Slashdot Mirror
Is the Concept of 'Cyberspace' Stupid?
frank_adrian314159 writes "In an article titled 'Stop Pretending Cyberspace Exists,' Salon writer Michael Lind notes that 'Some ideas make you dumber the moment you learn of them. One of those ideas is the concept of "cyberspace."' He says that analogizing cyberspace as a real place leads to an inability to think logically about laws, rules, and how and when the governments could or should intervene to regulate the Internet. He states that such a debate is essential, but that an '[invasion of] a mythical Oz-like kingdom called cyberspace is just as dopey' when talking about governments and corporations taking a larger role in online communications. Is Lind right? Does the notion of cyberspace make the debate over its governance less fruitful?"
Yes, the concept of 'Cybespace' is quite stupid.
The use of the word "cyber" is stupid in any computer-related context.
But it's not 1993 anymore. Instead of "cyberspace," just say "in the cloud" and you'll sound like you're living in 2013.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
The notion of "cyberspace as place" ala Neuromancer may be a bit out dated, but it paints an interesting picture. As someone who does understand how networking works, I find the concepts from early cyber punk to be valuable attempts to try to imagine the future of a data driven world. We don't see pictures in the raw data, there is no blond in the red dress. But we can take the numbers and extract the blond in the red dress and make her visible to everyone.
If, however, someone's notion of cyberspace starts and ends at Tron, then they're going to have a hard time understanding the lack of control they have over the system.
But, that's not to say the the idea of cyberspace as place has no, well, place. People create communities on line, both private and public. These communities have their own rules both written and unwritten. If a government wants to regulate it's place in cyberspace, then it can attempt to do so. It's when governments try to regulate the cyberspace of people outside it's jurisdiction, that we run into issues where the concept of cyberspace can muddy the waters.
Laugh all you want at the retro-ness of the word 'cyberspace', of course, but let me just say this: I was born in 1986, so during my childhood the internet grew with me. I only barely remember there being a time when the internet was not widely used. Consequently, I essentially do think of the internet as a 'place', or least I imagine that an MRI scan would see the same area of my brain lighting up. And why not? It's infinitely more democratised, instantaneous and ubiquitous than any other prior communication medium. Which, at least in my subconscious, makes me think of it as closer to real life and place than to '0s and 1s on wires and in computers' in the same way I think about real life itself as such, rather than 'matter and energy bumping around in a universe of space-time'.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
For the same reasons, the Slashdot category of "your rights online" is equally stupid. Last I checked, "online" is not a nation or city state with its own legal code defining any actual rights.
What I really learned from this submission is that:
1) Salon still exists and, apparently, people read it?
2) This "Lind" guy was desperate for something to write an article about, at the last minute.
"Cyberpace" is a metaphor. Used as such, it is sometimes useful, but, like all metaphors, it can be misleading if taken as a literal description; the internet is obvious not a literal physical place.
Is "cyberspace" a stupid term? No. Is it sometimes used stupidly? Yes.
Obviously, none of the metaphors that come to mind when we are talking about a conventional "space" apply when you're talking about communications and networking. It's a different concept entirely.
He says that analogizing cyberspace as a real place leads to an inability to think logically about laws, rules, and how and when the governments could or should intervene to regulate the Internet.
So what he says is that if you stop using certain words, it becomes harder to think about things in ways that the author doesn't like. This is a classical Orwellian exercise.
Actually, cyberspace exists - just like many other intangibles exist. The reason we're Homo sapiens rather than some other primate is precisely because of our ability to work with intangibles. Some sophomoric selective limitation of this ability which suits a partiuclar belief system isn't going to make it go away.
Guys, how is this any different than "cloud" computing, or "cluster" computing, or pretty much the overwhelming majority of technical terms. Zip, unzip, explode, compress... yes, if I stopped and thought about it, I'd probably consider it perverted. And cloud computing doesn't mean we're all hovering above our cubes playing magical harps. Getting hungup on terminology is neither productive nor interesting.
The term "cyberspace" may be stupid, but it refers to something that is very real: The internet may just be a collection of wires, boxes with circuit boards in it, and a lot of ones and zeroes, but that is not how people look at it, anymore than they look at their car as a collection of fiberglass, steel bolts, and rubber. And the problems of the digital world aren't terribly hard to comprehend, nor do most of them require radical change in how we think about it.
Those of us under the age of 40 can conceptualize this "brave new world" quite well, and make moral and ethical decisions about it. Most of us understand and agree that privacy is a right, online and off. We may disagree about the particulars, but not the substance. Same with file sharing: Most of us are against people "pirating" for profit, but likewise have little objection to Joe Average maintaining his own personal collection of downloaded music and movies. This isn't hard for us to understand.
