Oaxaca, Oaxaca (Mexico)

San Cristobal, Chiapas (Mexico)

San Cristobal, Chiapas (Mexico)

Oaxaca, Oaxaca (Mexico)

San Cristobal, Chiapas (Mexico)

San Cristobal, Chiapas (Mexico)

all images by
giorgia aiello and irina gendelman

In discussing the body in physical and cyberspace, we must first ask: What is the body? One's answer will be informed by culture. Scholars in cyberstudies emphasize the body as meat and wetware (Bell, 2001) or see the physical body as merging with technology and becoming cyborg (Haraway, 1991). Other scholars and non-scholars alike might view the body as a sacred vessel; a sinful object; a miracle; a conduit for sensory, survival, and reproductive experience; life as one knows it; a corpse; a unified whole with the spirit and mind; or the soul's animal representation.

Since the use of cyberspace involves the human user, we must look at the body and its relationship to space and how this relationship relates to the body's experience of cyberspace. In particular, we consider the experience of the body as it is filtered through cultural differences, and how these differences in cultural cues, codes, norms, and worldviews might affect the conceptualization of body in cyberspace. In this section, we focus primarily on the body's sensory experience of space, and how senses are translated via the filter of culture and, in turn, shape the body's relationship to physical and cyberspace.

Space is a sensory experience. Whereas a market in Mexico may contain the smells of tortillas steaming from a nearby mini factory, of fish warming in the sun, and of the decay of yesterday's market produce, the western parallel, such as Pike Place Market in Seattle, involves very few offending or tantalizing smells. On the other hand, in cyberspace, there are no smells at all. There is also no touch or taste. This leads us to our assertion that cyberspace is an (audio)visual reality, as opposed to a virtual one.

In his chapter on bodies in cyberculture, Bell (2001) talks about what he calls "the question of embodiment." If the physical body is to be discarded, as the punk fiction suggests (recent and not so recent examples in film include The Matrix and EXistenZ), then physical space becomes irrelevant to the experience of the new virtual or cyborg body. As Bell discusses posthumanism and Haraway's cyborg, he suggests the line between life and cyberspace blurs our understanding of life and death. In contrast, we argue that how we experience our bodies in physical space directly affects our understanding and experience of cyberspace as a space.

As the body's experience of itself starts with sensation, we, too, start with the senses. Senses are physical, not cultural. Yet the way one experiences one's senses and reacts to them is shaped by culture. Imagine yourself, for example, in a market in the Middle East; people of all ages bump up against you as you walk through the 2,000-year-old winding stone passageways; smells of sweet hot mint tea waft through the air, bustling delivery boys run their wooden carts by your bare toes, merchants beckon to you, touch you, pulling you toward their stalls. Stop. How do you feel?

Now, imagine yourself in an open air-market in Mexico, just before the merchants shut down for siesta. Smell the fish for sale lying on a wooden board in the hot sun, taste the fruit on ice as you eat it with your fingers. You bought the fruit after smelling the sweet mangos and watermelon the vendor was cutting. After you wander slowly, zigzagging and circling from one merchant to the next, you take a break to lean against a rough rock wall. Feel the wall's surface with your hand. Now, smell the stray dog's pee as she urinates on the wall. Stop. How do you feel?

How does it feel to stop? Is your body already used to entering and leaving cyberspaces with a click?

Let's visit two decidedly western physical spaces. We'll start with Pike Place Market. As you enter you hear a shout; the shout is echoed in chorus and a large dead fish flies through the air. You notice no particularly fishy smell in the air. Everyone around you is taking pictures of the spectacle. You walk down a straight hallway with artfully arranged fruit stands on each side. The fruit is bright red and yellow, but you notice no smell. You leave quickly as it is Saturday and the market is packed with tourists who are not buying groceries, but are taking many, many pictures, and buying T-shirts and postcards with images of the market. Stop. How do you feel?

You escape to a shopping mall nearby in downtown Seattle. You enter the front doors, which you don't touch because they automatically open before you and close behind you. You hear muzac. The air is conditioned and unnoticeable. A few people wander among the stores with handled shopping bags. You smell nothing. You buy an ice cream cone like you had wanted at Pike Place Market before the tourists got to you - you feel the cool temperature and the ice cream melt on your tongue. The cone is wrapped in paper so it feels smooth. You are not sure how the cone actually feels or whether it has texture under its sanitary wrapper. Stop. How do you feel?

Depending on your culture or cultures, you will experience these physical spaces differently. For instance, if you grew up in China, you might experience the energy of the Middle Eastern market with its many people and loud noises as pleasant. Lot's of noise, crowds, and heat is an experience that is appreciated in Chinese culture and that carries its own name: rua no. A person who grows up in the Midwest of the United States might react to the Middle Eastern market differently, with words like suffocation, claustrophobia, an assault of the senses, chaotic. The environment of the Seattle mall might feel more comfortable to a person from this culture. Whereas, to the Chinese person who appreciates rua no, the mall might feel isolating, sterile, and entirely lacking in interest.

