Virtual places and real spaces.
The smaller world brought about by transport and communication infrastructure has increased the division of labour. It is now economically sane to manufacture a car in 11 different countries using raw materials from another 9 countries and sell the car all around the world.
Émile Durkheim saw the increasing division of labour in the 1890’s and was scared of the rapidly changing world. He predicted a social disorder he called Anomie. Whereby the impersonal, individualistic and mechanistic workings of the post industrial revolution society would lead to confusion and abandonment of social norms and the self regulating controls of a society.
Perhaps anomie has increased somewhat since Durkheim’s time. A lot of society is less personal now, there are less opportunities for casual interaction with people in the community. The infrastructure we have has taken away the routines of rural community life that once acted as community glue. We no longer have to collect water from the village well, it arrives straight into our homes. Fuel for heating is the same. Waste is automatically carried out. Food is collected once a week from the supermarket where it is such an automated and efficient process there is no time for casual banter with the staff, and the chance of seeing your friends and neighbours is small due to the scale of the operation. Casual encounter is disappearing and although purposeful encounter is increasing it is often through phones and email. Whatever the advantages it is a poor alternative to face to face. The world has become increasingly connected, increasingly efficient and increasingly impersonal. When you are meeting someone over some kind of long distance communication you loose some sense of place, you are no longer as firmly rooted in your own environment. You have joined some kind of third place, a ‘non space’. Or a non spatial place.
Perhaps this is something that needs addressing. How do we reconcile the new world of virtual space within a more humane framework?
One option is to recreate the real world online. Perhaps position the intangible arrangement of online spaces within a spatial framework that we are used to… A replication of the spatial language we are used to in daily life. After all we have an innate sense of the qualities of space, and we have learnt the cultural norms that are embedded within the environments around us. The school and the home have different meanings, systems of operation and rules of behaviour contained within the walls and rooms that define them. What if we used the cultural meaning of different spatial environment to define the meaning and expectations on behaviour on different social places online?
Even if it was possible to position online social groups within a spatial framework would it be desirable? The direction and beauty of the internet is the mashing and mixing of content and the interconnectedness of these different places. Physical space is not supportive of these qualities, a primary function of architecture is privacy and security. The contents of a room are only available to the selected who are allowed within it, even within a public space you can only access it if you are sharing the same space with it, at the time it is available. The web is generally free of time restrictions, but in terms of access it is gated and barricaded no less than any other part of the built environment. It is only the public zone of the internet that creates the utopian notion of freedom of information for all.
