Meanwhile, much attention is being paid to online leisure spaces such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, where people check each other out, share their views on movies, or just mindlessly browse. This is seen as the mark of the 21st century. It is the arrival of a new kind of movement, a novel means of experiencing, producing, and consuming leisure: “whether desired or not as part of any ‘official’ history of this currently central cultural medium, online recreation or ‘virtual leisure’ has been positioned among the dominant elements within the Internet’s development” (Weiss, 2006, p. 961). What is more, these activities are seen as perhaps the most democratic of all. As such, these common social spaces appear to serve as open platforms for all to participate, circumventing gender, class, nationality, and culture (Arora, 2011).

In fact, the relationship between technology and leisure is highly debated. For instance, there is a belief that new communication technologies produce new kinds of leisure. Here, traditional practice gives way to novel acts of leisure. Another school of thought highlights deteriorating social ties and lifestyles through remote and isolating leisure practices online (Turkle, 2012). There is no denying that new technology terrains inspire contemporary forms of leisure expressions and enactments. Rather than focusing on the differences in leisure topographies, the goal here is to delve into the similarities between the digital and the urban commons. The intent is to demystify major claims of novelty by grounding the Web 2.0 hype in situated and historical contexts of public parks. Hence, the starting premise of this book is the following: In order to understand new digital space, we need to move away from viewing it as technical and see it more as a cultural and social space. While new technologies open up new possibilities for performing leisure, these tools are still rooted in a basic human impulse that has found expression in different ways over the centuries (Roberts, 2006).

In recent ethnographic studies of social network sites, a range of online leisure activities have surfaced, from game play to dating to just plain sociality (Arora, 2010; Boyd, 2007; Buckingham & Willett, 2006). Researchers have found that online leisure takes on numerous and often discriminatory forms and is shaped by economic, political, and sociocultural forces. To maintain their democratic and public status, these spaces are in constant flux. Similarly, public parks in the early 19th century reveal struggles between the state and their citizens when shifting from privatized to public leisure domains (Rosenzweig & Blackmar, 1992). What constitutes as a public park has expanded to corporate, community, and fantasy parks, signifying new trends in leisure spaces. These trends resemble niche and semi-private social networking sites. Overall, the problematic that pervades the cyberleisure realm can be addressed through park comparisons, especially along the lines of the following. (1) Open versus closed systems: what are the social costs to keep these lived spaces open and who regulates participation? (2) Private versus public interests: what is the impact of commercializing and branding of leisure spaces on their diversity? And (3) work versus play dimension: how much labor goes into producing leisure online and how are corporations appropriating these spaces to enhance productivity?

Granted, a Japanese garden is different from its English counterpart. Yet, this book argues that, worldwide, there are common patterns across the public leisure commons that are useful for analysis. Where the overlap ends, the novelty of the digital commons begins. This book starts with the generic image of what a park is and goes to demonstrate its pluralistic, cross-cultural, and contemporary nature, expanding the notion of ‘public parks.’ This is much like how Web 2.0 is perceived—social networks are generic and universal, yet are deeply diverse and niche-oriented, targeting different needs and cultures.

Most studies on Web 2.0 delve into the technological but not the spatial history of leisure practice online. Hence, this book fills the gap by bridging the urban and the digital commons. Given that most of the world’s population struggles to gain access to the Internet, the choice of public parks (that is more accessible) as a comparative leisure terrain is a deliberate means of including such populations in this analysis. To investigate the spatiality of the leisure commons, the book has drawn heavily from the disciplines of urban planning, cultural geography, and law to address the contemporary concerns in new media studies.

For greater methodological efficacy in using metaphors to explain and critique, throughout this book specific online phenomena and concerns are juxtaposed against the physical spatial equivalent. This demonstrates the extent to which social practice has historical underpinnings. It also mitigates some of the hype on the novelty of these new digital geographies. This enables an extension of important discussions on the rights and responsibilities of citizens, and the role of the state and corporate entities and other interest groups in the makings of the leisure commons. As mentioned earlier, metaphors have been harnessed repeatedly to map virtual leisure spaces. Today, there is common acknowledgment that the real and the material realms are deeply intertwined and cannot be extricated from one another. There is an implicit agreement that the Internet has spatial characteristics in common with real-world places. After all, in situating these conceptions within real space, we are able to avoid “a purely technological interpretation and [recognize] the embeddedness and the variable outcomes of these technologies for different social orders” (Sassen, 2002b, p. 365).

