Geography / Internet:
Ethereal Alternate Dimensions of Cyberspace or Grounded Augmented Realities?
Forthcoming (2013) in The Geographic Journal
Mark Graham
Oxford Internet Institute
University of Oxford
www.geospace.co.uk
[email protected]
1
Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2166874
The internet has fundamentally transformed everyday life for over two billion people
around the world. Geographers have had much to say about these changes, and there have
been many productive debates about the relationships between geography and the internet.
However, it remains that geographers have had relatively little influence on broader
debates about the internet in academia, government, and the private sector.
In this commentary, I argue that many of the ways in which we discuss, imagine, and
envision the internet rely on inaccurate and unhelpful spatial metaphors. In particular, the
paper focuses on the usage of the ‘cyberspace’ metaphor and outlines why the reliance by
contemporary policy makers on this inherently geographic metaphor matters. The
metaphor constrains, enables, and structures very distinct ways of imagining the
interactions between people, information, code, and machines through digital networks.
These distinct imaginations, in turn, have real effects on how we enact politics and bring
places into being.
The commentary traces the history of ‘cyberspace,’ explores the scope of its current usage,
and highlights the discursive power of its distinct way of shaping our spatial imagination of
the internet. It then concludes by arguing that Geographers should take the lead in
employing alternate, nuanced, and spatially grounded ways of envisioning the myriad ways
in which the internet mediates social, economic and political experiences.
Cyberspace in popular discourse
“cyberspace is real” - President Barak Obama (2009)
In late 2011, The London Conference on Cyberspace was organised by William Hague and
the UK Foreign Office. The conference, held in the heart of Westminster, brought together
powerful and influential names such as UK Prime Minister David Cameron, US Vice
President Joe Biden, UNDP Head Helen Clark, former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt,
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and many others in order to tackle what even the
organisers admitted was an ambitious goal: "to develop a better collective understanding of
how to protect and preserve the tremendous opportunities that the development of
cyberspace offers us all."
A range of visions were presented for the future of the Internet, but what might interest
2
Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2166874
geographers most was the constant use of the word ‘cyberspace.’ David Cameron
remarked "we can't leave cyberspace wide open to criminals." Joe Biden called it "a new
realm." Russia's Minister for Communications was worried enough that he asked that the
Internet be made to respect borders and state sovereignty. Continuing the use of the spatial
metaphor, Carl Bildt, the former Prime Minister of Sweden, speculated that light would be
brought to even the most hidden corners of the internet by asserting that "there will be no
dark spaces for dark acts any more."
Importantly, the attendees at this conference are not the only contemporary decision
makers to employ the ‘cyberspace’ metaphor1. Fifteen years ago, Graham (1998) already
argued that Internet metaphors like ‘cyberspace’ mask many patterns and practices enacted
and brought into being through the intersections between ICTs and society. But since then,
‘cyberspace’ has not disappeared as a way of describing the Internet and the interactions
that occur through it.
In other words, the term is not solely a relic from an earlier age of the Internet.
‘Cyberspace’ remains present in the ways that many powerful actors talk about, enact, and
regulate the Internet. Governments around the world have policies, laws, and departments
dedicated to regulating ‘cyberspace.’ The United States, for instance, has a Cyber
Command dedicated to ensuring “US/Allied freedom of action in cyberspace and deny the
same to…adversaries.”2 South Korea, China, the United Kingdom, and other countries all
similarly have their own ‘cyber commands’3 (e.g. Sung-ki 2009).
The media in much of the world contains daily stories that make reference to ‘cyberspace,’
and even academics have continued to employ the metaphor as a way of referring to the
internet4. Work grounded in the fields of law5 (e.g. Spinelo 2011), politics (e.g. Bernal
2006 or Deibert and Rohozinski 2010), sociology (e.g. Daniels 2011), education (e.g.
Irving 2011), religion (e.g. Badahdah and Tieman 2009), psychology (Suler 2004), health
1
While the term is perhaps less widely used in the general media and in academia now than it was a decade
ago, it does remain widely employed. Perhaps more importantly though, it is used more than ever in the
public sector and state security services (as illustrated by the very name of the London conference). 2
arcyber.army.mil (accessed Oct 19 2012).
3
News stories about the role of these defense agencies tend to be replete with quotes that build on the
perceived spatiality of the internet. The Wall Street Journal, for instance, recently quoted American General
Keith Alexander as saying that “we do have to establish the lanes of the road" for what governments can and
can't do in cyberspace” (Gorman 2010)
4
I admittedly have even employed the term in my own work until relatively recently.
5
In fact, there is even an entire branch of the study of law termed ‘cyberlaw.’ 3
(e.g. Fernandez et. al. 2007), anthropology (e.g. Carter 2005), and especially geography
(e.g. Couclelis 2009; Devriendt et. al. 2011; Kellerman 2010; Zook and Graham 2007)
continue to use the metaphor.
The spatial metaphor
“[b]ecause metaphors can guide our imagination about a new invention, they influence
what it can be even before it exists” (Stefik 1996, p. xvi in Andrade 2010).
In all of the cases mentioned above (and indeed many others), the idea of 'cyberspace' is
deployed as an inherently geographic metaphor. We know that metaphors reflect, embody,
and, most importantly, reproduce ways of thinking about and conceptualising our world
(Lakoff & Johnson 1980). As Stefik notes: “When we change the metaphors, therefore, we
change how we think about things... The metaphors we use suggest ideas and we absorb
them so quickly that we seldom even notice the metaphor, making much of our
understanding completely unconscious” (Stefik 1996, p. xvi in Andrade 2010).
It is important to point our that even before the coining of the ‘cyberspace’ metaphor,
commentators were speculating that synchronous communication technologies like the
telegraph would bring humanity together in some sort of shared space. For instance, in
1846, in a proposal to connect European and American cities via an Atlantic telegraph, it
was stated that one of the benefits would be the fact that “all of the inhabitants of the earth
would be brought into one intellectual neighbourhood and be at the same time perfectly
freed from those contaminations which might under other circumstances be received”
Marvin 1988, 201). Twelve years later after the completion of the Atlantic telegraph, The
Times proclaimed “the Atlantic is dried up, and we become in reality as well as in wish one
country” (quoted in Standage 1998, 80). In the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan’s philosophy of
media posited a future not too different from proclamations about the power of
communication technologies a century earlier. He noted, “electric circuitry has overthrown
the regime of “time” and “space” and pours upon us instantly and continuously concerns of
all other men. It has reconstituted dialogue on a global scale...“Time” has ceased, “space”
has vanished. We now live in a global village” (McLuhan and Fiore 1967, 63).
But it was almost three decades ago when William Gibson (1984, 51), who coined the term
‘cyberspace,’ defined it as:
4
“A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every
nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data
abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable
complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations
of data. Like city lights, receding.”
John Perry Barlow built on Gibson’s concept in his Declaration of the Independence of
Cyberspace, in which he boldly asserts that “cyberspace does not lie within your borders”
and “ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies
live.” William Mitchell (1996, 8), similarly asserted that the internet is “profoundly
antispatial. . . . You cannot say where it is or describe its memorable shape and
proportions.”
Many of the reasons for the power and prominence of the explicitly spatial metaphor of
‘cyberspace’ are likely borne out of the early days of the internet, when it was
understandably hard not to imagine the network as a portal to another dimension. It was
fully detached from mobile material realities (i.e. access had to occur through clunky fixed
infrastructure), but offered up almost infinite possibilities for information and
communication. For instance, Rey (2012), describing Sterling’s (1992) book on hacker
subculture, argues that the idea of a ‘cyberspace’ was needed by people to make sense of
the space in-between instantaneously and yet non-proximate communications (such as
telephone calls):
“The telephone creates a feeling of cognitive dissonance. How can the other person on the
line be so far and yet seem so near? To overcome this disconnect, we create for ourselves a
little expository travel narrative. We begin to imagine information as occupying space and
then imagine this space as something that can be traversed and experienced, an alternate
geography that provides a new path to reach the other person on the line. And though we
know we are indulging in a fantasy, we can’t help but take it seriously.”
Both the metaphor of ‘cyberspace’ and the distinct social and spatial practices that it
described allowed the virtual to take on an ontic role (Adams 1997; Graham 2011).
'Cyberspace,' in this sense, is conceived of as both an ethereal alternate dimension which is
simultaneously infinite and everywhere (because everyone with an Internet connection can
enter), and as fixed in a distinct location, albeit a non-physical one (because despite being
infinitely accessible all willing participants are thought to arrive into the same
5
marketspace, civic forum, and social space). 'Cyberspace' then becomes Marshal
McLuhan’s (1962) ‘global village.’
