I. History and Philosophy

BOOKS

1) Benedickt, Michael: Cyberspace: First Steps (MIT Press, 1991) A pre-www collection of essays edited by a professor of architecture at the University of Texas; especially valuable are the perspectives on cyberspace as"liquid architectures"

Samples:

"We can define 'space' in phenomenological, operational terms. That is to say, we can talk about how space appears/feels to us and what both space and various conceptions of space are Ôgood for objectively. We can ask: What operations does space permit or deny? What phenomena would be different if space were not constructed in this way or that?" -- Benedickt, "Cyberspace: Some Proposals," page 126

"The city, traditionally the continuous city of cultural and intellectual community, becomes the discontinuous city of cultural and intellectual community." -- Marcos Novak, "Liquid Architectures in Cyberspace," page 225

2)Lanham, Richard:The Electronic Word (University of Chicago: 1993) This is probably the best consideration of the philosophical and rhetorical dimensions of cyberspace.

Samples:

"Print... is a philosophic medium, the electronic screen a deeply 'rhetorical' one."--page xii

"In the digital light of these technologies, the disciplinary boundaries that currently govern academic study of the arts dissolve before our eyes, as do the administrative structures that enshrine them. It is not only the distinction between the creator and the critic that dissolves, but the walls between painting and music and sculpture, music, architecture, and literature. Might not they all, like a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, find a common literary reality as drama?" -- page 13

3) Roszak, Theodore: From Satori to Silicon Valley (Don't Call It Frisco Press, 1986) From a paper delivered at San Francisco State in 1986, Roszak draws out the connections between the "technophile" hippies of the Haight-Ashbury and the rise of the personal computer industry. For Roszak, though, the ideals that originally fueled the counterculture were overwhelmed by the power and the rewards that the mainstream culture could bring to bear on the PC pioneers.

Samples:

"There were those in the ranks of the counterculture who sought to work an odd variation on the futuristic theme. They insisted they could have it both ways: the best of high tech, the best of the Haight-Ashbury lifestyle... together. The technophiliac route forward would lead to a reversionary future... something like a tribal democracy." --page 32

"It was an attractive hope that the high technology of our society might be wrested from the grip of benighted forces and used to restore us to an idyllic natural state. And for a brief moment -- while the music swelled, and the lights flashed, and the dope cast its spell -- it looked like the road forward to many bright spirits... But ultimately -- and really in very short order -- the synthesis crumbled, and the technophiliac values of the counterculture won out. They are, after all, the values of the mainstream and the commanding heights, forces that have proved far more tenacious than most members of the counterculture guessed." -- page 50

4) Standage, Tom: The Victorian Internet (Walker and Company, 1998) A well-told history of the rise of the wired world in the nineteenth century, together with some striking parallels of the radical changes in society and consciousness brought about by telegraph to the transformations wrought by internet of today

Sample:

"Today, we are repeatedly told that we are in the midst of a communications revolution. But the electric telegraph was, in many ways, far more disconcerting for the inhabitants of the time than today's advances are for us." -- page 213

URLS

Arts and Letters Daily: http://www.cybereditions.com/aldaily/
   A splendid collection of links to literary, philosophical, and social analysis sites
The Gutenberg Project: http://sailor.gutenberg.org
   The vast, ongoing effort to put all printed books online
Hobbes Internet Timeline: http://u.cc.utah.edu/history.html
   A detailed chronology of the main historical events in the making of cyberspace

II. The Fine Arts

BOOKS

1) Gelernter, David: Machine Beauty (Basic Books, 1998) Gelernter has received much publicity as one of the victims of the Unabomber. But the tragedy has worked a good, because Gelernter, a computer scientist at Yale, is an excellent writer with a strong sense of the moral and aesthetic dimensions of digital culture. -- as this passage demonstrates:

Samples:

"The sense of beauty is a tuning fork in the brain that hums when we stumble on something beautiful. We enjoy the resonant hum and seek it out. And when we return numb and weary from a round of shoveling the grim gray snow of life, beauty is the hearth, beauty s the fire, beauty s the cup of coffee (the fragrance, the saucer s clink, the curl of cream) that makes the whole business seem almost worthwhile. Pondering long enough as you sip and life can turn inside out under your gaze like a trick profile, and coffee and hearth become the reason snow exists, and beauty explains the world. Strangely enough, beauty is also a truth-and-rightness meter, and science and technology could not exist without it. Its tuning-fork hum guides scientists toward truth and technologists toward stronger and more useful machines. It leads the way forward." -- page 1

"Microsoft cares about beauty the way clams care about pantyhose." -- page 32

2) Johnson, Steven: Interface Culture (HarperEdge, 1998) An penetrating, well-executed analysis of the glory and the limitations of the metaphors (such as the desktop) that both empower and impede the imagination.

Samples:

"the epic endlessness of the World Wide Web" -- page 42

"Almost without exception, the leading examples of digital sociability didn't require a spatial metaphor to make their communities happen. For the most part, the social fabric of cyberspace is still stitched together by the gossamer thread of text." -- pages 70-71

"Being Digital means being able to reinvent yourself at the click of a mouse." -- page 146

3) Laurel, Brenda: The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design (Addison-Wesley, 1990)  This splendid collection of essays demonstrates that good design principles do not become dated. Not all of the essays here are classics; but enough are to give the book staying power. Laurel's introductions alone are worth the price of admission.

Samples:

"An interface is the contact surface of a thing...A point that's often missed is that the shape of the interface also reflects who is doing what to whom. A doorknob extends toward the user and its qualities are biased toward the hand. In a high-security government office I visited the other day, there was no doorknob at all. I was screened by a hidden camera and the door opened for me when I passed muster. My sense of who was in control of the interaction was quite different from the way I feel when I enter a room in my house. In the office, the door -- representing the institution to which it was a portal -- was in control." -- page xii

"The Phoenician alphabet was invented as a way of hiding information from Greek traders and other rivals. Whenever I see that alphabet on a keyboard, I see a phalanx of Phoenician soldiers facing me. You can see the look of triumph on the face of a DOS wizard when his fingers rapidly tap in some long string of alphabetic commands. Those DOS wizards often smile, secretly, because they are demonstrating their arcane power to manage the secret commands. The mouse is a guerilla device, an end-run around the Phoenician guardians of the code. Nonprogrammers can approach the holy of holies that was originally created for the exclusive use of the programming priesthood." -- Timothy Leary, "The Interpersonal, Interactive, Interdimensional Interface," page 232

4) Norman, Donald: The Invisible Computer (MIT Press, 1998) Norman takes a stern, bottom line approach to the computer world. Quality, genius, personal sacrifice -- nothing matters but big sales figures and crushing the competition by "giving customers what they want." To this end, he proposes that the computer industry is currently in a sad state of disarray, unaware that its true maturity lies in the direction of "information appliances."

Samples:

"This is the important lesson about infrastructure technologies. It doesn't matter whether or not your technology is superior; it only matters that what is being offered is good enough for the purpose. If you lead the marketplace in sales, it is permissible to use a nonstandard infrastructure. After all, if you have the majority of customers, then what you do becomes the standard. Your competitors have little choice but to follow. If you are not the leader, then having non-standard infrastructure is a bad idea. Ultimately, it leads to extinction." -- page 13

"Engineers often resent the influence of marketing. They feel that marketing people do not understand the technology and that their lists ask for outrageous things. In turn, marketing may feel that the engineers don t understand the needs of the customers, that they simply want to build neat gadgets, regardless of market needs." -- page 37

URLS

Balthaser Studios: http://www.balthaser.com/home.html
Virtuoso Flash site
BayCHI: http://www.baychi.org/index.html
   The San Francisco Bay Area Computer/Human Interface group
Gabocorp: http://www.gabocorp.com/
   A splendid site for showing "state of the art" multimedia web design
Matinee: http://www.matinee.co.uk/fr_nmd.htm
   Another showcase multimedia website

III. Literature

BOOKS

1) Anthony, Piers: Killobyte (Ace/Putnam, 1993) A disabled policeman and a love-wounded diabetic become trapped in a virtual reality -- rousing action and imaginative implications of living out fantasies in cyberspace.

Sample:

"Well, one thing the Killobyte game had done was give her some fleeting objectivity about this dreary alternative realm that was reality. For the moment, she could review her situation, maybe without breaking up into emotional goo. So now was the ime to get it straight. Maybe it would give her a more specific notion of what she really wanted in the game, or out of it." -- page 27

2) Brownrigg, Sylvia: The Metaphysical Touch (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998) Brownrigg's tale is like the movie You've Got Mail but with far more depth of character motives and the implications of anonymous communication.

