The End of Cyberspace

Retro Arcade set

For those of you old enough to have played video games in the late 1970s or 1980s-- the halcyon days of Defender, Xevious, and Tron, not to mention a Pac Man franchise that rivaled CSI-- the terrific retro arcade photset on Flickr is not to be missed.

Perhaps I'm just over-generalizing from my own over-excited teenage reactions to these kinds of spaces, but I think these arcades, with their spaceship or Buck Rogers interiors, darkness lit only by the neon and the light of the games, played an underappreciated role in creating a psychological association between computers and space-- or alternate spaces.

called Station Break. The arcade was on the edge of the Virginia Commonwealth University campus, near student eateries, bookstores, and the city's only independent movie theatre. For a teenager, it was a neighborhood that spoke of leisure, freedom, and escape. The arcade itself was like another world.

The appeal of these spaces hasn't disappeared entirely, though most arcades are gone. The memory of the old arcade model was compelling enough to inspire MAME developers to create a virtual arcade, and there's a pretty clear linage from Station Break to Chuck E Cheese to the Pizza Planet in Toy Story. For those who really want the old experience, a Springfield, MO arcade, 1984, is a nostalgic re-creation of arcades from the era, right down to the 50+ classic games.

Tags: endofcyberspace, arcades, videogames, history

Quote of the day

When events move very fast and possible worlds swing around them, something happens to the quality of thinking. Some men repeat formulae; some men become reporters. To time observation with thought so as to mate a decent level of abstraction with crucial happenings is a difficult problem. Its solution lies in the using of intellectual residues of social-history, not jettisoning them except in precise confrontation with events... (C. Wright Mills, on Franz Neumann's Behemoth: the Structure and Practice of National Socialism 1933-1944)

[via Daily Kos]

Technorati Tags: quotation

Information technologies in the past

From Eamon Duffy's essay in the New York Review of Books, March 29:

Early Christianity was more than a new religion: it brought with it a revolutionary shift in the information technology of the ancient world. That shift was to have implications for the cultural history of the world over the next two millennia at least as momentous as the invention of the Internet seems likely to have for the future. Like Judaism before it and Islam after it, Christianity is often described as "a religion of the Book." The phrase asserts both an abstraction—the centrality of authoritative sacred texts and their interpretation within the three Abrahamic religions—and also a simple concrete fact—the importance of a material object, the book, in the history and practice of all three traditions....

Our modern book form, the codex, in fact evolved from the ancient equivalent of the stenographer's pad, bundles of wooden tablets linked with string hinges and coated with wax, on which information could be jotted with a stylus (often in shorthand). When the information was no longer needed, the wax could be heated and smoothed, and the tablets reused. The first papyrus and (especially) parchment books of pages were recyclable in just the same way, folded and stitched bundles written on with soluble ink that could be washed off to leave the pages blank again. To inscribe the words of Holy Scripture on such jotting pads would demean its sacred character and authority....

Why should the new religion have adopted this down-market and unfashionable book technology? The codex, it is true, has obvious practical advantages. Being written on both sides of the page, it is more economical than the roll, it can be readily indexed, it can be leafed through quickly to find a particular place, and it is more robustly portable. But these practical advantages, which certainly contributed to its eventual adoption as the normative form of the book, do not adequately explain the early Christians' exclusive preference for the form, even for their copies of the Jewish scriptures, which must of course have been transcribed from rolls. Historians have speculated that difference from Judaism may have been the point—that the codex was adopted to distance the emergent Church from its origins within the religion of Israel, or perhaps in an attempt to signal that its foundational texts were indeed a sort of sacred stenography, the living transcript of apostolic experience, taken from the mouths of the first witnesses.

Technorati Tags: books, history, reading, religion

Museum of Lost Interactions

Interesting online exhibit of old technologies, produced by students at the Interaction Design Lab at the University of Dundee. The names alone are fascinating historical-contemprary blends: the Richophone, Acoustograph, Social Communicator, and Radio Hat, among others.

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, history

Notes on "Is Cyberspace Still Anti-Sovereign?"

There are a number of things I’d change about the language of that screed, but, still, a decade later, it feels both impetuous and important. Serious questions remain. Was it accurate? Is Cyberspace naturally anti-sovereign? If so, is that a good thing?

So John Perry Barlow asks in "Is Cyberspace Still Anti-Sovereign?"

There have been notable efforts to regulate or restrict access to the Internet. Indeed, "one could write a book about all the ways in which existing governments and multinationals have imposed themselves on the global commons" in the last decade; in fact fact, "several people have done so." Netwar has emerged as a new kind of asymmetrical projection of power, enabled by the Internet. Spam and online crime proliferate, and arguments over copyright law continue.

But Barlow is still fundamentally optimistic:

I have not given up on the idea that, as a species, we can be more humane and fair, nor have I forsaken the notion that the greater understanding bred by universal access to knowledge is the key to increasing these qualities in us....

