The Cyberspace Handbook

Jason Whittaker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134703609
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Cyberspace Handbook is a comprehensive guide to all aspects of new media, information technologies and the internet. It gives an overview of the economic, political, social and cultural contexts of cyberspace, and provides practical advice on using new technologies for research, communication and publication.

The Cyberspace Handbook includes:

*a glossary of over eighty key terms
*a list of over ninety web resources for news and entertainment, new media and web development, education and reference, and internet and web information
* specialist chapters on web design and journalism and writing on the web
*Over thirty illustrations of internet material and software applications.Jason Whittaker explores how cyberspace has been constructed, how it is used and extends into areas as different as providing us immediate news or immersive games and virtual technologies for areas such as copyright and cybercrime, as well as key skills in employing the internet for research or writing and designing for the Web.

Part I
Introduction and contexts

1 Cyberspace, digital media and the Internet

What is cyberspace?

When asked to define cyberspace, most people will probably envisage a personal computer connected to the Internet. Important as both these technologies are to our concept of cyberspace, it is clear that such elements constitute only a very small part of the wider political, social, economic, cultural and financial networks that constitute what we can call cyberspace. Cyberspace is not merely hardware, but a series of symbolic definitions, or ‘tropes’ as David Bell (2001) refers to them, that constitute a network of ideas as much as the communication of bits.

Imagine the following: a technologically savvy female student is speaking to a friend on her mobile phone while drawing money from a cash machine. Both the money and the conversation share a common purpose – visiting the cinema to watch a Hollywood blockbuster – but while the woman knows which film she wishes to watch (she has, after all, read a number of previews recommending the movie), she is not sure what time it is playing. Her friend has just checked listings for the nearby multiplex online and reminded her that she also needs to contact customer services for the company that made her MP3 player, which has developed a fault. She could send them an email, but as they have a 24-hour helpline it will probably be simpler to phone.

Cyberspace is one name for the technological glue that binds many of these elements together. Telephone masts and satellite connect the voice communication between the two friends, while similar networks link the woman to databases that hold details on her finances (including potential information on spending activities and personal financial ratings if she uses debit and credit cards to make purchases). Movie magic is not something particularly new to the age of cyberspace, but the film she wishes to see is of a kind that regularly uses digital effects to fill in details for the camera – special effects, furthermore, that often do not wish to draw attention to their own pyrotechnics but instead pass themselves off as reflections of the real world. As a young woman, she has grown up in a school environment where information and communication technology (ICT) is increasingly the norm for delivering many parts of education, and her music player will have probably been constructed in southeast Asia – probably China or Taiwan – while there is a good chance that the call centre which handles her request is based in India. Finally, while her friend could easily check the local newspaper for film times, this is the sort of information that indicates the commonplace, even banal, uses to which the Internet is put on a daily basis.

It is now possible to travel to more parts of the world than ever before, a world in which trade is increasingly globalised and, more than ever, dependent on services and information as much as on the trade of material goods. And while we tend to still think of books, films and photographs as things, information technology – in particular the Internet – is transforming our view of communications into texts and images that can be more easily downloaded as mutable bits rather than immutable atoms.

The term ‘cyberspace’ was invented by William Gibson in his cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer:

The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games . . . in early graphics programs and military experimentation with cranial jacks. . . . Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts. . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.

(1984: 67)

Part of the success of Gibson’s novel lay in the fact that he was able to provide expression to the emerging technologies (personal computers, the Internet, computer graphics and virtual reality) that were beginning to capture the popular imagination. Gibson, as poetic futurologist of cyberspace, provided a vision of the matrix that was much more than the bare technical bones of the putative Internet: for him, cyberspace is technical complexity – computer-generated graphical representations of data that are transferred across networks – but is also framed by psychology, epistemology, juridical and social systems. It is taught to children, a ‘consensual hallucination’ shared by users defined by their relation to legitimate (and also, the source of many of Gibson’s plots, criminal) sources of power. Such power can be political, military and commercial, the huge transnational conglomerates that fill the backgrounds of his novels.