Sample:

" I do know how self-indulgent this is, by the way. Writing and posting all this, treating the world on the Net like it's my therapist." -- page 19

"Ontologically, e-mail is not in any recognizable category: neither voice nor paper, neither pure mind nor pure matter."

3) Gibson, William: Neuromancer (Ace Books, 1984) The first, and still the definitive cyberpunk novel: bleakly dystopian and wired cool

Samples:

"He'd operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix." -- page 5

"The drug his him like an express train, a white-hot column of light mounting his spine from the region of his prostate, illuminating the sutures of his skull with x-rays of short-circuited sexual energy. His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol. His bones, beneath the hazy envelope of flesh, were chromed and polished, the joints lubricated with a film of silicone. Sandstorms raged across the scoured floor of his skull, generating waves of high thin static that broke behind his eyes, spheres of purest crystal, expanding..." -- page 154

4) Murray, Janet: Hamlet on the Holodeck (MIT Press, 1997) A very thorough examination of the new possibilities for storytelling in Digital Culture, along with some bold speculations about possible future directions.

Samples

"To me... the computer looks more each day like the movie camera of the 1890s: a truly revolutionary invention humankind is just on the verge of putting to use as a spellbinding storyteller." -- page 2

"For my experience in humanities computing has convinced me that some kinds of knowledge can be better represented in digital formats than they have been in print. The knowledge of a foreign language, for instance, can be better conveyed with examples from multiple speakers in authentic environments than with lists of words on a page. The dramatic power of HamletÕs soliloquies is better illustrated by multiple performance examples in juxtaposition with the text than by the printed version alone. Discussions of film art make more sense when they are grounded by excerpted scenes from the movies being discussed." -- page 6

"In electronic narrative the procedural author is like a choreographer who supplies the rhythms, the context, and the set of steps that will be performed. The interactor, whether as navigator, protagonist, explorer or builder, makes use of this repertoire of possible steps and rhythms to improvise a particular dance among the many, many possible dance the author has enabled." -- page 153

5) Stephenson, Neal: Snow Crash (1993) One of the two (along with Gibson's Neuromancer) foundation novels of cyberpunk fiction

Sample:

"The old central neighborhoods are packed in tight below an eternal, organic haze. In other cities, you breathe industrial contaminants, but in L.A., you breathe amino acids. The hazy sprawl is ringed and netted with glowing lines, like hot wires in a toaster. At the outlet of the canyon, it comes close enough that the light sharpens and breaks up into stars, arches, glowing letters. Streams of red and white corpuscles throb down highways to the fuzzy logic of intelligent traffic lights. Farther away, spreading across the basin, a million sprightly logos smear into solid arcs, like geometric points merging into curves. To either side of the franchise ghettos, the loglo dwindles across a few shallow layers of development and into a surrounding dimness that is burst here and there by a blaze of a security spotlight in someone's backyard."

6) Vinge, Vernor: True Names (out of print, alas) The most visionary and well-crafted tale of the Net, written in 1987, well before the rise of digital culture; the implications for issues of privacy versus governmental intrusion, personal identity in cyberspace side by side with "real life" identity outside, and even the essential character of all of cyberspace, are explored with gifted insight by Vinge

Samples:

"In the once-upon-a-time days of the First Age of Magic, the prudent sorcerer regarded his own true name as his most valued possession but also as the greatest threat to his continued good health , for -- the stories go -- once an enemy, even a weak unskilled enemy, learned the sorcerer s true name, then routine and widely known spells could destroy or enslave even the most powerful..."

"The first hint Mr. Slippery had that his own True Name might be known -- and, for that matter, known to the Great Enemy -- came with the appearance of two black Lincolns humming up the long dirt driveway that stretched though the dripping pine forest down to Road 29."

URLS

The Spot: http://www.thespot.com/
   A web soap opera? If you like the idea, this one is worth a visit.
BayMOO: telnet baymoo.sfsu.edu 8888
   An all-text virtual reality on the Net with some very imaginative features
Storyspace: http://www.eastgate.com/Storyspace.html
   A classic nonlinear narrative site (discussed in Hamlet on the Holodeck)

IV. Metaphysics

BOOKS

1) Dyson, George: Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence (Addison-Wesley, 1997) Like Kevin Kelly, Dyson sees the merging of the computer and the human race as the major event of the coming millennium. His discussions of the byways of the history of the theory of evolution (Erasmus Darwin, Samuel Butler, Lamarck) might seem eccentric, but, combined with his ideas of computer processing and network theory, they all add up to a coherent vision of the meaning of evolution.

Samples:

"Everything that human beings are doing to make it easier to operate computer networks is at the same time, but for different reasons, making it easier for computer networks to operate human beings." Page 10

"If bandwidth begins to match the internal processing power of the individual nodes in a communications network, individuality begins to merge. Since human beings (usually) think at a higher speed than that at which they communicate, the situation does not occur in human society, though hints of it may be found in certain ritual activities in which thoughts are synchronized through music or dance and communication between individuals is speeded up." -- pages 203-204

"Coding and processing, like matter and energy in conventional physics, are related manifestations of an underlying field. This computational field is observed and measured in bits. A bit is the fundamental unit of information -- the difference between two discernible alternatives, perceived as change or choice. The computational universe of time and space in which we live intersect by means of two kinds of bits: bits that represent a difference between two things at the same time; and bits that represent a difference between one thing at two different times. "The power of computers -- whether the strictly regulated machinations of a Turing machine or the amorphous intelligence residing in our heads -- derives from their ability to form maps between sequence, arranged in time, and structure, arranged in space. Memory and recall, no matter what their form, are translations between these two species of bits. 'Memory locations,' according to Danny Hillis, "are just wires turned sideways in time.' In this correspondence between sequence and structure lies the basis not only of computation and memory, but also of organic life, based on the translation of sequences (nucleotides) into structures (proteins), with natural selection the mechanism for debugging the source code and translating improvements back from the structure of the organism to the sequence of its genes. Computers are speeding the process up." -- page 216

2) Kelly, Kevin:Out of Control (Addison- Wesley, 1994) Kelly is the executive editor of Wired magazine, and his own style attempts, in more measured terms, to capture in prose the visionary quality that the magazine attempts to evoke with print multimedia. Kelly's most recent work, New Rules for the New Economy, attempts to formulate some strategies for doing business in a wired world

Sample:

"The Atom is the icon of 20th century science... "The popular symbol of the Atom is stark: a black dot encircled by the hairline orbits of several other dots. The Atom whirls alone, the epitome of singleness. It is the metaphor for individuality: atomic. It is the irreducible seat of strength. The Atom stands for power and knowledge and certainty. It is as dependable as a circle, as regular as round...
"The internal circles of the Atom mirror the cosmos, at once a law-abiding nucleus of energy, and at the same time the concentric heavenly spheres spinning in the galaxy. In the center is the animus, the It, the life force, holding all to their appropriate whirling stations. The symbolic Atoms sure orbits and definite interstices represent the understanding of the universe made known. The Atom conveys the naked power of simplicity. "The Atom is the past. The symbol of science for the next century is the dynamical Net.
"The Net icon has no center-it is a bunch of dots connected to other dots-a cobweb of arrows pouring into each other, squirming together like a nest of snakes, the restless image fading at indeterminate edges. The Net is the archetype-always the same picture-displayed to represent all circuits, all intelligence, all interdependence, all things economic and social and ecological, all communications, all democracy, all groups, all large systems. The icon is slippery, ensnaring the unwary in its paradox of no beginning, no end, no center. Or, all beginning, all end, pure center. It is related to the Knot. Buried in its apparent disorder is a winding truth. Unraveling it requires heroism." -- pages 25-26

3) Kurzweil, Ray: The Age of Spiritual Machines (Viking, 1999)

4) Levy, Steven: Artificial Life (Vintage Books, 1992) Perhaps the finest journalist of technology now writing This is the best comprehensive overview of the attempts to create life in silico: not artificial intelligences or robots, but software viruses that manifest some, or perhaps all, of the traits of carbon-based life

Samples:

"Life is a property of the organization of matter, rather than a property of the matter which is so organized." -- Chris Langton (in Levy, page 118)

"Could animals made of information encourage the sort of conceptual flexibility that regarded living organisms as a subset of machines? In order to do so, one would have to do away, totally, with the preconception that corporeal form is a precondition for aliveness." -- page 117

5) Resnick, Mitchell:Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds (MIT Press, 1994) the first and last sections of the book contain some sweeping speculations about the coming of decentralized thinking -- a common theme of MIT Media Lab faculty. The central sections are a mixture of StarLogo programming notes and anecdotes (such as studying termites and traffic jams by computer simulation); and unless readers are involved in LOGO already, this part of the book might seem tedious.

Samples:

"The major challenge for educators and educational developers, then, is to create tools and environments that engage learners in construction, invention, and experimentation. This process involves (at least) two levels of design: educators need to design things that allow students to design things." -- page 24

"The gut attraction to decentralized phenomena can be seen in the wild popularity of 'the wave' at sporting arenas. The wave is formed by spectators themselves, as they stand up and sit down at the appropriate times. Everyone participates. People stand up at their seats when the waves reaches them, then sit down at it sweeps past. There is no conductor or choreographer for the wave. No one is in charge. The wave is a rare opportunity for people to create and participate in a self-organizing phenomenon." -- page 131

URLS

Atlases of Cyberspace: http://www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/casa/martin/atlas/atlas.html
   An amazing collection of visualizations of cyberspace. Recommended!
The Santa Fe Institute: http://netra.exploratorium.edu/complexity/CompLexicon/santafe.html
   The center for research on artificial life
The Game of Life: http://www.yahoo.ca/Science/Artificial_Life/Conway_s_Game_of_Life
   The classic implementation of lifelike behavior in silicon

V. Society

BOOKS

1) Bennahum, David: Extra Life (Basic Books, 1998) A story of growing up in New York in the 1970s and 1980s, and the complex interaction between computers, divorced parents, burgeoning sexuality and teenage rivalries

Samples:

"Throughout history toys prepared children for the future by allowing them to imitate adults. Children fought fires, built houses, sailed ships, saved lives. Toys reflected the values of the time. Our toys were different. For what future were they preparing us? What role were they teaching us to play? Ours was the first generation to have toys that bore little relation to the world of adults, or reality on this planet. They came from a galaxy far, far away... My future was not here, it was somewhere out there..." -- page 24

"I could tell my dad wanted to sit down at the machine, but this was my territory. I was better than them at something -- better than adults. I didn't understand that was why I was so happy -- that they couldn't do this and I could." -- page 76

"The Macintosh marked the arrival of the Power User, the rise of the computer-literate autodidact who "knows" how computers work. It also changed the way people learned about computers. Where once learning meant teaching children how to program, the new breed of machine spawned a new curriculum that taught them how to use software. The Macintosh unleashed a torrent of product placements in the classroom, a fantastic boondoggle in which a new generation would grow up "learning" computers through a peculiar form of teaching: hand-on introduction to commercial software, during class time, at school. Lost was the idea of hands-on access to the way the machine worked and a curriculum rooted in collaborative programming." -- page 213

2) Hafner, Katie and Markoff, John: Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier (Simon and Schuster, 1991) Though public fascination with outlaw crackers and phreaks has faded in recent years, there was a time when their exploits were front page news. This well-documented account focuses on the careers of three of the most notorious abusers of the networks -- though there are a number of interesting sidebar tales as well.

Sample:

"While in Washington, Susan got a chance to demonstrate her 'social engineering' skills. As Susan later told the story, a team of military brass -- colonels and generals from three service branches -- sat at a long conference table with a computer terminal, a modem and a telephone. When Susan entered the room, they handed her a sealed envelope containing the name of a computer system and told her to use any abilities or resources that she had to get into that system. Without missing a bet, she she logged on to an easily accessible military computer directory to find out where the computer system was. Once she found the system in the directory, she could see what operating system it ran and the name of the officer in charge of that machine. Next, she called the base and put her knowledge of military terminology to work to find out who the commanding officer was at the SCIF, a secret compartmentalized information facility. Oh, yes, Major Hastings. She was chatty, even kittenish,. Casually, she told the person she was talking to that she couldn't think of Major Hastings's secretary's name. 'Oh,' came the reply, 'You mean Specialist Buchanan.' With that, she called the data center and, switching from nonchalant to authoritative, said, 'This is Specialist Buchanan calling on behalf of Major Hastings. He's been trying to access his account on this system and hasn't been able to get through, and he'd like to know why.' When the data center operator balked and started reciting from the procedures manual, her temper flared and her voice dropped in pitch. 'Okay, look, I'm not going to screw around here. What is your name, rank and serial number? Within twenty minutes she had what she later claimed was classified data up on the screen of the computer on the table. A colonel rose from his seat, said, 'That will be enough, thank you very much.' and pulled the plug." -- page 60

