Recently the social networking site Myspace gave up the competitive ghost, and rose out of the ashes with a new musically oriented purpose, providing a worldwide gateway for up and coming music groups. The founding concept behind Myspace reminds me of an essay by an intelligently wordy French philosopher named Michel de Certeau. In his article “The Practice of Everyday Life” de Certeau defines the tension between place and space with the presence of action. He claims that people transform a dead place into a live space by acting within the designated boundaries that define the two. Think of my bedroom before I moved in, the blank walls, empty closet, and general cleanliness. This is the definition of place, the walls are boundaries, there is a map of it somewhere, and the room exists regardless if I live there or not. To make it my space I hung a few posters of The Black Keys, put my Atlanta Braves sheets on the bed, and left Crunch wrappers all over the floor. My actions have transformed this place into my space.
Being a college student means that my place is exceptionally small. Everything I own fits into an area of 50 square feet. De Certeau argues that space is place-dependent, or that space can only exist within a designated place. Here’s an example: my family descends from a long line of Swedish dirt farmers who handed the farm from one son to the next. They stayed in the same small town in Southern Sweden for almost five generations. I’ve seen the farm, and stayed there for a week when I was twelve. My father and I worked the land, we saw the hand-built stone fences, and ate the cheese made from the cow’s milk. The family farm has been preserved as both our family place and our family space. Following this line of thought, and de Certeau’s argument, my space would be slightly smaller than 15 square feet, but it’s not. I have moved 16 times in the last 5 years, meaning that I am, in every sense of the word, displaced, but I am not dis-spaced. Times have changed, and the farm isn’t handed down from son to son anymore; and the concept represented by an individual’s space has changed over the fifty years since de Certeau issued his claim. The internet has allowed people to connect their space wirelessly to every place where they find themselves.
For example, my blog is defined as a digital place. It has an address on the blogspot network, where I started with a blank template. Given time I’ve modified the template, changed the colors, put up essays, embedded music videos, essentially creating my digital space; a space that I can access from any place, at almost any time. My iPod also represents a mobile space that I have created, with the ability to create a space of any temporary place through which I pass.
Enter the death and rebirth of Myspace. The digital frontier has allowed us to expand our space, and nourish its mobility. With every advance along the frontier we become more like a turtle, carrying our space on our backs, moving from place to place. Turtles move slowly because where they are is the place where they need to be. Their space follows them, transforming temporary places into spaces under their feet. The connectivity of our space makes us all turtles. Like the shell, we use our space for comfort, protection and shelter. It provides a cushion in our interaction with other spaces. We represent it with brand names, with clothing styles, the music emanating from it, and the people we invite to enter or leave it.
Personally I spend hours every day maintaining and grooming my space. I decorate it with colors, or share it when I put an ad in the paper that says, “Brown-haired male with taste for The Black Keys seeks like-minded female.” The creators of Myspace understood the concept of interacting spaces, so they created a site that encouraged opportunities to explore other spaces on an unprecedented scale, and with minimum effort. They took the business of everyday life to the digital frontier, and mobilized space for the displaced like myself.
As the mobility of our spaces has increased we are entering an age when we work for the opposite of what de Certeau asserted; we manage our space in order to obtain a place. Recently I’ve started my applications for law school. Each law school has a number of seats, or places, available to those willing to brave the competition. The goal is to make your space unique enough that it warrants you a place in the school. To this end I’ve started a creative nonfiction blog, provided community service on vast fronts and taken a variety of college courses to round out my academic representation. The application process exists to invite the application board into your space, where they will make a judgment as to your priority placement in the school. Once accepted and enrolled you start school by mixing your space with those of other students in a newly designated place for the next three years.
As the mobility of our spaces has increased we are entering an age when we work for the opposite of what de Certeau asserted; we manage our space in order to obtain a place. Recently I’ve started my applications for law school. Each law school has a number of seats, or places, available to those willing to brave the competition. The goal is to make your space unique enough that it warrants you a place in the school. To this end I’ve started a creative nonfiction blog, provided community service on vast fronts and taken a variety of college courses to round out my academic representation. The application process exists to invite the application board into your space, where they will make a judgment as to your priority placement in the school. Once accepted and enrolled you start school by mixing your space with those of other students in a newly designated place for the next three years.
This business of newly designated place is as old as Adam and Eve. Whenever a couple marries they merge their spaces and create the family space. We can extrapolate this to a national level with the Constitution is a document largely regulating space on an individual, state and federal level, and international level with hundreds of nations fighting to protect their space against those who would impose another form of space. Movies and television reveal the possibilities included with expanding our space into the galaxy, where space becomes a concept beyond our finite comprehension.
What does all this mean to my space? I’m just a college kid with 50 square feet of rented place, and dreams of larger possibilities. It means that what I thought I was designing, defining and maintaining is actually shaping me and how the world defines me as an individual. My place in the world depends on how I use my space to represent who I am and what I intend to do with more of it. With that thought in mind do I change how I represent my space? I could start with a six-pack and biceps, or brand name clothing, or maybe the right pair of eye-glasses. I realize now that I won’t do any of that. I’m even tempted to delete my facebook account because it distracts me from exploring my own space. It dawns on my now that by knowing my own space, I’ll find the place I’m looking for. Where I am now is where I need to be, just like the other turtles.
