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Citation for published item:
Crang, M. (2010) ’Cyberspace as the new public domain.’, in Urban diversity : space, culture and inclusive
pluralism in cities worldwide. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press ; Woodrow Wilson
International Center for Scholars, pp. 99-122.
Further information on publisher’s website:
http://wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=wwcp.titlebookid = 631197
Publisher’s copyright statement:
Cyberspace as the New Public Domain” in Caroline Wanjiku Kihato, Mejgan Massoumi, Blair A. Ruble and Allison M.
Garland (editors), Urban Diversity: Space, Culture, and Inclusive Pluralism in Cities Worldwide, pp. 99-122. 2010
(Woodrow Wilson Press, 2010) Copub: Johns Hopkins University Press. Posted with permission of The Johns Hopkins
University Press.
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Cyberspace as the New Public Domain?
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Chapter 12: Cyberspace as the New Public Domain
Mike Crang, Durham University
In thinking through inclusive cities, it is increasingly important to think of the role of the
non-tangible realm of digital media in the city. Immediately one might be justified in
asking – what possibilities for inclusion, and threats of exclusion, are created specifically
for cities? This chapter suggests the answer to that is three fold. First, increasingly
information and communication technologies (ICTs) are part of a competitive interurban
order. Increasingly the economic order and relationships between cities are mediated
through flows of information. Cities are located in this digital terrain as much as a
physical one – one where flows of data and information have their own specific
geographies produced through key cities and which in turn positions some (parts of)
cities differentially in a global environment. Second, leading from this we have to
challenge our habitual, definition of cities in terms of a spatial location and extent.
Instead, we need to think of cities as simultaneously containers for, facilitators of,
constraints upon and products of interactions. Looked at in this way, the mediation of
such interactions by ICTs may have profound effects. This then ‗switches the emphasis of
urbanity from physical built form to the quality of interaction in cultural life through the
exchange of information‘ (Little 2000: 1814). If we see cities as originally creating a
densification of activities in space (thus increasing the number of actions possible in a
given time), then disembodied media for interactions seem to offer the inverse tendency
Cyberspace as the New Public Domain?
328
(to intensify what can be done in a given time irrespective of distance) (Graham 1998,
1997). Together these two issues suggest a rescaling – or multiscaling -- of urban
interaction that challenges conventional planning and governance via territorial units.
However, the third strand is a resurgence of the urban as a means of coalescing multiple
digital environs. The city still operates as both a formal template for understanding the
conditions of openness, free circulation and multiplicity that might be argued to
characterise informational realms, but also acts as the location where such digital terrains
are produced.
This chapter will ask how these processes entwine with the actual existing city. So rather
than seeing cyberspace as a separate detached realm it will focus upon ‗a multi-scalar comingling
of electronic and physical space‘, digital flows and physical flows, virtual and
real places (Page and Phillips 2003: 73). Daily lives do not encounter a great divide of
offline and online worlds but rather feed the one into the other in subtle and continuous
interplay. Thus:
‗The real-actual and the virtual-imaginary are not distinct halves but
something akin to oscillating forces in a shifting field, existing not side
by side but through and across each other. If we were to assign
identities to the real-actual and the virtual-imaginary, we might say
that they are at one singular and doubled, like Siamese twins. If they
are entities at all, they share functions and spaces over coterminous
territories, or overlapping regions of non-exclusivity. In our cities,
there already exist demonstrations of the links between the real and the
Cyberspace as the New Public Domain?
329
virtual: the ubiquitous cash machine (ATM), for example, the garish
video arcade, even the lowly phone booth all call into play the
possibility of a coterminous merging of very real city of bricks and a
conceptually experienced ―city of bits‖.‘(Zellner 1999: 10)
Different media, different spaces and forms are layered over each other, bringing the
virtual out of the realms of the technical elite and into the everyday. This layering
through more and more media transforms and recombines elements of the city so that
‗like parasites taking over their hosts, [new media] have transformed the functioning of
the systems on which they were superimposed, redistributed activities within those
systems and eventually extended them in unprecedented ways‘ (Mitchell 1999: 15). As
Bolter and Grusin put it, we should
‗not believe that cyberspace is an immaterial world, but that it is very
much a part of our contemporary world and that it is constituted
through a series of remediations. As a digital network, cyberspace
remediates the electric communications networks of the past 150 years,
the telegraph and the telephone; as virtual reality, it remediates the
visual space of the painting, film and television; and as social space, it
remediates such historical places as cities and parks and such
nonplaces as themeparks and shopping malls. Like other contemporary
mediated spaces, cyberspace refashions and extends earlier media,
which are themselves embedded in material and social environments‘
(1999: 182-3)
Cyberspace as the New Public Domain?
330
This creates an entangled pattern where advantages and disadvantages from the social
world are ramified by the affordances and distributions of new digital spaces and
capabilities. The chapter begins by looking at the effects of global flows on creating
exclusionary geographies – starting with networks and relations between cities but then
focusing upon effects within cities. It then addresses how such global changes might be
inflected – looking at ways new media have been connected to new modes of
participation which are both disruptive and inclusive. It contrasts planned initiatives
which invoked an urban public realm (taking the Digital City of Amsterdam as an
example) with attempts to create an ‗Intelligent Island‘ (in Singapore) alongside the
unanticipated and disruptive forms of participation rendered possible through new media
(looking at Seoul). In each case it examines the effects on the use of space and access to
resources in and through the city.