As expected, when we cross disciplines, we always encounter a new lens of analysis and different theoretical approaches. For instance, in Chapter 4 on walled gardens, we borrow the framing of gated communities as ‘architectures of fear’ and apply it to the increasing privatization of the digital leisure realm. Or we take the rich discourse on ‘Disneyfication’ and ‘brand empires’ of public space in Chapter 6 on fantasy parks and apply this to the threat of homogenization of digital leisure networks. In fact, this book is full of such borrowings. When these borrowings are resituated in the field of new media, it fosters innovative ways to look at staid media discourses. Of course, when embarking on unfamiliar disciplinary terrain, there is a tremendous challenge on what to extract as significant and how to identify key thinkers in these alien fields. By no means has this book leveraged and capitalized on other disciplines to the fullest. Yet it hopes to have at least opened the doorway to interdisciplinary work that goes beyond the superficial.

Most notably, this scholarship is a tribute to the field of geography for enabling the rootedness of technology hype through emphasis on the spatial context. In fact, this research is as much a spatial history of public parks as it is about Web 2.0. Most books out there on the history of new technology trace a path back to older technologies. However, this book moves away from the artifact and focuses on the social space that contributes to the constructing, regulating, and sustaining of leisure architectures.

Furthermore, this book’s usage of the term ‘leisure’ to frame Web 2.0 spaces underlines the core characterization of the digital commons. In doing so, we situate it within the larger discourse of our current leisure society. This effort opens a new set of viewpoints around leisure, self-expression, popular culture, and social life. That said, the most emphasis goes into how these leisure architectures are constructed, regulated, and sustained by a host of actors; there is less focus on leisure-oriented practices. Given that the field of leisure studies is rich with such analysis, this book has refrained from pursuing these well-established areas.

There is also a deliberate effort to illustrate case studies on public parks and digital formations from places such as Saudi Arabia, China, and India. This effort is made to balance the disproportionate scholarly emphasis on the United States and Western European countries. This transnational effort has revealed that, in spite of such diversity in cultures and practices, in governments and publics, there is much more in common in the politics of the public park than one would assume. For instance, in the 19th century, the rise of the public park in China was a concerted effort by the state to signify modernity and to create a common platform for socializing the masses. This has uncanny parallels with the carving of public parks in Massachusetts, where the state intended to contain their 19th-century immigrants through the offering of a common recreational space. Likewise, we see common threads when we look at their respective digital spheres. As illustrated in-depth in the following chapters, we reveal that users play with digital space through humor and satire and foster communities online, both in China and in the United States.

However, we must admit that in spite of this overt bias to draw from studies in non-Western regions, there continues to be a strong focus on the West. Partly, this is attributable to the fact that with wealthier nations, come greater support for research. The case of China stands as an exception to the usual Western focus in new media studies. In fact, there are some excellent recent studies on the Chinese Internet. This work is driven by the urgency to understand China as a digital and urban giant of the 21st century. When it comes to research on public parks, the United Kingdom is particularly impressive: they come with a rich heritage on the urban commons, such as the Speakers’ Corner, the Victoria Park, and other signature public leisure spheres. As we will see in the coming chapters, the United Kingdom was a pioneer in the making of the public park and influenced significantly the direction of the then unique and unprecedented terrain. This, coupled with strong and specialized departments in garden studies, reveals their national passion for the politics and history of gardening. Such national research pursuits has added richness to this text.

It is important to note here that this book is not exhaustive in its focus on key thematic issues. Each chapter has been concertedly written with a specific focus on a particular issue facing new media studies. This by no means suggests that it is comprehensive. For instance, the protest parks chapter focuses on digital activism and social movements online. Corporate parks focus on digital and free labor; fantasy parks on branding and homogenization of public leisure networks; global parks investigate the internationalization of hyperlinked leisure networks and the walled gardens chapter digs deeper into the central question of the right to privacy on social network sites. In the next section, a more elaborate description is provided on each of these chapters. While these are indeed important and current concerns, this book should not be seen as a handbook on new media issues and concerns. If the book were to be expanded, it would examine the rise of cultural parks and how public leisure domains, such as museums, are taking to the digital sphere. It would also examine darker aspects of leisure spaces, such as pornography and terrorism. While the issues have been selective, this book is a demonstration that we can thoughtfully examine Web 2.0 concerns by stepping away from media scholarship. We can learn from multiple disciplines, and these disciplines can significantly shape our understanding of social spaces.

Overall, this interdisciplinary, comparative, and historical approach to cyberleisure space offers opportunity to gain insight into possible futures of Web 2.0 spaces in particular and of contemporary public leisure territories in general. It is valuable to achieve a macro-perspective on current state activities as they engage and experiment with how to architect and regulate online leisure spheres. This book does not delve much into why people do what they do online. It is best to leave the ‘why’ to a systematic, longitudinal anthropological study. This book reveals how an effort to move beyond one’s conventional discipline can lead to innovative thinking on a subject. No doubt, the comparison between public parks and...