Cyberculture Theorists

Manuel Castells and Donna Haraway

David Bell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781134346745
• Topic: Informatica
• Subtopic: Scienze della comunicazione

This book surveys a 'cluster' of works that seek to explore the cultures of cyberspace, the Internet and the information society. It introduces key ideas, and includes detailed discussion of the work of two key thinkers in this area, Manuel Castells and Donna Haraway, as well as outlining the development of cyberculture studies as a field. To do this, the book also explores selected 'moments' in this development, from the early 1990s, when cyberspace and cyberculture were only just beginning to come together as ideas, up to the present day, when the field of cyberculture studies has grown and bloomed, producing innovative theoretical and empirical work from a diversity of standpoints. Key topics include:

• life on the screen
• network society
• space of flows
• cyborg methods.

Cyberculture Theorists is the ideal starting point for anyone wanting to understand how to theorise cyberculture in all its myriad forms.

MOMENTS IN CYBERCULTURE

As a way into a tight focus on particular cyberculture theorists, I want to introduce here three writers – Michael Benedikt, Sherry Turkle and Maria Bakardjieva – whose work represents three phases of cyberculture research. These accounts give a flavour of the development of cyberculture theory, its methods and concerns, since the early 1990s. While the endless branching and bifurcating of cyberculture means I could have chosen countless alternatives, these three writers all do the useful job of summing up the mood of the time and place they were writing from.

1 CYBERSPACE: FIRST STEPS

Edited by Michael Benedikt, Hal Box Chair in Urbanism and Director of the Center for American Architecture and Design at the University of Texas at Austin, USA, Cyberspace: First Steps is based largely around papers presented at the self-proclaimed First Conference on Cyberspace, held at the same institution in May 1990. So the book does indeed contain a number of ‘first steps’, including landmark essays, still often cited, such as David Tomas’s ‘Old Rituals for New Space’, Michael Heim’s ‘The Erotic Ontology of Cyberspace’ and Alluquere Rosanne Stone’s ‘Will the Real Body Please Stand Up’, as well as cyberpunk guru William Gibson’s account of birthing the word cyberspace itself, ‘Academy Leader’. It also includes two essays by the editor, which are the focus on my discussion here; given the heterogeneity of the chapters in the volume, it seems more fruitful to focus on these twins rather than to try to capture something of the buzz that still, more than a decade later, crackles through Cyberspace: First Steps.

Benedikt provides both a contextualizing and thematicizing introduction to the volume, and his own extensive essay which discusses how cyberspace might work. This future-facing orientation is important: the book was published ahead of cyberspace, signalling a beginning, an advent: ‘Cyberspace itself is an elusive and future thing’, Benedikt (1991c: 22) writes, adding that ‘one can hardly be definitive at this early stage’ about the forms it was then yet to take. This is one reason why I have chosen to discuss this work here; for its ‘prefiguring’ of cyberspace and cyberculture (see also Tofts, Jonson and Cavallaro 2002). There is a palpable sense of promise and excitement: ‘the door to cyberspace is open’ (ibid.: 18) and Benedikt is keen to step through. He also sees in the book, and in cyberspace, a ‘motivating, unifying vision’ of the future (Benedikt 1991b: 188) – a door to be leapt through enthusiastically, then.

His introduction to the book opens with ten vignettes, each one attempting to poetically capture what cyberspace was imagined as, at this time and place. I would love to quote them all, as they’re all so evocative, but there isn’t time for that here. Instead I give one full example from the ten, then select some choice cuts from the others:

Cyberspace: The tablet become a page become a screen become a world, a virtual world. Everywhere and nowhere, a place where nothing is forgotten and yet everything changes.

(Benedikt 1991c: 1)

Cyberspace is also summoned as a ‘parallel universe’, as a ‘common mental geography’, as forming ‘wherever electricity runs with intelligence’, as a ‘realm of pure information, filling like a lake’, as a ‘soft hail of electrons’, but also as ‘an unhappy word’ from the dystopian pen of William Gibson, here to be made happy again when removed from the cyberpunk domain and brought into computer science. (The ‘category line’ on the back of the book jacket, which signals the subject area of the book to aid booksellers in shelving it appropriately, lists only Computer Science as the proper home of this book – cyberspace was not yet fully seen as of interest to those studying culture.)

GIBSONIAN CYBERSPACE

Cyberpunk writer William Gibson famously coined the term ‘cyberspace’ to describe a ‘virtual’ landscape made up of all the information in the world, a description given fullest form in his novel Neuromancer (1984). Cyberspace is entered as disembodied consciousness, by ‘jacking in’ to the network, and the landscape is a battleground over the ownership of and access to data, between corporations and hackers. Gibsonian cyberspace thus refers to visions of cyberspace which trace back to Gibson’s vivid descriptions. In some contexts, Gibsonian cyberspace is contrasted to Barlovian cyberspace, named after John Perry Barlow, the American cyber-guru, who is said to have first used ‘cyberspace’ to describe networked computing.

That Gibson is here from the start is another key point: we are talking here about ‘Gibsonian cyberspace’ – the neologism coined to describe cyberspace as imagined in the shadow of its description in Neuromancer (1984). As Stone (1991) notes in this volume, Neuromancer had an incredible impact not just on sci-fi fans but also on computer scientists, hackers and academics. It became a kind of ‘source code’ for the development of cyberspace, and etched into the ideas presented in Cyberspace: First Steps is exactly that legacy, which informs, for example, Benedikt’s own discussion of the ‘datasphere’ as an urban architectural form, as we shall see.

CYBERSPACE THREADS

Now, having laid out those ten conjurings of cyberspace, Benedikt hits the brake: ‘Cyberspace as just described – and, for the most part, as described in this book – does not exist’ (Benedikt 1991c: 3). It does not exist – yet. Or, rather, it exists in the minds of those imagining it, but does not yet exist as an everyday experience, as a ‘thing’. It does not (yet) exist as the thing Benedikt later defines it as: ‘a multisensory, three-dimensional, involving, richly textured and nuanced virtual world converting oceans of abstract data and the intelligence of distant people into perceptually engaging, all-but-firsthand experience’ (Benedikt 1991b: 191). We might ask, here and now: does this cyberspace exist yet? Will it ever? Benedikt is himself sanguine about this issue in an interview from a decade later, as we shall see (Szeto 2002).

Using the Popperian idea of ‘World 3’ – the ‘world’ of patterns of communications that overlays Worlds 1 (the material world) and 2 (the subjective world of consciousness) – Benedikt uses his introduction to weave four intertwining historical threads that have evolved in World 3. One aim of this approach is to highlight the long history of cyberspace – that it has been coming for millennia. His first thread is perhaps best summarized by his term ‘symbolic doing’ (Benedikt 1991a.: 13) – representation, including pictures and writing, myths, stories. Human cultures need to live in stories, need rituals and magic, and cyberspace is coming to be ‘the most tempting stage for the acting out of mythic realities’, the prime site for symbolic storying (ibid.: 6; see also Bell 2001).

Benedikt’s second thread is also about ‘symbolic doing’, this time encapsulated in the history of communications media, in its broadest sense, from writing to printing to transmission, storage and retrieval (hence his ‘The tablet become a page become a screen … ’ formulation quoted above). Here he is concerned with the dematerialization of communication – or, perhaps, we might say its ‘redematerialization’ after it had first been materialized in printing, recording, photography, etc. Crucially, this dematerialization erases the constraints on communication made by geography, at all scales, from the global to the local (he gives the excellent example of remote controls for TVs in the latter case). Moreover, the history lesson in thread two is also about widening access to media production as well as consumption – cameras, photocopiers, cassette recorders all put the tools for making content in ordinary people’s hands. Cyberspace expands this potential exponentially.

WORLD 3

Austrian-born British philosopher Karl Popper (1902 – 98) proposed the idea of the existence of three ‘worlds’: World 1, the world of physical objects, events and biological entities; World 2, the world of mental events and objects; World 3, the world of products of the human mind, or abstract objects (theories, formulae, learning). He proposed that World 3 is partly autonomous from the other two, and that changes in World 3 can impact on Worlds 1 and 2. Today, World 3 is sometimes used to talk about cyberspace and cyberculture, as an emblematic abstract ‘mind-space’.

The then-recent history of this thread is overshadowed, Benedikt (1991c: 11) writes, by the ‘almost irrational enthusiasm’ for virtual reality (VR). Indeed, VR overshadows much of Cyberspace: First Steps, as it did much of the writing and talking about cyberspace at that time. Benedikt notes how virtual reality was seen as superseding the ‘symbolic doing’ of threads one and two by reintroducing direct,‘post-symbolic’ communication – a return of the literal – though he is unsure of how this will pan out:‘In future computer-mediated environments, whether or not this kind of literal, experiential sharing of worlds will supersede the symbolic, ideational, and implicit sharing of worlds embodied in the traditional mechanisms of text and representation remains to be seen’ (ibid.: 13). With the benefit of hindsight, we can say that, at least where we’ve got to now, that idea is still a long, long way off, but also that people have found ingenious ways round the failure of VR to deliver such a cyberspace.

The third thread is, unsurprisingly given Benedikt’s disciplinary background, about architecture. He argues that architecture is also part of World 3, the world of patterns of communication (just as ‘natural architectures’ such as ant colonies are) – architecture is communication in built form. Benedikt presents a take on the history of architecture in biblical terms, moreover; using ideas of nostalgia for Eden and of the Heavenly City from Revelation. Architecture is about transcendence, he writes, about a desire to go beyond – an idea which has led to the ‘ephemeralization’ or ‘self-dematerialization’ of architecture, as buildings become light, hollow, transparent. The Heavenly City epitomizes this impulse, this transcendent architecture: ‘weightlessness, radiance, numerological complexity, palaces upon palaces, peace and harmony through rule by the good and wise, utter cleanliness, transcendence of nature and of crude beginnings, the availability of all things pleasurable and cultured’ (ibid.: 15) – hardly Gibsonian cyberspace, then, given the latter’s dystopian griminess (see Tomas 1991, 2000).Yet it is very like cyberspace, the city as information, the epitome of World 3 – a different way of imagining what Manuel Castells calls the space of flows (see later). Benedikt’s bottom line is also unsurprising: building cyberspace will require cyberspace architects, designers of electronic edifices, the liquid architecture of information flows. In this respect, in the visual imaging of data arranged like skyscrapers or heavenly cities, he is, of course, purely Gibsonian.

VIRTUAL REALITY (VR)

3-D, immersive, computer-generated audio-visual simulations of reality (or imaginings of reality), for a while widely seen as the most exciting new development in human – computer interactions. Applications such as flight simulation and battle training have been developed, but the technology has not evolved to match the hype that preceded it. VR has become more useful conceptually, in terms of troubling ideas about what is ‘real’, as well as being widely depicted in science fiction and cyberpunk.

The last of Benedikt’s historical threads concerns the mathematics of space, both geometry and algebra. How is ‘real’ space theorized mathematically, and what does this mean for ways of thinking about cyberspaceas-space? Space is here seen more as a ‘field of play’ for information, and this has crucial bearing on a whole set of questions about the space of cyberspace that Benedikt raises and addresses later on: how big is cyberspace? What are its edges like? What shape is it? How are we to find our way around it? These four threads (and he notes there are many others) begin the process, then, that Benedikt picks up later, in his own contribution to Cyberspace: First Steps.

PROPOSING CYBERSPACE

‘Cyberspace: some proposals’ has a similarly speculative, future-facing tone, for which Benedikt is unapologetic; as he says at the start, there is vital work to be done at this stage: ‘Before dedicating significant resources to creating cyberspace … we should want to know how it might look, how we might get around it, and, most importantly, what we might usefully do there’ (Benedikt 1991b: 119, emphasis in original).The project of envisaging cyberspace is crucial, therefore, and connects to the history lessons he has already taught us: to understand how we might think and build cyberspace, we need to understand how we have developed ways of acting in the world around us – phenomenologically, if you like (see p. 45). At times with vertiginous complexity, Benedikt talks us through the mathematics and cosmologies of space and time, speculating on the futures brought about by twin processes: ‘the etherealization of the world we live in’ and ‘the concretization of the world we dream and think in’ (ibid.: 124, emphasis in original). But before he can figure out cyberspace, he has to ask some tricky questions. First up: what is space?

Turning to mathematics and physics, and also to experience, he asks how we come to understand space both commonsensically and theoretically. How do we understand, experience and live in space and time, and how can this be fed into emerging cyberspace? What do we need to know about human spatiotemporal perception and use in order to build cyberspaces that work for, rather than against, their users? Benedikt, like Maria Bakardjieva who we shall meet in a while, is adamant that the views and experiences of ‘ordinary users’ are central to this task; otherwise, cyberspace will be inhospitable, alien, disorienting, useless.

Yet use must not be read to mean purely rational use or instrumental use. Remember thread one: symbolic storying, myth-making. Cyberspace must be magical, too – and it can be magical, Benedikt argues, through it violation of principles that govern our ‘real life’ experiences of space and time. As Sherry Turkle writes, cyberspace can be thought of as a liminal space, a space where rules are overturned (see p. 36 below). Prefiguring Turkle again, Benedikt discusses graphical user interfaces (GUIs) on computers as the beginnings of something, a new experience of space and time. But, for all his talk of violation, Benedikt is equally keen to establish some guiding principles for the design and building of cyberspace: principles aimed to produce usable, livable, but also magical worlds. These principles concern a number of key issues: the dimensions of space and cyberspace, how to visualize cyberspace, how to distinguish different ‘data objects’ in cyberspace, how ‘things’ will ‘look’ there, how we will find them, and so on.