3) Lessig, Lawrence: Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (Basic Books: 1999) A Harvard Law Professor turned to the vision of the Framers of the Constitution and to the very nature of computer code to find the hope for both freedom and order in cyberspace.

Samples:

"We are just beginning to see why the architecture of the space matters -- in particular, why the ownership of that architecture matters. If the code of cyberspace is owned (in the sense that I describe in this book), it can be controlled; if it is not owned, control is much more difficult. The lack of ownership, the absence of property, the inability to direct how ideas will be used -- in a word, the presence of a commons -- is the key to limiting, or checking, certain forms of governmental control." -- page 7

"What does it mean to live in a world where problems can be programmed away? And when, in that world, should we program problems away? -- page 13

"Cyberspace will not take care of itself. Its nature is not given. Its nature is its code, and its code is changing from a place that disabled control to a place that will enable an extraordinary kind of control. Commerce is making that happen; government will help. Before this happens, we should decide whether this is the way we want things to be." -- page 61

3) Levy, Steven: Insanely Great (Penguin Books, 1994) The story -- biographical, technical, social, and philosophical -- of "the most important consumer product in the last half of the twentieth century" (page 7)

Samples:

"It was [Doug] Engelbart who devised the first tools to propel one through cyberspace. Best known is the mouse. An odd companion to a keyboard -- because its purpose was something that could not possibly have been envisioned until Engelbart had constructed his system -- it would be used to reach into and manipulate a world constructed only of information. The requirement was that this task had to be so smoothly integrated into the overall system that people would not even realize that they had jammed their hand into the Phantom Zone." -- page 40

"You can have your Lufthansa Heist, your Great Train Robbery, your Crown Heights Caper, and your Brinks Job. For my money, the slickest trick of all was Apple s daylight raid on the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center." -- page 77

4) Negroponte, Nicholas: Being Digital (Alfred A. Knopf, 1995) This book is really a collection of essays on a variety of subjects, many of them speculative. As the founding director of M.I.T.'s famous Media lab, Negroponte draws on a life of intimate experience with digital culture and design for his meditations.

Samples:

   "Think of the capacity of fiber as if it were infinite. We literally do not know how many bits pre second we can send down a fiber. Recent research results indicate that we are close to being able to deliver 1,000 billion bits per second. This means that a fiber the size of a human hair can deliver every issue ever made of the Wall Street Journal in less than one second. Transmitting data at that speed, a fiber can deliver a million channels of television concurrently -- roughly two hundred thousand times faster than twisted pair. That's a big jump. And mind you, I am talking about a single fiber, so if you want more, you just make more. It is, after all, just sand. -- page 23

   "Television networks and computer networks are almost the opposite of each other. A television network is a distribution hierarchy with a source (where the signal comes from) and many homogeneous sinks (where the signals go to).
   "Computer networks, on the other and, are a lattice of heterogeneous processors, any one of which can act both as source and sink. The two are so totally different from each other that their designers don't even speak the same language. The rationale of the one is abbots logical to the other as Islamic fundamentalism is to an Italian Catholic.
   "For example, when you send email over the Internet the message is decomposed into packets and given headers with an address, and pieces are sent over a variety of different paths, through a variety of intermediate processors, which strip off and add other header information and then, quite magically, reorder and assemble the message at the other end. The reason that this works at all is that each packet has those bits-about-bits and each processor has the means to pull out information about the message from the message itself.
   "When video engineers approached digital television they took no lessons from computer network design. They ignored the flexibility of heterogeneous systems and information-packed headers. Instead, they argued among themselves about resolution, frame rate, aspect ratio, and interlace, rather than let those be variables. .".-- pages 180-181

5) Rheingold, