technological affordances comes out of a “postphenomenological” school of thought (Ihde et al., 2015; Rosenberger, 2017; Verbeek, 2005). Drawing from Ihde (1995), postphenomenology is influenced by phenomenological thought (e.g., Heidegger, 1962, 1977; Merleau-Ponty, 1962), but rejects the romanticizing distance these theories place between humans and technology, arguing, “technologies do not afford action possibilities to preexisting subjects with fixed goals, but subtly invite and facilitate certain comportments while inhibiting and foreclosing others” (Aagaard, 2018, pp. 5–6; see also Rosenberger, 2014). This view of human–technology relationality is uncannily reminiscent of Lefebvrian (1991) social space: “Itself the outcome of past actions, social space is what permits fresh actions to occur, while suggesting others and prohibiting yet others” (p. 73). In Lefebvrian terminology, affordance is the mode of “material” relation within the perceived space of the Internet: it is through perceived affordances that we interact with the stuff of the Internet. Affordances are also syntagmatic in the sense that they suggest interaction between user and environment (i.e., platform) through certain ordered features that prohibit others. And it is important here to distinguish between affordances and features, because the two can become confused. We have become accustomed to platform actions such as “liking” posts by clicking on thumb and heart icons, typing into text fields, and playing videos by clicking on prone triangle skeuomorphs recalling the days of magnetic tape. These icons, text fields, and skeuomorphs are not affordances, but rather features of the platform. The affordances are the ways in which the platform reveals itself to be likable, typeable, and watchable by the user—all available relational interactions—whereas features are the specific and various ways the platform offers a user to carry them out. The affordances are by definition, “invariant.” As Oliver (2005) argues, Gibson's initial concept of affordance “adopts a materialist, essentialist position” (p. 403). He quotes Gibson to illustrate: “Let us suppose that a kind of essential structure underlies the superficial structure of an array when the point of observation moves. This essential structure consists of what is invariant despite the change” (Gibson, 1977, p. 73, cited in Oliver, 2005, p. 403). So, the structured affordances of a platform may not vary, but the structuring features through which we enact them might. And since we are to understand affordance in more embodied terms (because we are present within the space of the Internet) it is useful to view these structures of affordance as analogous to habitus. Bourdieu (1977) defines habitus in many ways: “the orchestrated improvisation of common dispositions” (p. 17); “semi-learned grammars of practice” (p. 20); “the durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisations” (p. 78); and even “the mysteries of pre-established harmony or the prodigies of conscious orchestration to account for what, apprehended in pure synchrony, appears as objective meaning” (p. 79). His most famous and deceptively concise definition, however, is “structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures” (p. 72). In a digital environment, the space of affordances is a complex of structured structures—they are the invariant materials through which things get done in the context of the particular platform. They are structured in their invariance, guided by what Bourdieu calls an objective intention: “because his actions and works are the product of a modus operandi of which he is not the producer and has no conscious mastery, they contain an ‘objective intention’ (…) which always outruns his conscious intentions” (p. 79). Also recall (again) Lefebvre's (1991) claim that social space is “itself the outcome of past actions” (p. 73). Simply put, affordance represents the structured structures that the environment (or habitus) makes available as ways of being, and features represent the structuring structures through which we enact affordance based on personal choice (i.e., our “regulated improvisations”). Let us take the social space of a Facebook group page as an example. Facebook affords the ability to share content with the whole group, comment on other members' content, and communicate directly with the group or specific members of the group. As the “structured structures” of the platform, these are the only affordances available. We enact these affordances through features such as “posts” on “walls,” “likes,” “friend requests,” and personal or group “messages.” These actions represent habitus' “semi-learned grammars of practice” (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 20). A person's habitus is largely founded in social class and passed down through familial, institutional, and experiential pedagogy to act in the present, so any two people's ways of being in a space can differ greatly. Recall, also, that perceived space involves varying levels of competence and proficiency. This is no different in the space of affordance of Facebook group. Unlike the basic group “members,” the group “Administrators” (Admins) enjoy a slightly expanded set of affordances in relation to the platform. Specifically, Admin affordances include the ability to determine who and what can be present in the space, which they enact through features such as “approving,” “blocking,” and “deleting.” Although non-Admin group members engage with and in these environments through features, free to alter how a platform looks and feels to them, they have not changed the actual structures of the platform. But, notably, neither have the Admins. Though their sets of affordances are larger, they are still invariant. Robert Gehl (2014) puts this user/affordance relationship in a social media context thus: “on the one hand, social media allows for users to ‘be the media’ and thus influence mass culture; on the other hand, social media sites are rigidly hierarchical, allowing certain uses and discouraging others” (p. 6). Going back to our restaurant-space example, Admins are similar to the managers: they approve and order the movements and practices of the servers (group members), but they themselves are also following an ordered set of actions as dictated by the conceived space of the restaurant. Likewise, our engagement in the Internet is heavily constrained by the limits of the affordances, as dictated by the programming of the platform. The space of programming The space of programming is perhaps the most similar to Lefebvre's triad at first glance. Like the conceived “representations of space,” it describes the official sanctioned use of a space: a program is a plan as much as any map, blueprint, or manual. Further, the program itself—before being put into effect through code—is purely conceptual, devised by experts at high levels of authority. Hence, a space of conceived representation and a space of programming are quite similar. In a physical-spatial paradigm, conceived use is designed by scientists, architects, and governmental bodies, then communicated through bureaucrats, laws, studies, and guidelines, to the workers and agencies that do the actual building of objects and borders into some pre-existing place with concrete, bricks, and other tangible materials, according to the planned out spatial attributes to facilitate the conceived use. In digital Internet space, use is envisioned by executives, lead designers, and boards of tech companies, then communicated through paper mock-ups, prototype presentations, and focus groups on aesthetics and functionality to the programmers who write the code into pre-existing programs and operating systems with “bricks” of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The above example helps illustrate the important distinction between programming and code. It is easy to blur them, but—much like affordances and features—differentiating the two is necessary, because it clarifies how these spaces are co-productive, rather than simply intermingled or adjacent. As the “bricks” of the Internet, code materializes programming. Returning, as ever, to our restaurant-space: say the architectural design for the space includes a chest-high divider and podium near the front door, conceived as a place for diners to wait and servers (or a host) to assign them seating, according to a grid of table sections. The divider is built with physical material to the specifications of the design and provides a physical barrier that communicates a spatial practice to a specific group: “diners, wait.” If the podium was not there, diners would not know to wait, and conversely, if the diners did not wait (because they misunderstood, or simply refused) the podium would have no purpose; the two influence and depend upon one another. Similarly, on the main feed of a Facebook group page, a user is induced to “write something” in a text box in the center of the screen, right beneath the name of the group. The text box is situated in this location in the platform-environment as a direct consequence of the conceived program, materialized through code, and it acts as a feature through which a user can (should) engage the affordance of intra-group communication. It does not only afford, though; it also precludes writing in other areas, and organizes/indicates the conceived use of the space, as envisioned by designers. Without a text box, users would not know where to write (or even to write) and if users could write anywhere, the text box would be useless. Facebook's space of programming communicates conceived user practice not only through directly enabling features via code, but also through the conceptual frameworks prompted by genre of social media: connecting to other users, sharing and creating content. These social media platforms contain and propagate “media ideologies” (Gershon, 2010a, 2010b; Gershon & Manning, 2014; Marvin, 1990)—"beliefs about communicative technologies with which users and designers explain perceived media structure and meaning” (Gershon, 2010b, p. 3). As a consequence of the combined spaces of affordance and programming, we tend to know what a particular platform is for and what it is not. Texting, for example, is for conversation, but not if the conversation is too serious, e.g., a death or a break-up. There is no reason you could not grieve or break-up over text message, but it is just not done; or if it is, it feels somehow wrong. This is the case for every media platform: its intended uses become ideologically ingrained as unwritten rules. And because the conceived space of programming is (usually) devised by the executives of private companies, the expected user-practice is integrally concerned with the many business activities of the company (e.g., Facebook) and agreements it has with other companies (e.g., advertisers, Cambridge Analytica, etc.). But let us not go as far as to treat the term “platform” so monolithically either. In its simplest sense, a platform is a conduit through which media content flows, but, as Gillespie (2010) argues, this simplistic usage obscures how catch-all terms like this do not come organically from public discourse, but are rather “drawn from the available cultural vocabulary by stakeholders with specific aims, and carefully massaged so as to have particular resonance for particular audiences inside particular discourses” (p. 359). A platform, then—like the media genre itself—is an ideological construction. Some of the practices alluded to above, such as sharing customer browsing information with advertisers, has led Gehl (2014) to claim that “social media outlets are new media capitalism's attempt to absorb and capture [the] explosion of user-generated content as objectified surplus value” (p. 5). While this assertion is not necessarily false, it does miss a key component of Internet sociality: while we are, on one hand, acting as unpaid labor for Internet companies, we are also, on the other hand, experimenting and creating cultural objects and practices. Gehl takes into consideration the spaces of affordance and programming but neglects their integral third partner: the space of virtuality, the lived space where we make meaning, where we embody ourselves into digital Being. The space of virtuality The space of virtuality is the way the Internet is experienced and comprehended by users in a meaningful sense; it is what the Internet feels like and what being there means to us. It is lived space. To Be in the space, though, we need some sort of form—to embody or be embodied by something. Jenny Sundén (2003) describes this phenomenon as “actively having to type oneself into being”—a type of “cyber-subjectivity [that] is neither coherent nor spit, but digitally connects subjects through discursive circuits” (p. 3). The spatial triad I am proposing here does not take Sundén's “discursive circuits” as purely metaphorical, but as fundamental to the production of Internet space. I am, indeed, arguing that we become embodied discursive objects in Internet social space. And note that I speak of discourse not simply as conversation. Rather, I mean that we, as discursive objects, take forms that both actively communicate and are generated through some sort of semiotic framework—we are signs and symbols that mean something. We are not only “typed into being,” but also typed into meaning. And what we are and mean can change depending on Internet platforms, involving both the space of programming to ascertain what form we take, and the space of affordance to enact the taking of that form. Taking form requires what boyd (2008) calls “articulated participation”—"One cannot simply ‘be’ online; one must make one's presence visible through explicit and structured actions” (p. 145). For Sundén (2003), the structured action of typing herself into being includes typing out of her former being, leaving it “neither disengaged from nor reducible to a concrete, locally situated, sexually specific body, but rather (re)embodied through prosthetic writing technologies” (p. 13). These prostheses we embody, dependent on the platform, can come in the form of avatars, images, video clips, or simply lines of text. In Lefebvre's (1991) original framework, the perceived and lived spaces were subordinated by the conceived, because everything in the space had to operate through the language and ideology of the way it was “written.” He envisioned us all disabled by the overwhelming power of the system. This would seem the case in the Internet at first—recall that the coding of a platform and the invariance of affordances designates what can and cannot be done—but what we actually do in Internet social space can subvert conceived space. Lefebvre's contemporary, Michel de Certeau (1984) would note that, when faced with Internet “strategies” (large scale systems of rules and order governing a space), we employ “tactics” (small, daily, on-the-ground, resistance undermining the strategy). In his own words: “many everyday practices (talking, reading, moving about, shopping, cooking, etc.) are tactical in character. And so are, more generally, many ‘ways of operating’: victories of the ‘weak’ over the ‘strong’” (p. xix). Many tactical actions are not consciously subversive but are rather undertaken in the interest of personal preference or ease (e.g., jaywalking, sitting on a stoop). Through tactical engagement with the space of affordance, the cultural meanings created in the space of virtuality can transcend the strategies of the space of programming. A simple example of Internet tactics exists in the rise of emojis as recognized platform features. Initially, the affordance of communication was only available to users in text-based Internet spaces through the given alpha-numeric key-features, so they began to interact with them tactically, creating “emoticons” to convey emotion, like happiness :) sadness :( or shock :O, sometimes even employing multiple language sets to express feelings like indifference or frustration . Over years of use, the emoticons were replaced by cartoon “emojis,” built into the afforded features through the programming code, and now “bitmojis” incorporate the users' own personal avatars into the process. Some (probably Lefebvre, definitely Gehl) would see this as a cooptation of users' ideas and labor for capitalist ends at the hands of Internet companies. And they would be right, but that is not the point to all this. The point