Fisk-Memo28

Cyberspace is undeniably one of the popular “places” where youth Internet users meet, interact and generally “hang out” with one another. However, the “space” of cyberspace refers more to a range of collective action, rather than a bounded area like a mall. Cyberspace is performative – it is what everyone does with it, and as such there are many “spaces” within cyberspace where users interact according to specific codes set forth by others. Diane Saco (2002) theorizes cyberspace as a Foucaultian heterotopia - “an in-between space of contradiction and contestation: one that mimics or simulates lived spaces but that calls those inhabited spaces into question.” (p. 76). As such, developers of online spaces invariably carries the ordering of the “physical world” or “meatspace” into cyberspace, but doing so calls that ordering into question in a number of ways. Just as with Foucault's example of the mirror as heterotopia, Internet users get the sense of being both here and there while online. Additionally, cyberspace places users in a position to imagine alternatives to the ordering of the physical world as...

I don't think I'm doing this right, and I think I'm going to have to come back to it. I want to describe cyberspace both as a “range of action” at a more analytical level, but I'm not really tying it to the actual practices of youth as much as I think I should be.