Global flows – the hyper included, the cyber coolies and the disconnected
Cities and Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) may at first seem only
accidentally related as topics. ICTs are presented as placeless – or perhaps oscillating
between an interior setting of use (generally) and a virtual realm. However, they have
been connected with a massive global restructuring of urban relations. ICTs ‗have not
eliminated the importance of massive concentrations of material resources but have,
rather, reconfigured the relations of capital fixity and hypermobility. The complex
management of this interaction has given some cities a global competitive advantage‘
(Sassen 2001, page 411) in an inter-city competitive realm. So some cities are striving to
Cyberspace as the New Public Domain?
331
attain places of dominance or superiority in a new digital global landscape where the
need for the ‗dispersal of activities without losing coordination has gone hand in hand
with massive concentration of resources for command and control embedded in specific
milieu‘ (ibid., page 412).
However, the new communication technologies affect more than competition between
cities – they alter how we can conceive of urban centres. It is now possible to disembed
urban functions from local geography, by which I mean that one part of one city may be
functionally connected to another part of another city rather than its immediate environs.
Thus we may have direct links between different parts of different cities – not a pattern of
links within cities and then between whole cities. So, for example, the digital connections
of the City of London to Wall Street may be stronger than the connections from those
financial quarters to some parts of their own urban environs. The digital media enable ‗a
relation of intercity proximity operating without shared territory: Proximity is
deterritorialized‘ (Sassen 2000, page 226). The effect then is to move from ‗container‘
based notions of scale (crudely hierarchies of home, street, neighbourhood, district, city,
region, nation) to one where these different scales are entangled and cross cut:
‗What is the ―context‖, the local, here? The new networked
subeconomy occupies a strategic geography, partly deterritorialized,
that cuts across borders and connects a variety of points on the globe. It
occupies only a fraction of its ―local‖ setting; its boundaries are not
those of the city in which it is partly located or those of the
―neighbourhood‖. ... I see a re-scaling: the old spatial hierarchy local-
Cyberspace as the New Public Domain?
332
regional-international no longer holds. Integration is no longer
achieved by going to the next scale in terms of size. The local now
transects directly with the global. The global installs itself in locals,
and the global is constituted through a multiplicity of locals.‘ (Sassen
1999, page 119)
These global flows are not simply free floating but are deeply embedded, so that many
‗urban residents begin to experience the ‗local‘ as a type of microenvironment with
global span‘ (Sassen 2006: 23). Sassen (2002) exemplifies this with all the local activities
necessary to sustain the „virtual‟ financial realm – from logistics services, to taxis, to real
estate agents and so forth. This translocal urbanism (Smith 2001) is not just digital – but
in almost every case involves flows of people. Sassen (2001) argues digital flows do not
replace flows of people due to the two types of information in the global economy: data
which can be reduced to transmissible forms, and evaluative knowledge that requires
high skill interactive processing, supported by tacit competences. Firms seek cities whose
social affordances enable the latter interactivity and thus the maximization of benefits
from the technical connectivity (2001, page 412-3). The informational flows thus play
upon transnational flows of people from global elite workers, to tourists to poorly paid
migrant labour brought in to service the domestic needs of these mobile elites. In terms of
who ‗inhabits‘ the city then we have to think not just of residents but constituting the city
out of flows of people (Martinotti 1999), from citizens to residents to sojourners to
trippers raising questions of who has rights to and claims upon any given city. These
divisions and disruption of who can claim a right to the city and who is included in
various forms of participation are bound to the embedding of digital technologies.
Cyberspace as the New Public Domain?
333
Many analysts thus see digital media exacerbating urban divisions, with critics such as
Virilio seeing society split by speed where ‗one part lives in an electrical world of
relative speed – transportation --, the second with absolute speed of transmission of
information in real time‘ (1998: 185). Virilio is notably ambivalent whether the absolute
speed of electronic interaction is pleasant for those subject to the demands of immediacy
in accelerated lifestyles, suggesting the only thing worse is not to be subject to them. In a
similar vein Castells (1989) critiqued the ‗dual city‘ or Boyer (1996) the ‗min-max‘
scenario, where the city is sharply divided between prosperous ‗knowledge workers‘ and
those incapable of finding a place in the ‗new economy‘ (other than, ironically, in
servicing the needs for baby-sitting, house cleaning and similar for the ‗knowledge
workers‘ to enable them to pursue their frenetically busy lives). Processes of social
polarisation are exacerbated by the unbundling of ‗public‘ services through electronic
service provision, permitting differential terms of access (Graham and Marvin 2002).
Ultimately these accounts suggest visions of ‗a society of cocoons ... where people hide
away at home, linked into communication networks‘ that allow, and increasingly compel,
a frenetic globally connected lifestyle, but where people increasingly opt out of the rest of
the city through a ‗spatial closure‘ (Burrows 1997: 38) or ‗pacifying space‘ (Robins and
Webster 1999). The ‗dual city‘ is simultaneously ‗globally connected and locally
disconnected‘ (Castells 1996: 404).
This vision of the dual city of digital elite and excluded others certainly has resonance but
it too readily equates global connectivity with power. We could equally look at the way
Cyberspace as the New Public Domain?
334
globalised telecommunications are altering the rhythms of urban life to produce new
patterns of disjuncture and differentiation. For female employees in call centres in
Bangalore –answering to the temporality of US markets, the night-shift is a time-trap
emphasising their marginal status in a night time environment that is dominated by men,
with women stigmatised and moved by chartered van (Patel 2006) as part of a new global
pink collar labour force. This digital economy (with 336 call centres employing 348,000
people in India in 2005) oddly echoes early electronics manufacturing that produced a
new urban proletariat in countries like Malaysia, with Malay women brought into urban
centres, with fears and desires for urban lifestyles and shift work (Ng and Mitter 2005).
Here the work regimes are far from a global elite‘s and instead the ‗outsourcing of
informatics represents new gendered complexities of surveillance of the ‗third world‘
worker by global information regimes‘ (Shome 2006: 107). In terms of the city, these
workers too are part of both the one where they live and work, and also those, usually
western ones, whose populations they service. A new source of urban difference and
hybridity is introduced not by the movement of people but their globe spanning digital
linkages that make them share, if unequally, electronic space.
Within a city we might then see very differentiated outcomes reflecting three sets of
digital divides: differential access at, first, inter and, second, intra-urban scales, and,
third, consequent divisions in what people do with that access. First, the global pattern is
almost too stark to require enormous comment (Table 1). The traffic flows clearly
delineate a global heartland in a landscape of flows. But although the data is national the
connectivity is often urban, with differential networks of urban connection underlying the
Cyberspace as the New Public Domain?
335
digital infrastructure (Moss and Townsend 2000; Zook 2002). Second there is differential
access within cities, in terms of provision and infrastructure (for instance the
concentration of wireless or broadband coverage in particular districts). These map onto
existing functional zonings and layerings in the city with points of hyper connectivity and
nodes of various flows around economic activities (Page and Phillips 2003). More starkly
the urban uptake maps onto social divides. For example, home internet access in the UK
varies from around 85% for the wealthiest quintile down to 15% for the poorest quintile
(ONS 2003-04). This gap, moreover, is widening in both the UK (where the divide in
access widened from 32 to 65 percentage points for the top and bottom quintiles between
1998-2004, or in occupational terms from 35 to 44 points between managers and
professionals and working class occupations between 2000- 2004) (Figure 1) and the US
(where the divide in access from richest to poorest categories widened from 25 to 55
percentage points from 1997-2002) with the least access concentrated in downtown urban
areas (Bromley 2004, page 78; National Telecommunications and Information
Administration 2002).
TABLE 1 AROUND HERE
Thirdly, rather than just focusing on the unequal distribution of access to networked PCs,
we might ask what difference digital media make to how people live (Selwyn 2004).
Some effects are about speed and priority. Thus we might see a variegated ‗economy of
presence‘ developing. Some activities may be accelerated and sped up through online
access. Online services may offer premium products, as with online banking allowing
preferential interest rates. Our speed of access may also be filtered through digital media
Cyberspace as the New Public Domain?
336
– where we do not just see an online/offline divide but also a fine grain stratification of
access. For instance software routers can identify more or less valued traffic and enable
or impede its progress – for instance queuing and sorting traffic according to its likely
market profile (Graham 2005). If alongside this online provision there is the closure or
reduction of physical services or points of presence then the effect on less connected
neighbourhoods may be heightened (Graham and Marvin 2002). These effects grow as
digital media ecome more or less essential to daily life.
FIGURE 1 AROUND HERE
However, increasingly digital access is not just about accelerating elite connections but
an economy of rationed presence. Thus many are now compelled to use digital interfaces
– precisely to control their access to services. Formula driven telephone menus, call
centre based provision and menu-driven web interfaces offer ways to reduce operating
costs and standardise a service product. Both call centre workers and their distanciated
clients are being disciplined. Indeed, elites may actually be marked by their ability to
demand physical co-presence. Alternately digital networks may be strangely suited to
enabling the informal processes and networks that are integral to the functioning of
marginalised spaces in cities such as those in Southern Africa (Odendaal 2006: 45). The
rest of chapter will focus upon the social realms created by digital spaces – rather than
say economic advantages – through different conjunctures of multiple technologies to
look at inclusion through social interaction and urban participation.
Cyberspace as the New Public Domain?
337
Plugging in to the global flows
A paradigmatic example of a city that has deliberately used ICTs to position itself as
globally included is Singapore. The Singaporean state has been a leading player in efforts
to use ICTs as tools of economic development and governance since the early 1980s. A
series of strategic master plans focused first on ICTs in government data handling (1982),
then building labour ICT skills leading to the National Information Technology Plan
(1986-91), resulting in levels of IT literacy, computer usage and telephone and digital
connectivity ahead of the rest of SE Asia (Chun 1997: 49-53). This was incorporated into
the IT2000 strategy for a nationwide information infrastructure -- subtitled ‗A Vision of
an Intelligent Island‘. Given that the plan was devised in the early nineties before the
world wide web, it addressed many issues with striking foresight. As with much state led
development in Singapore, ‗It took visionary thinking, high-risk daring, meticulous
planning and relentless application … in envisioning and building Singapore as an
intelligent island‘ (Arun and Yap 2000: 1750).
The centrepiece of IT2000 was to be a broadband interface that would be networked
throughout the island. Networking a whole city was a revolutionary idea at that time and
it took vision for politicians to support it. At the launch of the network, named
SingaporeONE, in 1998, it boasted 120 applications and 98% of households needed just
the ‗last 3 metres‘ ( ie their own connection to the network passing their doors). In terms
of inclusion the massive state investment (US $86 million of public and US $114 million
of private investment at mid nineties prices) did indeed help home internet access rise
Cyberspace as the New Public Domain?
338
from less than 10% in 1997 to 65%, with total broadband access rising from less than 3%
of home users in 1998 to 40% by 2003. The digital gap between poor and wealthy was
contained, so by 2001 52% of those in social housing had home access as against 74% in
private housing. The gap had widened from 17 points to 21.5, but in the context of
massively increased connectivity of all groups that meant a change from private houses
being 3.8 times more likely to be connected to being 1.4 times as likely (Annual Survey
on Infocomm Usage in Households and by Individuals 2001, 2003, 2004, IDA).
Two factors though complicate this picture. First, is the issue of inclusion and control.
The very name SingaporeONE -- ‗One Network for Everyone‘ -- neatly encapsulated the
tensions of the socially inclusive yet socially controlling state in Singapore. Everyone
would be provided for, yet there would be no alternative. Inclusive urbanism but hardly
pluralistic. Dramatising these issues of control was the unanticipated advent of the world
wide web. Along with it came the nineties rhetoric of an infrastructure that was endlessly
proclaimed to treat censorship as something to route around. Suddenly a government
monopoly service began to look anachronistic. Local critics derided SingaporeONE as a
‗virtual condom‘ designed to keep control of information from outside and manage it
inside to create a ‗government sponsored ‗no-place‘‘ (Thomas2Less 1999). The paradox
of increasing informational flows yet maintaining control was persistent.
Having on the one hand announced that global flows are inevitable, unstoppable and an
historic necessity the state has had to face the uncomfortable application of this economic
rhetoric to social realms. However, Singapore had managed such conflicts before --
Cyberspace as the New Public Domain?
339
already being a major corporate satellite transmission centre, the regional base of 16
international broadcasters, yet at the same time prohibiting satellite receivers and instead
providing state approved cable TV. The state offered more technical freedom while
maintaining social control as effectively as ever. The first famous example came with a
scan of all Singaporean email accounts in 1994 ostensibly for offensive imagery followed
by outraged messages documenting traces of surveillance posted on alt.soc.singapore
(Rodan 1998, page 77-8). The ensuing outcry, speedy backtracking and almost
embarrassed scapegoating of bureaucrats, and the global stories confirming Singapore‘s
authoritarian tendencies, make these seem the maladroit steps of a state grappling with a
new informational landscape. However, if we look at the effects then the outcome is not
so clear. The state had demonstrated its capacity to search email accounts, and the
postings fuelling the rumours of surveillance amplified this. In other words the state had,
despite the technical limits of surveilling huge volumes of data, created the impression
that it could do so. The action was followed by the announcement of limits to access to
foreign web sites. The state forced all domestic providers to use a state run cache, which
had a list of proscribed sites. Ministers were at pains to suggest, to Anglophone audiences
and media, that this was a light touch regulation drawing line in the sand – with but a
hundred or so (undisclosed) sites forbidden (Lee 2005).
Such intrusion did though risk upsetting the global informational elites Singapore was
assiduously courting. The state was rapidly forced to allow commercial traffic to bypass
such an insecure data store. Moreover, it would be a fairly simple matter for residents to
use a Malaysian service provider and bypass it too. When it was suggested the limits
Cyberspace as the New Public Domain?
340
were unenforceable, Ministers would agree, suggesting it was intended as a signal.
Ministers positioned themselves as reasonable people, aware of the new environment yet
unwilling to simply throw in the towel, and they would often point to a conservative,
‗heartland‘ of the island that would not want such a capitulation either and needed to feel
included in and belonging through this public realm. Inclusivity became a justification for
control.
The second factor limiting the success of this ‗inclusive strategy‘, was that content
provision was never at the heart of the project. Planners had adopted the mantra of ‗build
it and the traffic will come‘. That is, of the ABC of network development (Access,
Bandwidth and Content), they had identified ‗B‘ as the one on which the state had
leverage. They saw a vicious circle of low access meaning little incentive for content
development intensive and thus little demand. Breaking that circle would, they hoped,
open out the system to attract new media industries to provide high quality content that
would draw in users. The resulting promotion of ICTs was wholehearted but tended to be
one directional -- suggesting that if only the populace realised what was on offer all
would be well, rather than looking at what people wanted or how they used what was
provided (Tang and Ang 2002). And yet what became apparent to those implementing the
much vaunted information gateway was that, for all its technical capacities, it was far less
popular than those in ‗competitors‘ like Hong Kong. The sotto voce opinion among the
developers, and with some evidence, was that the killer advantage Hong Kong‘s system
had was content that was consumer driven – specifically online gambling on horse racing
Cyberspace as the New Public Domain?
341
and soft core pornography, providing 40% of revenue in 1998. Both were not merely
absent from SingaporeONE but precisely what it was set up to prevent.
A similar one-way flow of information characterises electronic government. While
Singapore has been a pioneer and exemplar of the electronic delivery of government
services to citizens and business, via the E-citizen and GeBiz portals respectively, there
has been far less encouragement of political involvement (Lee 2005; Sriramesh 2006). In
the late 90s there was a flurry of young educated Singaporeans using the Internet – partly
self-consciously thinking how it might open a new public sphere, and partly through a
wish to stretch Singaporean space to include those doing graduate work in the US.
Initiatives such as Sintercom (Singapore Internet Community) and the Thinkcentre
appeared and offered ‗civil society‘ discussions, while the pseudonymously and US
hosted Singapore Window offered an alternative news portal on happenings in Singapore.
They were tolerated, partly due to policies keen to foster, or be seen to foster, a lively
society and culture. Alongside the relaxation of cinema, drama and entertainment
restrictions Singapore was trying to foster creative thinking and also make the place more
vibrant and attractive to key informational workers from around the world. Indeed
various senior bureaucrats and the ruling party began to publicly discuss the rationale of
censorship after 2000 which was remarkable in itself (Warschauer 2001). Recent official
attempts at fostering digital participation have been focused upon soliciting public
comments for consultation initiatives but the take up by both ministries and the public has
hardly been enthusiastic (Sriramesh 2006: 715-6). The content of communication is
mostly functional and within that the flow has largely been one-way from the state to the
Cyberspace as the New Public Domain?
342
citizen. There have been some limited participatory sites, such as the municipality of
Tampines‘ ‗web town‘ whose discussion board hosted queries and complaints about local
services. Notably as postings were public, they produced a strong incentive for the
municipality to be seen to respond in a timely fashion. However most developments
suggest not a full blown two-way dialogue, giving voice to citizens, but an asymmetrical
process where the citizen can only respond within predefined scripts. The focus we might
say has been delivery rather than democracy.
Fostering digital civic spaces
Almost the opposite strategy can be seen in Amsterdam‘s deliberate attempts to mobilise
online participation as a means of reinvigorating urban democracy – seen as denuded
with less than half of Amsterdam residents voting in the 1990 local elections. A left
leaning administration looked at the high levels connectivity and saw a way of both
positioning the city as „a gateway to Europe‟ and instituting democratic control over the
technology. Alongside a range of infrastructural investments in connectivity, it sponsored
De Digital Stad (the Digital City) - a space of civic engagement and interaction and new
mutation of public space for collective exchange, interaction, and negotiation of social
diversity. Mobilising an explicitly urban imagery it sought to recreate urban life in a virtual
realm. Launched in 1994, DDS soon had 31 `agora‟ themed by topic for public debate and
participation modelled on city squares as a metaphor for a public sphere of information and
discussion -- urban metaphors which explicitly invoke „Athenian participatory democracy‟
with direct contribution and discussion (Francissen and Brants 1998: 20-2). It became
Cyberspace as the New Public Domain?
343
famous as one of the first online environments where people were conducting parts of their
social lives (Hinssen 1995).
The urban imagery was used to try to provide a frame of reference for shaping debate
(Francissen and Brants 1998: 39), reanimating a virtual notion of urban „thirdplaces‟, such as
cafes, for public interaction. The site interacted with real institutions and created a virtual
civic arena of „plattegrond’ and fora for new urban sociality – by both actual inhabitants of
Amsterdam and „tourists‟ who are „using‟ the city while being elsewhere. The virtual city
thus had porous borders to outsiders – though the membership costs to have a home page
implied a commitment for serious involvement. It was also a private initiative, despite its
municipal support, and remained in private ownership growing into multi-faceted amalgam
of small communities who share a notion of an „open city‟ (Lovink and Riemas 1997: 81-2).
In many ways it pioneered precisely what are now celebrated as Web2.0 social software
features – inviting participation and community building. This was echoed in the amateur,
self-built feel of many of the sites and „the prevalence of a hands-on, innovative attitude, an
engrained spirit of temporality, and the deployment of „quick-and-dirty esthetics‟ „ (Lovink
and Riemens 2000). It was truly about a digital public since, rather than a communication
architecture of „one-to-many‟ with the state providing information or services, or indeed a
„many-to-one‟ structure, where the people might communicate with the state, it enabled
„many-to-many‟ peer contacts (P2P) (van Dijk 1999).
In part this design echoes its origins from Dutch hackers organisation (Hacktic) using start
up funding from the state. Their aim was to create a „non-hierarchical space for everybody‟
(Van Meerten 1993 cited in Rommes, van Oost, and Oudshoorn 1999: 481). The urban
Cyberspace as the New Public Domain?
344
imagery was not applied slavishly, but served as navigational tool and more importantly
metaphorically invoked the concept of the city as a pluralist house of culture (Lovink and
Riemens 2004: 112). But the choice of metaphor highlights the constructed nature of a
digital commons. Digital space is shaped very much by how it is conceived – it can be
constructed and utilized in different ways. In that sense metaphors (be that of digital
highways, electronic hubs or webs) offer guiding principles about how to use and relate to
new technologies (Crang 2000: 302). The urban metaphor thus configures the anticipated
use – as open and plural as the city itself (van Lieshout 2001). As the designers put it „We
don‟t want a dull – clean – city that requires political correctness of anybody‟ (ibid.: 138).
Citizens could appropriate spaces and technologies using this metaphoric structure. For
instance, while users could create houses (instead of the now familiar metaphor of „home
pages‟) the amount of memory available for these was limited both overall and thus for each
site. The effect was the equivalent of land scarcity, and some users responding by developing
a convention of „squatting‟ unused sites while others subdivided the memory space available
on a site creating „flats‟. Indeed urban processes of „land values‟ and locational sorting are
common in several other entirely online worlds, such as Alphaworld, with an urban
morphology structuring interactions (Anders 1998; Ryan 2004).
As a provision of the early days of internet based development the digital city stands out –
with more than 100,000 „citizens‟ by the late nineties (van Lieshout 2001: 133). But without
ongoing state support, the model of public digital culture (Lovink and Riemens 2004) has
been progressively commercialized, and the aim of public access transformed until it
became effectively a broadband supplier. The trajectory from a free good supplied by
volunteers to a commercial enterprise follows the overall contours of the Internet‟s
Cyberspace as the New Public Domain?
345
development. The issue is how sustainable and how inclusive this model was. Certainly it
was a child of its time – its design came from the assumptions and interests of a small group
of the „digerati‟ and at various points notions of user-friendliness and the technical issues of
access got sidelined. While access for all was the goal, „the user‟ tended to be seen as a
homogenous „everyone‟, whose interests and abilities were uncannily similar to those of the
designers (Rommes, van Oost, and Oudshoorn 1999). A look at the demographics reveals
that after four years 79% of users were men, 74% under 30, 62% had university education
and only 22% were Amsterdam residents (van Lieshout 2001: 142). These figures are broadly
reflective of internet access as a whole at that time, so this initiative can hardly be said to
have widened access.
Moreover, it exemplified clashing ideologies of what widening access should entail. Although
the ideal was to improve democracy for Amsterdammers by „allowing everybody to
communicate and debate in a nonhierarchical space‟ (Oudshoorn, Rommes, and Stienstra
2004: 37) it functioned through a like-minded community of liberal, technologically
sophisticated users. Thus the interface was regularly upgraded to „keep up‟ with digital
developments – which upgraded the cost of the equipment to access it and entailed learning
new procedures. Perhaps most telling is that although inspired by the freenets in the US,
which had been lauded in places like Santa Monica for drawing in groups such as the
homeless and enabling them to debate and contest with city government (Schmitz 1997), it
rapidly removed public access terminals.
„the most striking reason why the public terminals were removed was that
the institutions in which they were placed, especially De Balie [cultural
centre] and the city hall, complained about the people they attracted. Or
Cyberspace as the New Public Domain?
346
to quote one of the initiators‟ reflections on these complaints, “They sat
there for hours without ordering anything”; “they gave a tramp-image”;
and they made the surroundings look “untidy”‟ (Oudshoorn, Rommes,
and Stienstra 2004: 40)
A further problem was that the Digital City‟s notion of access for the general public nd
shared identity conflicted with ideas of multiple publics who have specific and differentiated
needs. So when the Women‟s House set out to create a Women‟s Square on DDS as
natural extension of their activities, they encountered resistance. Although several of the
designers were women, their ideological position was to say that gender was a non-issue.
Indeed as technologically skilled designers, they were very wary of any initiative that tended
to associate women with needing special provision. It was thus only through negotiation that
they reformulated one of the squares to provide home sites to eight women‟s issues, to
remove banner advertising to make space to offer a bulletin board of women‟s events and
links to (moderated) women only email list (Rommes 2002). The logics of inclusion in DDS
implied a uniform imagined user, entering into the collective. It had a clear sense of being a
coherent whole – rather than offering multiple avenues to a fragmented population.
Fragmentation and inclusion.
Thus far in this chapter fragmentation of the city, with global connections and rhythms
interrupting its coherence, has been seen as a problem for policies using digital media to
foster social inclusion. However, global connections and disruptions can function as
mechanism of inclusion and recognizing diversity in a variety of configurations of urban
and digital space. Thus in Singapore, in spite of local legal (and social) intolerance to
Cyberspace as the New Public Domain?
347
homosexuality, a variety of gay discussion groups sprang up to enable the Singaporean
gay scene (Ng 1999). They could do so since they were hosted, not in the island state but,
in the USA. Here we have a rescaling of inclusion with US based discussion boards being
used to foster discussion and organise illicit (physical) meetings in Singapore. The
opposite sense of differently scaled media might be found in Barcelona with urban
sociality and inclusion expanding beyond the city through things such as Radio Raval.
Located in the old quarter of the Raval with a large immigrant population, a civil funded
media initiative was designed to help foster technological literacy and inclusion. From
out of this sprang Radio Raval which broadcast digitally over the Internet both to
Moroccan immigrant youth in Barcelona but also back to Morocco. In both locations it
opened up a previously unavailable discursive space to articulate the condition of
transnational migration and community developing across the Mediterranean, giving
voice to a marginalized population. The local politicised scene in Barcelona, along with
some small scale government resource, offered the chance to create a new voice that
could not previously be heard in either Morocco or Spain. Bringing two places into
contact in a virtual space is a growing phenomenon for many diasporic groups if we add
cheap telephone cards, voice over-internet telephony and email connections (Vertovec
2004). A different configuration creating new publics in a city would be that of Manilla
where massive demonstrations were articulated around low cost text massaging to mobile
phones (Rafael 2003) or in Indonesia where political mobilisation was centred upon
Internet cafés and users (Lim 2003) or). Both gave access to non-state controlled media,
circulated information and created informed publics in urban settings.
Cyberspace as the New Public Domain?
348
So to examine these configurations of urban experience, I want to use a city that has also
sought to position itself in a global media space and foster digital inclusion – Seoul in
South Korea. This can be seen in several informatization strategies to create ‗e-Seoul: an
intelligent city‘ from 2001, the development of the Digital Media City building towards
an Information Network City ―where the citizens can share and exchange information and
culture within the city’s boundaries‖ (Seoul Metropolitan Government Digital City
Masterplan, 2001: 19). This has been supported by festivals and events such as Media
City Seoul (or the Seoul International Media Art Biennale), which has been held every
two years since 2000. The overarching technological aims of the Korean Information
Infrastructure speak to competing in a global knowledge economy. More widely though,
it is also a country where digital media have intersected with democratisation – for
instance OhmyNews, an online portal, has been significant in generating huge crowds for
rallies and influencing governmental policy (Kluver and Banerjee 2005: 35). Most
notably, after US servicemen who killed two teenage girls were acquitted by a military
court, online postings led to candlelight demonstrations of unprecedented scale and social
breadth (Song 2007). During and since the 2001 election, online media have challenged
existing conservative media (where three established newspapers have 80% of
readership) with forms of citizen journalism – from portal/papers like OhmyNews, where
three quarters of the content is generated by its 35,000 so called ‗news guerrillas‘, to
blogs to platforms like Seoprise that host non-gaek (polemicist) pages (Chang 2005,
2005). This turn to online media fits with a society ‗democratizing‘ away from
authoritarian rule supported by inter-generational pressure for change. It is also digitally
one of the most connected societies in the world where in 2005, 31 million of 47 million
Cyberspace as the New Public Domain?
349
Koreans had access to very high-speed internet and more than 83 percent of households
had personal computers (Chang 2005: 928). The result is that
‗online media function as an epicenter of activities that lead the
movement for political reform against conservative hegemony.
Reformist netizens are using online media to produce and exchange
values and arguments that challenge the existing social order.‘ (Chang
2005: 933)
Not surprisingly in Korea new media are seen, by more conservative groups, as
threatening to fragment society by undercutting traditional socialities (cheong) of dense
affective ties (Yoon 2003). However, the media are far from a simply virtual phenomena
and are tied to a rapid growth of youth culture who are connected, symbolically and
literally, with digital media. Seen as antagonistic to the state, they are the subject of
periodic moral panics about disconnection from Korean norms of harmonious sociality.
The digital realm is transforming specific urban spaces. Sites of connectivity, such as
Internet cafes, are ‗technosocial spaces‘ in that they ‗are not only places offering access
to technology; they are also social spaces centred on a specific technology‘ and which
bend the physical boundaries of the local space by including actors situated in other
villages, cities and countries (Liff and Lægran 2003: 360). Associated with youth culture,
and especially Massively Authored Online Worlds and gaming, there were more than
20,000 Internet cafés or PC Bang, as they are known, across Korea by 2001. About 50
per cent of all PC Bangs are in the capital region, and almost 25 per cent are located in
Seoul (Lee 2005). They foster specific temporalities of behaviour and rhythms of
Cyberspace as the New Public Domain?
350
activities that become the hallmark not merely of these particular buildings but the wider
locale within which they are situated. They might be seen as creating and transecting
conventional social orders. Although residential broadband has led to a reduction in the
total numbers of PC Bangs, they still thrive precisely as a third place of technosociality –
allowing young adults to congregate and share online experiences. Sinchon, a university
quarter in Seoul, has developed a new urban consumption landscapes based around these
technospaces. Many PC Bangs are clustered there, and many newspaper stories,
especially those commenting on ‗immoral‘ behaviour in PC Bangs, focus on there. It has
become a 24/7 social milieu with all night gaming, but also a social milieu especially for
young men that is technologically mediated (Lee 2005). Far from being a virtual cocoon
this has become a rebellious, contestatory and ‗happening‘ zone in the city. The same
area where symbolically student demonstrators fought the police in the 80s under the
dictatorships, they now challenge a conservative social order with games. Here there
seems something of the liminal – a fragmentation that is allowing the self expression of
identity and a transformation of local culture. Meanwhile circuits of mobile phone
messaging are offering new means of sharing intimacies among young women that
actually enhance existing patterns of local sociality but without visible public arenas
(Yoon 2003: 339-40). Far from a disembedding or loss of local belonging, there is a
reembedding and reinscription of the role of older forms of bang (as in tea bang, marriage
bang) alongside a long established fascination with games (now digital rather than board
based). Urban space is being remediated.
Cyberspace as the New Public Domain?
351
What is being produced is a concentrated zone of a different urban culture. Seoul has
significantly higher rates of access than the rest of Korea (even other cities) but also
higher rates of engagement – that is meaningful use of services, especially ticketing, eauction,
e-party, and e-banking (Hwang 2004: 383). If we look at the use of digital media
by adolescents in Seoul and Singapore then it is clear it is the social milieux of friends
and contacts, who are also online, that means digital media are extensively used and
central to social life (Jung et al. 2005). This is not distinct from ‗physical‘ networks but
linked to them. Far from the glossy, commercial vision of the Digital Media City, a
different digital city is emerging. One that is woven through diverse digital nodes, from
discussion boards to online communities. It reacts to and responds to global networks and
ideas but is enabled by specific urban socialities. Its urban rhythms are plugged into
online communities that span the globe as well as ones that are intensely local.
Conclusions:
This chapter has picked out symptomatic moments of how online spaces and urban
spaces interact. It has shown that one does not simply determine changes in the other.
The digital realm is embedded in urban life with new media layering onto existing media
and forms, offering new affordances to social practices that transform socio-spatial
relations. Moreover, digital connections challenge the notion of a simple geography of
the city. The urban tissue comprising these mutually entangled digital-physical practices
recombines former and existing elements into new assemblages. These entanglements are
quickly becoming the everyday idiom of urban life. In a variety of cases the everyday
Cyberspace as the New Public Domain?
352
public sphere and civil society are now inseparable and almost inconceivable without a
variety of communication media.
The brief review of cases here suggests digital inclusion is not separate from real world
inclusion, nor irrelevant to the urban poor. It is both linked to ‗real world‘, traditional
patterns of inclusion and exclusion but even more notably has consequences for life
chances and experiences of inclusion and exclusion. The brief review of different urban
scenarios and initiatives offers no simple recipe for either fostering digital inclusion or
digitally fostering inclusion. Both Amsterdam and Singapore show the weaknesses of any
centrally planned initiative in a fast moving technological environment. Both also invited
people to take part in a preformed realm – with intended uses and outcomes. The last
section outlined how fragmentation, plurality and disintegration can also create moments
of inclusion by transforming the uses of the city and enabling new voices to be heard in
refashioned platforms for collective exchange, interaction, and the negotiation of social
diversity. They all suggest though that cities can mobilise their local social milieux to
interact with new globalised ties and connections. In this sense, they speak to possible
developments of urban life that blur the old scales at which life is conducted. If urban
planning restricts itself to the scales of physical environments and daily mobility it will
be overlooking a large and dynamic part of urban life. However, it is unlikely that these
virtual ties and relations can be coalesced into a singular ‗digital space‘. Rather we are
dealing with multiple, partial and heterogeneous relationships that do not add up to a
coherent totality.
Cyberspace as the New Public Domain?
353
Table 1:
Measures of internet penetration and intensity of usage which show a stronger significance
of online activity in Brazil and China than the gross uptake would suggest, raising questions
of hyper-inclusion alongside exclusion:
Global Weekly Internet Usage NovemberDecember
2005
Country Mean
Number
of Hours
Online
per Week
Country Proportion
accessing
within 30
day usage
China 17.9 Japan 89%
Japan 13.9 Canada 72%
South
Korea
12.7 U.S.
71%
Canada 12.3 South
Korea 68%
U.S. 11.4 Germany 62%
Mexico 9.2 France 61%
France 9.1 U.K. 58%
Germany 8.9 China
50%
Brazil 8.8 Mexico 40%
U.K. 8.6 Brazil 21%
Cyberspace as the New Public Domain?
354
Russia 5.7 Russia 19%
India 4.4 India 15%
Source: Ipsos, 2006
Cyberspace as the New Public Domain?
355
Figure 1:
ONS Household survey data
Households with Home Access to Internet by
Gross Income Decile Group in UK
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
1998-99
1999-00
2000-01
2001-02
2002-03
2003-04
PercentagewithAccess
Second decile group
Fourth decile group
Sixth decile group
Ninth decile group
Highest decile group
All households
Cyberspace as the New Public Domain?
356
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