Cyberspaces
of Everyday Life
Mark Nunes
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis,
2006
280 pp., Trade, $22.50
ISBN: 0-8166-4792-5.
Review by John F. Barber
Digital Technology and Culture, Washington
State University Vancouver
jfbarber@eaze.net
The notion of an immersive, virtual-reality
space within vast computer networks evolves
from speculative and theoretical work
ranging from Vannevar Bush to Marshall
McLuhan to Verner Vinge to William Gibson
to Neal Stephenson to Jay David Bolter.
This computer mediated-space, cyberspace
as Gibson named and others have theorized
it, possesses a topographical quality
capable of fostering and sustaining interaction
among those who use the medium in order
to communicate in various ways. Massive
multi-player online games and virtual
reality interactive worlds are testament
to the belief that real things can and
do happen in these environments. Cyberspace,
the place behind the computer screen,
the space between networked computers,
has always been considered a separate
space, a place one visited via computer-mediated
communication. But, as more and more communication
contexts have gone onlineworking,
banking, dating, checking the weather
or news, and, indeed, socializingusers
have begun to interact with network technology
as much more than a computational device.
In fact, as Mark Nunes argues in his
book, Cyberspaces of Everyday Life,
computer networks and computer-mediated
communication now penetrate the spaces
of everyday life, outside of cyberspace,
at fundamental levels to form a "networked
social space, articulated through a zone
of interaction marked by a human-computer
interface" (xvi). As Nunes argues,
this interface travels with us, rather
than we to it, through wireless laptops
and web-enabled cellular telephony. As
a result, a private and personalized zone
of interaction with global networks takes
a significant part in the production of
social space(s) that define and determine
our lives.
Nunes bases his own theorization on the
work of Henri Lefebvre whose work on analyzing
space required an understanding of any
social space as a dynamic process involving
material forms, conceptual structures,
and lived practice. Recapping Lefebvre,
Nunes argues that cyberspaces of everyday
life are not things, devoid of characteristics
or significance, but rather social processes
defined by the necessity for dynamic analysis.
For example, Nunes asks of the cyberspaces
of everyday life, are we engaged in the
production of new spaces and social relations,
or merely simulating social structures
in hyperreality? How does our experience
of the public and private, the local and
global change in a network-created social
space? What is the significance of outsourcing
and online education in the production
of this social space?
Nunes says answers must come from an
analysis of the context of everyday life.
The focal point is no longer where we
go and what we do with regard to computer-mediated
communication, but rather how we respond
to and interact with the social spaces
created for us by networked-technology.
Furthermore, he argues that these spaces
do not coordinate into an overall system,
but rather "interpenetrate each other,
producing spaces in conflict" (xxvi).
From this theoretical base, Nunes examines,
in a chapter titled "Virtual Worlds
and Situated Spaces," how web sites
enact spaces of control for users and
in doing so participate in a history of
conceiving the world as a comprehensive,
comprehendible whole. In contrast, one
can identify web sites that situate everyday
life as aberrant or highly situated accounts
that alter perceived relations between
the "global" and "local"
in networked societies. In another chapter,
"Student Bodies," Nunes addresses
corporeality and everyday spaces enacted
through computer-mediated communication
in the university, through both distance
education and computer-aided instruction,
to better understand online learning as
an event involving bodily and discursive
dispositions.
In his afterword, "Digital Dis-strophe,"
Nunes focuses on how the relation between
networked and everyday life spaces were
affected by the bursting of the "Internet
bubble" in March 2000 and the toppling
of the World Trade Center in September
2001. He argues that the networked structures
of computer-mediated communication have
become more dominant in the production
of social space and that, as distributed
networks become a more common feature
of everyday life, so does distributed
control. For example, implementation of
the Patriot Act and its emphasis on surveillance
and control brings into question the role
of virtual space and its role in the offline
world.
In the end, Nunes provides an interesting
and compelling critical framework for
understanding how networked technology
takes part in the production of social
space. As networks pass more and more
unnoticed into and through daily life
and culture, Cyberspaces of Everyday
Life emphasizes the mapping of theory
onto lived practice, the lived embodiment
of culture, foregrounding that cyberspace
is no longer a place we go with network
technology, but how we live with that
same technology as it permeates our daily
lives.