2003-09-06 A clarification of cyberspace It seems rather foolish to sit down and try to explain what I mean by "cyberspace", but there you go. What I don't mean by cyberspace is the visual representation of space, the public picture of "virtual reality", goggles and datagloves, this has nothing to do with it. Neither is it simple the internet or the www, although in a way it does emcompass both of those things. A bit about space first. I'm not very good about what "space" means either: space is what people say space is, afterall, people give each other space, they use space to speak in and meet each other. Whatever. A newspaper has a kind of space, but by that we don't mean the literal physical dimensions of the paper. Space is defined by distance and I've gone on about distance enough before, but as a short version... I'd like to use distance in the fullest sense of the word, to mean not just the physical dimension distance but also the way we - we, as humans - use it. Distance is the measure over which effects get diluted. So you hear a person shout less with distance. Originally that's all distance was, but the brain gets used to a thing - builds up expectances around it - so the concept "distance" becomes combined with the concept "effects get diluted", and we end up responding to both things as one thing. If effects get diluted, in other words, we treat that as a manifestation of distance. (By "combined" I don't mean just in the Lakoff sense of coherent metaphors, but in the Popper sense of genetic expectation. The very bits of our brain which deal with spatial things will have an expectation of what distance *means* hardwired. Afterall, if something doesn't mean anything (if it doesn't make any difference to us) what would be the point modelling it?) This is all second-nature, by the way. In the centre of a hedge maze you're a long way from the exit despite being only 10 metres or so from the edge. Roads bring us closer together. We end up having semantic distance. We have points of view which are far apart. You go on journeys of discovery. Again, all second-nature, but I think it's useful to see the roots of the metaphors we use every day: why they feel so natural. Semantic distance is what manifests as distance online. You could say that distance online is measured in the number of hyperlinks between two pages, but the fact somebody can write the addresses of two pages next to each other in a document, or they can come up on the same page of a search engine: those are forms of link too. The question is *why* somebody would write those links close to one another, or why they'd be found with the same query. It's because they're closely aligned, and that's why often the number of links between document approximates the actual distance between them. Closely aligned? Actual distance? The unbridgable gulf online - the actual distance - is the words people use and the meaning that can be communicated. There are whole fields of work which deal with pretty much the same topic but use different words and concepts to describe what they're doing. There's a distance between them. Okay, so "semantic distance" is the wrong term. The distance between the concepts as they manifest in people's heads, taking into account the assumed cultural frame, shared interests and references and so on. These are the true distances, and they operate on micro and macro scales. Micro scales are more interesting. Areas where there are sufficient common interests to define a space in which people may communicate and be understood. You could call these paradigms, but I think the term "rooms" is also useful. We divide up space in different ways in the physical world, and I'm thinking of cities here. There are rooms in which there isn't really intrinsic difference. Something happening somewhere in a room effects everything else in the room pretty much equally: a shout in the corner can be heard throughout the room. But step into a different room and there's a vast span between the two: close the door and there's nothing that happens in the next room that'll affect you (I simplify, of course). Then there are corridors, or roads, which very much have distance intrinsic to themselves: by definition they span distances which take time to move over, and one happens at one end does not simultaneously have an effect at the other. The space online is like this, and mainly it's rooms where you can't see what's going on outside. Tight clusters of things (not pages on the www, not a single messageboard) where there's a common vocabulary, a common understanding of The Way Things Work. And the space is roughly fixed, or at least mutates slowly, because it's not just the conversation that defines a space, but the technology itself, the ideas that have calcified into the infrastructure. For example, the mesh of weblogs constitutes a broad space which rests, in part, on a common understanding of what a weblog looks like, the sort of names these have so you can identify links between them, the concept of an "author" and so on. From the outside this can be impenetrable. The way this appears it seems much like extelligence in the real world - the expectances of individuals being made concrete in the world around us - or the affordances built into media: the passive response demanding by the television, the way conceptions are changed by continual exposure to advertising and pornography. But I'd make a distinction with what happens online because of the way these spaces are built up and how people talk within them. The online spaces are very shallow. The way they're defined in the technology and design decisions is extremely close to how people have conversations "within" them: it's all words. Social frames can manifest as choice of titles - and choice of software - for a messageboard, which automatically distances it from people who wouldn't have chosen those nicknames, that