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Location, Location, Location

Desktop Real Estate and the Cultural Economyof the World Wide Web

Richard Grusin

Abstract: The concept of remediation can help explain the cultural

economy of the World Wide Web. As developed in a recentlypublished book (co-authored with Jay Bolter), remediation refers to the

wayin which new

digitalmedia refashion

priormedia forms.

Digitalmedia like computer graphics, virtual reality, and the web definethemselves by borrowing from, paying homage to, critiquing, and

refashioning their predecessors, principally television, film,photography, and painting, but also print. Furthermore, older media

can remediate newer ones within the same media economy.Remediation seems to be a fundamental characteristic not only for

contemporary media, but for all visual media at least since theRenaissance with its invention of linear-perspective painting. Each

medium seems to follow this pattern of borrowing and refashioning

other media,and

rivalryas

wellas

homageseems

alwaysto be at

work. In this paperI take up the cultural economy of the web in relationto three competing conceptual frameworks for making sense of new

digital media: cyberspace, ubiquitous computing, and mediated publicspace. In so doingI hope to move towards an analysis of the cultural

economy of the heterogenous networks within which digital media

circulate and areconsumed.

Remediating the On Friday, 5 November 1 q99, Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson issued

desktop his findings of fact in the consolidated civil anti-trust actions initiated byboth the United States Justice Department and the State of New York

against Bill Gates’s Microsoft Corporation. As was widely reported,Judge Jackson’s findings supported almost point for point the anti-trust

case put forth by the Justice Department’s attorneys. Immediately uponrelease of these findings, speculation about the fate of Microsoft ran

rampant among media outlets, the general public, and the computerindustry generally. As interesting as Judge Jackson’s findings and this

ongoing speculation are (and as a longtime Mac user I find them

extremely interesting), the significance of the trial for observers of new

digital media is not to be found in the final outcome of what Microsoft’s

attorneys optimistically characterised as a

(baseball) game in its third ofnine innings. Rather, whatI find truly radical or fundamental about theMicrosoft case is a belief that is already shared not only by the Justice

Department, Judge Jackson and Microsoft, but by the popular media



49

covering the case and the computer-using public generally: that the

computer desktop itself is prime real estate. By building its own web

browser, Internet Explorer, into its operating system, which is the

operating system loaded onto virtually every Intel-based PC, Microsoft is

accused of occupying valuable desktop real estate with its own

commercial developments, thereby preventing other browsermanufacturers (most notably Netscape) from competing with them forcustomers.

The Windows desktop is explicitly characterised as real estate onlytwice in Judge Jackson’s findings (once in a quote from Bill Gates, and

both in conjunction with Microsoft’s agreement with America On-Line to

use Internet Explorer rather than Netscape as the default web browser

forits

nearly10

million customers).Nonetheless

the assumption that theWindows desktop is, in Judge Jackson’s words, ’valuable real estate’,underlies the entire dispute about Mierosoft’s decision to bundle Internet

Explorer into its operating system. In this paperI take up some of thecultural implications of characterising the Windows desktop as realestate. To do so I will employ the concept of ’remediation’ to thinkabout the nature of a cultural economy in which a pixellated image on

a computer monitor can be considered real estate. In thinking aboutthe cultural economy of the World Wide Web,I will not directly be

addressing issues of market share or profitability. RatherI will be

lookingat

the wayin which

theweb and

othernew

digitalmedia

function as forms of cultural representation or mediation.

As Jay Bolter andI develop it, ’remediation’ refers to the way in whichmedia (particularly, but not exclusively new digital media) refashion

prior media forms.’ In response to the question of what is new about

digital media, we propose the answer that new media are new

precisely because of the ways in which they refashion older media.

Specfically, we examine the ways in which computer graphics, virtual

reality, and the web define themselves by borrowing from, paying

homage to, critiquing, and refashioning their predecessors, principallytelevision, film, photography, and painting, but also print. Computergames remediate film by styling themselves as ’interactive movies’.

Virtual reality remediates film as well as perspective painting. Digitalphotography remediates the analogue photograph. The web absorbs

and refashions almost every previous visual and textual medium,including television, film, radio, and print. Furthermore, older media

can remediate newer ones within the same media economy. Today,Hollywaod cinema is attempting to maintain its influential cultural status

by employing computer graphics in otherwise conventional linear films

and by beginning to develop entertainment for the web. Television ismaking such extensive use of new media that TV screens often lookmore like web pages than like video. Remediation seems to be a

persistent characteristic not only of contemporary media, but of all



50

visual media at least since the Renaissance with its invention of linear-

perspective painting. Each medium seems to follow this pattern of

borrowing and refashioning other media, and rivalry as well as

homage seems always to be at work.

Our project starts from the recognition that at the current historical

moment, digital media have developed two very distinct, apparentlycontradictory, styles or logics of mediation. In the first, which we call

’transparent immediacy’, the goal of digital media is to erase or

eliminate the signs of mediation - as epitomised most powerfully in

virtual reality and photorealistic computer graphics. In the second,which we call ’hypermediacy’, the goal of digital media is to multiplyand make visible the signs of mediation - as epitomised in the

windowed style of CD-ROMs, the PC’s desktop, or the web. Althoughthese two styles of mediation obey contradictory imperatives, they are

necessary halves of a double logic of remediation, in which our cultureseeks both to multiply its media and to erase all traces of mediation, to

erase its media in the very act of multiplying technologies of mediation.Our concept of remediation has three corollaries: that all mediation is

remediation; that mediation and reality are inseparable; and thatremediation is reform.

That

digitalmedia can reform and even save

societyis reminiscent of

the promise that has been made for technologies throughout much ofthe twentieth century. This is in some senses a peculiarly Americanpromise; American culture seems to believe in technology in a way that

European culture, for example, may not. Throughout the twentieth

century, or really since the French Revolution, salvation in Europe has

most often been defined in political terms - finding the appropriateradical left or radical right (or, in Tony Blair’s Britain, radical centre)political formula. Even more Marxist-influenced thinkers, who believe in

technological progress, subordinate that progress to political change.One such figure is Walter Benjamin, whose influential essay on ’TheWork of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ argues for the

political possibilities brought about by technologies of mechanical

reproduction.2I invoke Benjamin’s argument as a way to think about

the corollary 1990s argument for new digital media. In the current

cultural climate new media, not unlike film in the 1930s and 1940s, is

thought to have the potential to democratise the production of mediaand thus offer the promise of political action in the form of individuals

taking grass-roots control of media, or political groups formingalternative forums for political agency. In the most extreme version of

this argument we find someone like John Perry Barlow proclaimingcyberspace as a new political territory in which the laws of industrial

capitalism no longer apply, and exhorting the possibility of a new

political order lying on (or perhaps just beyond) our monitors.’ In this

- paperI will unfold the cultural economy of the web in relation to three



51

new technological manifestations of digital media: cyberspace,ubiquitous computing, and mediated public space. in so doing t hopeto point the way towards an analysis of the cultural politics of the

heterogenous networks within which these new media circulate.

The virtual To begin to unpack further the cultural economy of the web, it is useful to

theology of think about art not only in relation to mechanical reproduction but in

cyberspace relation to the technologies of cyberspace more generally. It is also usefulto think about the mechanical reproduction not only of art but also of

nature, whose aura Benjamin defines ’as the unique phenomenon of a

distance, however close it may be. If, while resting on a summer

afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or

a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura ofthose mountains, of that branch’.&dquo; When natural

objectsor

landscapesare removed from their context in historical tradition by the mechanical

reproduction of photography or film, Benjamin argues, they are broughtcloser to the contemporary masses. At the same time, like works of art

that have been mechanically reproduced, they lose their aura of

uniqueness, fulfilling what Benjamin characterises as ’the desire of

contemporary masses to bring things &dquo;closer&dquo; spatially and humanly,which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of

every reality by accepting its reproduction.5

A

similar movement from distance tonearness can

beseen

if we takea

cursory, and admittedly incomplete, look at the representation of nature in

the history of Western painting. In late-fifteenth- and sixteenth-centuryItalian religious paintings, for example, the natural landscape is almost