is that the tactical action taken in the lived space of virtuality subverted the strategic space of programming, resulting in a change in the fabric of the space of affordance. Lefebvre (1991) describes lived space as “embodying complex symbolisms, sometimes coded, sometimes not (…) redolent with imaginary and symbolic elements, [that] have their source in history” (p. 33, p. 41). Because it is largely symbolic, he saw lived space as dominated by the other spaces, but in a space of virtuality, we are those symbolic elements, embodied. Each avatar, line of text, or icon we embody has an indexical relationship with—a “pointing to” (Peirce, 1955)—a corporeal human body outside of the space. And that body can have similar concurrent relationships across a multitude of platforms. A user could simultaneously be sitting by a campfire in a multiplayer videogame, having an instant message conversation with a friend, posting a comment about it in a Facebook group, taking a screen shot of the Facebook post to share with another person in a private chat, another Facebook group, or a web forum, then sending that person's comment as a “notecard” to the other avatars around the fire with her in the videogame. The options for tactical subversion of the programming approach limitlessness. In my own work as an anthropologist, for instance, I have seen Facebook group members deploy screenshots as evidence of harassment, victorious trophies for bragging rights, blackmail, and humorous meme creation (Proctor, 2018). Sometimes this was done in the name of resistance against perceived powers (Facebook itself or local group Admins), and sometimes as a form of policing (by the Admins). In either case, it highlights the social space of the Internet as fundamentally multiple and permeable. The practice of screenshotting reveals that users can employ affordances from outside the platform's spatial context. Facebook does not have a “screenshot” feature, but computers and phones do. In its ability to leverage other platforms' affordances, the space of virtuality challenges Lefebvre's initial framework of a dominant conceived space, putting the conceived (programming) and the lived (virtuality) on equal footing: while the programming of a particular platform allocates the available affordances, the lived space of virtuality employs the Internet's inherent networked multiplicity for tactical use to subvert programming's strictures. The lived virtuality of Being-in-the-Internet has its own unique affordance: transcendence. It is a space lived across platforms, affordances, and programs. As the space of virtuality continuously subverts and pushes the spaces of affordance and programming, those latter spaces often come to incorporate the subversive content and practices, as seen in the example of emoticons. Is it possible, though, that the tactical subversion of programmed affordance is, in many ways, immanent in this framework? Paradoxically, it seems the transcendence of Internet space becomes the engine powering the mutual co-production of Internet space. Networks Recently, many scholars have turned away from the idea of a spatialized Internet, instead arguing that “ubiquitous computing” (Greenfield, 2006), locative media (Farman, 2012), and the Internet of Things have made the concrete world the domain of the Internet. William Gibson himself even argues that, “Cyberspace, not so long ago, was a specific elsewhere, one we visited periodically, peering into it from the familiar physical world. Now cyberspace has everted. Turned itself inside out. Colonized the physical” (Gibson, 2010). There is much truth to these arguments: our transformation into a host of networked publics (boyd, 2010) has created a situation of near seamless connectivity that ignores the “digital dualism” of the supposed real/virtual binary (Jurgenson, 2011). Galloway and Thacker (2007) view our current “network” paradigm as vastly different from the utopian dream of the Internet—claiming that “networks, by their mere existence, are not liberating; they exercise novel forms of control that operate at a level that is anonymous and non-human” (p. 5) and even that “networks create the conditions of existence for a new mode of sovereignty” (p. 20). This turn from the spatial to the networked, they contend, represents a move from traditional power blocs and territories to autonomous insurgencies. I do not contest any of these arguments, but I also do not believe the incursion of web technologies into/onto the physical world precludes a spatial Internet. Rather than conflating space and place and assigning space to a locatable “real” or “virtual” position, I take the Lefebvrian view that social space depends not on emplacement, but on social practice, wherever it occurs: a computer, a phone screen, in augmented reality, or on the bodies and things of myriad physical networks. The tripartite framework I propose—spaces of affordance, programming, and virtuality—recognizes the inherent spatiality of our interaction with the Internet and allows us to examine Internet spaces in terms of their power structures and user creativity. 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TI - The Social Production of Internet Space: Affordance, Programming, and Virtuality
JF - Communication Theory
DO - 10.1093/ct/qtz036
DA - 2020-07-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-social-production-of-internet-space-affordance-programming-and-yUdAdZlREQ
SP - 1
VL - Advance Article
IS - 
DP - DeepDyve
ER -