The Immensity within the Minute: Forging Digital Space

The Internet is shaped through metaphors into spaces that have their counterparts in the " real " world such as the global city, superhighway or library. Although the generation of online space can be produced by lived embodied practices as users download or upload videos, read and write texts and create and view images, the production of space in this context is primarily phenomenological, produced through the imagination of its users. This paper argues that the Internet resembles the " real " world yet in miniature. A key facet of miniaturization applied to the creation of virtual space is that enclosed within the tiny is the immense. Consequently, by virtue of the imagination of its users, the boundary between large and small dissolves: contained within the miniature controlled world of a computer screen is a vast sphere of seemingly endless possibility. This research builds upon a central concern in cyberculture studies of whether the Internet is a locus of control or freedom, while incorporating an array of fields and disciplines beyond media studies namely philosophy, literary theory, cultural theory and linguistics.