Two Internet Spatialization Modes

By spatialization (spatial - spatiality, respectively “spatialization”) we will understand the process of production of spaces (as a complex of material, socio-cultural and mental forms) in the course of a person’s creation and comprehension of places, things and relationships, as well as ways of placing them on his cognitive maps and in the structures of perception. We remember this word because we want to refer to the experience of using the Internet, in which we can now easily consider not just one single tradition of interaction with it, but at least two: the “home” Internet, to which we connect on a personal computer, and the “mobile” Internet, accessible to a person on a smartphone. Each of these connection options means not only where or on what device we can connect, but also what restrictions and opportunities are imposed on us and provided to us by software, interface, application and website design, as well as images of psychophysical interaction with the device itself.

The specifics of the spatialization of the “home” Internet of personal computers are easy to imagine, remembering everything that until recently was developed in culture in science fiction discourse, in an imaginary cyber-something. First of all, this is “virtual reality”. Another world, the Matrix: not so much a region parallel to physical (or "real") reality, but also a region aggressively competing with it, constantly intent on taking its place. This is electronic escapism in the form of online games in which people “live”, these are communities that often require the user to know their special internal culture. The next thing to know about this Internet is its relationship with our bodies. The Internet of computers and laptops stops, paralyzes near electrical networks and furniture, requires from us physical rest and a special kind of comfort, that is, body discipline. To use local software and interfaces, we literally have to sacrifice our cognitive resources responsible for spatial orientation to technology. The Internet here is structured as a metaphor for the physical space itself, like space: we “go online” (open a browser, a “window”), use sites that we are forced to “walk” through, moving between sections and headings, to which we can return, remembering the way back, although the site may have a good map.

While our body is at rest and practically does not care about what is happening around, it is active within the boundaries of the large monitor screen, which successfully absorbs the gaze and replaces all horizons for us - the Internet itself turns into some kind of bizarre plateau, into a landscape with nooks and open areas. The Internet is kidnapping us. Increasingly wider monitors, purchasing a second and even third monitor, increasingly absorbed by the space on the other side. Meanwhile, personal computer software produces a special field of possibilities, offering with its design specific tactics and strategies for searching and hierarchizing information: for example, the emergence of bookmarks in the browser, this setting aside and packaging in shortcuts of ever new areas for potential viewing, creates a sense of spatial depth (or the volume of the mental “map” of current plans on the Internet) thanks to our constant attempts to project and predict our presence on all these potentialities. Grouped at the top of the browser window, bookmarks actually act as a horizon that is constantly in sight, which we feel in the back of our heads, like someone else’s gaze, forcing us to grope for our own logic or the meaning of the distribution of attention in the coordinates of this interface. Surfing turns into not just a random trip from page to page, but into a specific route that focuses and branches into the distance thanks to the increase in the number of our obligations before each new bookmark.

It is also noteworthy that the audience of various resources is prone to spatial metaphorization in the same spirit, for example, “cozy zheshechka” - a semiotic emphasis on the attractiveness of the “place” itself, sentimentality in relation to space, the imagination of its seclusion. This whole game of our perception of the Internet is reflected not only in how we specifically form cognitive maps of the virtual places there, but also in the socialization itself in these places. The home Internet also produces a specific sociality: these are not any superstructures over reality or its additions-modifications, but independent enclaves, independent social realities (“communities”), which may either not interact throughout their entire history with anything from the “real world”, “offline”, or interfere in its affairs, while still remaining something separate (objectified), “from the Internet” (literally from another place). They condense and layer, creating unique semiospheres that would never find a place in another reality, even one connected and dotted with smartphones.

However, the Internet becomes not just another “place”, but a place that, with the help of the peculiarities of the techniques of this spatialization, allows the user to acquire new, previously unknown competencies when interacting with the information landscape open to him. The spatialization of information itself here is noticeably different from the techniques of its production and transmission outside the Internet, in physical space, where we are forced to overcome distances, have access to specific institutions of knowledge (library, university, newsstand, TV show, wise old man), constantly encounter obstacles and waste resources (money, effort, time) because of them. The logic of databases and archives, the experience of near and far reading, the feeling of heterogeneity and polyphony - this is what the home Internet provides us with. Critics of cyberspace often refer to “clip thinking”, to the easy availability and superficiality of help in search engines, to argue about the deterioration of the quality of human knowledge, but now it is easy to see that their reasoning takes place in the dimension of familiar physical space (where Google, which appeared out of nowhere, which “replaced the head” of young people, is on a par with a thick and smart book, with the only difference that everyone is now too lazy to reach the latter), because of which, the possibilities of full socialization on the Internet are missed and ignored: an interactive combination of audio-visual and text data, a new culture of verification, modulation and generation of this data (starting with the next viewing of dozens of reviews and reviews for a product you are interested in, ending with working with big data and neural networks), not the superficiality of the reference, but the dynamics of sliding along the surface of many requests and answers, the ability and desire to constantly see, compare, recognize and double-check. Not the abolition of memory, but the inclusion in it of a new principle of structuring, functioning as a receptor susceptible to routes and forms of recollection and awareness. I may not bother to remember something because of the possibility of finding it again on the Internet, but at this moment I note somewhere on my cognitive map of a given discourse (be it cooking or nuclear physics), already outlined and identified in the space of the virtual network, that there is another place, a tension in the relations between things that should be taken into account and try to reproduce when the time comes, and the more important these data seem to me, the more they change the ways of assembling future knowledge. An experienced user of the home Internet not only quickly receives help, but also anticipates the contexts in which this help is created and submitted; he thinks of a specific article or comment as part of a huge library of opinions, habits and knowledge with its own specific areas, where, with the help of momentary teleportation to any part of it inside the monitor screen, it becomes possible to collide and compare what is outside the Internet tightly concreted, disconnected or simply inaccessible.

