Chapter Two

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CHAPTER TWO The Ideology of Fear and the Public-Private Dialectic

PANOPTIC LOS ANGELES

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According to Soja, ‘every city is a carceral city, a collection of surveillant nodes designed to impose a particular model of conduct and disciplinary adherence on its inhabitants’ (Soja, 1995a: 29), whereby what is perceived to be homogenous and a collection of shifting nodes and locales, is in fact a space that is regimented by a ‘hidden’ observer and an all-encompassing ‘eye’. This argument is deduced from Foucault’s influential theory of the city being composed of heterotopias, and correspondingly, the creation of the panopticon (a model derived from Jeremy Bentham). Writing about disciplinary measures within hierarchical institutions such as the prison and the hospital, Foucault argues that “panopticism” is the stage when ‘the disciplinary modality of power…has infiltrated the others, sometimes undermining them, but serving as an intermediary between them, linking them together, extending them, and, above all, making it possible to bring the effects of power to the most minute and distant elements’ (Rabinow,1991: 206-7). What he is suggesting here, is that the organised structure of institutional techniques of discipline are not confined to the workings of prisons and other places of control and power, but are a component of the social fabric that constitutes urban life. When the discourses of power and knowledge become ‘actual relations of power’ (Soja, 1995a: 28), Foucault maintains that this is the determinant for shaping urban space. At the stage when these discourses amalgamate, what society is left with is the model of the panopticon. This is the stage of the all-pervasive and all-powerful ‘eye’. It is the unseen dictator of control, order and power that shapes and regulates the organisation of socio-spatial relations in conjunction with the economic ‘growth of power’. It is also an ‘eye’ that attempts to survey and watch everything geographically as far as possible and thus continually attempts to assert its unseen presence within and outside the cityscape.

What Foucault provides the critic with is a theoretical model of how power is exercised in urban space and how this spatial arena can only exist and be produced if there is a coming together of power and knowledge, and of its ontological and epistemological relations. Yet one must not leave Foucault just yet, for to gain a comprehensive and cogent understanding about

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the operations and methods of surveillance of space in L.A., one must examine his influential notion of the heterotopia (Foucault, 1986).

Foucault argues that heterotopias are those sites that are a part of urban space, spaces that are obscured from public view because they encompass all other sites, and that they are spaces produced in relation to other spaces. These sites contain contradictory spaces that invert and disrupt the produced space they are supposed to represent. What is required, Foucault suggests, is a new method of analysing and thinking about these heterotopic spaces, those that are ‘The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and knaws at us’ (Foucault, 1986: 23).

Although he posits six principles that constitute the make-up of a heterotopic site, for purposes here it is worthwhile to concentrate upon Foucault’s fifth principle. This vital principle concerns the process(es) of open/public and closed/private space. What is interesting is that Foucault suggests that for certain spaces there are codes and regulations governing who is allowed entry into a particular urban public space. In typical fashion, Foucault argues that prisons are a space that have compulsory entry, whereby one must obtain permission to become a component of that arena. This is clearly a spatial operation that excludes many individuals. However, there are other sites that appear to be open (or public), yet are also spaces of exclusion and regulation. Here Foucault includes an example of the open family guest houses in Brazil. This is a space where one was granted entry into the house, yet was excluded from the quarters that were for exclusive use by the family who owned the property. This site includes an illusion of space, for it simulates notions of freedom and democracy, yet includes spaces that are protected by unwritten definitions of open and closed space.

What is worthwhile about this principle is that it relates directly to methods of surveillance and control. Territory is mapped out in the city, there are zones of public entry and those of

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prohibition. It is a supposed open and public space, yet techniques of surveillance are in operation to dictate boundaries and discipline. The question must surely be posed as to what use Foucault’s theories have for analysing the contemporary landscape of ‘central’ Los Angeles? What I intend is an exploration of how these techniques and principles are attained within the urban and what purpose they have for a comprehensive understanding of city space and how surveillance has transformed the landscape of L.A..