The seven key principles of cyberspace design and build, according to Benedikt (and very roughly sketched here by me, to be selectively filled out later) are:

1. The Principle of Exclusion – two things cannot be in the same place at the same time;
2. The Principle of Maximal Exclusion – rules to minimize violations of the first principle, for example, over how ‘big’ and ‘dense’ cyberspace can become;
3. The Principle of Indifference – ‘life goes on whether or not you are there’ (ibid.: 160); cyberspace has an existence independent of users;
4. The Principle of Scale – the relationship between the amount of information in space and the amount of space in space;
5. The Principle of Transit – even through we may move instantaneously, travel as an experience is important, as is navigation;
6. The Principle of Personal Visibility – users in cyberspace should be seen, at some minimal level, by other users (but we should also be free to choose who is visible or invisible to us);
7. The Principle of Commonality – there needs to be an objective, shared social ‘reality’ in cyberspace, so that people see and hear the same things (at least partially).

Benedikt works through these principles, exploring how they might be realized in cyberspace. Some of his answers are intensely mathematical, concerned with modelling cyberspace in algebraic terms; others are (for me at least) more down-to-earth. For example, part of the riddle of the Principle of Maximal Exclusion is: how big does cyberspace have to be so that things there aren’t in the same place at the same time too often? And once that problem occurs, how might cyberspace be expanded? The solutions to the latter quandary include literally making cyberspace bigger, producing a nested set of differently scaled cyberspaces, making data-objects multi-dimensional (so they might be in a different place or time at least in some dimensions), and so on. This is heady stuff, to be sure, a bit like imagining the size of the universe.

The question of the size of cyberspace is related by Benedikt to the question of how much data can it hold? How dense can that data become? How can we arrange data-objects so that users can comprehend them? And what do we want these data-objects to be like? Benedikt says, again recalling the magic dimension he is keen to retain in cyberspace, that some may be like mirages or rainbows, objects always far-off and elusive, but nevertheless clearly visible. Others will be fixed in place, objects we can move closer to, even ‘touch’.

Of course, this isn’t developing in a vacuum; users will enter cyberspace already ‘hardwired’ with a set of ways of dealing with space, time and objects. There’s only so much magic we can take, before we get giddy, start suffering from ‘sim sickness’ (the disorientations experienced when VR makes us out-of-kilter). The task of producing ‘workable data spaces’ (ibid.: 150) must acknowledge and work with these features, balancing heady opportunities with limits and limitations. Benedikt offers a beautiful exemplification of this, again too long to quote in full, discussing an encounter in cyberspace with an ‘unidentified flying data object’ (UfdO). Nicely tinged by sci-fi, it is mind-boggling in its implications for the design and experience of cyberspace. Here, again, is my sketch: the user sees a UfdO in the distance moving at constant speed.The UfdO starts to slow down and shrink – has it turned to travel away from the user, or actually slowed and shrunk, or entered a denser area of cyberspace where it gets squashed and slowed down? How can the user tell?

The user tries to get closer to the UfdO, flying towards it, and, as the user does so, the UfdO gets larger and more detailed; only suddenly the user starts to decelerate, and cannot move closer to the UfdO – both have in fact entered a region of more space, expanded space, where everything is far away and travel takes a long, long time. (I know, so far, so Star Trek.) The point is that our perception of space, time, movement, objects etc. in cyberspace is going to have to cope with a lot more than we’re accustomed to. I guess the question then becomes: how much do we think we can get accustomed to? What are the limits of the human in cyberspace, and can these be transcended, maybe by becoming posthuman?

This is part of the key paradox Benedikt has already hinted at: given that we can do pretty much anything in cyberspace, what should we do? Striking the right balance between the doable and the dreamable, between the real and the magical, is vital to the success of cyberspace development for Benedikt. So the Principles of Indifference, Transit and Personal Visibility, for example, don’t simply map onto ‘real life’ experience. There is something extra in cyberspace, something that exceeds ordinary real life. I particularly like his discussion of the Principle of Transit, and therefore move to discuss this in more detail now.

POSTHUMAN

The idea that either (i) the human species is at an evolutionary dead-end, and must incorporate technologies in order to evolve to the ‘next level’; or (ii) that we have long ceased to be human, because of our increasingly intimate relationships with nonhumans, such as technological artefacts. Often seen as similar to arguments about cyborgs (see p. 100), the idea of the posthuman provokes excitement in some, terror in others. It contains a number of variants in fields of biomedicine, science fiction and cyberculture theory.

MOVING IN CYBERSPACE

Setting aside the question of how the user might actually move in cyberspace – by flying or surfing, or by bouncing, seeping, slithering or strolling – Benedikt sets...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Why Cyberculture?
• Moments in Cyberculture
• Why Castells?
• Castells’ Key Ideas
• After Castells
• Why Haraway?
• Haraway’s Key Ideas
• After Haraway
• After Cyberculture
• Further Reading
• Other Works Cited