However, for people who grew up without computers, and are reluctant to embrace them, and still carry around Nokia phones from ten years ago because it's "more like a phone"... well, those people are more easily swayed by certain wealthy interests to look at it as a confusing and nebulous thing, and turn to said interests for guidance. Afterall... if you're rich, you must have done something right. There is a disconnect between our legislators (most of whom are 50+ years of age) and the general population (median age: 35).
The problems of "cyberspace" actually has nothing to do with technology: It has to do with people. Specifically, old people. Boomers. These people have taken an unwarranted familiarity with the technology and made bad decision after bad decision, institutionalizing ignorance and stupidity because that's what they were told to do. And that, really, is the only problem here.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Wait until we have Virtual Reality and ask again. Other than that, we still use a bunch of webpages and instant messaging protocols which do not make a place, in my opinion. Of course, you could argue that anything done with virtual reality amounts to data traveling between a client-server or multiple-peers and then being interpreted by the engine. However, starting this discussion does call for entering into technical details of how the Internet/Cyberspace works, what is the Cyberspace, what is the definition of place, etc. Or then we might as well say the Internet is a series of tubes and be done with it.
I don't care if I'm wrong. I only care about everyone obtaining something from the discussion.
the electronic FRONTIER foundation.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
It occurs to me that the concept of "Cyberspace" is not too distant from the concept of a soul in the individual. The soul seems to have originated, and continues to be accepted as a valid metaphysical concept, because we do not want to believe in ourselves as merely the firing of synapses in the brain. We want to believe that there is more going on there, something that supersedes those physical boundaries and makes us more than that. Thus, we think of the soul as a real thing, even as it's directly linked to our brains in some way. Thinking of Cyberspace as being more than the a mere collection of the computers, pathways between then, and signals being sent, is very similar. We seem to want to think of the Internet as more than the merely the the sum of those parts. Where the analogy breaks down of course, is that unlike the human brain, there is nothing we do not know about how the Internet functions. As such, it seems to me like the author is right, and we really should be taking a physicalist approach in order to have a meaningful conversation: The Internet really is merely the sum of it's parts, and nothing more. There is no "Cyberspace," it is a metaphysical mistake to think there is one, and it is a result of the way we use our language that lends credence to the concept.
Cloud is another example of the same. Read vendor's ad's replacing the word "cloud" with "service center" or "network" as appropriate and watch the magic go away. Read it to your boss and see his common sense come back online (unless, of course, you are being paid big bucks for the magic, then hide this and run away! run away!)
This is a problem with all names with a kind of non-uniqueness. The moment you use a common word (like space) to describe an idea or concept, you limit the mental map. For example, I find that using the word "saved" in a religious context limiting for the same reason. "Saved" in generally a good thing. So you start thinking the alternative (not being saved by religion) as bad.
As for the laws, we already have something I consider similar: the European Union. A region without real political unification, but with a sort of economic unification to allow free transport of goods, services, and capital. Which is kind of like `cyberspace', except information is included instead of goods (I'm not sure what the current status of the European Union Copyright Law is).
I know that the analogy goes back to a 'spatial' interpretation, but calling it the cloud or cyberworld or cyber-dimension (which might be another good way to think of it?) would bring similar problems in restricting our mental map of things.
Basing a critique of a term on its earliest use is beyond ludicrous. The concept of cyberspace is with us because we needed it and couldn't find anything better to define the phenomenon. Smart people well versed in the matter have debated this very point for a long time and we haven't yet found a more apt or useful word to explain the body of communication that traverses the Internet but is not limited to its technology. It is not the virtual reality dream of yesterday but it is a real environment with properties that differ from other realms. The idea of theft must redefined where taking something of value does not deprive the owner of its use. The impact of intrusion, harassment, and contraband all change in this arena of continual communication. Mr Lind seems to believe that the Internet is owned by governments and the have the ability to control it in much the same way they control traffic. We need the word cyberspace so that countries can seperate the laws for the Internet so that they can be uniform globally, not clouded by local legal systems. Each country trying to do it on their own is why we are in this mess. No country can regulate the Internet but by creating a common operating environment it can regulate itself.
I have hated the term cyberspace ever since I first heard it applied to the Internet. There is no place in space that IS cyberspace. Of course if cyberspace doesn't exist then Cybercrime can't exist either. There can not be a crime that can only happen in a place that doesn't really exist. Of course all of the crimes that are thought of as cybercrimes are really just ordinary crimes done using a new technology. Stealing 10,000 social security numbers to commit identity theft is just a technological variant on a type of fraud that has been around for centuries. Obtaining copyrighted content over the Internet, becomes as it should always have been, a civil matter of copyright infringement and not called piracy which can again apply to taking over a physical vessel, whether on land, sea or air, but not in a place that doesn't really exist.
Unfortunately the concept of doing something that has been done for decades (think of scheduled deliveries of milk) becomes a new and patentable thing when done on a computer or over the Internet. That is the kind of thing that happens when people think of cyberspace as a real place and somehow a different place.
When a bunch of rebels and outcasts when searching for gold, and good soil in the new world, it was cheered until it was found that some of them saw this as an oppertunity to do away with the cruel, tiered, hiearchial system of europe, and all its entitlements and entrapments.
Then a bunch of kings, princes, dukes, and their beneficiaries found about how there rules, titles and privledges where simply ignored in this "new world", they decided to let people know that that just because they are on the other side of the world, there powers, and hierarchies still exist awnd apply.
On a serious note, this concept of cyber space as a physical space never existed. There are, however decades of communities, with their own cultures that formed independantly of the TV culture of the time, and there have been unwritten rules about the internet.
The situation is the same, titleholders, owners, and the others who stat back while everyone else developed online, did nothing, but are now demanding controll of the internet, to make it an extension of the dull, boring, distraught, mainstream most of us sought to get away from 20 years prior. They also mean to press their statutory hierachy, in place of what used to be a meritocracy, destroying everything beautiful of the internet, and condemning us all to the same backwards, corrupt, dogmatic line of thinking the outside world uses
I wasn't born in Cyberspace, even if I remember using 110 baud modems on ARPANET.
But I was born in Texas.
The main question is: Did the Internet exist before we turned it on?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
It's a big NO. The concept of cyberspace is not stupid. It's some people's understanding of it that is. As is the concept in some undeveloped minds that a "hacker" is a term for cyber-locksmith instead of cyber-craftsman. Eastasians alltime unknow and badsay words.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
The US military won't stop using "cyber" and "cyberspace." It's super embarrassing.
"....how and when the governments could or should intervene to regulate the Internet" -- dumbest concept I see.
Mod parent up!
I agree, and I have tried to simplify my explanation of this concept for years. I started in database management and telecom and I use to be a computer design prof.
"Somebody else's computer" is exactly what is happening. The 'internet' is a system of networked (or 'internetworked') computers. The internet allows the computers to communicate information.
I always understood networked computers as just a really, really big mainframe spread across rooms in different cities. It helped with learning network engineering alot...but thinking my way makes you hate the way things like CSS work.
Thank you Dave Raggett
I have been saying this for decades. Yes, since even before the internet became popular. Since I was dialing up at 300 baud on a pay-phone in the barracks to get on bulletin boards with my TRS-80 Model 100. The internet is nothing more than a means of communication. Did people claim to be doing things in "phone space" when they first started using the telephone? (And they did some pretty interesting things with phones, like pipe concerts to whole towns at once.) Did people claim to be doing things in "Paper Space" when they first started writing letters back and forth? What about "telegraph space" or "radio space"? Seriously?
When you order something "in cyberspace" it is nothing more than another way to do mail order. Easier and faster, yes. But fundamentally no different. If you insult someone "in cyberspace" it is no different from picking up a party-line-telephone and cussing at whoever happens to be talking at the time. You are still insulting a real freaking person.
All the same laws should apply and DO apply. Pretending that "cyberspace" is an entirely different realm is just marketing speak made up by techno-hippies who wanted to get away with breaking the law. Now, a lot of the existing laws may suck. But claiming to be "in cyberspace" doesn't get you away from the suckyness. It just lets you pretend and rationalize until someone comes knocking on your very real door.
Lind treats countries and legal jurisdictions as "real," but says "there is no such place as cyberspace." It's a specious argument. A space is not the same as a place. I don't think mathematicians confuse the spaces they talk about with places. Geographer Manuel Castells, in his influential book series The Information Age, wrote about the conflict between "space of flows" - of networked finance, data and communication - and contrasted it with the "space of places" - physical locations where people live.
