explain the variance. Something more is going on.
Here is a test. Read the following passage, and ask yourself whether the description rings true for you:
I believe virtual communities promise to restore to Americans at the end of the twentieth century what many of us feel was lost in the decades at the beginning of the century — a stable sense of community, of place. Ask those who’ve been members of such a virtual community, and they’ll tell you that what happens there is more than an exchange of electronic impulses in the wires. It’s not just virtual barn raising. . . . It’s also the comfort from others that a man like Phil Catalfo of the WELL can experience when he’s up late at night caring for a child suffering from leukemia, and he logs on to the WELL and pours out his anguish and fears. People really do care for each other and fall in love over the Net, just as they do in geographic communities. And that “virtual” connectedness is a real sign of hope in a nation that’s increasingly anxious about the fragmentation of public life and the polarization of interest groups and the alienation of urban existence.[1]
There are two sorts of reactions to talk like this. To those who have been in “cyberspace” for some time, such talk is extremely familiar. These people have been on different kinds of “nets” from the start. They moved to the Internet from more isolated communities — from a local BBS (bulletin board service), or, as Mike Godwin (the author of the passage) puts it, from a “tony” address like The WELL. For them the Net is a space for conversation, connections, and exchange — a wildly promising location for making life in real space different.
But if you are a recent immigrant to this “space” (the old-timers call you “newbies”), or if all you do on the Internet is check your stocks or look up movie times, you are likely to be impatient with talk like this. When people talk about “community”, about special ways to connect, or about the amazing power of this space to alter lives, you are likely to ask, “What is this idea of cyberspace as a place?” For newbies, those who have simply e- mailed or surfed the Web, the “community” of the Net is an odd sort of mysticism. How can anyone think of these pages full of advertisements and spinning icons as a community, or even as a space? To the sober newbie, this just sounds like hype high on java.[2]
Newbies are the silent majority of today’s Net.[3] However much one romanticizes the old days when the Net was a place for conversation and exchange, this is not its function for most of its users now. There are exploding communities of bloggers and creativity. But bloggers are still just 3 percent of Internet users; the vast majority of Internet use has no connection to any ideal of community.
Cyberspace has changed in its feel.[4] How it looks, what you can do there, how you are connected there — all this has changed. Why it has changed is a complicated question — a complete answer to which I can’t provide. Cyberspace has changed in part because the people — who they are, what their interests are — have changed, and in part because the capabilities provided by the space have changed.
But part of the change has to do with the space itself. Communities, exchange, and conversation all flourish in a certain type of space; they are extinguished in a different type of space.[5] My hope is to illuminate the differences between these two environments.
The next sections describe different cyber-places. The aim is to build intuitions about how to think through the differences that we observe. These intuitions, in turn, will help us see something about where cyberspace is moving.
The Values of a Space
Spaces have values.[6] They manifest these values through the practices or lives that they enable or disable. As Mark Stefik puts it:
Barriers within cyberspace — separate chat rooms, intranet gateways, digital envelopes, and other systems to limit access — resemble the effects of national borders, physical boundaries, and distance. Programming determines which people can access which digital objects and which digital objects can interact with other digital objects. How such programming regulates human interactions — and thus modulates change — depends on the choices made.[7]
Choices mean that differently constituted spaces enable and disable differently. This is the first idea to make plain. Here is an example.
At the start of the Internet, communication was through text. Media such as USENET newsgroups, Internet Relay Chat, and e-mail all confined exchange to text — to words on a screen, typed by a person (or so one thought).
The reason for this limitation is fairly obvious: The bandwidth of early Net life was very thin. In an environment where most users connected at 1,200 baud, if they were lucky, graphics and streaming video would have taken an unbearably long time to download, if they downloaded at all. What was needed was an efficient mode of communication — and text is one of the most efficient.[8]
Most think of this fact about the early Net as a limitation. Technically, it was. But this technical description does not exhaust its normative description as an architecture that made possible a certain kind of life. From this perspective, limitations can be features; they can enable as well as disable. And this particular limitation enabled classes of people who were disabled in real-space life.
Think about three such classes — the blind, the deaf, and the “ugly.” In real space these people face an extraordinary array of constraints on their ability to communicate. The blind person in real space is constantly confronted with architectures that presume he can see; he bears an extraordinary cost in retrofitting real-space architectures so that this presumption is not totally exclusionary. The deaf person in real space confronts architectures that presume she can hear; she too bears an extraordinary cost in retrofitting these architectures. The “ugly” person in real space (think of a bar or a social club) confronts architectures of social norms that make his appearance a barrier to a certain sort of intimacy. He endures extraordinary suffering in conforming to these architectures.
In real space these three groups are confronted with architectures that disable them relative to “the rest of us.” But in cyberspace, in its first iteration, they did not.
The blind could easily implement speech programs that read the (by definition machine-readable) text and could respond by typing. Other people on the Net would have no way of knowing that the person typing the message was blind, unless he claimed to be. The blind were equal to the seeing.
