Thursday, February 28, 2008

The Internet and Navigable Space

As discussed in class and in the reading by Manovich, the Internet and computer programs in generally are constantly represented as some form of navigable space. In films like Tron and novels like Neuromancer we see computers as containing a secret world made up of physical space that affects the way the computer functions. Why does this interpretation seem so permeating? The idea that something can contain so much information and media without actually taking up any space at all is somewhat mind-boggling. The contents of the computers do not truly take up any space in themselves. Everything can be reduced to code, to text, which takes up no space other than the digital space on a page, which itself is coded for. It becomes very confusing. Therefore computers are posited as actual physical spaces in order to reconcile this dilemma of perception. It is a lot easier to think about the Internet as some great expanse containing sites that we travel to, rather than something that exists only in code.

            This ties back into the assertions of MacPherson’s article about mobility and the web. The Internet is represented as a navigable space because we like the idea that we choose where we are going, and that our travel through the Internet is an act of freedom. The reality is much different. We are not moving anywhere, and we are quite limited in “where” we choose to go. Perhaps this is the reason why games such as Doom and Myst were so popular when they initially came out. These games realized the navigable world behind the screen that many people had been searching for this whole time. They proposed the idea the computers could contain navigable space and that the user could move through this space (relatively, and less so in Myst) freely. These games opened up a type of interaction with the computer that had not previously existed. They brought the illusion of moving through space on a computer to more literal terms.

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