The thesis explores the materiality of communication environment in Cyberspace illustrating both the problem of disembodied rationalism and the benefits of emphasizing the phenomenological sense of presence in virtual spaces. Interactive realism is offered as an approach to explain how our sense of embodied existence is supported and threatened in a technologically mediated situation. Language and other artifacts are tools with which we build social reality. In particular, metaphors are the rink between language and other, non-linguistic skills that shape our sense of self and reality. / The metaphors of the computer as an electronic brain and of the networked computer as an electronic frontier serve as unconscious, cognitive models that guide our interactions with the world. Objects also work as models to embody ways of thinking about the world. It will be argued that social construction involves a sedimentation of language and a naturalization of the constructed environment. I argue that perception, as the bodily foundation of experience, involves a somatagnosis or body-knowledge, and that this knowledge is influenced by the particular devices we use to represent images of the world. The affective communities of Cyberspace are rule-governed communicative assemblies. Cyber-communities provide examples of the ways the body threatens and supports group formation and maintenance on the Internet . / Cyberspace highlights the process of construction and sedimentation through which we construct the social world. In the construction of symbolic embodiments Cyberspace presents the paradox of places that encourage emplacement and disembodiment. Disembodied spaces are utopian in nature. Such Digkopian places abstract us from the world. Heterotopian spaces illustrate playful experiments. Such materializations of metaphors and ideas dramatize the ways we model the world and build it. My interest is with the creative element my aim is to make clear the significance of constructed, digital reality and its tensions with bodily experience.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.34947 |
| Date | January 1998 |
| Creators | Downes, Daniel M. |
| Contributors | Straw, Will (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Graduate Communications Program.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001641576, proquestno: NQ44414, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
Page generated in 0.0019 seconds