As Katherine Hayles (1996) points out, Gibson’s vision of cyberspace did not spring out of nothing, but emerged from technical and social innovations that changed our worldview in the 1980s and 1990s, some of the consequences of which will be explored in this book. Outside science fiction, then, we encounter cyberspace most obviously when we use the Internet from a personal computer or, increasingly, a handheld device or our television sets. It integrates with older communication technologies, such as the telephone, and draws on theoretical conceptions of information and space that have enabled such things as communication and representation to be digitised and networked. We participate in cyberspace when we talk across a GSM phone network, change channels on a digital television set, or access our finances from an ATM. In its widest sense, then, cyberspace is space transformed by networks of information and communication. As Dodge and Kitchin (2001: 1) point out:

At present, cyberspace does not consist of one homogeneous space; it is a myriad of rapidly expanding cyberspaces, each providing a different form of digital interaction and communication. In general, these spaces can be categorised into those existing within the technologies of the Internet, those within virtual reality, and conventional telecommunications such as the phone and the fax, although because there is a rapid convergence of technologies new hybrid spaces are emerging.

Margaret Wertheim, in The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace (1999), draws attention to the fact that the human conception of space has not been fixed throughout history. The world of the Middle Ages, at the centre of the universe and connected to higher spiritual spheres or planes, was transformed by a series of revolutions from the Renaissance on due to discoveries in the solar system as well as transformations of perception and perspective. From the sixteenth century, we have become used to changing discernments of our psychological, philosophical and scientific world, but, suggests Wertheim, perhaps the most significant change was from the perception of ourselves as embedded in spaces of both body and soul to a universe in which the material body alone was important. Some of the claims made for cyberspace revolve around the recognition that if not the soul then at least the perceiving psyche is integral to our conception of the technospaces in which we live.

The emergence of cyberspace

One way to envisage the changes made to the practice of everyday life by cyberspace in all its forms is to compare current technologies to those available immediately after the Second World War. This was the point when many information and computer technologies came into existence, the history of which has been explored by a number of commentators such as Flichy (2002) and Winston (1998).

Fundamental to cyberspace is telecommunications, literally communication over a distance. This itself is nothing new: telegraph, in the mid-nineteenth century, established a vital communications network across the British Empire, replacing or supplementing other long-distance systems already in place such as mail and semaphore, while the end of the nineteenth century saw the invention of the telephone. Until the 1960s, however, telephones even in the West were in short supply, extremely expensive, and – more importantly – connections still had to be made manually for anything other than local calls. Ironically, answering machines and even primitive faxes were available by the 1950s, but until automation of telephone exchanges was implemented fully, telecommunications faced a huge bottleneck. Transatlantic communication had long been possible, with Atlantic telegraph cables having been laid during the mid-nineteenth century, but the space race of the 1950s began the mobilisation of a geostationary satellite system that would provide comprehensive contact worldwide.

Figure 1.1 A conceptual map of some of the elements of cyberspace.

The post-war entertainment boom was, of course, only just beginning in certain areas such as television: transformations in printing during the inter-war period made colour reproduction of glossy magazines simpler than ever, although wartime rationing represented a retrograde movement. Television was only just starting to emerge as a popular mass medium in the West at this time: at the beginning of 1952, for example, there were only 600,000 television licences in the UK, although a similar number were sold in the months preceding the Queen’s coronation that year, an event watched by an estimated 20 million people and which marked the emergence of TV as a popular medium. Radio, long favoured in the home, also shifted from valves to transistors after 1947: in the long term, this enabled more portable sets and reduced their price considerably, although the first to go on sale in 1954 were still extremely expensive.

Throughout the early 1950s, most electronic and communication equipment still used valves: the triode vacuum valve, invented by Lee de Forest in 1906, enabled a signal in one circuit to control the current in another circuit, giving rise to effective electronics. Manufacture was largely a manual process and miniaturisation was restricted, meaning that there was a limit to how cheaply these important components could be reproduced. In addition to being limited in terms of size and cost, each valve also consumed at least two watts on average, so the move from valves to transistors, coupled with the integrated circuit after 1959, meant that components and interconnections could be mass produced as single, relatively cheap items.

Technology is not the only component of cyberspace; indeed, of the three elements we have briefly considered here – computer, telecommunication and entertainment technologies – the latter is probably most important insofar as it represents a shift in social perceptions of ourselves as consumers. Post-war innovations, however, were important for the following, interrelated reasons: miniaturisation (particularly following the invention of the transistor and integrated circuit), coupled with increased automation of electronics and telecommunications, effected huge increases in production capacity coupled with rapidly falling costs. More and more electronics became consumer electronics, indicating the ways and means by which cyberspace technologies could infiltrate daily life to an ever-greater degree.

