Abstract: The concept of space is, like the others addressed in previous issues of M/C, one endowed with such an aura of simplicity that its complexity is often overshadowed. Words like 'new', 'memory', 'identity', and 'space' are used so often and in so many different contexts that it becomes difficult to ascribe them a fixed, singular meaning. This implies that these words -- and there are plenty of others that M/C plans to investigate in the future -- create concepts which are potentially, and perhaps inevitably, quite heterogeneous. When it becomes unclear what the word 'space' means, for example, it becomes unclear what 'space' is. The articles in this issue of M/C are unified in their attempts to understand, or initiate an understanding of, space, a concept that often intersects sharply with new media forms, such as the Internet, which vividly force users to confront the implications of space's experiential nature. Adam Dodd's article, "The Truth Is Over There", notes the cultural forces which shape and negotiate conceptualisations of space, relating some contemporary findings of quantum physics with the ancient, philosophical paradoxes of Zeno, and asking whether the apparent phenomenon of distance can be said to exist independently of observers. Felicity Meakins' "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" discusses the linguistic methods used to 'distance the dead', and the role of ceremony in this process, subtly revealing the arbitrary nature of the idea that the dead are 'somewhere else'. Axel Bruns visits "The n-Dimensional Village", and whilst there investigates the use of spatial metaphor in the negotiation of the Internet experience, looking at the restrictions of popular terms such as 'cyberspace', which endow a nonspatial experience with spati al qualities. Like Meakins, he uncovers another instance in which spatial experience is created before it is experienced or conceptualised. Lara Cain considers some practical consequences of the reorganisation of space that electronic publishing allows in her piece "What the Hell is a Tim Tam?", examining implications for texts' meaning in readerships well outside the point of the text's origin, principally localised Australian novels which contain specific cultural references. Sherry Mayo tampers with some pre-millennium ontological anxiety in "NXT Space for Visual Thinking", asking if we can determine our point in time and space at this moment of pre-millennium anticipation, and hinting at the irony of the loop that consensual measurements of time and space often produce: for example, the organisation of a 'millennium' has produced a unique cultural atmosphere which in turn alters that of which it is a product and against which it reacts. Mayo suggests that "NXT space", cyberspace, is the most vital space for visual thinking in the 21st century. Our feature article for this issue, "Of Cyber Spaces: The Internet and Heterotopias" by Sherman Young, initiates a Foucauldian understanding of culture and its relationship with the Internet through the concept of 'heterotopias', which "create a space of illusion that reveals how all of space is more illusory". This concept allows us to usefully explore the Internet as a heterotopic space. As usual, an apparently mundane concept -- 'space' -- becomes one of considerable depth and relevance under closer examination. And as usual, M/C suggests that rare forums such as this one shouldn't be the only 'spaces' in which such examinations are undertaken. We hope you're stimulated by, and enjoy, the latest issue of M/C. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Adam Dodd. "Editorial: 'Space'." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.4 (1998). [your date of access] 〈 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9811/edit.php 〉 . Chicago style: Adam Dodd, "Editorial: 'Space'," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1, no. 4 (1998), 〈 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9811/edit.php 〉 ([your date of access]). APA style: Adam Dodd. (1998) Editorial: 'space'. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1(4). 〈 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9811/edit.php 〉 ([your date of access]).

Abstract: Identity is two-faced. In fact, identity is many-faced. Since the work of Goffman on the theory of face, we have come to recognise the flucuating and diverse nature of our identities. Context has become highly relevant. In my own experience, my identity adjusts to various social situations and people. One moment, I am a linguistics student paying more attention to how people speak than to what they are saying -- a tactic guaranteed to irritate the imperturbable. In this face, I frequent the library at lunchtime only to emerge lugging a pile of books and periodicals. The next moment I find myself wearing dresses (well, occasionally) and lipstick, frolicking about the Arts scene feigning an air of infinite wisdom about some obscurity or other. Finally, I don the baggies, yellow glasses and an air of cool unconcern as I sit on my bike at the top of a steep drop-off, contemplating the promise of blood, mud, scars and facial reconstructions. In all these guises, I expend great energy ensuring that various friends only see one of these faces, adjusting my appearance and language accordingly. Mixed parties, of course, present an ultimate dilemma -- which face will I reveal this time!? Of course, this fluidity of face shift is not merely a personality quirk. We all constantly adopt different faces, depending on particular social contexts. We dress differently, adjust the modulation of our voices, and skillfully change the topics of our conversations as we interact in our changing environments. We are not merely two-faced, but many-faced. In this issue of M/C, the writers pull on their 'social commentator' faces to deal with various aspects of identity. M/C guest writer Jonathan Lillie takes a constructionist approach to identity, considering Manuel Castells's idea of a collective identity. He highlights problems with models which fail to identify the individual within the mass, proposing that even within an identity constructed by the dominant instutions, a person may adopt some aspects of a resistance identity. Lillie recognises the Internet as an ideal outlet for resistance identities. Continuing with the Internet theme, Axel Bruns discusses the display of personal identity within the Internet community. He describes how the disembodied nature of online identity means that some form of outside feedback to the presentation of individual personality is needed to realise a user's identity. The effect of this phenomenon is, Bruns suggests, that in computer-mediated communication the Cartesian 'cogito ergo sum' must be rephrased. Adam Dodd looks at computer fighting games and the transfer of player identity onto the characters onscreen. He suggests that in this projection, we demonstrate a willingness to forget ourselves and become an arrangement of coloured lights, happily turning our friends into quivering bloody masses. Linguistically, we can't separate the "I" at the controller from the "I" onscreen. Yet Dodd believes that we still never fail to distinguish between the violence of the computer microworld and that of everyday 'reality'. P. David Marshall considers the confession and its relationship to the self, suggesting that while confession demands an audience, the protestant reformations of self internalised this audience. However, Marshall believes that this audience has recently re-emerged in television programmes such as Ricki Lake, which he dubs the 'public confessional' of television talkshows. This type of confession is exemplified with his own confession concerning a Pat Rafter obsession. Also writing on identity and confession, Heather Wolffram examines the motives behind the current "scholarly striptease", proposing that academics are revealing their identities to vindicate their politics. Adrienne Rich is one academic rejecting the shroud of objectivity, identifying herself as a lesbian in order to speak with more authority on the subject. Wolffram also describes the self-promotion factor of these public confessions. Nick Caldwell turns the focus to a very different kind of assumption of identity. He observes that with the advent of sufficient processor power, many computer users are now using their machines to take on the look and feel of older home computers from a time before Microsoft established its stranglehold on the market. The reason behind this phenomenon, Caldwell offers, is not so much a nostalgia for the good old days, but the desire for computers with an identity beyond the slick and soulless design of Windows. Finally, Kirsty Leishman also looks at an area of rebellion against the mainstream. Taking her cue from a recent newsgroup debate, she reviews the adolescent nature of zines -- publications on the low- and no-budget end of the market. By nature, she finds, zines are both revolutionary in their questioning of institutional publishing industry wisdom, and evolutionary in their aim to develop the zine medium as well as the individual identities of their creators -- qualities which are also at the very heart of the adolescent quest for personal identity. As you can see, cultural criticism has approached problems of identity from many angles. So please slip on your critical reader face, and send us your comments on any of these articles! Citation reference for this article MLA style: Felicity Meakins. "Editorial: 'Identity'." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.3 (1998). [your date of access] 〈 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9810/edit.php 〉 . Chicago style: Felicity Meakins, "Editorial: 'Identity'," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1, no. 3 (1998), 〈 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9810/edit.php 〉 ([your date of access]). APA style: Felicity Meakins. (199x) Editorial: 'identity'. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1(3). 〈 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9810/edit.php 〉 ([your date of access]).

Abstract: "'Cogito ergo sum' is an insufficient measure of existence within Usenet. ... Without some sort of response beyond interior cogitation there is nothing to be perceived by other Usenet users." (MacKinnon 119) Much early research into computer-mediated communication (CMC) claimed that meaningful online interaction between individuals who didn't know each other 'in real life' was very unlikely, that online communities could never develop -- too restrictive seemed the medium, too lacking in extratextual cues to each participant's identity (like variations of the tone and style of one's language) to build relationships. Such views have been comprehensively refuted by now, of course: 'virtual community' has become one of the CMC researchers' favourite buzzwords, and it is widely accepted that the language of online interaction is rich with newly-invented cues that replace the body language and voice inflection changes that accompany oral communication -- smilies and acronyms are only the most immediately obvious of such tools. In any form of communication, we use these cues mainly to get our own identity across, and to uncover that of others -- beyond the actual content of the message, cues tell us how a speaker feels about what they're saying, whether they're sympathetic, angry, ironic, and more generally hint at a speaker's level of education, interest in the topic at hand, general state of mind, and much more. The different cue system of interaction on the Net may delay the communication of identity particularly for inexperienced users, but won't prevent it altogether -- the many closely-networked groups of participants on Usenet newsgroups are a strong testimony to that fact. The most celebrated benefit of online interaction is that we can now freely choose any identity we'd like to take on: leaving our 'meat', our bodily existence, behind as we 'jack in' to the network (to use William Gibson's terms), we can recreate ourselves in any shape or form we want. But to take on such identity is only half the story, and much like wearing extravagant clothes only in the privacy of one's own home -- on the Net, where merely physical existence is irrelevant, you have to show your identity to exist. Only if you participate will you truly be a part of the online community -- lurkers are nothing but insubstantial shadows of users whose potential for existence hasn't yet been realised. Like streams of subspace energy in Star Trek's transporter rooms, they haven't materialised yet, and only will with the creation of a newsgroup posting or Webpage, or any other form of communication. Even that is not the full story, though: just as oral communication requires at least a speaker and a listener, the presentation of an identity online also needs an audience. Again, too, the nature of the medium means that the presence of an audience can only be confirmed if that audience shows its presence in some way. "Without a visible response, a written statement remains isolated and apparently unperceived -- a persona's existence is neither generated nor substantiated", as MacKinnon writes (119). Disembodied as participants in discussion groups are, for their online identities to exist they depend crucially on an engagement in sufficiently meaningful communication, therefore -- this inevitable need to communicate thus is what makes online communities so strong, in comparison with similar offline groups where group members may simply refuse to communicate and still use this as a strong statement as to their identity. Online, those who choose to stand on the sidelines and sneer, as it were, don't really exist at all. This finding doesn't just apply to newsgroups and other discussion fora: Webpages similarly have little actual existence unless they are viewed -- much like Schrödinger's cat, they exist in a state of potentiality which can only be realised through access. Again, however, Web access doesn't usually leave any obvious traces -- the nature of the Internet as an electronic medium means that a site which has only been accessed once will look just the same as one that has had millions of hits. This is where the growing industry of Web counters and statistics servers comes in, services which offer anything from a mere count of accesses to a page to a detailed list of countries, domains, and referring pages the visitors came from. (And indeed, this very journal keeps track of its access statistics, too.) Descartes's physical-world premise of 'cogito ergo sum' isn't directly applicable to the online world, then. Merely to be able to think does not prove that you exist as an Internet participant; neither, as we have seen, does being able to write, or publish Web pages. As MacKinnon writes, the new credo for the information age has now become "I am perceived, therefore I am" (119) - videor ergo sum. Only this makes real the disembodied self-chosen identity which computer-mediated commu nication affords us. References Gibson, William. Neuromancer. London: HarperCollins, 1993. MacKinnon, Richard C. "Searching for the Leviathan in Usenet." CyberSociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community. Ed Steven G. Jones. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1995. 112-37. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Axel Bruns. "Videor Ergo Sum: The Online Search for Disembodied Identity." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.3 (1998). [your date of access] 〈 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9810/videor.php 〉 . Chicago style: Axel Bruns, "Videor Ergo Sum: The Online Search for Disembodied Identity," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1, no. 3 (1998), 〈 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9810/videor.php 〉 ([your date of access]). APA style: Axel Bruns. (1998) Videor ergo sum: the online search for disembodied identity. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1(3). 〈 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9810/videor.php 〉 ([your date of access]).

Abstract: The headlines of April 8, 1998 left little room for negotiation: "Mars romantics face the truth -- there's nothing out there" (The Australian); "Images form Mars scuttle face theory" (Courier-Mail). According to the reports, the infamous Face on Mars mystery has finally been solved. But has it? Such forceful pro-NASA/anti-anomaly media coverage should, rather than settle us into complacency, set mental alarm bells ringing. We should be asking the (interestingly portentous) question: if NASA did discover a Face on Mars, would they admit it? This paper suggests the answer is 'no'. In his essay "Social Intelligence about Hidden Events", sociologist Ron Westrum noted that if a person perceives a phenomenon that the person's society deems impossible, then the socially determined implausibility of the observation will cause the observer to doubt his or her own perceptions, leading to the denial or misidentification of the phenomenon (McLeod et al., 156). When Europeans arrived in Australia and sent back descriptions of a particularly bizarre creature they encountered here -- eventually named a 'platypus' -- biologists initially refused to believe it existed. Although Australia was (to Europeans) an alien environment in which new, and perhaps even radical, discoveries were expected and desired, an egg-laying furry underwater animal with a duck's bill, four webbed feet and a poisonous spike on its heel was just too much to handle. It was 'unacceptably new'. We have, as this example shows, heavy expectations about the future and the new, and are often reluctant to accept developments which differ radically from those expectations. For western culture, the exploration of space -- the final frontier -- has become synonymous with progress, with future and the new, and with moving away from a past and towards or into a future about which we already have many expectations. One particularly brutal violation of this conception of progress and the comfort of a confinable and predictable future would be the discovery of a 1.5 mile long, 1.2 mile wide humanoid face carved into the surface of Mars, staring back out into space (as was apparently photographed by the NASA Viking probe in 1976). It's hardly surprising, then, that the social institution perhaps most entrusted with propagating the dominant construction of the new and the future -- NASA -- should be the most ardent anti-Face voice in the controversy. (Readers interested in NASA's role in 'playing down' public curiosity in the Face and adjoining pyramids are recommended Professor Stanley V. McDaniel's The McDaniel Report, in which he cites many examples of NASA's deliberate misrepresentation of the geological and geometrical data gathered concerning the Cydonia region on Mars). Official confirmation of artificial pyramidal and humanoid structures on Mars would essentially dissolve dominant constructions of human civilisation's past and future. We would be forced to confront the possibilities that human civilisation has either had contact with extraterrestrial life some time in its past, or that humans have been capable of space travel and interplanetary colonisation before humans were thought to have even existed. Our 'present' would be equally damaged; our most cherished 'new' technologies would re-appear as inferior versions of those already developed -- they wouldn't be 'new' at all. The cultural (not to mention psychological) repercussions would be extreme. It is highly unlikely then, were such objects photographed clearly enough to remove uncertainty as to the nature of their origin, that NASA would release those photographs, since such a discovery would severely threaten its claim (and the scientific tradition it represents) to a monopoly of true descriptions of the nature of the physical world and the public position of science (Westrum, "UFOs" 272). I suggest that NASA's role in the public debate about the Martian enigmas should be approached with extreme scepticism. NASA's treatment of the Viking frames has indicated its willingness to misrepresent the data in a deliberate attempt to suppress public support of further investigation. Some reasons why NASA might take this course of action have been suggested above. We need not succumb to 'conspiracy theory' to explain NASA's behaviour, as conventional, if discomforting, sociological explanations are both simpler and more easily applied. Depending on how much power we afford prestige, we may or may not choose to accept the most recent NASA photographs of the Face as definitive. What we should not overlook, though, is that we do have a choice. References Bull, Sandra. "Images from Mars Scuttle Face Theory." The Courier-Mail 8 April 1998. Leech, Graeme. "Mars Romantics Face the Truth: There's Nothing Out There." The Australian 8 April 1998. McDaniel, Stanley V. The McDaniel Report: On the Failure of Executive, Congressional and Scientific Responsibility in Investigating Possible Evidence of Artificial Structures on the Surface of Mars and in Setting Mission Priorities for NASA's Mars Exploration Program.. Berkeley: North Atlantic, 1993. Westrum, Ron. "Social Intelligence about Anomalies: The Case of UFOs." Social Studies of Science 7 (1977): 271-302. Westrum, Ron. "Social Intelligence about Hidden Events" (1982) qtd. in McLeod, Caroline, Barbara Corbisier, and John E. Mack, "A More Parsimonious Explanation for UFO Abduction." Psychological Inquiry 7 (1996): 156-68. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Adam Dodd. "Unacceptably New: Cultural Factors in the 'Face on Mars' Controversy." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.1 (1998). [your date of access] 〈 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9807/mars.php 〉 . Chicago style: Adam Dodd, "Unacceptably New: Cultural Factors in the 'Face on Mars' Controversy," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1, no. 1 (1998), 〈 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9807/mars.php 〉 ([your date of access]). APA style: Adam Dodd. (1998) Unacceptably new: cultural factors in the 'face on Mars' controversy. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1(1). 〈 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9807/mars.php 〉 ([your date of access]).

Abstract: The pop cultural moment that most typifies the social psychology of invasion for many of us is Orson Welles's 1938 coast to coast CBS radio broadcast of Invaders from Mars, a narration based on H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds. News bulletins and scene broadcasts followed Welles's introduction, featuring, in contemporary journalistic style, reports of a "meteor" landing near Princeton, N.J., which "killed" 1500 people, and the discovery that it was in fact a "metal cylinder" containing strange creatures from Mars armed with "death rays" which would reduce all the inhabitants of the earth to space dust. Welles's broadcast caused thousands to believe that Martians were wreaking widespread havoc in New York and Jersey. New York streets were filled with families rushing to open spaces protecting their faces from the "gas raids", clutching sacred possessions and each other. Lines of communication were clogged, massive traffic jams ensued, and people evacuated their homes in a state of abject terror while armouries in neighbouring districts prepared to join in the "battle". Some felt it was a very cruel prank, especially after the recent war scare in Europe that featured constant interruption of regular radio programming. Many of the thousands of questions directed at police in the hours following the broadcast reflected the concerns of the residents of London and Paris during the tense days before the Munich agreement. The media had undergone that strange metamorphosis that occurs when people depend on it for information that affects themselves directly. But it was not a prank. Three separate announcements made during the broadcast stressed its fictional nature. The introduction to the program stated "the Columbia Broadcasting System and its affiliated stations present Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air in The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells", as did the newspaper listing of the program "Today: 8:00-9:00 -- Play: H.G. Wells's 'War of the Worlds' -- WABC". Welles, rather innocently, wanted to play with the conventions of broadcasting and grant his audience a bit of legitimately unsettling, though obviously fictitious, verisimilitude. There are not too many instances in modern history where we can look objectively at such incredible reactions to media soundbytes. That evening is a prototype for the impact media culture can have on an audience whose minds are prepped for impending disaster. The interruption of scheduled radio invoked in the audience a knee-jerk response that dramatically illustrated the susceptibility of people to the discourse of invasion, as well as the depth of the relationship between the audience and media during tense times. These days, the media itself are often regarded as the invaders. The endless procession of information that grows alongside technology's ability to present it is feared as much as it is loved. In the current climate of information and technological overload, invasion has swum from the depths of our unconscious paranoia and lurks impatiently in the shallows. There is so much invasion and so much to feel invaded about: the war in Kosovo (one of over sixty being fought today) is getting worse with the benevolence and force of the UN dwindling in a cloud of bureaucracy and failed talks, Ethiopia and Eritrea are going at it again, the ideology of the Olympic Games in Sydney has gone from a positive celebration of the millennium to a revenue-generating boys club of back scratchers, Internet smut is still everywhere, and most horrifically, Baywatch came dangerously close to being shot on location on the East Coast of Australia. In this issue of M/C we take a look at literal and allegorical invasions from a variety of cleverly examined aspects of our culture. Firstly, Axel Bruns takes a look a subtle invasion that is occurring on the Web in "Invading the Ivory Tower: Hypertext and the New Dilettante Scholars". He points to the way the Internet's function as a research tool is changing the nature of academic writing due to its interactivity and potential to be manipulated in a way that conventional written material cannot. Axel investigates the web browser's ability to invade the text and the elite world of academic publishing via the format of hypertext itself rather than merely through ideas. Felicity Meakins's article Shooting Baywatch: Resisting Cultural Invasion examines media and community reactions to the threat of having the television series Baywatch shot on Australian beaches. Felicity looks at the cultural cringe that has surrounded the relationship between Australia and America over the years and is manifested by our response to American accents in the media. American cultural imperialism has come to signify a great deal in the dwindling face of Aussie institutions like mateship and egalitarianism. In a similarly driven piece called "A Decolonising Doctor? British SF Invasion Narratives", Nick Caldwell investigates some of the implications of the "Britishness" of the cult television series Doctor Who, where insularity and cultural authority are taken to extremes during the ubiquitous intergalactic invasions. Paul Mc Cormack's article "Screen II: The Invasion of the Attention Snatchers" turns from technologically superior invaders to an invasion by technology itself -- he considers how the te levision has irreversibly invaded our lives and claimed a dominant place in the domestic sphere. Recently, the (Internet-connected) personal computer has begun a similar invasion: what space will it eventually claim? Sandra Brunet's "Is Sustainable Tourism Really Sustainable? Protecting the Icon in the Commodity at Sites of Invasion" explores the often forgotten Kangaroo Island off the coast of South Australia. She looks at ways in which the image of the island is constructed by the government and media for eco-tourism and how faithful this representation is to the farmers, fishermen and other inhabitants of the island. Paul Starr's article "Special Effects and the Invasive Camera: Enemy of the State and The Conversation" rounds off the issue with a look at the troubled relationship between cutting-edge special effects in Hollywood action movies and the surveillance technologies that recent movies such as Enemy of the State show as tools in government conspiracies. The depiction of high-tech gadgetry as 'cool' and 'evil' at the same time, he writes, leads to a collapse of meaning. This issue of M/C succeeds in pointing out sites of invasion in unusual places, continuing the journal's tradition of perception in the face of new media culture. I hope you enjoy this second issue of the second volume: 'invasion'. Ben King 'Invasion' Issue Editor Citation reference for this article MLA style: Ben King. "Editorial: 'Invasion'." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.2 (1999). [your date of access] 〈 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9903/edit.php 〉 . Chicago style: Ben King, "Editorial: 'Invasion'," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 2 (1999), 〈 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9903/edit.php 〉 ([your date of access]). APA style: Ben King. (1999) Editorial: 'invasion'. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(2). 〈 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9903/edit.php 〉 ([your date of access]).

Abstract: "It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards," the Queen remarked. "What sort of things do you remember best?" Alice ventured to ask. "Oh, things that happened in the week after next," the Queen replied in a careless tone. Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass. It would seem, odd as the notion may appear at first glance, that memory can in fact be thought of as working in two directions: both backwards and forwards. Take, for example, the commonly enough expressed sentiment that one should avail of every opportunity that life presents to "learn from experience". Isn't to do so, in fact, a projection into the future of the 'memory' that has been gained in the past, and stored in the present? Isn't the implication that, with a little careful observation of last week, one can begin to 'remember' what happened in the week after next? Consider now the development of a revolutionary new communications technology. Who are its pioneers? Experience has taught that there are at least three categories of person (or organisation) which are to be found wherever tomorrow is being actualised. They are the visionaries, the enthusiasts, and the entrepreneurs -- though some may argue that this last category would better be called economic opportunists. Of course, these are not, and shouldn't be thought of as, completely distinct categories, separated by impermeable barriers; one can be in all three as easily as not. The early days of Radio fit this model. As an infant technology it was fostered by visionaries like Marconi, enthusiasts like the many around the world who cobbled together their own home-made transmitters and receivers, and entrepreneur/opportunists like Frank Conrad of Westinghouse, whose 8XK transmitted periodically during the first world war to test equipment made by the company for the American military (Mishkind). The emergence of interactive networked computing, and ultimately of the Internet, fits this model too. There were early visionaries like Douglas Engelbart, and the MIT professor J.C.R. Licklider, who were among the first to see a potential for more than simply large scale number crunching in the fledgling electronic computing industry (Rheingold 65-89). Enthusiasts include the North Carolina students who created Usenet, and the Chicago hobbyists who "triggered the worldwide BBS movement because they wanted to transfer files from one PC to another without driving across town" (Rheingold 67). As for entrepreneur/opportunists, well, organisations like Netscape, Yahoo!, and Amazon.com leap to mind. When revolutionary development is underway the potential for change is seen to be boundless. Radio was quickly recognised as a means to cross vast distances, and difficult terrain. It became a lifeline to ships in distress, bridging the dreadful isolation of the unforgiving oceans. It was put to use as a public service: the US Agriculture Department's broadcasting of weather reports as early as 1912 being some of the earliest radio broadcasts in that country (White). Similarly, Westinghouse's 8XK, along with many other fledgling stations, broadcast the results of the US presidential election on the night of November 2nd, 1920 (Mishkind). The "wireless" telegraph helped to join that huge nation together, and having done so, went on to inform and entertain it with news, concerts, lectures and the like. The democratising potential of the new medium and its easily disseminated information was soon recognised and debated: "Will Radio Make People the Government" demanded a 1924 headline in Radio Broadcast, an early industry magazine (Lappin). All this inevitably gave rise to questions of control; for a free medium could also be seen, depending on one's point of view, as a dangerous, anarchic medium. Perhaps those who pay for it should control it; but who is to pay for it, and with what? For a long time there was no clear vision anywhere of how the medium could be made to turn a dollar. In England a tax on the sale of radio hardware was introduced to fund the newly formed, and government owned, British Broadcasting Corporation. Such a model was rejected in the US, however, where large corporations -- among them AT & T, Westinghouse and General Electric -- gradually gained the upper hand. The system they put in place at first involved the leasing of airtime on large networks to commercial 'sponsors', which subsequently grew into direct on-air advertising. It won't have escaped the notice of many, I'm sure, that much of this could just as easily be about the Internet in the 1990s as Radio in the 1920s. And this is where memory comes into play. Certainly there are many, and profound, differences between the two media. The very nature of the Internet may seem to many to be just too decentralised, too anarchic, to ever be effectively harnessed -- or hijacked if you prefer -- by commercial interests. But it was, at one time, also impossible to see how Radio could ever show a profit. And sure, commercial Radio isn't the only kind of Radio out there. Radio National in Australia, for example, is a publicly funded network that does many of the good things a relatively uncoerced technology can do; but is this aspect of the medium central or marginalised, and which do we want it to be? Robert Mc Chesney considers that "to answer the question of whither the Internet, one need only determine where the greatest profits are to be found". This is a fairly bleak view but it may well be true. To find out for yourself where the Internet is likely to go, exercise the memory of the past, and you might remember the future. References Carroll, Lewis. Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There: The Annotated Alice. Ed. Martin Gardner. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965. 166-345. Lappin, Todd. "Deja Vu All Over Again." Wired. 11 Aug. 1998 〈 http://www.wired.com/wired/3.05/features/dejavu.php 〉 . McChesney, Robert. "The Internet and US Communication Policy-Making in Historical and Critical Perspective." Journal of Computer Mediated Communication 1.4 (1995). 30 May 1998 〈 http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol1/issue4/mcchesney.php 〉 . Mishkind, Barry. "Who's On First?" 20 Aug. 1995. 11 Aug. 1998 〈 http://www.oldradio.com/archives/general/first.php 〉 . Radio Museum. 11 Aug. 1998 〈 http://home.luna.nl/~arjan-muil/radio/museum.php 〉 . Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual Community: Surfing the Internet. London: Minerva, 1995. Surfing the Aether. 11 Aug. 1998 〈 http://www.northwinds.net/bchris/index.htm 〉 . White, Thomas H. "United States Early Radio History." 25 Jul. 1998. 11 Aug. 1998 〈 http://www.ipass.net/~whitetho/index.php 〉 . Citation reference for this article MLA style: Paul Mc Cormack. "Remembering the Week after Next." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.2 (1998). [your date of access] 〈 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9808/week.php 〉 . Chicago style: Paul Mc Cormack, "Remembering the Week after Next," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1, no. 2 (1998), 〈 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9808/week.php 〉 ([your date of access]). APA style: Paul Mc Cormack. (1998) Remembering the week after next. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1(2). 〈 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9808/week.php 〉 ([your date of access]).

Abstract: Promising freedom and individualism, mountain bike magazines are an important source of narrative and visual pleasure. The dominant themes built in are technophilic desire, communion with nature and technical progress. While offering such pleasures, the illusion of technological determinism is maintained. Here mountain bike magazines are seen as independent variables in social change, existing within a "culture of no culture" (Haraway), a space in which events, races and so on can be objectively described and evaluated. However, when looking a little closer, it becomes clear that this is not the case. Rather, magazines such as Australian Mountain Bike (AMB) and Mountain Bike are shaped by, and implicated in guiding the use of the mountain bike and the variety of possible social arrangements this makes im/possible. With this in mind I want to make clear some of the ways magazines have an important role in negotiating the boundaries between the 'inside' and 'outside' of mountain biking practices, specifically in relation to riders' sex. Drawing on the work of Donna Haraway, I argue that these magazines construct what sex can be, or not be a mountain biker. Magazines are particular technical objects which do more than simply describe events in mountain biking. For Haraway, humans and nonhumans (in this case magazines) must be seen as "socially ... active partners" (8). That is, magazines are not only technical objects, but are also socially active at the level of discourse. Thus they are at the same time material and semiotic actors that are productive of gendered social relations. They function to tell a particular story about how the world is, and how it is understood. They can be seen to operate within a paradigmatic field which both shapes and bounds im/possible worlds. They also serve to inform 'us' about who we are as human subjects. Mountain biking magazines construct what it is, or not, to be a mountain biker through the process of interpellation. Interpellation is the process through which subjects are re/constituted through ideology through mis/recognising oneself in the address of a discourse (Haraway 50). Readers are invited to self-identify with a range of narratives that make up each magazine. This self-identification process operates through the hailing of the subject. Readers are hailed as mountain biking subjects when they can self-identify or recognise themselves within mountain biking magazine narratives. For example, in photographs of mountain bikers riding in 'nature', the viewer may be positioned in such a way that s/he can see things from the perspective of the rider. The subject's position is one where the viewer can understand the experience of mountain biking as the rider does. It is through the process of interpellation that a particular type of reader is hailed by these magazines: an individual, particularly a male individual, who exists within the mountain biking community. This community is discursively produced through shared values, beliefs and assumptions. For example, in a letter to the editor, Peter writes asking the questions: "Why is my wife so upset with me whenever my latest copy of AMB arrives? Could it be that I interrupt our marriage for the latest instalment of mountain biking news and stories?" To this, the editors respond "Maybe she gets mad because you never let her in on what you're on about. In the end, though, we're guys just like you, man ... -- what was that, darling? Yes, I'm listening..." (Peter 10). "We're guys just like you, man" constitutes mountain biking as a collective male activity. Such narratives are productive of a particular type of readership. On average, men make up 95% of the readership. Readers and riders represented in these magazines are predominantly male, white, heterosexual, middle class, and in the United States, urban. Readers are assumed to be technically literate, understanding the differences between different braking and suspension systems for example. Men also dominate in terms of narrative and visual representation. Most articles and photos are by men, designed for a male audience. For example, in race reviews, there are full page and half page photos of male riders while women, if pictured at all, might take up quarter of a page. Magazines also construct mountain biking as a collective masculine activity through normalising women's absence. According to the following review, the lack of women riding has to do with the problematic mix of bike saddle and women's genitalia, rather than with a range of practices which are constituted in women's absence. The reviewer comments: Forget mountain biking's ruffty-tuffty image and male domination, what actually stops most women from riding more is simple: most saddles put lots of pressure on the female genitalia, right where it's least welcome. The resulting abrasion and bruising is more than a bit of a turn-off... (Anonymous 24) It is in these types of accounts that the lack of women riding mountain bikes is constructed in such a way so that women's absence is seen as part of the "normal" operation of gender relations. That is, it is seen to be a sport in which mainly men participate because that's "what men do", while women continue to sit on the sidelines for fear of discomfort. Forget about wider social, political and economic considerations. Wives and female partners, while generally marked as absent, are simultaneously constituted metonymically, standing for all the limits men experience in being able to follow their 'true' desires. Women, simply put, disrupt men's complicit and illicit relations with their mountain bikes. Men's pleasure of riding, of engaging with mountain bikes on multiple levels is largely constituted as natural. Many narratives take on a confessional quality. As one writer notes "I did it. I cheated on my wife. I felt so dirty, so impure. Behind her back I went out and bought a full suspension bike ... . When she discovered my treachery, she had the right to be angry" (Hamelman 20). The bike becomes the sole object of desire with the wife remaining nameless in the background. Understanding magazines as material-semiotic actors in the production of social relations enables a questioning of dominant gendered narratives in mountain biking magazines. In utilising theorists such as Haraway, the political project becomes an interrogation of discourses which produce social relations of inclusion and exclusion. This shifts the focus from examining how mountain biking magazines simply maintain male technical relations to how material-semiotic actors are implicated in their shaping more broadly. References Anonymous. "Stuff." Australian Mountain Bike Aug./Sep. 1996: 22-9. Hamelman, Steve. "Soar Spot." Bike 4.7 (1996): 20. Haraway, Donna. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouseTM: Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge, 1997. Peter. "Marital Bliss." Australian Mountain Bike Mar. 1999: 10. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Sophie Taysom. "True Love Is a Trued Wheel: Technopleasures in Mountain Biking." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.6 (1999). [your date of access] 〈 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/bikes.php 〉 . Chicago style: Sophie Taysom, "True Love Is a Trued Wheel: Technopleasures in Mountain Biking," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 6 (1999), 〈 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/bikes.php 〉 ([your date of access]). APA style: Sophie Taysom. (1999) True love is a trued wheel: technopleasures in mountain biking. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(6). 〈 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/bikes.php 〉 ([your date of access]).

Abstract: Memory is everywhere. We remember, more often than not, who and what we are, recognise friends and acquaintances, remember (hopefully) birthdays and anniversaries, and don't forget, as much as we'd sometimes like to, our everyday tasks and duties. But that's just the tip of the iceberg: we also speak of computer memory (usually in the context of needing more to run the latest Microsoft-made memory hog), of digital archives where we store what we don't want to bother our braincells with, and of those storerooms of human knowledge -- libraries -- which are gradually moving from analogue to digital storage as they join the new global memory that is the Internet (according to the visionaries). And then there are the alternatives to this 'official' memory: repressed memories, oppositional views of history, new discoveries that challenge our ideas of the past. It is in this wide field of possible cultural interaction that this, the second issue of M/C operates. At a time when half the world remembers the first anniversary of Princess Diana's death, with the other half trying desperately to avoid the tabloids ' crocodiles' tears, at a time when most of us are looking forward to forgetting all about the White House sex scandals, and at a time, finally, when cultural commentators the world over are beginning to sort out which events of the past decade, century, and millennium will have been worth remembering, we review the idea of 'memory' from a variety of angles -- some broad, some narrow, some focussed on individual human memory, some on the memory of humanity as such. Our featured M/C guest writer, Canadian scholar Paul Attallah, opens this issue. In his article "Too Much Memory", he covers a lot of ground -- from the growing nostalgia for cultural products of the past to the recovery of political memory of past wrongs, to the memory of Princess Diana and other deceased celebrities. The media, he writes, are today in the business of creating 'pseudo-events' -- but the public are getting better at looking behind the façades: they might come to reject this constant stream of too much (fake) memory. As P. David Marshall writes, the problem becomes even more complicated if you're in Australia, at some distance from the centres of mainstream cultural production. As publicity leaks across the Internet and similar channels, Australians collect 'anticipatory memories' of those pseudo-events created by the media -- before the events even take place in the local channels of popular culture. The result of this phenomenon, Marshall suggests, may be an even stronger hegemonic grip of American broadcast standards. Adam Dodd takes us from memories of events in the immediate future to repressed memories -- of alien abductions. He points out that whatever the truth behind abduction stories, we should take note of the fact that these stories are reported as truth, and promptly rejected by the scientific establishment. This raises age-old questions of the nature of 'reality' in a postmodern world where objectivity has come to be recognised as an unattainable dream. Continuing the extraterrestrial theme, Nick Caldwell turns to the possible revival of 1950s science fiction iconography. After the cynical 80s with its dark and dirty SF designs, fond memories of the curvy, stylish interstellar dreams of post-war times are beginning to emerge again -- at a time of frantic artistic recycling of works from all eras, and at the dawn of a new millennium where again everything seems possible, perhaps now the rocketship designs of the 50s can finally come true. Axel Bruns returns the focus earth-wards, but remains on the topic of modern technology. He points to the opportunities and threats brought about by Internet archives such as Deja News -- with every newsgroup article at every user's fingertips, the potential for abuse is immense. As the perfect digital memory offered by Deja News is becoming a favourite search tool, it is high time to question the ethical implications of archiving the ephemeral. Paul Mc Cormack's article offers some more general thoughts on the future of the Internet. Comparing what still are the early days of this new medium with the first decades of radio, he suggests that we may 'remember' the future of the Net by learning from the past. The commercialisation of radio after its 'anarchic' childhood may be what's in store for the Internet, too -- despite the obvious differences between the two media. Finally, in her article on "Memory and the Media", Felicity Meakins closes the circle by returning to an issue touched on by Paul Attallah -- the death of Princess Diana. She describes how since Diana's demise the media's rhetoric has changed profoundly to consist almost exclusively of forms of eulogy. Using Speech Act Theory, Meakins identifies the performative function of this rhetoric, and points out how it has influenced our memories of Diana. Finally, in her article on "Memory and the Media", Felicity Meakins closes the circle by returning to an issue touched on by Paul Attallah -- the death of Princess Diana. She describes how since Diana's demise the media's rhetoric has changed profoundly to consist almost exclusively of forms of eulogy. Using Speech Act Theory, Meakins identifies the performative function of this rhetoric, and points out how it has influenced our memories of Diana. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Axel Bruns. "Editorial: 'Memory'." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.2 (1998). [your date of access] 〈 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9808/edit.php 〉 . Chicago style: Axel Bruns, "Editorial: 'Memory'," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1, no. 2 (1998), 〈 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9808/edit.php 〉 ([your date of access]). APA style: Axel Bruns. (199x) Editorial: 'memory'. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1(2). 〈 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9808/edit.php 〉 ([your date of access]).

