Saturday, September 16, 2006

imaginary space

An MA student at WSA, writes about how Nation States with heavily defined, regulated and guarded borders have strict criteria about who can be a citizen of their country. Whereas people, who migrate around the world for variety of reasons including persecution, make look back/across their 'own' country, perceiving that country as home, when the country does not/longer recognises that individual as citizen or 'belonging' to the national state.

This is of couese why the space of the internet is so precious and so important to remain unregularised, uncompartmentalised - free space as it were. With that in mind, I'd think every effort should be made to stop Ed & Helen colonisation any inch of cyberspace.

Can you own cyberspace? Access is controlled and limited, but ownership is illusory, fading like vapour trails from planes that 'write' messages in the sky. Or like the Etch-a-Sketch drawings that get shaken away.

If you can't own but can only occupy imaginary terriotiory of cyberspace for a while, what need for immigration?

Could we be thinking of using our space in a less terrestial way?

I like the notion of boundaries forming and dissolving.
Dissolve is strong action

2 comments:

vicki said...

in a very old george lucas movie [maybe his first] in a perceived future where because of the destruction above ground humans all live underground

anyway miscreants are punished by being put 'out' into white space

there they remain no longer able to determine which direction to head in

maybe ed and helen [or kate] are trying to give themselves a sense of place by giving name to the directions

helen varley jamieson said...

in virtual worlds such as second life, people buy and sell virtual real estate. with real money. people are already colonising cyberspace, whether ed & helen do or not.

if ed & helen claim the bit of white space they find themselves, perhaps it opens a space to discuss issues of ownership - not just of cyberspace but of the planet.

(but i think this has become one of our tangents ... )

h : )