To be fair, Lind seems to be arguing tha cyberspace is not like a physical territory. The metaphor of cyberspace, by implying that it is, supports misleading conclusions. This is a reasonable argument. Metaphors are useful for description, but they are not predictive - though many people, journalists among them, take them too far. Lind is right that governments already have jursidiction over people acting on the Internet, though as others Slashdot commenters point out the Internet has raised numerous jurisdictional questions. However, we could not name or understand anything new if we did not compare it with something already known. I don't think the imperfection of a metaphor is sufficient grounds for discarding it.
But the motivation of the argument, it seems to me, is political. He writes: "it makes no sense to say that California and the U.S. are extending their jurisdiction 'into' cyberspace . . . The idea that corporations are 'invading' a mythical Oz-like kingdom called cyberspace is . . . dopey." I don't know about that. Scholars often use the language of colonization in cases like this. We could talk about government "invasion" into private or family space. Canada's then-justice minister Pierre Trudeau used a spatial metaphor when he said in 1967, upon the introduction of a bill to decriminalize homosexuality, "there's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation."
He takes it for granted that these comparisons are reasonable. I don't think they are. I don't hear anyone talking about a "fax" community or a "telephone" community. But people do talk about an "Internet community," an "Internet generation" (more questionable in my mind) - even of belonging to an online "tribe". The Aaron Swartz memorial site is full of such statements. Note also the big-I: the Internet is a proper noun (even he spells it that way).
Benedict Anderson wrote Imagined Communities about the formation of new nations, such as Indonesia, following decolonization. He explains how arbitrary colonial lines drawn on a map gave rise to real feelings of national identity among people who did not know each other: but who had a sense that they had shared histories and experiences. I think the Internet has produced some similar feelings. I don't think Lind's argument is entirely clear, but it seems to me this is what he is really arguing against. But that's a judgment of what should be. Disguising it as an objective description of the Internet is problematic.
Or hey, just read China Mieville's The City and the City.
You first-posted yourself some karma, Mitreya (at least for a moment), but as long as you use readily use similar devices, like "deskspace" and "screen real estate" and "folders" and "directory trees", you might want to reflect a little more before you say something as ridiculous as "the concept of "Cyberspace" is quite stupid". It's no less a troll than "people who use perl are stupid". Worse, I'll hazard a guess that you use the term "the Cloud" several times a day [note: I'm profiling here]
Now, if you want to say, as the writer of the Salon article at least tried to say, that "people have used the concept of "Cyberspace" in stupid ways", that might at least be a little bit defensible (if you gave sufficient evidence).
Where's mod points when you need it?
The concept of a "space" is widely used in many science disciplines, especially on the more abstract concepts, e.g. phase space, Hilbert space, address space, etc. But of course, any fool can use them in stupid ways such as writing fictions where people "enter" them (anyone who knew what a phase space is will see how silly it is to say it can be "entered", double bonus for quoting a novel with people entering an address space).
The concept of "Cyberspace" is no different. We mentally used that concept of a "space" every time we used the term "log in" or "log out" of a remote system. We talked about "going" from one node/server to another in online games, have terms like "server hopping", or even the most common usage of "surfing the web" (yuck!). All of them used the metaphor of a "space" to refer to computers connected to a network.
The concept of a space is not stupid, it is how people used it that is stupid.
Oliver.
I think that for a time "cyberspace" really was a different realm. It was not a commercial venture in the early days; it was more like a research project that escaped the bounds of academia and the military. The .com TLD was vastly outnumbered by .edu and .mil. The first commercial Usenet spam provoked alarm and outrage, and the first advertising banners on the Web were seen as an unwelcome exploitation of a public resource. Due to its immediacy, richness, interconnectedness, and interactive nature, it really did feel like a separate "space" back then, as opposed to paper, telegraph, or radio.
The posted article comes across as a diatribe by an industry frustrated that they haven't completely taken over and owned this new space yet despite over a decade of their best efforts. They probably will eventually anyway, as most pockets of freedom succumb, so the tone of the article seems strangely vindictive. Yet I and others still entertain a nostalgia for the original dream of an open, creative, peer-to-peer interconnected network unmediated by the demands of profit-hungry corporations focused on monetizing their intellectual property and all the personal data they can scoop up and sell to marketers and advertisers.
I support the efforts of organizations such as the EFF and encourage others to do so as well. It's not often that a frontiers like the Web and Internet open up in one's lifetime, and it would be a shame for it to devolve into a slightly better version of the cable TV system.
Cyberspace was created, developed, or fashioned, around 1878. It was the telephone, and when people could use it to project their presence in real time, cyberspace was a thing, concept, or result.
As if you didn't know that already. The Internet was initially not even real-time for human communications. E-mail predates the Internet we think of anyways. Nothing you think you know is that simple.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.