The ontic role assigned to ‘cyberspace’6 is likely also reinforced by the grammatical rules
associated with the internet in the English language. Common prepositions associated with
internet use (e.g. to go to a website, or to get on the internet) imply a certain spatiality
associated with the internet. In other words, they imply the need to move to a cyberspace
that is not spatially proximate to the internet user. Similarly, it is common practice to treat
the word “Internet” as proper noun (hence the trend to capitalise the word). In doing so, the
notion of a singular virtual entity or place is reinforced. A combination of a long history of
dualistic philosophy in Western thought (Wertheim 1999), and the reinforcement of the
ontic role applied to ‘cyberspace’ in popular media (e.g. Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash,
films such as The Matrix, or the famous Dave Chapelle comedy sketch titled What if the
Internet was a place that you could go to?) all further serve to reinforce these roles.
Such imaginations of ‘cyberspace’ all claim an aspatiality for the collective hallucination
of internet: a disembodied place, but a place nonetheless, paradoxically imbued with
another type of spatiality allowing for a global coming-together of humanity. They give
their imagined ‘cyber-’ space an ontic role. It becomes a fixed and singular, but also an
ethereal and ubiquitous alternate dimension. It is this spatial imagination that has remained
with us in the ‘cyberspace’ metaphor until the present day.
The internet as an abstract space or a network?
“on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” – Peter Steiner (1993)
It is important to point out that we do have many alternate ways of conceptualising
communication and flows of information and knowledge through the internet. A first step
has been to move away from the assumed offline/online dichotomy in research and
descriptions about the social roles of the internet (e.g. see work by Leander and McKim,
2003 or Wilson, 2006). Wakeford (1999, 180), for instance, describes “the overlapping set
6
This is not to deny the fact that “space” has always been a contested and complex term. Kern (2003), for
instance, argues that space is a historical construct and has necessarily evolved concomitantly with other
cultural elements. Sack (1986) demonstrated that space can understood in myriad ways and is an essential
framework for all modes of thought (from art to magic to physics to social science). Space can also be many
things and is far from always described as fixed, homogenous, universal, and coherent. Current thinking in
Geography, in particular, imagines space as relational. In other words, it emerges out of interactions rather
than preceding them. This paper, therefore, recognises that people do not experience a ‘cyberspace’ in the
same way, and that it cannot pre-determine particular ways of bringing spaces into being.
6
of material and imaginary geographies which include, but are not restricted to, on-line
experiences.” Burell’s (2009) nuanced way of describing her fieldwork sites (Ghanian
internet cafés) as networks rather than bounded places, similarly functions as a way of
avoiding assumptions of material proximity or co-presence. In other words, they challenge
the now famous adage that “on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”
Many geographers have also moved away from envisioning the internet as a technology
that can bring into being any sort of detached ‘cyberspace.’ Stephen Graham (1998)
importantly warned against the dangers of employing determinist metaphors of
technological change, and Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin have written extensively about
the intersections between the virtual and the material. They distinguish between
‘code/space’ (in which 'code dominates the production of space') and ‘coded space’ (in
which code is influential, but incidental, to the production of space (Dodge and Kitchin,
2005, 198). This distinction is important specifically because it highlights how technology
can produce or 'transduce' space via continuously “reiterated digital practices that create
space anew” (Wilson 2011).
Information in and communication through the internet can be thought to take place as part
of the many palimpsests (or layers) of place (Graham 2010; Crang 1996). It is also
important to note that the internet has been shown to have distinct spatial biases that
greatly influence possibilities for voice, representation, and communication that are
mediated through the network (Graham and Zook 2011; Crutcher and Zook 2009). These
broad and individualized geographies of enablement and constraint also then shape the
ways that we bring our internet mediated (or augmented) presences into being (Graham et
al. 2012; Graham and Zook 2012).
Ultimately, places can never have ontological security and they are always "of-themoment, brought into being through practices (embodied, social, technical), always remade
every time they are engaged with" (Kitchin and Dodge 2007, 335). Therefore, even if we
did choose to employ a spatial metaphor for online interactions, the singular ‘global
village’ entailed by most popular imaginations of ‘cyberspace’ would remain unsuitable as
a way of imagining the relational and contingent ways that those places are enacted,
practiced, and brought into being. We might of course simply pluralize 'cyberspace' (as we
do with ‘knowledges,’ ‘materialities,’ ‘spatialities,’ ‘genders,’ ‘subjectivities,’
7
‘positionalities,’ etc., but that this doesn't resolve more problematic assumptions that are
mobilized with the word that are addressed in the following section.