I appear doomed to live a long time, but I don’t think I’ll live to see the world I dreamed of when I was dashing off my little manifesto 10 years ago. Nevertheless, I believe that world is being born. It won’t be paradise, since it will be full of human beings and all our less noble qualities, but it will be more enlightened and enlightening than anything we have experienced so far.

Technorati Tags: culture, cyberspace, end of cyberspace, internet, John Perry Barlow, politics

The history of alternative media forms

As part of my study of the end of cyberspace and the future of information and information technologies, I've spent some time looking at the history of the idea that printed media are a problem to be solved: that, as Eldred Smith put it, "information is restricted by the very vehicle that was designed to promote its availability-- the book or other print product."

It turns out that while predictions of the "death of the book" became a stock in trade for Internet enthusiasts in the 1990s, and were the subject of plenty of attention in popular culture (at least, that part that reads New York Review of Books, Atlantic Monthly, and the like), arguments about whether the book could survive as a useful medium for professional knowledge-workers has a long history.

There are a couple good articles that talk about debates within the library world about the future of the book, but through the miracle of Google Scholar (and the vanity of searching for yourself), I just came across something that looks broader and quite promising as a history of anxieties about the future of print: Andy Duffy's 2000 M.A. thesis (PDF), "The replacement of printed text: Alternative media forms from the 1940s to the 1980s."

Here's the abstract:

The purpose of this thesis is to examine alternative forms of media developed in the USA between the 1940’s and 1980’s, which were proposed in order to come to terms with the faults associated with printed text and the paper medium. The examination is concentrated on relevant literature on the media and not the actual media themselves. The questions asked were:

1. Why were alternative forms of media presented for replacing printed text and what were the aims of those wanting to replace it?
2. What were these alternative forms of media and how did they compare with printed text with regard to storing and disseminating text? The study concentrates on two aspects of the different media: their ability to store and disseminate text.

Due to the increasing amount of scientific research results in the form of printed text the research community experienced growing problems with text dissemination and recall. These problems caused delays in research procedures hampering scientific development. Due to the increasing importance of scientific research, not least its role in international conflicts, a solution to these problems was regarded as being of the utmost importance....

A few pages in, Duffy expands on the problems with books:

I have chosen to emphasise one important aspect of this change for this thesis. This is the examination of the social and historical context in which different media were developed to help solve what I refer to as the information problem....

In the 1930’s and 1940’s mechanically printed text had been regarded by many as being responsible for giving rise to the information problem. Printed text, in diverse forms, was no longer regarded as being the best medium to disseminate and preserve information. Despite its previous importance for spreading scientific research results, printed text was now viewed as limiting and constraining scientific research and development.

The thesis covers micro-card, Vannevar Bush's Memex, J. C. Licklider's Online Information Network, and Ted Nelson, Xanadu. (It doesn't talk about microfiche, microfilm, or the other micro-technologies that actually did make it into the library, and were occasionally touted as replacements for the book.)

Technorati Tags: books, history, library, media

Cyberspace, term and technology

Alex Reid, a literature professor at SUNY-Cortland, points out that

cyberspace was coined before the technology it came to designate was invented. The term was meant to estrange, to create a poetic vision of a sublime encounter with information that could only be acheived through flatlining, through a near-death experience. And now after two decades of commodification, cyberspace strikes us as strange once more.

Certainly the point about cyberspace evoking "a poetic vision of a sublime encounter with information" is right on; and the desire for such encounters have been a constant in the history of personal computing and networking, if you believe accounts like John Markoff's What the Dormouse Said (which makes the point that the pioneers of personal computing did a lot of drugs, and in some ways saw the computer as another mind-altering substance) and Theodore Roszak's From Satori to Silicon Valley (also available here). Douglas Engelbart "dreamed of "flying" through a variety of information spaces" even before his research group discovered drugs in the mid-1960s.

But was it "coined before the technology it came to designate was invented"? I suppose it depends on which technologies you think are designated by cyberspace. We're still waiting for the technologies that Gibson describes in Neuromancer. But when the book came out, we had personal computers, the ARPANet, and a few commercial computer services-- some basic pieces, but neither yet well-assembled nor widely distributed.

Technorati Tags: cyberspace, end of cyberspace, science_fiction

Karl Schroeder on the end of cyberspace

The basic idea that the metaphor of cyberspace is getting worn isn't new to me: a number of people have been talking about it. Science fiction writer Karl Schroeder, for example, blogs:

[W]hen the only way to use a computer was to sit still and look through a little window (the screen) into a virtual space, the cyberspace metaphor worked best for us. But with cell phones, PDAs and geographical applications such as store-finders and the proposed "taxi" key for cell phones (which simply summons the nearest cab when you press it), we're no longer staring through a window into cyberspace. The window's been broken, and the cyber world has spilled out into our own space.

Cyberpunk that relies on the old metaphor of cyberspace is, therefore, at best quaint and at most thoroughly passe.

Technorati Tags: cyberspace, mobility, science_fiction, ubicomp