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Nunes, Mark.  "What Space in Cyberspace: The Internet and Virtuality." In David Holmes, ed., Virtual Politics: Identity and Community in Cyberspace (Sage, 1997).

This piece by Nunes serves as a good companion piece to Chris Chesner's essay on the ontology of cyberspace in the same volume.  Whereas Chesner does an excellent job describing the material manifestations of digital domains but becomes somewhat muddled in his description of the ways in which spatial metaphors reinforce particular power relations, Nunes does just the opposite, offering a less sophisticated analysis on the ontology question, but providing an engaging discussion of the attempts to impose real spatial forms and "maps" on cyberspace.  Nunes agrees with Chesner that "travel" is a very problematic metaphor for how one negotiates the terrain of the digital, taking the metaphor and practice of mapping cyberspace a step further.  The internet "presents a totality without even the possibility of a beyond," he argues, noting that one can only discover what has already been discovered, through the use of search engines, but here Nunes fails to describe the possibilities of producing new sites and of the workings of search engines.  The strength, here, is his description of virtual worlds, MOOs and MUDs, which exist as very different digital representations than sites on the web.  In both instances, however, the digital world is presented, through spatial metaphors, as simulacra, a world more real that the real, which situates control in the hands of capital, the agents of which are producing both the sites and topology.  He closes on an optimistic note, however, in that like capital, this new logic may contain the contradictions that will bring about its own demise.  We need to begin to look, Nunes argues, in the space between the real and digital for where the conditions for new possibilities exist. [E. Martini.]