The End of Cyberspace

The Digital Sublime

I recently read Vincent Mosco's The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace. It's an interesting book, and it does a good job of ground-clearing of the "I read all these books so you don't have to" variety, but I have some reservations about it.

The book has several big ideas. First, ideas about cyberspace and its impact are myths. Not myths in the sense of ideas that are "delusional and completely wrong," but myths used by religious scholars-- concepts that order our understanding of the world, that, as Alisdair MacIntyre put it, "are neither true nor false, but living or dead." (29) Myths of cyberspace, promulgated by figures as varied as Al Gore, Thomas Friedman, and Nicholas Negroponte, helped drive the dot-com boom, the belief that the Internet would transform modern life, and predictions about the end of history, politics, and space. The digital library, information highway, e-commerce, and virtual community were all, in one way or another, representations of the myth.

Myths of cyberspace were also part of a broader discourse that developed in the years before Y2K, characterized by "a general willingness to entertain the prospect of a fundamental turning point in society and culture" (55-56). The Internet was assigned the role of driver of changes that were already under discussion. Most prominent among them were arguments about the end of history; the death of distance (something that's been happening since at least the telegraph and railroad); and the end of conventional politics (exemplified by the arguments of the Progress and Freedom Foundation).

But it turns out that such technological myths aren't new. When they were new, the telegraph, electric light, radio, and television all seemed to some to herald a new age in which war would be obsolete, economies would prosper, and the lion would lie down with the lamb. In each case, those predictions turned out to be false. Just as Brian Arthur argues that it's after the boom that technologies like the railroad and telegraph really start to matter, so too does Mosco argue that "it is when technologies... cease to be sublime icons of mythology and enter the prosaic world of banality... that they become important forces for social and economic change." (6)

It's had some positive reviews in Technology and Society, First Monday (scroll down to the second review), SCRIPT-ed, Culture Machine, and University Affairs, among other places. Yet I find myself less impressed by the book. What's there to object to? I think there are a couple small things, and one big one.

Technorati Tags: cyberspace, digital culture, end of cyberspace, pervasive computing, ubicomp

links for 2006-06-30

• Learning to be a Citizen of Cyberspace (1998)
  "This paper addresses the need to focus on the content of education in cyberspace and, specifically, about teaching people to be citizens, not just consumers, in this new arena."
  (tags: endofcyberspace cyberspace politics)
• Vincent Mosco
  Author of The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005).
  (tags: cyberspace cybergeography endofcyberspace)
• From Laws for Cyberspace to Cyber Laws (literally)
  "The following discussion introduces the dialectical transition from the “code is law” concept to an active “law is code” software application. It advocates the redevelopment of network protocols into reflections of contemporary legal systems as a
  (tags: law cyberspace endofcyberspace)
• SSRN-Law and Economics in Cyberspace by Niva Elkin-Koren, Eli Salzberger
  "The paper is intended to provide a preliminary and tentative look at the challenges posed by Cyberspace to the project of the economic analysis of law."
  (tags: cyberspace law endofcyberspace)
• Review of "Law, Economics and Cyberspace The Effects of Cyberspace on the Economic Analysis of Law"
  Does the “pre-internet” economic analysis of the law still apply in the age of Cyberspace?
  (tags: law endofcyberspace cyberspace)

Adam Greenfield @ IFTF

Adam Greenfield gave a lunchtime talk at the Institute today, drawing on his book Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing (which I'm slowly reading). I've blogged the talk at Future Now, the IFTF group blog.

Technorati Tags: design, digital-physical, Everyware, pervasive computing, ubicomp

Espresso @ Xando, and the nature of the Internet cafe

I'm in Baltimore for the next couple days for work. This afternoon, while walking around Johns Hopkins in the warm blanket-like heat of the Southern summer, I stopped in Xando for a quick espresso.

Xando is a pretty decent chain: I first saw them in Philadelphia, shortly after I finished grad school. And this one seemed rather nice. I'm sure it does a booming business during the school year.

When I was in school, Penn had absolutely no coffee places. There were places where you could buy coffee, but no actual cafes. I'm not sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing for me in my last year, when I was spending 12 hours a day writing my dissertation. Probably since I didn't have a laptop, it was a good thing.

Actually, I wonder if you graphed the growth of cafes in the U.S. (or just around universities) with the penetration of laptops, would you see a correlation? More to the point, could you make a reasonable causative argument-- that the growth of laptops has played a role in making cafes more attractive spaces? In the U.S., it seems to me, the "Internet cafe" hasn't quite taken off in the way it has in, say, Asia or the Middle East, though it has become A Thing. Arguably we have as many Internet cafes as any place in the world, if by the term you mean cafes where people go to drink coffee and access the Internet. The difference is, in the States we tend to bring our own machines, not rent them from the cafe.

Technorati Tags: baltimore, cafe, Johns Hopkins, mobility, space, travel

links for 2006-06-16

• Jihad 2.0 (Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2006)
  With the loss of training camps in Afghanistan, terrorists have turned to the Internet to find and train recruits. The story of one pioneer of this effort—the enigmatic “Irhabi 007”—shows how.
  (tags: e21 endofcyberspace religion Internet cyberspace)

links for 2006-06-14

• Wired News: Dawn of the Gig-Stained Wretch
  "Some of the world's top newspapers publishers are planning to introduce a form of electronic newspaper that will allow users to download entire editions from the web on to reflective digital screens."
  (tags: epaper publishing newspapers)

links for 2006-06-13

• African Countries Brand Themselves with Eco - Labels - New York Times
  "Countries such as Madagascar and Rwanda are starting to "brand" themselves as unique ecotourism destinations in a bid to carve a lucrative niche in the global economy."
  (tags: environment)

links for 2006-06-12

• Libraries of Gracious Reading, for Members Only - New York Times
  Article on the "17 membership libraries scattered through the United States, survivors of an era long before that of tax-supported public libraries."
  (tags: library)

The social world of subscription libraries

I have no idea how I'd work in a citation to today's New York Times article about subscription libraries. Though the last quote does highlight the way that libraries are social spaces as well as places to storehouses for books:

[There are] 17 membership libraries scattered through the United States, survivors of an era long before that of tax-supported public libraries, said Erika Torri, executive director of the Athenaeum Music and Arts Library in La Jolla, Calif. The La Jolla library offers its 2,300 subscribers a large circulating DVD and video collection in art, foreign film and music, among other attractions. An individual membership costs $40 a year.

Many membership libraries, like the Boston Athenaeum and the Athenaeum of Philadelphia, are housed in elegant historic buildings. The Boston Athenaeum, which has five curators and a major collection of statues and paintings, is the nation's largest, said Richard Wendorf, director and librarian. Some 8,000 people have cards to the library, and a family membership costs $275. The library sponsors 14 discussion groups. "What people find here," Mr. Wendorf said, "are other people who share their interest not just in books, but in discussion."

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, library

links for 2006-06-11

• J. LeRoy's Evolving Web: The winds of Yes/And, The rudder of Either/Or
  "As we create the social software environment that will end up governing the early 21st century, we need to think of how our tools are used. What elements of them reward Either/Or, which reward Yes/and and are these tools balanced?"
  (tags: endofcyberspace software cyberspace cooperation)
• Micronations.Net
  "Welcome to the Micronational World."
  (tags: cyberspace politics Geography gaming endofcyberspace place-space)