invariably represented as a subordinate, almost decorative, element in

relation to the paintings’ religious narratives. Landscapes are viewed onlythrough windows or doors, so that nature is also framed by contemporaryarchitecture; in fact the shapes of the windows or doors often parallel the

shape of the painting itself. Such paintings set their scenes in an interior

not because their subjects demanded it, but as a way of symbolising and

containing their theological message. But it is not only the depictedlandscape that is framed. Nature itself is framed or subordinated to the

religious allegory represented in the painting, more generally to the

theological meaning of the world. In these paintings what we regard as

the natural world was subordinated to the religious. In other words, the

largest possible context, the largest conceptual frame, so to speak, is

Christianity, the story of God’s intervention in human affairs set forth in theOld and New Testaments. Embedded in the Christian tradition, nature or

landscape possesses an aura and is kept at a distance.

The visual subordination of nature to Christianity began to give way as

early as the seventeenth century, in later Italian religious paintings and

especially in Dutch landscapes. Although in narrative terms Italian

_

~ religious paintings still conceptually subordinated nature to God,



52

visually the religious subject is increasingly situated not inside a built

environment, but outside in a natural landscape. The ’art of describing’in Dutch landscapes, on the other hand, increasingly depicted nature

independentlyof any larger spiritual narrative.~ And ever since the

eighteenth century, when nature had begun to replace God and theChurch as the largest context for making sense of human actions and

purposes, the windows of the Italian Renaissance have not been neededas a frame.

On the computer screen, however, the windows have now returned:

everything in this world (and, as NASA’s 1997 Mars Pathfinder mission

demonstrated, beyond this world as well) is made visible to us throughwindows, which we can click on and enter in a more interactive way

than one could enter the windowed spaces of Italian paintings.Furthermore, for enthusiasts at least, cyberspace is bidding to replacenature as the largest interpretive context for understanding the human.

As Marcos Novak puts it: ’Cyberspace involves a reversal of thecurrent mode of interaction with computerized information. At presentsuch information is external to us. The idea of cyberspace subverts that

relation; we are now within information. In order to do so we ourselvesmust be reduced to bits, represented in the system, and in the processbecome information anew. 17 Just as, in early religious paintings, nature

was initially separate from us and then became the predominant context

for understanding our world and our actions, so ’the idea ofcyberspace’ is seen to transform information from something separateand contained within our computers to a space that we inhabit. The

current development of the visual and conceptual space of the computerscreen thus mirrors the development of the space of the canvas in the

history of Western painting. We are said to inhabit cyberspace as

previous generations inhabited nature, or even earlier generations livedin a theocentric (and indeed logocentric) world. For Novak, Michael

Benedikt, and others, the master narrative of our culture is no longer the

story of God’s relation to us or of our relation to nature, but of our

relation to information technologies: it is a virtual theology of

cyberspace.

When William Gibson invented the term ’cyberspace’ in his novel

Neuromancer, it was described as ’[a] consensual hallucination

experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators in every nation ...

a graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every

computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of lightranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data.

Like city lights receding ...‘.~ For Gibson, cyberspace consisted of thenetwork of all computer and information-processing systems on the earthor in orbit. When hackers ’jacked in’ using a headset, they could see

and feel their way through this electronic network. The passinginformation had colours and shapes, and the network itself defined a



53

space through which they could move. Gibson’s definition of

cyberspace as a combination of networking and virtual reality, a spaceboth in a metaphorical and in a visual sense, has become paradigmaticfor others (such as Novak, Benedikt, and David Tomas) in their

observations about cyberspace. Tomas speaks of a ’a parallel world ofpotential workspaces’,9 Benedikt of a ’globally networked

...&dquo;virtual&dquo;

reality ... made up of data, of pure information.&dquo; For cyberspaceenthusiasts, there are two distinct worlds: ’the sensorial world of the

organically human’ and the digitised, pure, immaterial world of

cyberspace. Benedikt thinks of the relation between these two worlds

as an evolving process of dematerialisation: ’And cyberspace, wemight now see, is nothing more, or less, than the latest stage in theevolution of [Sir Karl Popper’s] World 3, with the ballast of materialitycast away - cast away again, and perhaps finally.’&dquo; While Benedikt

instantly qualifies this statement, insisting that cyberspace or virtualreality will never replace ’real reality’, he nonetheless conceives of these’realities’ as distinct, autonomous realms.12 Proponents of cyberspaceseem to be replaying the logic of transcendence at the heart of

