Weekly Post: Lefebvre, Simonsen, Tuan
A lot of the questions that occurred for me came from relating the text to my own interests, so they’re entirely focused on online space.
1. Tuan connects interpretations of environment to culture and experiences (55). He focuses specifically on interpretations of spaciousness, using different nationalities as examples. I wonder if this argument could also be applied to online spaces. Can Facebook feel claustrophobic? Are there “wide open plains of the internet”?
2. “When social space is places beyond our range of vision,” Lefebvre argues, ” its practical character vanishes and it is transformed in philosophical fashion into a kind of absolute,” after which everyone and thing within it becomes an abstraction (93). Lefebvre’s proceeding example is of seeing a city for its totality as opposed to just a representational space. This made me wonder about what ways in which we miss the totality of production for just the representations space. In example, the size and impact of Google’s server farms versus the representational space of Google the search engine.
3. According to Lefebvre, architecture should play the same role as poets in complicating the relationship between sign and signified, and speaks specifically of their access to building material and matériel (137). Could the same be said for online architectures? And if so, what qualities that would make their spaces like the “living bodies” he describes?
Definitions: