Wikipedia as Virtual City: Initial Thoughts
(From a response I wrote for my Cultural Studies seminar, which is currently reading de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life.)
I’m wondering if de Certeau’s notions about cities-as-operational-concepts can be transferred to digital environments – particularly Wikipedia, which is my current research site. I’m specifically thinking about the criteria he sets up on page 94:
- the production of its own space: rational organization must thus repress all the physical, mental and political pollutions that would compromise it.
- the substitution of a nowhen, or of a synchronic system, for the indeterminable and stubborn resistances offered by traditions…
- the creation of a universal and anonymous subject which is the city itself: it gradually becomes possible to attribute to it, as to its political model, Hobbes’ State, all the functions and predicates that were previously scattered and assigned to many different read subjects — groups, associations, or individuals. “The city” like a proper name, thus provides a way of conceiving and constructing space on the basis of a finite number of stable, isolatable, and interconnected properties.
My initial thought is that Wikipedia does demonstrate many of these properties. First, there is the production of its own, unique space that is constructed word by word as new pages (759,000+ as of today) are created and then networked. Second, the Wikipedia entry, which is theoretically constantly updated, is a synchronic system that (potentially) continuously rejects its past. The history does exist, but it is relegated to a tab that must be clicked on for viewing, thus placing it in the “invisible” category that de Certeau maps on page 85. Finally, the system provides a way of conceiving and constructing space (or text), through stable formats, isolated texts and textual conventions, and the interconnected nature of the whole process/product. (I tend to argue that Wikipedia is a process, not a product, but that’s too much to go into here.)
It also demonstrates some other properties that de Certeau associates with cities:
- it develops “waste products” (94) in the form of spam (abnormality), revert wars (deviance), and page deletions (illness and death).
- It is a space of transformation and appropriation (95), as information is brought in from other sources and then collectively filtered and edited.
- One might claim it is “simultaneously the machine and the hero of modernity” (95) if one listens to certain groups and media accounts. The copyleft and open content groups have clustered around it, and much has been written lately about its anarchic/radically collaborative/whatever methods of peer production.
- It presents a collective memory, both the memory of the project generated by Wikipedians and the greater memory presented in real-time encyclopedic accounts of events like the Asian Tsunami, and Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. .
One of the problems I see with this whole line of thinking is its reliance on the notion of digital/virtual “space,” which is a hotly argued concept. Some people argue this a metaphor we use because we can’t think of a better way to wrap out minds around it. On the one hand, there is no such thing as a definable virtual space. Or is there? We spend a lot of time figuring out different ways to map the Web (see this old blog entry of mine. I really haven’t decided where I stand on this argument, and I’ve been thinking about it for a couple of years now.
So what do you folks think? Does that hold up? Comments and questions are welcome.