The End of Cyberspace

New law and technology blog

In the course of my attempts to reconstruct the history of cyberspace, I've spent a certain amount of time reading legal writing on cyberlaw-- the application of copyright and property law on the Internet. I hadn't expected it, but the law is arguably the field in which the metaphor of cyberspace has been most influential. The metaphor of the Internet as place, and the way you conceptualize the relationship between real physical places (which have jurisdictions and laws) and digital places (which might or might not be terra nova) has serious consequences.

So I was interested to come across the new Law and Technology Theory blog. As today's post explained, it's interested in two big questions: "First, should we have a general theory of law and technology? Second, what form should such a theory take?"

Is it a good idea to have a general theory of law and technology? Should we try to generate principles that will provide us with advance guidance for approaching a new technology? For example, we are currently trying to decide how to deal with privacy threats imposed by RFID tags that are incorporated into passports. Should we generalize from previous efforts to regulate technologies that threatened privacy to formulate principles that will guide us in the case of RFID tags? Alternatively, should we formulate principles that will serve as common guidelines for regulating the adoption of technologies that produce similar social tensions, but at first blush appear quite different? For example, genetic testing and the Internet, two technologies, which were recently diffused, produce similar social tensions. Should they be governed by common principles?

Two primary objections are likely to be brought forward. First, such an endeavor is antithetical to the very essence of technological change. The application of general principles will suffocate human creativity. We are likely to make decisions that will inhibit new opportunities at the expense of stability and social order. Second, the articulation of general principles would be impractical and doomed to failure. Nobody could have predicted the way the Internet has changed our lives. Technology advances beyond our wildest imagination - any principles we formulate today will become very quickly extinct and unworkable.

Of course, in my view the obvious first thing to do is ask, what "theory" of technology should you use? The definition of technology one begins with will have a serious effect on the project.

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, law, technology

links for 2006-11-28

• Paul Adams, "Cyberspace and Virtual Places," Geographical Review 87:2 (1997) [PDF-- subscription req]
  Computer networks are described using "three broad metaphorical themes: virtual architecture, electronic frontier, and cyberspace. These metaphors encourage control, surveillance, and capitalist expansion through computer technologies."
  (tags: endofcyberspace language cyberspace)
• Ambient Intelligence in Everyday Life [sub req]
  (tags: ambient interface endofcyberspace design AI)

links for 2006-11-24

• Technology Review: Hyperlinking Reality via Phones
  "A Nokia research project could one day make it easier to navigate the real world by superimposing virtual information on an image of your surroundings."
  (tags: endofcyberspace augmentation mobility geoweb)
• Nokia Research Center - MARA
  "The Mobile Augmented Reality Applications project explores utilizing camera equipped mobile devices as platforms for sensor-based, video see-through mobile augmented reality."
  (tags: endofcyberspace mobility augmentation geoweb)

links for 2006-11-22

• plus six » Once more into the future
  "Studio visitor tonight was Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, from Institute for the Future in Palo Alto. I recognised Alex’s name from a very brief paper in this February’s Wired that I’d cited in my dissertation, entitled “Cyberspace” is dead."
  (tags: endofcyberspace future)
• More4 - Documentaries - Suspect Nation
  On technology and privacy in the UK and US.
  (tags: endofcyberspace privacy technology surveillance)

How much does cyberspace weigh?

Russell Seitz offers a back-of-the-envelope calculation:

A statistically rough (one sigma) estimate might be 75-100 million servers @ ~350-550 watts each. Call it Forty Billion Watts or ~ 40 GW. Since silicon logic runs at three volts or so, and an Ampere is some ten to the eighteenth electrons a second, a straight forward calculation reveals that if theaverage chip runs at a Gigaherz, some 50 grams of electrons in motion make up the Internet. As of today, cyberspace weighs less than two ounces.

Two ounces. Six of them could fit in the Diet Coke can sitting on my desk. Okay, not really, but still.