When examining methods of surveillance in the contemporary ‘electronic’ city, one can become awash with representations and models of such ‘police’ (or polis) tools. Technologies such as pay-per-view television, identity cards, the ‘Clipper’, office key-stroke counting and of course Closed Circuit Television (CCTV), are all telematics-based methods of control and order. My concern is not with the abundance of surveillance tools - for there are far too many to discuss here1 - but is rather with how social surveillance within L.A. increases social polarities, encourages an ideology of fear and is continually determined and dominated by the hegemonic ruling classes and the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). Perhaps the most vocal critic of the ‘totalitarian’ procedures employed by these state forces is Mike Davis. It is within his engaging and challenging texts and essays that he proposes theories that L.A is more than ever resembling a ‘fortress city’ (Davis, 1990) and that an ‘ecology of fear’ (Davis, 1992a), or as I maintain, an ideology of fear is emerging among the elite classes that inhabit L.A.

ERECTING THE FORTRESS

In his classic text City of Quartz, Mike Davis attempts to illustrate the transformation of L.A. through a variety of disciplines. These mediums are primarily geography, history, economics, religion and contemporary urban theory. Coming from a Marxist-based background, Davis asserts that the city is awash with hierarchical spatial matrixes. By this he means that ‘in contemporary metropolitan Los Angeles, a new species of special enclave is emerging in sympathetic synchronization to the militarization of the landscape’(Davis, 1992a: 7). This

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enclave is a space where the urban core is dominated by the polarities of the upper-classes and the poor, where dominant capitalist business structures have the power to control and determine the public mobility of Downtown L.A.’s underclass. As more financial capital is accumulated within cities, public spaces are in danger of becoming privatised: ‘private-public spaces’. A transgression occurs from what was previously considered a space of liberation or heterogeneity (often funded and maintained by the city council), to a space that becomes a zone of exclusion: one that is privately owned by a chosen social group. Areas such as Skid Row in the city of L.A. have been deprived of council funding and regenerative processes. They are areas of high taxation; places that have become run-down areas of poverty. The result is that they are areas of both simulated and real danger. In contrast, the open spaces of Beverly Hills are privately owned and are controlled by private security firms who enable the area to remain safe and privileged, creating a ‘closed-public’ space.

It is this privatisation of public land and space that is characteristic of the gentrification of the city. This was especially true throughout the 1980s (especially in New York City), when young upwardly mobile people purchased apartments and loft warehouses within the centre of cities which had been converted into luxury housing. Real estate prices soared within these areas, causing an increase in the social divisions between the two predominant classes. Landlords and developers realised the opportunities that this housing transformation could offer and accordingly raised rents, causing many citizens to leave their homes and find alternative accommodation (sometimes this meant the streets or, the few, local hostels).

Davis observes this transformation as being illustrated in terms of architecture. His examination of architecture is to see it as representations of social power, buildings that define regions and boundaries. Due to the increase in finance and global capital being positioned within the core of the urban centre (Downtown) and its radius, the elite have the power to transform (or disguise) the appearance and space of the city. Buildings, and their display of technological surveillance, have come to signify the amount of wealth a corporation holds, and

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its position in the transnational economic infrastructure. As the urban core of Downtown, LAX, and Westside has been deemed the spatial container of capitalist wealth, the geographic space of these areas has been ‘mutated’ to dictate the movement of social space. This architectural spatiality having the power to determine spatialization and movement is particularly illustrated within Davis’ much published essay entitled ‘Fortress LA’ (Davis, 1990 and 1992b). It is within the discourse of Davis’ piece that he illustrates the dichotomy of space determining and being determined by the capitalist state, and how methods of surveillance have erected a city space that resembles an open, yet closed and private, prison.

The restructuring of LA during the 1960s and 1980s produced a compression and shortening of Downtown space; something that has occurred from what Davis describes as a ‘militarization of the city’(Davis, 1990: 223). Due to the rising crime rate and gang warfare in contemporary Central L.A., architectural space has adjusted to this urban state and has restructured space in what may be interpreted as a totalitarian manner. Davis argues that contemporary architecture, such as the Goldwyn Library in Hollywood, has come to be indistinguishable in design and feel to prisons. This supposed public information building, designed by Frank Gehry, has electronic steel gates surrounding it, CCTV cameras monitoring each visitor and passer-by, graffiti proof walls (a characteristic of contemporary L.A. architecture in ‘public’ places), and what Davis terms an invitation for ‘potential trespassers to ‘make my day’’(Davis, 1990: 239). Davis suggests that this inversion of ‘public’ space projects a sense of oppression, conjuring ‘imaginary dangers’(Davis, 1990: 226), where the ruling classes contain their fear of undesirables and unemployed members of ethnic minorities by erecting buildings that continually ‘watch’ those individuals, ensuring that the Other does not have access to that space. This architectural transformation has not only altered the way in which the human subject observes the buildings, but has also had a devastating effect upon the socio-spatial dialectic.

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Los Angeles has been witness to a dramatic securing of the city, particularly since the “internationalization” of Downtown between the 1960s and 1980s. Video surveillance cameras operate on almost every street, especially outside buildings that are deemed to be representative of great wealth. Alongside this, certain streets and areas have become exclusive spaces, excluding those who are considered by the elite to be ‘undesirables’. Public spaces, social conveniences, and places of conviviality have become almost obsolete, and any notion of Foucault’s ‘heterotopia’ is in danger of disappearing in terms of ‘traditional’ public space. Perhaps the most explicit example Davis offers of this operation and restructuring of space is in relation to ‘the’ race issue. Although he defines this in a binary relationship, that is between blacks and whites rather than including the largest Los Angeles minority group the Hispanics, he does provide the critic with an insight into the class structure of the city.

PLAYING THE RACE CARD (AGAIN)

Davis observes racial space determining the occupant’s locale. After the Watts rebellion in 1965, the fears of the upper-class ‘white’ people in control of economic power was accentuated. The irony here is that the perception of the dominant whites was that the discontented blacks would infiltrate and cause a threat within their spaces of power. The hegemonic position of the ‘whites’ enabled them to embark upon a respatialization of the city, segregating blacks from those spaces that signified white economic progress and expansion. Downtown was witness to this transformation perhaps more than any other social and business space in Los Angeles. Being the financial ‘capital’ of L.A., Downtown was, according to the proponent of urban postmodernism Charles Jencks, architecturally restructured by skyscrapers, to include ‘forty new ones where there were only five in 1976’(Jencks, 1993: 33). As this form of architecture signifies an increase in economic wealth, Downtown restructured itself into a

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spatial security zone, where black mobility was restricted in the sense that if they were occupying a space that signified the middle/upper classes (offices and the peripheral area of skyscrapers), they were deemed unlawful, or to encourage stereotypes, that they were involved in an illicit crime. CCTV was believed to be a technological solution to these ‘problems’, a tool that would eliminate the reality of crime and unlawful activities, warning those who would consider participation in a criminal offence that they were being watched and recorded.

As the fears of some of the white populace increased, created by the explosion of gang-related crimes and race-related social uprisings, Downtown’s space was restructured. The polarity between rich and poor was signified in architecture and if an individual from a ‘poor’ space was to relocate into a space of economic power, then that individual would probably be seen by the LAPD and the electronic ‘eye’ of CCTV as an outsider/intruder. The problem with analysing this restructuring is that it means different things for each individual. There is a danger in grouping ‘whites’ and ‘blacks’ together in select and exclusive parties, particularly when there are both successful blacks and whites working in Downtown and when there are both ‘undesirable’ blacks and whites. What one needs to do is move away from playing the ‘race card’ and enter the arena of the space of everyday life (the street), where the restriction of social space may appear to be more visible and coherent.

THE STREETS OF L.A.

Within Downtown (particularly the area known as Skid Row) and its neighbour Bunker Hill, the space occupied by the homeless has been restricted ever since the fears created by the Watts rebellion. With the advent of increasing numbers of L.A. citizens being made unemployed (particularly during the Reagan/Bush years of massive privatisation) due to the ‘downsizing’ of Silicon Valley, the homeless have borne the brunt of the spatial restructuring of Downtown. The Los Angeles authorities have manipulated socially operated spaces in their attempts to remove (or ‘hide’) the homeless from the streets. According to Michel de Certeau, the streets of a city

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carry their own rhetoric, where walking defines and produces urban social space, and ‘practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen’(de Certeau, 1984: 93).The spaces of the homeless are clearly visible to all those ‘practitioners’ who walk by them and more importantly ignore their existence.