Imagining the future

Just as the term ‘cyberspace’ was coined by a science fiction writer, so SF in film and literature is often the best place to begin looking for blue-sky thinking on the way that cyberspace will exist in the future.

Future gazing has been a favourite activity of the twentieth century. Jules Verne and H.G. Wells outlined their visions of impending decades and centuries, and – particularly following the Second World War – the information technologies and telecommunication networks that constitute cyberspace have played an important role. Often the vision that is important to the development of narratives is far from the mark: not only was man not travelling to the further reaches of the solar system in 2001, but the superior AI of HAL also has yet to emerge in the near millennium. At the same time, many writers and film-makers have attempted to capture details of the present that may inform the future, such as the integrated computer and entertainment systems used in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, or the miniature communication devices in various Star Trek television episodes of the 1960s that look surprisingly similar to the mobile phones and handheld computers of the 1990s and the new century.

Probably the most detailed recent vision, elements of which are more than possible in the next few decades, was the 2002 Steven Spielberg film Minority Report, adapted from a book by Philip K. Dick. The potential future shock realism of the film was due to the fact that the film’s production designer, Alex McDowell, had consulted a wide range of experts from the worlds of computing, car design, robotics and even advertising (McIntosh and Schofield 2002). Thus, for example, when John Anderton is besieged by advertising screens appealing to him directly as he attempts to evade his former colleagues (‘John Anderton: you could use a Guinness right now’), these ideas were drawn from technologies – such as retinal scanning and databases of consumers’ preferences – that already exist. Likewise, when Anderton is on a subway train and a fellow passenger’s newspaper is updated to show the face of the wanted fugitive, the technology that will make digital paper linked wirelessly to content providers widely available is already underway at Xerox PARC, where developers are working on a project called Gyricon, a flexible plastic containing millions of multi-coloured beads suspended in an oil-filled cavity that can be manipulated by electrical power.

Some elements of the film, such as hundreds of cars traversing buildings vertically, or fully autonomous spider robots, are, for the time being at least, purely the stuff of fantasy. Even technologies such as those listed above, while perfectly possible, do not operate in a social and psychological limbo: thus, for example, while it may be technically possible to provide personalised advertising in the very near future, concerns over privacy and even advertisers’ fears that consumers will be repulsed by such tactics are larger obstacles to their widespread adoption. McIntosh and Schofield point to one example in the film where technical feasibility does not automatically lead to usability: Jetpacks, which had their original inspiration in the Buck Rogers comic books of the 1920s, have been designed and engineered, notably the Bell rocket belt designed by Wendell Moore at Bell Aircraft in the 1950s or, more recently, the SoloTek, created by the company Millennium Jet, but have all proved too dangerous or costly to be effective.

Cyberspace and cybernetics

The term ‘cyberspace’, invented by Gibson, obviously owes much to the term ‘cybernetics’, coined by Norbert Wiener in 1948. Cybernetics is the science of control theory applied to complex systems, and was defined by Wiener as ‘the science of control or communication, in the animal and the machine’, from kubernetes, the Greek for ‘steersman’ or ‘pilot’. Cybernetics is a theory of machines and systems that treats not things but ways of behaving: any system that is not spiralling out of control or in a state of collapse must be self-regulating to some degree, and it is how such systems are controlled or regulated that is of interest to cybernetics. At its simplest, a cybernetic system works like a thermostat, turning heat on or off when a system falls or rises to a certain point.

Cybernetic theory has been applied far beyond its original application in systems science, for example, in the field of regulation and social phenomena (Dunsire 1993; Beer 1994). Dunsire, for example, has identified three main strategies of control that may be employed by governmental regulators: the first is simple steering, where policy-makers intervene on an ad hoc basis; more complex is homeostasis, where alterations are made to correct a system that deviates from a desired state or range of states; and finally the calibration, or balancing, of opposing forces such as requirements of equal access to information sources versus the demands of the free market. The more complex a system, the more complex the system of regulation is likely to be, so that single controllers are unlikely to be sufficient.

In 1991, Timothy Leary expounded an entertaining – if limited – theory of cyberpunks as ‘reality pilots’, guiding the rest of us to decentralised self-reliance (returning to the original meaning of the kubernetes, as opposed to the Latin gubernare, ‘to govern’). Leary opposed his vision of cyberneti...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Introduction and contexts
• Part II Using cyberspace
• Part III Reading/writing cyberspace
• Part IV Regulations, institutions and ethics
• Glossary
• Web resources
• Bibliography