Show description

Gibson coined the term cyberspace and defined it as something more than a network: “Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts. […] A graphical representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system” (128). Gibson’s notion of cyberspace was necessarily inter-active and agential. The ‘consensual hallucination’ is a deliberate act of creation of the space and of the self.

In the first half of their blogging cycle, most users try to map their known-imagined and aspired-for bodies in the virtual world, and look upon these bodies as an extension of their physical presence. In the post-blorgasm world, where the blogger suddenly becomes conscious of the disembodied body and makes a call for privatising the public, the disembodied self comes to be mapped upon the physical body of the user; Section 1: The Rise of the Netporn Society 39 something that needs to be hidden from the people not in the grid of the blogging community.

The very act of blogging becomes pornographic in nature as it moves towards creating a certain ethos of sexual interchange and a coming of the self in the course of this interchange. The blog becomes a space of shared meaning where signals need to be decoded and signs get produced out of intimately shared meanings. The blogs on ElJay, specifically the personal blogs, take on the form of pornography as they use the pornographic structure of interplay and represented pleasures of a disembodied spectator in their unfolding.