It is de Certeau’s focus on the street that breaks away from Foucault’s theory that the state is able to control and dominate society via the panopticon. It is because of the cultural need and requirement of individuals to interact and communicate with each other, that according to David Harvey ‘spaces can be more easily ‘liberated’ than Foucault imagines’ (Harvey, 1990: 214). What this illustrates about the busy streets of Downtown L.A. is that the abundance of surveillance cameras may not have the regressive and totalitarian potential to transform human social and spatial mobility as Davis proposes. Instead, they respatialise human interaction where the citizens of, say, Skid Row, are unable to ‘perform’ successful interactions with the high executives of corporations in Downtown. It is through ignoring a class and racial system, that de Certeau appears to project a form of utopia, whereby he maintains that social interaction occurs regardless of spatial boundaries determined by a hierarchical social formation. As Los Angeles is deemed a postmodern city because of its cosmopolitan and heterogeneous mix of citizens and cultures, and because of the erected visible and invisible fortresses, interaction is deliberately restricted to ensure a sense of security and exclusivity.

De Certeau fails to recognise that these ‘requirements’ of human interaction and communication are manufactured and controlled by the all-powerful ‘eye’. Interaction can (and should) be possible and be achieved between different individuals and groups, yet the economic infrastructure has deemed them impossible, or not viable, by an unequal capitalist class system. The methods of video surveillance position this polarisation to a more extreme level. This is the stage where ‘undesirables’ are not give the opportunity to experience the complete ‘pedestrian rhetoric’ of de Certeau’s theory. Human movements are simultaneously monitored and restricted, creating zones of exclusion and division. Without this monitoring, certain classified

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‘undesirables’ would be ‘free’ to walk and interact within the areas of public consumption, creating a semblance of democracy.

The public space of Downtown L.A. has erected invisible walls and spaces through continual video surveillance, an invisibility that is accentuated by the unseen observer. The street no longer resembles the open and interactive spaces of nineteenth century Paris or New York but is a cityscape that renders the street invisible and segregated. This positions L.A. as an individual and uncharacteristic city space: an area that ‘performs’ spatial operations that are not ‘seen’ in the majority of other world cities, possibly creating what Jencks terms a ‘heteropolis’ (Jencks, 1993). These uncharacteristic spatial operations in L.A. are perhaps most severely experienced by the homeless of the city, those persons who have generally - because of the economic structure and the rising numbers of the unemployed - been forced to relocate themselves and be seen as the most marginal section of the ‘undesirables’; a state that brings us ever closer to the dystopic image of a Blade Runner or Escape From New York scenario.

POLICING THE CITY AND THE PERIPHERY

Dramatic increases in police power and control to remove the homeless from the space of the streets took place during the 1980s and continue today during the Clinton administration. The authority that the LAPD and the corporations have been given to eliminate the homeless’ space of ‘home’ has progressively increased throughout the decades. Architecture within Downtown has been restructured to make it uncomfortable for these citizens to sleep, eat and live: public toilets have been closed to deter them from keeping dry and security cameras have been erected to reduce any ‘public’ space occupied by the extreme poor. Davis argues that this ‘new Downtown is designed to ensure a seamless continuum of middle-class work, consumption, and recreation, insulated from the city’s ‘unsavoury’ streets’(Davis, 1992b: 159), where this restructuring allowed the capitalist state to determine space in L.A. by continually presenting a hierarchical structure that performs the role of the ‘thought police’. These ‘unsavoury streets’

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also emerged as a consequence of the economic depression during the 1980s. The accelerated rate of homelessness was due to the cutbacks in the defence industries positioned on the periphery of the city centre and the decline in small businesses and community facilities within the core.

Although space has had the power to control mobility for blacks and the homeless, it has also determined the architectural structure of the homes of the upper-classes who live in the suburbs and hills of the city. Occupying the peripheral space of the city and correspondingly occupying the core of the city for business and occupation, the upper-classes have blurred the spatial security of the centre into their neighbourhoods and mansions. As stated earlier, homes in these areas have come to resemble prisons, or ‘fortresses’. Residential areas have been able to ‘privatize local public space’(Davis, 1990: 246) by hiring private security companies to monitor and ‘protect’ their homes and lifestyles, and where the ‘reason is not primarily personal safety but the protection of equity’(Christopherson, 1994: 420). What were once public spaces (such as the street and the public park), where the citizens of L.A. were able to drive or walk through, have now become spaces that are segregated from urban social space. This is essentially an upper-class fear that has derived from the crime-ridden nodal centre of the locality, where the streets and business buildings of the Central Business District have embarked upon a securing of the city and their economic space. It is also a fear that is continually on the rise, for the occupants of the homes are not content with the oppressive and excessive security they own: some are now demanding enclaves that are ‘terrorist proof’ and ‘the right to gate themselves off from the rest of the city’(Davis, 1992a: 12).