Beyond cyberspace
Source: Robert Thompson, The Guardian, Online section, 29 March 2001, page 4. In Dodge (2008, 106)
As noted in the section above, many people have moved beyond the idea of a singular
ontic entity of 'cyberspace' that we can enter into to transcend our material presences, and
recognise the hybrid and augmented ways in which the internet is embedded into our daily
lives. That is probably why few of us imagine a movement into 'cyberspace' when we
access Wikipedia, log into Facebook, send an email, or watch a video on YouTube7. So
why do the global leaders present at the London Conference on Cyberspace, national
defence agencies, and many academics insist on using this term?
The reason is certainly not because ‘cyberspace’ is being thought of as a networked
relational space. The ‘cyberspace’ metaphor is instead almost always applied to an ontic
entity. Rather, I would argue that part of the reason likely can be attributed to the fact that
states, and their representatives and leaders, are naturally concerned with unregulated
activity that is hard to geographically place. When thinking about warfare, hackers,
pornography, fraud, and other threats to the rule of law that pass through the internet, it is
challenging to fully understand the complex geographies of these processes and practices.
7
We probably also don’t imagine a move into ‘physical space’ when we step out the door. But the crucial
difference here is the ‘cyberspace’ has often been held up as an alternate dimension (whereas ‘physical
space’ usually isn’t).
8
It is much easier to imagine that they simply happen 'out there' in Carl Bildt's dark spaces
of the internet.
Another reason is likely the extensive literature on the ‘information revolution’ and the
'networked society.' Most national governments have departments, task forces, plans and
policies set up to address issues of digital exclusion. Because of the existence of the ‘global
village’ ontology of cyberspace, there is often a pollyannaish assumption that once the
material ‘digital divide’ is bridged, the many problems attributed to ‘digital divides’ will
also vanish (Graham 2011). Or, in other words, once people are placed in front of
connected terminals, the ‘digital divide’ becomes bridged and the previously disconnected
are consequently able to enter 'cyberspace.' As such, those without access to 'cyberspace'
and the ‘global village’ are therefore seen to be segregated from the contemporary socioeconomic revolution taking place. This idea of exclusion is powerful8, and some, such as
former US Secretary of State Colin Powell9, and the chief executive of 3Com10, have on
separate occasions gone so far as to term this exclusion “digital apartheid.”
But the most duplicitous explanation is that a dualistic offline/online worldview can
depoliticise and mask the very real and uneven power relationships between different
groups of people. We cannot simply escape what Doreen Massey (1993) aptly terms
‘power-geometries’ by accessing an imagined ‘cyberspace.’ While many people and
projects have demonstrated that the internet can indeed be harnessed to challenge
entrenched economic, cultural and political interests, it remains that it is not a utopian
space that allows us to automatically transcend most of the real and place-based constraints
that we face. This is not to say that ‘virtuality’ cannot provide a site for the alternate
performances that have been so immensely important to queer studies, cyberpunk
literature, and various online social movements. Propositional spaces of possibility and
idealism can be left open by avoiding denials of contingency and recognising that spaces
can be augmented (rather than transcended) with a range of technological mediations.
In contrast to imaginations of a digital global village and an ontic entity of 'cyberspace,'
this paper has argued that there isn’t some sort of universally accessible ‘cyberspace’ that
we are all brought into once we log onto the internet11. The internet is not an abstract space
8
It is also important to point out that it is almost always overstated. Many governments and development
organisations with digital strategies tend to confuse necessary and sufficient conditions.
9
http://www. businessweek.com/adsections/digital/powell.htm (accessed Oct 19 2012).
10
http://news.cnet.com/FCC-cuts- E-rate-funding/2100-1023_3-212239.html (accessed Oct 19 2012). 11
There, of course, isn’t any sort of universally accessible ‘material space.’
9
or digital global village, but rather a network that enables selective connections between
people and information. It is a network that is characterized by highly uneven geographies
and in many ways has simply reinforced global patterns of visibility, representation and
voice that we’re used to in the offline world.
Geographers are well placed (both theoretically and methodologically) to take the lead on
employing more suitable and appropriate ways of talking about, and materializing, the
internet. But, too often, we have lazily employed old and tired metaphors. Imagining the
internet as a distinct, immaterial, ethereal alternate dimension ultimately makes it more
challenging to think through the contingent and grounded ways in which we consume,
enact, communicate and create through the internet. The internet is characterised by
complex spatialities which are challenging to understand and study, but that doesn't give us
an excuse to fall back on unhelpful metaphors which ignore the internet's very real, very
material, and very grounded geographies.
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