Abstract: "Food, like eroticism, starts with the eyes, but there are people who will put just about anything in their mouth" -- Isabel Allende (90) In the beginning is not the word, but the caress of the eye, the touch of the tongue and the taste of food. From the nipple onwards, the primary pleasure of food is part of a social eroticism -- a playful eroticism -- that prefigures and sets up the logic of speaking to and loving others. And it is this sensual and emotional potential of food as a source of power that has guaranteed a place for food in cultural media such as M/C. Food as eroticism is not food as sex. In "Beyond Food/Sex", Elspeth Probyn manoeuvres the reader around the conflation of food and sex and convinces us that we really are over food porn! She tantalises instead with the idea that the way to shake off constraining prohibitions and achieve greater susceptibility to pleasure is to think through food, to sex, the universe and everything... Thinking through our tongues reminds us of our shared corporeal vulnerability -- reminds us that we are bodies, connected to others, intuitively, materially and meaningfully. This is a politicisation of desire, a passionate advocacy of the impulse to give and receive pleasure with food. Of course, this impulse has always been exploited and distorted -- power says no as often as it says yes. Centuries of extravagant personal rivalry between élites while starving masses hungrily watch spectacles of waste have shown us that patriarchy is not the sole provenance of the misuse and abuse of food. Nations, groups and individuals define themselves by and through acts of consumption that are as much about exclusion, and creating otherness, as they are about inclusion. These twin themes of consumption and identity inform much of what is written about food today. Issues of identity -- both personal and national -- are held within a tension between have and have-not; inclusion and exclusion; self and Other. And frequently these binaries are articulated within the discourse of food and gastronomy: whether it is racial vilification based on the perception of cuisine stereotypes; or snobbery about the correct pronunciation of prosciutto or the ingredients for baba ghanoush. Even something as simple and necessary as cooking is commonly gendered in problematic and political ways. The articles in this issue of M/C all, to a greater or lesser extent, address these issues. Sydney academic Elspeth Probyn has long been interested in the problematics of identity and subjectivity, and in this issue's feature article, "The Indigestion of Identities", she suggests that a productive way of interrogating identity is through the lens of food, and those themes which append to eating. As she says, "eating continually interweaves individual needs, desires and aspirations within global economies of identities". Teemu Taira continues this theme in his discussion of unemployment in Finland, "Material Food, Spiritual Quest: When Pleasure Does Not Follow Purchase". His provocative view is that for the unemployed, the socialising role of work is replaced by food preparation and consumption, a social activity which is, paradoxically, jeopardised by the marginalisation and poverty which frequently coexists with unemployment. Construction of identity through food is also featured in "You Have a Basket for the Bread, Just Put the Bloody Chicken in It", Felicity Newman's reminiscence of growing up in a Jewish part of Sydney. Warm memories of fish and chips at Bondi lead Felicity to a discussion of ethnicity and race in contemporary Australian politics. According to Todd Holden in his investigation of portrayals of food on Japanese television, "And Now for the Main (Dis)course: Or, Food as Entrée in Contemporary Japanese Television", food is important because of the way it evokes a sense of nihonjinron -- that which is unique about Japanese culture -- and its ubiquity in everyday life. Food becomes a "common conduit" through which non-food issues can be understood. "Killer Zucchini", Ric Masten's witty and clever poem about gender politics, is framed around a description of that most phallic of vegetables, the zucchini. In a first for M/C, photographer Judith Villamayor presents a series of five images that evoke themes of food, sex and consumption. As described in the editors' introduction, "Chuck Another Steak on the Barbie, Would'ja Doll", all sorts of assumptions and beliefs about the gendering of food are played out in these confronting and original photographs. Lynn Houston, in her article "A Recipe for "Blackened 'Other': Process and Product in the Work of Victor Grippo", describes the work of the Argentinian artist who combines a fascination with food with other cultural issues, especially representations of the "Other". In "What About the Women? Food, Migration and Mythology", Danielle Gallegos and Felicity Newman use the stories of three women to provide a point of departure from the dominant discourse that suggests that migration and the increased mobility of Australians fills a culinary void left by a lack of affinity with the land and its produce. "Food Deserts: An Issue of Social Justice" is the descriptive title of Sinead Furey's, Heather McIlveen's, and Christopher Strugnell's article on the growth of "food shopping deserts" in parts of the United Kingdom. These are areas where the concentration of major supermarkets on the edges of towns have caused the closure of inner-city grocery stores, making access to food difficult for low-income families, who often do not have the advantage of private transport. Finally, issues of food and nationalism are brought together in Guy Redden's article, "Packaging the Gifts of Nation", in which he examines the packaging of certain food stuffs that construct a link between the food and idealised images of nature and nation. We want to thank Team M/C for their help in the planning and production of this issue of M/C, as well as our reviewers and all the authors who contributed to the journal. We especially want to thank Ian Van Wert who helped with translations from Spanish. Throughout the production we have scrupulously avoided the temptation to fall into obvious and regrettable food puns. Now, as the work is nearly done, we can afford the liberty of claiming one for ourselves: if this collection resembles a smorgasbord, we invite you to enjoy as much or as little of the offerings as you desire, but hope that all the dishes will provide satisfying food for thought. Bon appétit! Vikki Fraser, John Gunders -- 'Food' Issue Editors References Allende, Isabel. Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses. Sydney: Flamingo/HarperCollins, 1998. Probyn, Elspeth. "Beyond Food/Sex: Eating and an Ethics of Existence." Theory, Culture and Society 16.2 (1999): 215-28, 244. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Vikki Fraser, John Gunders. "Editorial: 'Food'." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.7 (1999). [your date of access] 〈 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/edit.php 〉 . Chicago style:M Vikki Fraser, John Gunders, "Editorial: 'Food'," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 7 (1999), 〈 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/edit.php 〉 ([your date of access]). APA style: Vikki Fraser, John Gunders. (1999) Editorial: 'Food'. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(7). 〈 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/edit.php 〉 ([your date of access]).