The dilemma with these security techniques is that by limiting spatial mobility for other L.A. citizens, the occupants of the upper-class enclaves are in fact minimising the space in which they themselves can interact. The ghettoised spaces of the inner city poor also excludes the wealthy from spatial mobility, because of the media-induced mythology of danger that areas such as Watts and South Compton have. Yet this distorted picture of these areas being infested

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with crime does hold some truth, particularly before the truce between L.A.’s two main rival gangs, the Bloods and the Crips. What occurs when both social groups are excluded from other spaces and are self-contained is a mass compression of social space that has been produced from the radical extremes in class structure that is characteristic of L.A.. Yet it is also a situation that stems from the fear the upper-classes have helped to create, not only within the sphere of the street and social space, but also through the omnipotent media. To take this notion of security one step further, the Rodney King rebellion in 1992 accentuated this belief and also illustrates how L.A. is developing an ideology of fear that is more real than an ersatz form of postmodern L.A..

DESTROYING AND RE-BUILDING THE CITY

As mentioned above, the Watts rebellion of 1965 helped to accentuate levels of fear within central L.A.. In 1992, the same fears were resurrected after the acquittal of four police officers, after the blatant and brutal beating of black motorist Rodney King. Although the amateur video footage of the event was shown on television across the world, few people envisaged that the officers would be deemed innocent. No fixed surveillance cameras could have prevented the chaos and fury that followed the court decision. Those who took to the streets were being surveyed by the world, from the obligatory cameras of CNN and other major news networks, rather than from the privileged CCTV. Here the voyeur was known; the all-powerful ‘eye’ belonged to both the ‘desirable’ and the ‘undesirable’. What is interesting about such a media event is that it originated from an individual practising video techniques who just happened to be ‘in the right place, at the right time’. The amateur was the voyeur, invading the behaviour of the LAPD, the institution that would normally have the power to survey and harass ‘the Other’. The question to be asked though, is how this public/private event had the potential to restructure space?.

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The uprising in 1992 was the ‘fortress’ architect’s dream come true. The massive spatial security of buildings that the city had introduced and put into practice during the previous two decades had at last succeeded in its mission and objective. As predominantly young black male youths looted and destroyed buildings in central L.A., the area of Bunker Hill, according to Davis, lived up to its name: ‘By flicking a few switches on their command consoles, the security staffs of the great bank towers were able to cut off all access to their expensive real estate’(Davis, 1992a: 3). The erected concrete bunker buildings provided safety for those in control of L.A.’s financial capital and also reduced the level of fear for those citizens living in the suburbs concerned about the welfare and defence system of their workplace. Jencks has argued that even before the rebellion there had been ‘enough representations of alienation… talked about, designed and built for us to understand…what a riot realism would be’(Jencks, 1993: 91). Yet it was those buildings and businesses that did not have the financial capital with which to employ the dominant fortress architects (Frank Gehry and Charles Moore) that became the brunt of the looting, especially those owned by Koreans, who were believed to have taken many economic opportunities away from the already established black citizens of L.A.. The ‘fortress’ buildings were inaccessible to those who took to the streets in protest, yet one wonders whether this was because of their architectural design or whether it was because the rebels saw their own neighbourhoods as being worthless and concentrated their discontent in those areas. I believe that it is the latter, because no matter how secure and defence orientated these fortress buildings are, the LAPD would have protected them at any cost because of the economic wealth they represented. Realising that the Central Business District was effectively secure, the LAPD ensured that the rebellion did not spread into the upper-class areas by confining it to the areas of poverty and unemployment.

This operation of the LAPD (aided by the monitoring of CCTV, police helicopters and the ubiquitous television news network cameras) compressed the urban space and places that they were required ‘to protect and to serve’, allowing them to gather information about human mobility quickly and efficiently, particularly movement according to race. Although the LAPD

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made its presence known in the streets of Broadway and Spring and particularly in the neardestroyed Koreatown, their predominant concern, as mentioned above, was with the Central Business District. The LAPD had a major influence in the structural design of the C.B.D., offering advice on the most effective security techniques. Since the Rodney King rebellion, many businesses and those upper-classes living in suburbia have approached the LAPD to instruct them on the most effective way to restructure their public-private space. As Davis suggests, ‘the riot-tested success of corporate Downtown’s defenses has only stimulated demand for new and higher levels of physical security’(Davis, 1992a: 4).

