This Printable Version Was Created under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Sharealike License (see Www.juliecohen.com) 2 from the Virtual to the Ordinary: Networked Space, Networked Bodies, and the Play of Everyday Practice

Before exploring the questions about creativity, subjectivity, and sociotechnical ordering raised in Chapter 1, it is useful to establish a general framework for those inquiries. I have promised an account of the “networked self,” related in some way to something called the “play of everyday practice.” Those terms are not usual in legal scholarship about information policy. For most legal scholars, the most salient aspect of the networked information society is the network itself and the new patterns of cultural participation that it enables. As we have seen, legal scholars have used theoretical frameworks derived from liberal political theory—most notably, frameworks organized around expressive liberty and market exchange—to impute overarching structure and purpose to those patterns. For the most part, they have conceptualized the activities of network users as occurring in an abstract, disembodied plane, detached from material and geographic contexts.