Christianity, as when Benedikt, sounding very much like a revivalist

preacher reminding us not to ignore the care of our spirit while caughtup in the bodily snares of this world, implores us to take care of

cyberspace:

The

designof

cyberspaceis, after all, the

designof another life-

world, a parallel universe, offering the intoxicating prospect of

actually fulfilling - with a technology very nearly achieved - a

dream thousands of years old: the dream of transcending the

physical world, fully alive, at will, to dwell in some Beyond - to be

empowered or enlightened there, alone or with others, and to

return.’3

This dream of transcendence is so compelling that its advocates willsometimes ignore even the most obvious material limitations of

cyberspace. For example, Michael Heim suggests that ’the computernetwork appears as a godsend in providing forums for people to gatherin surprisingly personal proximity - especially considering today’slimited bandwidths - without the physical limitations of geography, time

zones, or conspicuous social status’. 14 Yet all of us know that preciselythe opposite is true. Geography, time zones, and social status are

indeed limitations, or rather the enabling characteristics, of computernetworks. Where we are located on earth (in what kind of urban or

rural setting, in an industrialised or developing country) will determine

how and whether we can connect to the internet at all. The

institutionalised system of time-keeping affects every phase of ’time-stamped’ internet communications. Finally, the conspicuous social status

of a post-industrial, computer-owning, global citizen is as much a partof the internet as are routers and protocols. Cyberspace exists in a



54

tightly defined network of computers, economic status, and

considerations of time and space. It is only within this network that onecan enjoy what Heim describes as the erotic experience of cyberspace,or what Benedikt characterises as transcendence, both of which entailan apparent rejection of the material world and the human body thathas called forth serious criticism from feminist and cultural studiesscholars like Donna Haraway, Kate Hayles, and Sandy Stone.

Christine Wertheim has noted the same rhetoric of theologisation that I

have been discussing, remarking approvingly that cyberspace promisesto reintroduce the soul to Western civilisation in the form of a

cosmological dualism that has been missing since soon after the Middle

Ages. ’5 Wertheim suggests that where for Dante and his contemporaries

there were two worlds, with two distinct geographies - the profanephysical world and the sacred spiritual world - for the world of

rationalism, materialism, and science there has long since been onlyone. Beginning with the invention of linear perspective, Wertheim sees

the eradication of the spiritual world mapped out in Dante’s Inferno, thereduction of all space to a single continuous material space. Tracingcosmological theories from Galileo to Stephen Hawking, Wertheim

argues that for the first time in more than 500 years, cyberspace offersour culture the possibility of a space of the soul, a spiritual world not

reducible to material causes and explanations.

While Wertheim’s argument may appear to support mine, it reallymoves in the opposite direction. Wertheim subscribes to the theology of

Heim, Benedict, Tomas, and others - accepting the theological rhetoricof cyberspace as her own newly discovered faith. In matters pertainingto the theology of cyberspace, I on the other hand must declare myselfagnostic. My concern with cultural economy is not with space in an

ontological sense but with mediated space, the space of representation- what might be called screen space. Cyberspace is not, despite whatWertheim proclaims, an immaterial world. Very much a part of our

contemporary world, cyberspace is constituted through a series ofremediations. It is not, as its enthusiasts assert, a parallel universe. It is

not a place of escape from contemporary society, nor indeed from the

physical world. Cyberspace is a shopping mall in the ether. It fits

smoothly into our contemporary networks of transportation,communication, and economic exchange. As a digital network,cyberspace remediates the electric communications networks of the past150 years, the telegraph and the telephone. As virtual reality, it

remediates the visual spaces of painting, film, and television. And as a

social space, it remediates such historical places as cities and parksand such non-places as theme parks and shopping malls. Like othercontemporary mediated spaces, cyberspace refashions and extendsearlier media, which are themselves embedded in and in turn embed

material and social environments.