Via Bob McHenry

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace

Royal College of Art talk, and the end of my own private Shibuya

Last week I gave an impromptu talk at the Royal College of Art, outlining the end of cyberspace argument and its implication for interaction design. Chris Hand and Andy Broomfield, two recent graduates of the interaction design program, both blogged about the talk.

The whole thing was kind of hurried and off-the-cuff-- one of the recent grads and now current faculty invited me right before I got on the plane, and the night I was giving the talk, I dashed from Paddington Station down to the RCA, on the other side of Hyde Park, managing to wander around for a few minutes before finding the right entrance. But it was a large crowd, basically supportive about the overarching idea but also highly skeptical of the particulars-- in other words, the sort that's at once satisfying without being too much of an ego boost.

I've been ending most of my presentations on the subject with a slide that shows various overlays of digital images atop a normal street scene.

Turns out the students didn't quite hate it, but they thought it didn't work. And upon reflection, I'm inclined to agree with them, for a couple reasons.

First, and most important, instinct says that we're quickly going to find that when it comes to overlaying information on top of our everyday views of the physical world, less will be more. To some degree, we've assumed that users would go for My Own Private Shibuya (hereafter, MOPS):

Colodio, "do androids dream of Tokyo?"

Stéfan, "Karaoke in Shibuya"

But after some reflection, I'm now questioning that assumption.

Part of the pleasure of these streetscapes is precisely that they're collectively experienced, rather than individual visions: for even a brief period, we share with other postmodern, globe-hopping flaneurs and expatriates and temporary natives the light of the ABC-Mart sign and storefront.

If I had a pair of glasses that fed me annotations of the city around me, what would I really want? Would I want dinosaur heads peering around buildings? In England, where I worry constantly about looking the wrong way when I cross the street, absolutely not: I'd be killed instantly. Indeed, in any big city, MOPS would be at worst a hazard to life and private property (how long would it take thieves to learn to target people who are walking down the street watching YouTube?), and at least an intrusion on my experience of the place.

Instead, most of the time I'd want a safety reminder or two, maybe directions if I'm headed somewhere, and then some occasional "look here for more information" icon that popped up whenever, say, I passed a building designed by a particular school of architects. At other times, I'd want other information: when I travel with my kids I want to know where clean, publicly accessible bathrooms are. But would I want MOPS? Almost never.

As is so often the case, the real value won't come in providing a constant stream of semi-processed data, but in useful abstraction and restrained but enlightening presentation.

So now I've got to find another slide to end with....

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, England, future, London, Royal College of Art

links for 2006-11-21

• new media thinking: New Brief, New Stress, and talks in between (still loving it though!)
  Another post about my RCA talk. These interaction design students sure like to blog.
  (tags: endofcyberspace design)
• Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | Cappuccino conformity
  Charlotte Ashby argues, "The homogeneity of the modern coffeehouse chain could be seen on one hand as a reflection of the democratisation of society. On the other hand it is evidence of the stifling impact of rationalising corporate culture."
  (tags: place-space culture cafe)

links for 2006-11-11

• Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology
  Home page for the journal.
  (tags: STS technology research engineering)

David Weinberger at Oxford

Webcast of a talk Weinberger gave at Oxford last year:

The New Shape of Knowledge: From Trees to Piles of Leaves

The digital revolution is enabling knowledge to slip the bonds of the physical which had, silently, shaped it. Now we get to see its "natural" shape. What does it look like? How big are topics when they aren't determined by the economics of paper? Who gets to organize it? What are the new principles we're using to organize it? David Weinberger proposes that in the digital world, the most "natural," efficient and responsive way to manage knowledge is to create huge, distributed piles of leaves, each tagged with as much metadata as possible - including treating the content as metadata - and postponing until the last minute the taxonomizing of the information. What will be the social effects as we move from trees to piles of leaves?

Yet more proof that data doesn't just exist in some alternate plane

A story from Georgia Tech about mysterious disk failures in a computer center. Quite something....

Technorati Tags: computer, end of cyberspace