Abstract: Postmodernity, as is its wont, conjures up new ways of thinking about everything, and it is no different with ideas about space. One such analysis is the idea of 'heterotopias'. Published in the French journal Architecture-Mouvement-Continuité under the title 'Des Espaces Autres', and subsequently published in English as 'Of Other Spaces' in 1986 was an essay written by Michel Foucault in the mid-sixties (see Soja). In it, he coined the notion of heterotopias -- 'absolutely Other and differentiated social Spaces'. The ideas he presented formed the basis of contemporary writings on the nature of space -- with many authors using it as a way into examining 'postmodern spacings'. Given that the Internet may be the archetypical postmodern space, how useful then is the idea of heterotopias in considering cyberspace? In his essay, Foucault contrasted his notion of Utopias -- idealised conceptions of society, impossible to locate in reality -- with the idea of heterotopias. These, he suggested, were Other spaces; socially constructed counter-sites: There also exist, and this is probably true for all cultures and all civilisations, real and effective spaces which are outlined in the very institution of society, but which constitute a sort of counter-arrangement, of effectively realised utopia, in which all the real arrangements, all the other real arrangements that can be found within society, are at one and the same time represented, challenged and overturned: a sort of place that lies outside all places and yet is actually localizable. (Foucault 351) Foucault went on to present examples of heterotopias, and a set of principles which govern their existence; a kind of heterotopology. He suggested that every human culture is made up of heterotopias and in their description persists implicit social, moral and political oppositions such as private/public or pleasure/work. He initially generalised two types of heterotopia. There are heterotopias of crisis, such as the boarding school or military service, where young men were banished to experience their initial adolescent sexuality. And heterotopias of deviance, such as rest homes, clinics and prisons where those considered abnormal could be spatially isolated. Foucault also suggested that society can reshape existing heterotopias, so that they function in very different ways. The cemetery, for example, has changed from being a place of little importance, to one that is revered -- as western atheism has placed more emphasis on the dead body in contrast to older religious societies, whose understanding encompassed ideas of resurrection, and de-emphasised the physical container. Similarly, a heterotopia can juxtapose several contradictory spaces in a single real place. Such a place is the cinema, where many social spaces exist in the one physical location -- the two-dimensional screen projecting a three-dimensional space for the pleasure of a real life audience. Of course, heterotopias have a relationship to time. Places like museums and fairs can be defined by their respective biases towards chronology. A museum leans towards the eternal, a fair towards the transitory. As well, heterotopias contain within their spaces a system of opening and closing that isolates them -- and excludes those without the necessary permission to enter. Or only accepts those who have been forced into its confines. Finally, heterotopias have a function which places them between opposite poles. They create "a space of illusion that reveals how all of space is more illusory". And they form a space of compensation -- one that contrasts the utopias that otherwise exist. To Foucault then, heterotopias are conceived as socially defined spaces that embrace material and immaterial, and yet are located outside of all other places -- even though it may be possible to indicate their position 'in reality'. Indeed, his most concrete example may in fact be that of the boat, a floating space searching for new colonies -- themselves imagined heterotopias that represent most clearly the Other. With that example in mind, we can briefly explore the idea of framing the Internet as a heterotopic space. If we take as a given that the new communications and computing technologies have resulted in the formation of new social spaces, it is a relatively straightforward task to map this so-called cyberspace as a heterotopia. Some, such as McKenzie Wark, have done just that. Without holding cyberspace up to each heterotopic principle in detail, it is apparent that, at first blush, cyberspace contradicts none of the previously described Foucauldian principles. Cyberspace handily embraces notions of the other, limits access and presents contradictions of purpose, illusion, the imagination and deviancy. The romantic ideal of cyberspace as the Other World, conjured up in countless science fiction novels and articles in the popular press seems to confirm its heterotopic status. On closer inspection though, some (none too) subtleties emerge. Initially, cyberspace should not be thought of as a single space. Whilst the network is a kind of malleable, expandable, linked unity, the actual social spaces that result from its amorphous being are many in number and vary in both quantity and quality. The early cyberspatial constructs range from sex-based chat-rooms to commodified digital libraries and embrace almost every spatial possibility in between. Thus, not only can cyberspace as a whole be considered a heterotopia, but within cyberspace itself there must exist heterotopias -- and indeed utopias. Within this larger 'other' space, there must be a mosaic of normality and deviance, imagined and real, juxtaposed and otherwise, that reflects the social relations emerging in cyberspace. Within the colony of the Internet, there is an emerging complexity still to be explored. More widely though, the very idea of heterotopias suggests a problem with the definition of 'other'. Foucault's initial contrast between utopia and heterotopia was not particularly detailed and provided few clues as to how to locate the essence of difference. Whilst it is tempting to use the term 'heterotopia' as a catchcry for new conceptions of spatialisation, as a kind of postmodern reframing of space embracing generic notions of 'Other', it is perhaps a simplistic approach that produces little. As Benjamin Genocchio points out, "scouring the absolute limits of imagination, the question then becomes: what cannot be designated a heterotopia? It follows that the bulk of these uncritical applications of the term as a discontinuous space of impartial/resistant use must be viewed as problematic" (40). Or in this context, bluntly, what can be gained from suggesting that cyberspace is a heterotopia -- or even a heterotopic set? The key lies perhaps in Foucault's final principle of heterotopia: Finally, the last characteristic of heterotopias is that they have, in relation to the rest of space, a function that takes place between two opposite poles. On the one hand they perform the task of creating a space of illusion that reveals how all of space is more illusory, all the locations within which life is fragmented. On the other, they have the function of forming another space, another real space, as perfect, meticulous and well-arranged as ours is disordered, ill-conceived and in a sketchy state. This heterotopia is not one of illusion but of compensation, and I wonder if it is not somewhat in this manner that certain colonies have functioned. (Foucault 356) The suggestion here is that a heterotopian framing for an observation of cyberspace can be valuable. For example, the character of cyberspace -- the different social and individual constructs that are becoming visible in the so-called virtual communities -- forces us to reflect upon the other spaces that exist in our societies. The nature of the new spaces gives us overt clues as to the construction of our existing societies. Further, cyberspace is a new space -- a compensatory space, which exists in contrast to that initial reflective realm. Moreover, this particular new space has characteristics that allow it new freedoms of construction. Its lack of material constraints give rise to new ideas about risk, consequence and relationship. The ease with which rules (expressed entirely in malleable software schemes) can be changed alters ideas of existing social mores. And there are myriad possibilities, both intended and accidental, which will unfold as the power of the new technologies becomes apparent. It is early days yet. If the history of the Internet is paralleled to that of the motorcar, we live in an era just before Henry Ford introduced the Model T. As the story of cyberspace unfolds, new spatial conceptions -- new heterotopias -- will emerge that give rise to different social possibilities. Perhaps this is the point of heterotopias. Not that they exist as a way of categorising, but that as a way of examining social spaces, they give rise to new discourses about what those spaces are, how they arise and what they may mean. New discourses about knowledge, power and society. Which ultimately are reflected in the constitution of our human relationships. Just as the colonisation of the new world eventually shattered established western social conventions and changed the shape of the western world, the settlement of cyberspace may do the same. References Foucault, Michel. "Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias." Rethinking Architecture. Ed. Edmund Leach. London: Routledge, 1997. Genocchio, Benjamin. "Discourse, Discontinuity, Difference: The Question of 'Other' Spaces." Postmodern Cities and Spaces. Eds. Sophie Watson and Katherine Gibson. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995. Soja, Edward. "Heterotopologies: A Remembrance of Other Spaces in the Citadel-LA." Postmodern Cities and Spaces. Eds. Sophie Watson and Katherine Gibson. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Sherman Young. "Of Cyber Spaces: The Internet & Heterotopias." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.4 (1998). [your date of access] 〈 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9811/hetero.php 〉 . Chicago style: Sherman Young, "Of Cyber Spaces: The Internet & Heterotopias," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1, no. 4 (1998), 〈 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9811/hetero.php 〉 ([your date of access]). APA style: Sherman Young. (1998) Of cyber spaces: the Internet & heterotopias. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1(4). 〈 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9811/hetero.php 〉 ([your date of access]).