55

Ubiquitous Where cyberspace theologians imagine that new digital media can

computing and empower postmodern subjects by allowing them to transcend theinformation materiality not only of their own bodies but of the world itself,

appliancesadvocates of

ubiquitouscomputing argue that new digital

technologyempowers postmodern individuals in a consumerist sense preciselyinsofar as it makes its technology invisible to the user by embedding it

in what are often characterised as ’information appliances’. Asdescribed by Don Norman in The Invisible Computer, information

appliances are to the personal computer what electric appliances are to

the electric motor.16 Extrapolating from the fact that in the earlytwentieth-century home electric motors were marketed as all-purposeengines for a variety of domestic attachments (like sewing machines,fans, churns, mixers, beaters, vibrators, and grinders), Norman arguesthat the

personal computer,like the home electric motor, will soon

become invisible, to be embedded in information appliances like

calculators, cameras, medical sensors, and so forth. For Norman, the

personal computer is a technology in which mediation is not onlyalways evident, but often makes it difficult for users to accomplish thetasks they set out to perform. Information appliances, on the other

hand, by making their digital mediation invisible, provide an interfacethat is immediately evident to their users.

The information

appliancemodel of

ubiquitous computingreverses the

virtual theology of cyberspace in an important way. Where cyberspacetheologians would reform reality by giving us an alternative world and

insisting on that world as the locus of presence and meaning for us,

recent proposals for ’ubiquitous’ or ’distributed’ computing would do

just the opposite, but in the service of the same desire for reform.Instead of putting ourselves in the computer’s graphic world, the

strategy of ubiquitous computing is to scatter computers and

computational devices throughout our world: to ’augment reality’ with

digital artifacts and so create a ’distributed cyberspace’ in which

computers (concealedin information

appliances)bustle around -

opening files, opening windows, switching cameras and sound systemson and off - to suit our needs.&dquo; Enthusiasts for ubiquitous computingenvision environments in which our data files, applications, and

preferences follow us automatically from computer to computer as we

move around our workplace. Devices that are now ’dumb’, such as

windows, doors, and refrigerators, become ’smart’, communicate withus and with one another, and anticipate our needs. Ubiquitouscomputing attempts to reform reality by making technological objectsconform to human needs and wishes: windows that open at bedtime

because welike

to

sleepin

the fresh air; refrigerators that notifyus

when we are low on milk; computers that download program updatesbefore we ask for them, and so on. Some enthusiasts have begun to

develop a vast industry of wearable computers - watches, hats, belts,

eyeglasses, and shoes that entertain or inform us. Finally, there are the



56

evangelists for ’nanomachines’ placed throughout the environment, even

inside our bodies for medical and other purposes. These reformers are

all remediators of reality, who want to turn our physical world into a

placewhere

everythingremediates

somethingelse.

Advocates of ubiquitous computing and information appliances insist

aggressively on the reality of media in our social and physical world.

They see such a strategy ’as a way to improve on the &dquo;flawed&dquo; designin ordinary reality’ .18 For Wendy Kellogg and others, the problem with

reality is that ’objects are largely &dquo;dead&dquo; to distinctions we care about.

Television sets and stereo systems are socially insensitive: they do not

turn themselves down when we talk on the phone’.’9 Of course, as the

proliferation of cell phones makes evident almost daily, the problem of

social insensitivityis not

limitedto

older technologies, butis at

leastequally true of eager adapters of new ones.

Like virtually all manifestations of new media, ubiquitous computingoperates according to the double logic of remediation. Information

appliances express the desire for immediacy, by concealing their

technological mediation behind a ’natural’, easy-to-use interface. At thesame time, the proliferation of such appliances, and the seamless

networking that is imagined to link them together, expresses thefascination with mediation at the heart of hypermediacy. Following the

logic of remediation as reform, ubiquitous computing insists thatnetworked information appliances will improve contemporary society byrefashioning the personal computer into new digital technologies that,for the first time in history, respond to the needs and desires of its users.

I would take issue with this idea - not becauseI believe that information

appliances will not be responsive in precisely this way (indeed many ofthem already are), but because for hundreds of years we have been

constructing our technologies precisely to take our cultural distinctions

seriously. Bruno Latour reminds us that in certain respects information

appliances would hardly be new, because technologies like seat belts,speed bumps, and hotel keys already act in such a way that they carryout our cultural preferences - by keeping us from going through thewindshield in a crash, by discouraging us from speeding throughresidential neighbourhoods and other pedestrian-dense areas, and byreminding us (at least in Europe) to leave our keys at the front desk

when we leave our hotel .20 Although Latour might agree with theenthusiasts for distributed computing that ’[t]he &dquo;distinctions&dquo; peoplecare about can be viewed as virtual worlds, or

...information webs’,

these enthusiasts miss the point when they want to make a categoricaldistinction between a distributed cyberspace and other current and pasttechnologies .2’ For Latour the idea of technologies that embody our

cultural values or distinctions has been a feature not only of modern but

of ’amodern’ or ’premodern’ societies as well.22 I, too, would argue



57

that technologies have in this sense always been ’smart’. The

information appliances of ubiquitous computing may only be ’smarter’.

Location, location, Advocates of information

appliancesand

ubiquitouscomputing express

location : desktop grandiloquently the implied goal of all advocates and practitioners ofreal estate as digital media: to reimagine and therefore to reform the world as a

new public space mediated (and remediated) space. Like the desire to remediate society,the desire to remediate public space is not new. Nor will theinformation appliances of ubiquitous computing be the last expressionof remediation as reform - as we are reminded by the proliferation ofthe public and quasi-public mediated spaces (shopping malls, theme

parks, stadia, airports etc) that anthropologist Marc Aug6 has called

’non-places’.23

Aug6 characterises these non-places as ’spaces which are not

themselves anthropological places’. He argues that ’a dense network ofmeans of transport which are also inhabited spaces is developing;where the habitu6 of supermarkets, slot machines and credit cards

communicates wordlessly, through gestures, with an abstract,unmediated commerce.&dquo; Although non-places provide the immediacyof an unmediated commercial exchange, they also provide a standard

against which we can measure the heterogeneous network ofmediations that makes up supermodernity. As Aug6 writes:

[non-places] are the real measure of our time; one that could be

quantified - with the aid of a few conversions between area,

volume and distance - by totaling all the air, rail and motorwayroutes, the mobile cabins called ’means of transport’ (aircraft,trains and road vehicles), the airports and railway stations, hotel

chains, leisure parks, large retail outlets, and finally the complexskein of cable and wireless networks that mobilize extraterrestrial

space for the purposes of a communication so peculiar that it

often puts the individual in contact only with another image ofhimself.zs

Not only can these non-places be measured and quantified, but they also

provide sites for experiencing the reality of mediation: ’Frequentation of

non-places today provides an experience - without real historical

precedent - of solitary individuality combined with non-human mediation

(all it takes is a notice or a screen) between the individual and the publicauthority.’26 What the individual experiences in these moments is the

hypermediacy of these non-places, which are defined not by theirassociations with local history or even with the ground on which they are

built, but primarily by the reality of the media they contain.

In conceptualising the non-places of supermodernity as being defined bythe ’non-human mediation’ of’a notice or a screen’, Auge points the way



58

towards an understanding of the computer desktop itself as perhaps the

quintessential non-place of our time. Like Microsoft, AOL, the Justice

Department, and Judge Jackson, others too have recognised (and tried to

capitalise on)what real estate

agentscharacterise as the three most

important considerations in determining property value: location,location, location. Thus, in 1998 the Pixel Company began marketing a

piece of software called MySpace, which allows users to claim forthemselves the unused one-eighth to one-half inch of the monitor thatframes the desktop display. As described on the company’s web site,

’MySpace is a patent-pending graphical user interface that expands and

utilizes the unused border of the monitor below the MicrosoftWindows@ desktop. By increasing the number of pixels in the displayarea, MySpace creates entirely new digital real estate.’2’ For the Pixel

Company MySpace remediates the

desktopinterface as a television:

Made up of functional cartridges (think: television dials), the

MySpace control bar has limitless content possibilities. It can launch

any technology - it can manage applications; manage hardware;link to the Internet; control your CD, and more. Because it is outsideof the standard desktop area, MySpace is never covered byrunning applications, so it is always visible. Users can access

information and/or launch applications more directly by bypassingthe multiple layers of the desktop without interfering with desktop

applications.28

Where Pixel Company would exploit the notion of desktop real estate to

sell consumers its software, other companies have begun to give awaycomputers, often in exchange for a three-year commitment to a

particular Internet Service Provider. One of the first of these companieswas Free-PC, which initially offered 10,000 lucky ’beta testers’ free

personal computers and internet access, in exchange for their

agreement to accept an irremovable code that allows the company to

claim a frame on the monitor’s screen for

corporateand other

advertisements sold to the highest bidders. According to the Free-PC

website: ’That frame surrounds a screen area that is the same size as a

traditional high-resolution monitor (800 x 600 pixels for you techies!),which is available for Web browsing, e-mail, or any other MicrosoftWindows@ application.’29 Both of these companies (and there are

many more) are built upon the shared cultural assumption that underliesthe Microsoft case - and indeed Free-PC is built upon the Windows

operating system as well. The unspoken assumption, of course, is thatthe desktop interface, the medium, the digitalised display of pixels on

the monitor is potentially more valuable, and

arguablymore ’real’, than

the mechanism itself (the CPU, the hard-drive, the case, cables, fan,monitor, and so forth) - indeed so much more valuable that Free-PC is

willing to give away the computer itself in exchange for permanentspace on the desktop. And the reason for this is that the desktop, like



59

any non-place, offers the immediacy of commercial exchange througherasing or concealing the network of heterogeneous mediation thatmakes this exchange possible.

To conceptualise the desktop as real estate, as mediated space, is to

move the question of cultural economy to a very local, indeed personal,level. To boot up your computer is thus always to engage in commerce,

to be already engaged with real estate and monopoly law, withnetworks of communication and transportation. Like mechanical

reproduction, remediation makes possible a reconfiguration of propertyrelations by bringing them, in the form of commercial exchange, closerto the user. Put more plainly, whenever you boot up your computer, youare engaging in a commercial transaction in a mediated public spacewhich is

being increasinglycontested

by Microsoft,the USA

Government, and inevitably other governments and corporations as

well. As the Microsoft anti-trust case makes clear, these propertyrelations are constitutive of our use of all digital media - whether we

are using our computers on-line or off. That is, as users of digitalmedia, we are engaged in commerce not just in purchasing our

computers or contracting with our Internet Service Providers or

engaging in e-commerce. Rather commercial exchange has now been

built into the very interface with the computer itself. Inasmuch as our

exchange with desktop real estate has become a necessary part of our

interaction with our

personalcomputers, we find ourselves in a situation

in which our exchange with the market is not (as it has developedhistorically) something that happens external to the home, but has now

become internal to, in some senses at the very heart of, domestic space. And if, as the German computer art collective Knowbotic Research

writes, ’the interface ... is the medium that brings forth the subject andshapes the world, 30 then our exchange with the market has now become

constitutive of personal space as well - evident in the mobile

technologies of lap-tops, palm-tops, PDAs, and cell-phones (which work

similarly to reconfigure the space of telephonic communication from

private to public space).

The cultural politics of the Microsoft case, then, run counter to the virtual

theology of cyberspace by insisting in multiple ways upon the very real

materiality of the digital interface. Similarly, the Microsoft case reverses

the argument behind Norman’s advocacy of ’information appliances’ -that the camera or the phone or the ’appliance’ is more ’real’, more

persistent, more visible, than the motor or the chip, which should be

invisible. In the case of the personal computer, it is the desktop display,the digital realm, that is seen to be real and visible, while the

technology itself,the

appliance,is rendered invisible as we focus on the

desktop and the information space to which this desktop gives us

access. Although the virtual theology of cyberspace would privilege the

dematerialisation and disembodiment of new digital media, and the



60

advocates of ubiquitous computing would privilege the materiality ofinformation appliances, both sides would agree in maintaining a

categorical and practical distinction between the materiality of physical

objectsand space and the immateriality of digital information.