BUSINESS SECURITY AND ‘MALLING’

Susan Christopherson has termed this central area of Los Angeles city (Downtown) as being characteristic of a ‘business improvement district’ (Christopherson, 1994: 418) and Davis that it is a component of the ‘social control districts’(Davis, 1992a); both remarks indicate that they are spaces of finance and therefore security. Although they are conventionally public spaces, they are privatised in the sense of the ‘public-private’ dialectic described above. Christopherson argues that these districts attempt to emulate the controlled environments of the shopping mall, where private security firms are employed to dictate access, video monitoring is continuous and where mobility and patterns of consumption are regulated and surveyed.

The analogy of the Central Business District with shopping malls is useful because it illustrates how a private space disguises itself as being wholly public. Those entering the mall environment (presumably the predominant middle-class white consumer) desire food and clothing that signify globalism and the diversity of cultures that ‘heterotopic’ L.A is thought to represent. The mall provides an escape from the urbanity of Central L.A., for it allows these consumers to experience ‘global’ products, yet also ensures that they do not have to witness or experience ethnic minorities face-to-face. The consumers are removed from the safe space of their homes in the gated communities of suburbia, into another protected and regulated

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environment, without ever experiencing the mythology of a dangerous multi-cultural and heterogeneous society. Surveillance cameras in shopping malls ‘remove’ the ‘risks’ that are characteristic of inner city life, and the mall also simulates a public space in the sense of a place that is open to all citizens and is a place of leisure and consumption.

The privatisation of public space in Downtown ensures that urban designers and planners can portray a simulation (or ‘hyperreality’) of this space, for those living in the suburbs believe that the mall environment is public, in that it is not regulated and monitored. This theory is interesting for it clearly illustrates the breakdown of definitions of public and private. Iris Marion Young describes public space as ‘a place accessible to anyone, where anyone can participate and witness, in entering the public one always risks encountering those who are different, those who identify with different groups and have different opinions or different forms of life’(Young, 1995: 268).Within the realms of the mall, what may be deemed public is in fact private, because those members of society who are witness to this space have little comprehension of what exactly constitutes a public space such as a park, because such places have become privatised and spaces of exclusivity. The street that consumers witness in this controlled environment is that of a walkway besides a parade of shops designed for profit and consumption, often a simulation of the mythical Main Street of ‘traditional’ America (an explicit and overt example being CityWalk at the Universal Studios’ theme park). Public space can no longer be defined as Young describes it, for it has become a concept that bears no relation to the conventional and traditional binary relationship between public and private. Instead, both have been juxtaposed creating a permanent public-private dialectical relationship.

This confusion between what is private and what is public space becomes even more distorted if one looks at the way those living in suburbia have erected and transformed their homes within the enclaves, creating their own autonomous ‘smart’ homes through the use and appropriation of technological tools. The fragmentation of L.A. city life into the suburbs creates a further dispersion and disintegration of public space, something that was accentuated

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by the uprising in 1992. To gain a more complete understanding of this ‘militarization’ of space, one needs to examine the way in which the technological surveillance techniques that have come to characterise the contemporary space of the city are transferred to the private realm of the home. CCTV, the information superhighway and the Internet can possibly all be viewed as potential destroyers of the public spaces of city life, whereby those who can afford to have access to these tools are able to distance themselves even further away from the streets of central L.A.. The question to be asked though, is what is the future for those ‘other places’ and public/private spaces in Downtown L.A., if the emerging world of cyberspace2 encourages the erection of “virtual cities” and the annihilation of a public realm within the cityscape of L.A.?

See David Lyon (1994) for an in-depth discussion of the various methods of surveillance in contemporary society. Cyberspace is a term coined by the cyberpunk novelist William Gibson in his debut novel Neuromancer (1984): ‘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 light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding…’ (Gibson, 1984: 67). I interpret it to be that ‘space’ that is beyond the interface of the computer, a transparent place that is infinite and one where communication is interacted through telephone links and fibre optics. It has recently become the buzz-word to describe the Internet, the Information Superhighway and “virtual communities”, that is those electronic spaces that cannot be navigated or positioned, spaces that are not constrained by temporal and spatial boundaries. 1 2