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.
Continue reading "Wikipedia as Virtual City: Initial Thoughts" »