The mobile Internet, which initially existed as a technically stripped-down and simplified version of the “real” Internet of personal computers, has now simply become a different way of understanding and perceiving this Internet. Another software and another interface, an independent application code that develops new ways for our bodies to interact with the Internet and reality in general. The Internet as a “place,” as a series of territories with a fixed content structure, where, refusing any other world, the invited body “enters” and where it literally inspects objects, is abolished in favor of the Internet as a group of application modules connected to a free body, constantly changing its gaze between the phone and the environment in which it continues to move or decides to suddenly stop. The mobile Internet is a network of interfaces that has emerged from messengers and assistant programs that modulate and rationalize our everyday practices here and now (paying for purchases, morning jogging, requests for help, yesterday's impressions and future meetings). The “real” offline world and the virtual patterns of this electronic slime mold intertwine with each other, alternating and mixing, complementing and stimulating each other, and the virtuality of the networks itself becomes invisible and transparent (as opposed to the “convex”, almost tactile virtuality of the computer Internet), everyday and routine, fused with the body and its capabilities, the new reality of any team. This Internet socializes not somewhere “out there,” but unexpectedly here and there: it either compresses or disperses, albeit fragmented, but now the common space of the medium, bringing my friends closer to me and creating new ones, speeding up communication between us about things in “reality” (IRL) or creating these things for her.

Interfaces no longer try to subjugate the body, instead they penetrate it and live in it (just as the smartphone becomes an important organ-extension, overgrowing our nervous system), changing its trajectories and dynamics, while minimizing the need for orientation and “looking around” at meeting places with the virtual, bringing all interaction to the maximum simplicity and elegance of touching the surface with a finger. Posts slide in the rut of a small screen - the content does not just lie somewhere “in place”, as on the home Internet, waiting for the user who makes his way to it through rows of bookmarks, branches of hyperlinks and a suite of pages, instead it oozes from an immediately accessible, pre-connected point (from a public page, from an Instagram page, from a news feed), and in the sense of our body - flickers in an episodic tunnel of perception where it is impossible to properly look around on the sides and see the space of things without falling out of the smartphone-Internet itself. The user occasionally tries to “catch” posts, adding them to bookmarks, remembering and liking, creating a minimal personal space (“my saves...”), a slight shadow of a “homey” view of the Internet, but most of them flow away somewhere, into the gray abyss beyond the border of attention, which is unheard of for the already dusty, but still resting archives of the stationary Internet, which I constantly anticipate as objects that I can approach and turn to at will. them at any moment, because they “lie” somewhere on the Internet as a place. Ultimately, the mobile Internet is less about “content” and more about ways to connect and be with others, think about them and direct your actions accordingly.

Traveling through old web pages opened on a smartphone seems like clumsily picking through the small hole of telephone resolution of a large Internet gallery, and many applications familiar to a mobile Internet user can be used on a personal computer only through awkward emulations. The caricature symbol (protagonist or antagonist - depending on the perspective of criticism) of the Internet of personal computers is an asocial nerd who has locked himself in his room (who has completely donated his body to the virtual space and his community), and a similar figure for the mobile Internet is an Instagram model, either stuck in his phone (performing an examination of other lives in order to correct his own), or actively transforming and absorbing the surrounding reality into this phone through photographs, videos and hashtags. If the home Internet isolated (or rather localized), creating unique cultures (according to the names of resources) and alter egos (forum and blog identities), then the mobile Internet becomes the nervous system of political and social activism, constantly pulsating in the thick of events, playing with our personalities, creating new responsibilities and involving us in the confusion of the social.

We deliberately did not consider borderline states or hybridity, the mutual influence of these modes at the moment, since we set ourselves the goal of finding out how these two different spatialization processes work and what they produce, how the functionality and design of devices and software creates the reality of interaction with the Internet. Without laughing, we can say that we tried to look at different Internets.