Web Space and Place … More

A number of really interesting responses to my
blog on the Web as Utopia came in, especially on the
nature of the Web’s spatiality, which AKMA had
blogged about.

Jason Thompson of MuseUnlimited has a fascinating spin. He
thinks we see the Web as space because we’re so
desperate to find a utopia to save us from the real
world: “In other words, we strive to design the Web
as a space, another world safe from necessity.” What
a great way of putting it. It says compactly what I
struggle to say in the last chapter of my upcoming
book.

John Peters of Competitive.com writes in response
to AKMA’s call to come up with a metaphor for the
Web that is non-spatial:

On the face of it, I don’t think
that I could conceive of the web as anything but a
space. It’s connected, ordered, has measurable
dimensions (number of hops required to jump between
points, with points defined as URLs, time to
transition between URLs…) The measured dimensions,
however, squirm about constantly. It’s not a fixed
space, not even in the relatively short term. …
Anyway, let me try a new definition of space:
something that can be explored. This the Web
satisfies. Just don’t ever expect to be able to get
back home.

Oddly, I get to the same conclusion through the opposite reasoning. I don’t think the Web feels spatial because its measurable or ordered. Rather, I think that because the Web feels like a set of navigable places (not abstract, measurable dimensions) it feels like the real world. It could, of course, be both. Or neither.

Categories: Uncategorized dw