Week 2 Summary – The cyberspace imaginary

My Blog and my mind this week has been on a journey. The films we watched in week 1 left me feeling a kind of mistrust of technological advances as though greater surveillance would lead to greater control and therefore a move from the real to the unreal in a way I didn’t feel happy with Jordan ( 1999) refers to these images of the future as ‘ the cyberspace imaginary’ – the ways in which cyberspace is depicted in fiction and film.

Through the cinematic journey we firstly focused on control and access to information eXistenZ: the restaurant sequence. We then looked at Toyota GT86: the ‘real deal’ which represented the idea of breaking free from the digital Worlds as though it was something we needed to escape from. Once the real world had collapsed we focused on the recreation of the old world in World builder. The focus being on the detail especially in nature re stimulating the senses. This then led onto the aspect of control that many of the films portrayed.Frightened Rabbit: I feel better – represents the idea that now with technologies help we have so many more choices about what we can do, but yet we still want to make our own choices it shows the character breaking away from the path that he is being led to and allowing himself free choice rather than predictable life plan set out before him

Jordan’s (1999)made a distinction between, Gibsonian cyberspace which is the purely symbolic version of cyberspace found in fiction and film;
and Barlovian cyberspace which joins together the visions of cyberpunk to the reality of networks creates a concept of cyberspace as a place that currently exists. The distinction is becoming less apparent as the reality of technology is becoming more and more actual as Bell (2009) quoted (Davis 1998) Counterculture has a way of leading and moving on technology into a direction in which it wasn’t initially planned, it is moving from symbolic and representative to actual. So the ideas in many of the films we have watched have actually become reality to a certain extent through the addition of a kind of subversive cultural movement.

The ongoing negative themes are perhaps societies anxieties about the future of cyberspace actualised through film in the reverse process that is moving forward technology?

Bell, D (2001) Storying cyberspace 1: material and symbolic stories, chapter 2 of An introduction to cybercultures. Abingdon: Routledge. pp6-29.

Davis, E. (1998) TechGnosis: Myth, Magic & Mysticism in the Age of Information
London : Serpent ‘s Tail.

Jordan, T (1999) Cyberpower: the culture and politics of cyberspace and the Internet,
London: Routledge.