Privileged play spaces.

INTERACTIVE REALISM: THE POETICS OF CYBERSPACE

BY DANIEL DOWNES

MONTREAL AND KINGSTON: MCGILL-QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2005

192 PP./$24.95 (SB)

Breaking with what he considers the general tendency in media theory to identify technology as an agent for change, Daniel Downes focuses on new forms of interaction and new processes of communication in Interactive Realism: The Poetics of Cyberspace. Cyberspace, for him, is a "psychological space that develops through our use of technology to mediate our communications and our interactions" (140). In this sense, Downes challenges traditional media theory--the "transformative turn," as he calls it--that posits causality between technological change and psychological or social change within his own theory of "interactive realism" (140). A derivative of media ecology that emphasizes social construction, interactive realism stresses the experiential qualities of cyberspace. Indeed, one of the book's main objectives is to clarify a "persistent tendency" in the field of media studies to conflate the communicative environment of cyberspace with the technological infrastructure and information delivery system of the Internet.

Another of Downes's primary concerns is "to shift the terms of debate from technological evolutionism and the linguistic determination of subjectivity and reality to the kinds of worlds we construct using the tools at our disposal--metaphors and technologies of representation" (141). Applying theoretical insights from other disciplines, specifically metaphor as a structuring trope for thought and technology as a calibrator for perception, allows Downes to combine aspects of media and cultural studies. Downes reviews a number of prior models for the theorization of cyberspace, particularly the arguments of Michael Heim on computer-mediated writing and Mark Poster on shifts from one-to-one to many-to-many models of communication. Not finding such models completely satisfactory in terms of the interplay of communication and subjectivity in cyberspace, Downes develops a "poetics of cyberspace" that combines social constructionist theories and metaphoric analysis with five themes: the transformative view of media ecology vis-a-vis the power of technology; an interactive understanding of identity wherein experience is calibrated by tools of representation; mediated social identity formation; cyberspace as iconic landscapes that embody utopian ideals; and the temporal qualities of a multiplicity of cyber-environments. In each of these analyses, he enters into debates with a wide variety of models of western thought, including Greco-Roman and Italian Renaissance aesthetics, structuralist linguistics, phenomenology, continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, cognitive psychology, and post-structuralist historiography.

More specifically, Downes argues against linguistic preference in post-structural and cognitive psychology theorizations of social construction with his emphasis on metaphor and technologies of representations. He begins his analysis with the notion of embodiment (relating personal experience to the body) and extends it into social, rather than individual, experience, pointing to the importance of the computer as a material object throughout his theorization of cyberspace. "Technologies," he argues, "are, in the end, artifacts created by people living in particular, historically situated cultures who use these devices to interact with the world, with other people, and with themselves" (xvi). Technologies calibrate perception and train vision, as he makes clear in an analysis of historical technologies of western representation, such as the linear perspective of Leon Battista Alberti's fenestra aperta (open window), Robert Barker's Panorama, Louis Jacques Daguerre's diorama, and Jeremy Bentham's infamous Panopticon. Downes's analysis is less concerned with modes of representation than with ways that the body responds through "embodied perception" and "body knowledge" to different modes of representation. "Embodied perception is less concerned with the nature of the appearance of things," he points out, "than with demonstrating how perception is a body skill-set embedded in representation, discourse, and technique" (52).

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Among other concepts that Downes interrogates is virtuality, a concept "based on the relative transparency of a technological system that allows a user to experience a communicative event and to ignore the technology mediating the experience" (72). Virtuality situates interaction within the relative transparency of technology. (By contrast, virtual reality situates interaction within an immersive experience.) In his analysis, presence in cyberspace is a "double awareness," a sense of being both in an environment as well as in an(other) environment via a communications medium. A major shortcoming in many analyses of cyberspace, he argues, has been precisely to ignore the embodied nature of perception.

Downes concludes with a discussion of cyberspace in relation to public memory. Adjusting Michel Foucault's concept of the heterotopia, he describes his method of interactive realism as permitting examination of "constructions that take the body into account and that characterize digital experience as heterogeneous and supportive of a kind of selfhood comprised of complex assemblages of interactive skills and experience" (122). He emphasizes multiplicity and complexity, spatiality and temporality. The poetics of cyberspace becomes a method for mediating relationships between metaphor, artifact, and experience that are used in relation to embodied experience (140-41).

Downes concludes his work with the word "hopeful." Indeed, he is hopeful in response to more qualified readings by John Perry Barlow of the so-called democratic potential of cyberspace, which he bookends in his introduction and conclusion. Downes argues that "the concepts of cyberspace, virtual reality, and virtual community are useful as imaginative spaces where we can try out various forms of social experimentation with a view to changing the increasingly global, formal, and abstract characteristics of the world we live in" (23). Change, as Downes points out, can be enacted as oppression and repressive tolerance, and he cites the examples of legal cases involving copyright, such as Napster, as well as "antiterrorism" surveillance legislation in the United States. What perhaps demands some rethinking is the "we" position that Downes adopts. Although, theoretically, everyone may try out forms of social experimentation, practically, not everyone can.

Cyberspace is not a substitute for reality, he points out, rather it is an environment that provides "play spaces for experimental interactions" (xiv) and invites questions about "the role of physical space in setting limits for human interaction" (4). Conversely, the limitations for human interaction set by physical space affectively limit human interaction in cyberspace. Increasing disparities in access to cyberspace in computer-mediated communication (yesterday's "digital divide," today's "racial ravine") stifle voices and thereby set predetermined limitations on the sorts of interaction and communication that Downes exalts. Granted, certain subaltern movements and subcultural groups would lose their political relevance were they visible in cyberspace (a topic that spills over into an examination of the Internet, yet one that is inseparable from the study of presence in cyberspace), but other potential groups are not permitted access to one of cyberspace's "play spaces." The importance of such group presence in cyberspace as sites for resistance and negotiation within this heterotopia is well illustrated by the Zapatista movement, the anti-MAI (Multi-lateral Agreement on Investment) campaign, and the International Landmine Ban Treaty. Downes himself points to "how communities negotiate a sense of belonging and participation through mediated interactions" as one of his two areas for further research (142). This research seems central to his theorization of a poetics of cyberspace.

Moreover, the embodied experience that Downes describes often seems based on the experiences of privileged bodies. "Cyberspace does allow participants a rare form of freedom," he argues. "[A]s communication is detached from the intersubjective play of bodies that structures the proximal-social realm, members of virtual communities can experiment with identity" (85). Whether male or female, they are largely first-world bodies. (Although Downes does discuss First Nations [Canada] artist Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptan's work, there is little, if any, mention of Asia, Latin America, or Africa.) This first-worldist embodied experience risks becoming a default (almost colonizing) experience insofar as it often ignores (and thereby disembodies) the embodied experiences of bodies, whether in cyberspace or IRL (in real life), that are marked by the social categorizations of race, ethnicity, nationality, class, religion, age, sexuality, gender, and physicality in general--bodies whose embodied experiences include being identified, objectified, disenfranchised, controlled, deported, scarred, or even sold in ways that the playfulness of cyberspace cannot undo. The "playfulness" that Downes describes as inherent to cyberspace might include passing in the most apolitical sense, yet his theory might do better to go further in its questioning of ways that bodily experience affects embodied experience in cyberspace. How does embodied user interface vary according to familiarity and access? How do different cultural traditions of perception, particularly ones that do not presuppose a philosophical split between mind and body, affect embodied experiences in cyberspace? Perhaps these points can be grouped into a third area for further research, one that would further destabilize some of the very logo-centric assumptions that Downes's concepts of interactive realism and a poetics of cyberspace begins the important work of doing.

Downes's analysis is broad and necessarily schematic; however, it could address, rather than circumvent, some of the significant criticisms of the often very limited access of many populations to online technologies, such as Zillah Eisenstein's arguments about cybermedia and transnational capital, which Downes mentions. Addressing such issues, particularly in terms of their ramifications in a theorization of cyberspace based on embodied experience, would be useful as Downes continues to chart the unknown in his own Inventio Fortunata.

DALE HUDSON is an assistant professor of cinema and photography at Ithaca College.