Now, quickly, think of the Internet via the metaphor of the agora, or the marketplace. Which market do you see? Is it the Seattle shopping mall? Or the Mexican open-air market just before siesta? We would venture that many people's vision of the Internet as cyberspace more closely mirrors the (audio)visual experience of the shopping mall.

While sensation and interpretation of sensation play large roles in shaping the body's experience of physical and cyberspace, other cultural factors also play a part. In cyberspace, bodies are textual because they are embedded and emerge from the combination of words and images that make up (audio)visual reality. A working concept that can be applied to a study of culture in cyberspace is Barthes' discourse of absence (1978): in cyberspace, shared experiences often occur in the physical absence of others and with others who do not share the same material conditions, especially in terms of culture and space. Thus, others are inscribed in text, often with the absence of shared cultural cues and circumstances. In other words, in cyberspace text, not senses, is what defines a person as a physical entity. Such definition can be: 1) self-directed, through presentation and performance of self (e.g. http://www.areyouhotornot.be/); 2) hetero-directed way through categories (e.g. Nakamura's [(Nakamura, 2002)] race forms); 3) hybrid, through the more or less creative use of programming specific constraints (e.g. Kolko's [(Kolko, 2000) MUD with racial clause).

This limiting of the body to text often excludes or ignores cultural elements that play a large role iRL experience. At other times, this textual representation of the body forces different cultural representations and translations of experience onto the user. While we do not have time to go into the influences of each sometimes nuanced and sometimes very obvious cultural element that shapes one's experience of space, we feel it is useful to point to some cultural filters, outside of interpretations of sensory experience, that will be influenced by the limits of textual representation of the body in (audio)visual space.

These cultural filters include proxemics, or the amount of intimate/personal/public space one is comfortable with between one's self and others; nonverbal communication, or the substantial percentage of communication within cultures that is not composed of spoken words; perspective of space, or whether one is used to right angles and cities or round huts and open spaces; the view of the body (e.g. meat/wetware or sacred vessel for the spirit); cultural worldviews, which include not binary choices among extremes but spectrums in which cultures place themselves differently. These worldviews include whether a culture sees the world as egalitarian to hierarchical, as collectivist to individualist, see its relationship with nature as adaptive to mastery, its social roles as ascribed to achieved, its time perception as polychronic to monochronic, its communication as social lubricant to information, its human basic nature as good to evil (the last worldview spectrum also can inform dystopic to utopic worldviews) (Hall, 2002; Martin & Nakayama, 2000; Rogers & Steinfatt, 1999).

As this project is merely an opening of a discussion, we hope we, and others who visit this site and comment on our accompanying blog, will explore further how these cultural filters, in the forms of codes, cues, norms, values, and worldviews, shape one's experience of physical space and, hence, of the Internet as a cultural cyberspace.

We question whether the current iteration of (audio)visual space, with its exclusion of other senses and its specific cultural filters, more closely aligns with Western cultural codes, cues, norms, values, and worldviews. We also question whether the proliferation of cybercafes in many cultures outside the United States serve as a counterbalance for visits to (audio)visual space, providing users with shared physical space that allows for sensory intake and a balance of cultural influences.

We close this section with more questions to spur further comment and discussion:
- We ask again, what is body? Is it wetware, meat, an extension of the technology with which we engage? Or is our physical self the very experience of life and connection to life that we crave and need?
- Might our answers to what is body already be shaped by our experience of our bodies as they relate to technology, more in a (perhaps) culturally deterministic cyberspace than in a culturally constructed physical space?
- What happens when we don't experience all of our senses when we are confined to (audio)visual space? Does the imagination kick in and truly substitute for real sensory experience?
- If we can argue the imagination does well in transporting the senses within cyberspace, what does this do to our experience of our connection to our environment iRL? If can imagine smelling real flowers and experiencing the feeling of hot sand on our feet and cease to experience these senses iRL, are we likely to feel less connected to our environment? If so, what will the result be for our environment?
- If cyberspace is shaped by specific cultural interests and views, do people from other cultures transform this space when they enter it? For an example of this kind of cultural use as a form of transgression or resistance to dominant culture's translation of space, see work on skateboarders in the city (Borden, 2001).
- In the West, we are used to representations. Often, when we are exposed to sensory experiences within physical agoras we make (audio)visual representations of these experiences, photographic representations. How do these representations relate to cyberspace and how do they shape our experiences iRL?

a project for
COM 538 Theories and Criticism of Communication Technologies
Professor David Silver

University of Washington
Spring 2003