Revisit the question "What and where is cyberspace?"
Can we approach cyberspace as a collection of communities?
Is cyberspace a local, national, or international "space"?
Does familiarity and engagement with cyberspace give insights into the broader world community?
I believe that cyberspace is the connection between computers which allows for communication across vast distances almost instantaniously.This is a bare-bones definition, but I believe that it works very well. This connection and communication allows for many parts of what we may call cyberspace to occur. The where is far more abstract, as there is no real location for cyberspace. It exists in the connections.
Cyberspace includes the comunicties which are created from this connection, but is not solely comprised of these communities. People gather in many places online, accessing the same site hosted on another computer in order to communicate. And these gatherings, with their real-time communication, allow for people to grow close to one another in a community. But there are also many other aspects of cyberspace. There are online resources, such as The Perseus project which people can access, but I would not really call it a community. So, cyberspace is not so much a collection of communities. But it does have a collection of communities in it.
Cyberspace is ultimately global. But it is not truly global, in that many people in several countries are not online. It is rather localized to the US, along with some other Western countries, as far as participation goes. American culture pervades the internet, so it can be deemed a national space. But there are many global aspects to the internet. Even the French can wield some control over American companies if they do something online which is against French law. So many countries help determine what is online, not just America. So the effects of the internet are not just localized to America. And when more people from other countries get online, they will be able to affect what goes on in cyberspace. So cyberspace has the potential to be a truly global phenomenon, if only others were connected.
I remember the discussions at an online community (now defunct) which went on after the release of the movies U-571 and The Patriot came out. The movies were extremely US-centric, and looking at them I may not know how increadibly biased they were becuase I am very US-centric myself. U-571 dealt with an American submarine crew getting the Enigma coding device in order to crack German codes. Of course, the Americans did no such thing. I believe that it was said that the Americans weren't even in the War when the British obtained the Enigma machine. Of course, the people in the online community who were British were upset over the movie. They made sure, under no uncertain circumstances, that we knew What Really Happened. I never did see the movie, becuase I became just as upset over the gross innacuracy of the movie as they were. It made me realize just how much America would push itself as the greates thing that ever happened, and how institutions like Hollywood would distort the record in order to portray this image. I personally believe that America is great, and probably the greatest nation on earth right now. But I cannot personally look at the distruction of historic fact as a way to show this. There are many other ways to portray this image that are, in fact, truthful.
Likewise, when The Patriot came out, the British members of the online community became upset. The historical figures which the movie was based on were warped almost beyond recognition. Not beyond recognition enough, however, that people could not figure it out. One member, interestingly from New Zealand, listed the differences between historical fact and the movie. Unfortunatley, this got lost when the community came down. One fact that truly upset people was the scene where people were locked in a burning church. The only historical event to which this can be compared is a similar act by the Nazis in WWII. This upset many, becuase it implied a link between the British and the Nazis. I may remember some of the dtails wrong, since I can no longer access the discussion, But I do remember the intense emotions which were present.
By being able to witness these thoughts, I could understand more thoroughly what was going on in other coutries. I could understand their thoughts on America culture by communicating with them. And conversation was not limited to nationalistic debates. Most converstations on this community were centered on the theme for the commuity; Ancient Rome and Greece. Many people role-played like the ancients. They also had many out-of-character discussions about everyday life. It was easy to identify with the highschooler from Australia who was busy working on a paper for her history class, or the guy from the Netherlands who was busy becuase of exams. And it was easy, in a way, to ask about their different countries in order to learn more. it was easy, once you knew them, to understand people from different parts of the world.
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