Re-thinking Virtual/Physical Boundaries

If there were clear conceptual borders between the virtual and the physical, then our material lives would not include virtual realities and virtuality would have nothing to do with our emplaced everyday lives. Yet our cyber-urban everyday spaces include manifestations in both the social practices of their proponents and an essential nature. To label one as virtual and the other as physical dismisses and ignores both the reality of our imagination and the imaginations of reality. Drawing on China and its cyberspaces, this paper argues that understanding how hybrid aspirational spaces that provide alternatives to imposed hegemonic visions are imagined and created requires us to transcend the four traditional realms of virtual, physical, public, and private. The paper proposes Spaces of Dissent and Autonomy (SoDA) as the key component of a framework that makes conceptual space for the less visible aspects of an emancipatory ‘cyburbanity.’