What the cultural economy underlying the notion of desktop realestate allows us to see, however, is that new media are engaged in

reconfiguring the distinction between materiality and immateriality,between reality and mediation. The cultural economy of new digitalmedia does not, as Baudrillard would have it, murder the real, butremediates it.31 In saying this I am not claiming that digital media are

doing anything radically or fundamentally new, but rather are onlyrefashioning a distinction with its own problematic genealogy in the

historyof western culture. In so

doing, theyare

engagedin a

projectwhich goes back, at the beginning of this century, to art forms likemodernist collage, but which has been at play in various forms of

representation and mediation since before the invention of linear

perspective. While totalising arguments are, and have always been,rhetorically and emotionally appealing, we need to resist the

temptation to indulge in them. Although it has become fashionable to

promote the web as having established a truly global economy, we

need to think carefully about what the category of the global reallymeans:

What is referred to as the global is, in most cases, based on a

technological infrastructure rather than on real-life experiences. Theelectronic networks form a communication superstructure that allows

for a fast and easy exchange of data over large distances. But the

way in which people use these networks is strongly determined bythe local contexts in which they live, so that, as a social and cultural

space, the electronic networks are not so much a global but a

translocal structure.32

Seen from the perspective of remediation, the cultural economy of theweb is neither revolutionary nor consumerist, neither monopolistic nor

utopian, but like cultural practices everywhere, only local, partial,tactical, and fragmentary. If one wishes to think otherwise, to

maintain, for example, either the fantasy of transcendence at the heartof the virtual theology of cyberspace, or the fantasy of immanence thatinforms the advocates of ubiquitous computing, then there are plenty of

purveyors of personal computers and information applicances who willbe eager to fulfill those fantasies for a very modest price.

Notes 1 This isa

revised version of my keynote address presented at the Creativity andConsumption conference, University of Luton, UK, 29-31 March 1999. It is

deeply indebted to my work with Jay Bolter, from which portions of this essay

are derived. See Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation:

Understanding New Media (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1999).



61

2 In Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, edited and with an introduction by Hannah

Arendt, transloted by Harry Zohn (N.Y: Schocken, 1969), pp. 217-252.

3 John Perry Barlow, ’Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace’, at

http://www.eff.org/pub/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/barlow_0296.declarotion

(31 January 2000).4 Ibid, pp. 222-223.

5 Ibid.6 Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).7 Marcos Novak, ’Liquid Architectures in Cyberspace,’ in Cyberspace: First Steps,

ed. Michael Benedikt (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1991), p. 225.

8 William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace Books, 1986), p. 52.

9 David Tomas, ’Old Rituals for New Space,’ in Benedikt, p. 35.

10 Michael Benedikt, in Benedikt, pp. 122-123.

11 Ibid, p. 4.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid, p. 131.

14 Michael Heim, ’The Erotic Ontology of Cyberspace,’ in Benedikt, p. 73.

15 Christine Wertheim, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from

Dante to the Internet (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999).16 Don Norman, The Invisible Computer (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1999).17 Wendy A. Kellogg, John M. Carroll, and John T. Richards, ’Making Reality a

Cyberspace,’ in Benedikt, pp. 411-433.

18 Ibid, p. 418.

19 Ibid.

20 Bruno Latour, ’Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few

Mundane

Artifacts,’in

Shaping Technology/Building Society:Studies in

Sociotechnical Change, eds. W.E. Bijker and J. Law (Cambridge, Mass: MIT

Press, 1992), pp. 225-258.

21 Kellogg, Carroll, and Richards, p. 418.

22 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter

(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993).23 Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity,

trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1995).24 Ibid, p. 77.

25 Ibid.26 Ibid, p. 117.

27 At

http://www.thepixelcompany.com/ (29March

1999).28 Although the Pixel Company has now renamed their software xSides™, the

assumptions underlying it, and much of the rhetoric promoting it, remains the

same.

29 At http://www.free-pc.com (29 March 1999).30 Knowbotic Research,’10_Dencies - Questioning Urbanity,’ in The Art of the

Accident, ed. Joke Brouwer et al (Rotterdam: NAI Publishers/V2_Organisatie,1998), p. 194.

31 Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1996).32 Knowbotic Research, p. 200.

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