Developing the Virtual Landscape
Jennifer S Light · Environment and Planning D Society and Space · 1996
Developing the virtual landscape In 1950s America, the shopping center basked in projections of hope for a new public space to enhance community life in an era of highways, automobiles, and suburbs.According to some visionary planners, the mall would function as an enclosed town in suburbia, its street-like corridors with their sidewalk cafes recalling the spaces of preautomohilc Main Street, small-town USA (Girucn, 1957; Grucn and Smith, 1952).Yet as privately owned spaces focusing on profit per square foot, malls are fundamentally different from civic spaces, particularly with respect to the possibilities of 'community* and 'public life', Cultural theorists today see mallspacc as an embodiment of the American culture of simulation, a complete contradiction to the illusory rhetoric of these planners (Baudrillard, 1995; Bocock, 1993; Kcyes, 1973; Kowinski, 1985; Oldenburg, 1985).The planners* mistake was projecting an American dream, an historical cultural fantasy, onto a new space without fully evaluating the implications.Today's talk about the Internet in the United States echoes such early hopes for mallspacc, The rhetoric of information superhighways, with comparisons between cyberspaces and physical spaces of an older America, is filled with imagery of looking ahead to the past.Forecasters suggest that virtual communities [as Howard Rheingold affectionately describes in his Virtual Communities: Homesteading on the Electron Frontier (1993)] will replace the small-town street-corner societies of a bygone era.They portray cyberspace as a new frontier, a melting pot, and as democratic public space where anyone can talk to anyone else and all are created equal.Cyberspace is the "American Dream II", according to an August 1995 conference organized by supporters and advisers of Newt Gingrich (http://wvvw.townhall.com/pff).Like the fantasies of community off the highway in the suburban shopping mall, the rhetoric of virtual communities and virtual commons on the information highway in cyburbia is inspiring.But it is not necessarily accurate.* 1 *The kinds of hype being fixed on computer-mediated communications have analogs in the technological Utopian literature published in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th century.This literature portrayed technological advance as central to achieving social perfection (Segal, 1985; 1994).Nearly a century later, the confident expectation that new technologies will improve society-that technology equals progress-persists.Proponents of a kind of good-faith technological determinism, cyberoptimists believe new communication and information technologies will automatically generate good ends as a matter of course.Yet as yesterday's tomorrows-past visions of the future-demonstrate, early predictions generally fail to anticipate the complex implications of inventions (Corn, 1986).( 2) W Of course, there are also pessimistic forecasters of the information future such as Jan Zimmerman (1986) or Neil Postman (1992) who see a total shattering of community and, for example, see home networking as creating a world of shut-ins.This too is an extreme viewpoint.I wish to address the problem of optimism, because it is positive hype that dominates US media.M Particularly relevant to an examination of computer networking is Susan Douglas's chapter on wireless radio networks, "Amateur radio operators and American broadcasting: shaping the future of radio" in Corn (1986).