Dodge and Kitchen Chapter 3 Discussion Questions

Cyberspace, identity and community

• What is spatiality?
• What are the implications of cyberspace for community and identity?
• How does cyberspace facilitate shifts in identity?
• What is cyborging?
• Why are online identities so powerful and meaningful to people who adopt them?
• What role does spatiality play in online identity construction? What is the interrelationship between online and offline lives?
• How can a MUD provide emotional support?
  
• To what extent does cyberspace provide a space of meaningful social interaction?
• How are cyberspace and geographic space interconnected to form a single experiential reality?
• What is a virtual community? How are they similar or different than geographical communities?
• What is real virtuality?
• To what extent are cyberspace communities exclusive? How are the structured by power relations?
• To what extent does cyberspace get used to support existing social networks rather than to create new ones.
• What is a lurker? And why don't they participate?
• How are online social relations contextualized by spatiality?
• Why do people use geographic metaphors to describe online contexts?
• What network typologies are there and how do they mirror geographical equivalents?
• How does community form? What is needed to facilitate or encourage community formation?

Online geographies of power and exclusion

• What kinds of power relations help to organize social relations online and how do they affect the spatial freedom of users online?
• How do customary laws lead to unjust spatialities according to Kitchin?
• What are the difficulties in legal regulation of cyberspace?
• What is trolling?
• How are cultural ideologies from geographic space reproduced in online spaces?
  

Spatial Geometries, forms and structures

• In what sense does cyberspace have a "liquid architecture" with no constraints on the qualities of space?
• What is liminal space?
• What does it mean to say that cybersapce is characterized as having "timeless time" ?
• In what sense is everywhere local in cyberspace?
• What is a rhizome form? How is hypertext a rhizome form?