way of posting. What's more, it's all relatively recent technology and from the same mindset. So the models that produced modern computer operating systems produced the network, produced the www and linking, and so on. What these models all share is that they're constructed by a series of statements, of links between things. A plus B. Computer programs are a series of statements that construct a space and how it works, how effects and transformations filter through it. Context is established using hyperlinks. The entire systems is biased towards showing explicit statements of defining a space. What links are is wormholes through space. Where two things used to be a long way apart (two pages, say, or two concepts, or two variables), the statement joins them together and says that what affects one will affect the other. This is a shortening of distance between things, and in the absence of any other way of defining distance this is the dominant method of building territory online. All space online can be subverted by statement-wormholes and therefore space itself comprises statement-wormholes. These networks of statements comprise the whole of the online world, from infrastructure through technology and the expression of concepts (in a fashion that is "true to the medium"), not for any forced reason - saying that technology causes thought methods is like saying there's no free will in a mechanical universe [1] - but because each layer biases the next, and it's all been built by people willing to follow those biases. The field of study that identified and analyses these statement-wormhole networks is cybernetics: the study of feedback loops. It looks at how cause and effect is wholly linear, isn't just cause and effect either really, but at how the loops work, negative and positive feedback, control mechanisms and so on. But it all presupposes that the universe can be modelled like this. And so the ideas that it produces have the same foundations, and those ideas are still dominant today. Hence cyberspace: a mesh of feedback loops of technology and meaning that defines its own space as it goes. There's nothing unbridgable in cyberspace because everything is linkable, nothing unbridgable except the meaning that somehow arising in the human brain. To continue the distance metaphor for a little, consider that a wormhole creates negative distance. It brings things closer together. In the real world we can create positive distance too, move things further apart. This is barely possible online because simply mentioning two things in the same statement bridges them. But offline we can build walls which part two things, or mazes. Positive distance is significant because it isn't a binary relationship between A and B: it modifies the relationship between B and *everything else*. It warps space in unpredictable ways and doesn't need to deliberately specify everything it involves. Walls make use of properties that are extrinsic to both A and B and exist in some way shared between them. Say, direction. A wall around B can block off everything in a certain direction, and anything that fulfils that property will be obstructed, without having to deliberately specify it. This isn't possible online, not in a fundamental way (although it's possible to emulate it). You can't specify link conditional on an extrinsic property of subject and potential object, although we try to build it in (for example, search engines that are designed not to return adult material). It's this lack of walls that gives cyberspace its defining characteristics. Lack of accidental context: you can't modify the neighbourhood of anything because neighbourhoods have to be explicitly defined. This is very much a conduit metaphor issue (I've spoken of that before) which, among other things, assumes that meaning slips through a transparent medium between source and receiver. There is no space in it for extrinsic meaning. (The explicit nature of cyberspace is also coherent with the Western mindset: freedom to speak but no compulsion to listen.) For this reason I don't like to think about cyberspace as a medium. It constructs its own transparent media as it goes - the www, IRC - it's something else: a physics. A space that allows itself to be rewritten by the space it constructs. A construction that is able to reconstruct itself. Like the real world, these low-level laws are what produce patterns of behaviour online. The physics of the real world has (or at least had) certain truths. Physical objects are rivalrous -- that is, if I have it over here, you can't have it over there. Physical things also have an effect in the same place as their footprint. That is, the input is centred on the output (our reach and our senses have the same origin). Then there are things like the speed of evolution, the nature of society and so on. There are immutable things, and things we need. And out of this come manners and ethics -- the solution to the game theory equations we inhabit that nature has iterated to via evolution. Online the physics are very different. Many of us can "visit" a web page simultaneously before any apparent (to us, the visitors) effect is had. Information - within limits - is not rivalrous. What kind of economics, what kind of ethics will this produce? Are there statement-wormholes that are valuable? Certainly, gathering and creating these bridges is difficult and time-consuming. What kind of "fairness" will emerge as we come to an understanding of where we should support each other, and where we should compete? Again, in the real world we are unable to not communicate a certain quantity of information due to our faces. It's a truce called by our competing genes. Ditto economics and the division of labour. What similar truces will we have in cyberspace? [1] cause and effect dilutes over abstraction layers, too, which is what emergence is all about: distance again.