Space, Place, and Identity in the Digital Age

Virtual/Real Communities and Identities

Definitions:

Space: that which we create in and around us by virtue of our embodiment, by virtue of our relationships with other bodies (including objects), and by virtue of practices of representation (digital or otherwise).

Place: those specific spaces or locations to which we are affectively attached, bound, or oriented toward by virtue of meaningful relationships with other bodies (including objects), through embodied practices of power (biopolitics), and through practices of representation, visualization, and mapping; those spaces or locations that come into being through technologies of surveillance.

Identity: the enduring bodily and psychic perception and conception of self across spacetime(s), including the extension of self through cultural tools, technologies, and virtualities, and the disciplining of self through technologies of surveillance, as well as the imagination of self in relation to virtual and actual communities.

Questions:

1. While perhaps not directly related to the themes of space and place we’ve been exploring throughout this class, I was particularly interested in Benedict Anderson’s discussion of print capitalism, which he argues set the stage for the a national consciousness or an imagined community of the nation. In his discussion of the newspaper as “a book sold on a colossal scale, but of ephemeral popularity” that becomes obsolescent the next day (34), I was thinking about zines in the context of capitalist market ecologies. What scale could zines, as independent publications with usually limited print runs, be said to operate on, and how do space and place affect this? How does the relationship between identity and community get imagined? These are some of the enduring questions of my research.
2. Furthermore, if, as Anderson argues, the newspaper reader “is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion” (35), then what happens in a neoliberal context, when narrowcasting encourages us each to be our own private market, consuming media individually and asynchronously according to our own finely tuned tastes? I get the sense from boyd that we are consuming, disciplining, and policing each other’s identities all the time in virtual and actual social networks, thereby imagining the boundaries of our communities; is there anything different about this in a neoliberal framing or is it the perfection of liberal individualism?
3. I find the frameworks that de Souza e Silva and Sutko lay out for thinking the virtual and the real to be immensely useful, especially when it comes to potential. I am also preoccupied with the language of “possible and incompossible worlds” (32), which I think has implications for community organizing of various kinds. They write, “For Borges, as for Deleuze, there is no longer a person who chooses among several worlds, as in Leibniz, but a person who is pressured by several selves, which are not masks or appearances (like in Plato), but indeed constitute the same person. This perspective frames the virtual into something that is ready to emerge, to be created, or to transform” (32-33). This is particularly useful for conceptualizing identity and intersectionality; it gives us a way to think about identification as a process, with multiple forms or modes of consciousness operating or salient at different times, a la Chela Sandoval. My question therefore is about how the difficulty of writing about this process in an analysis, as language seems inadequate to the task of apprehending being/becoming.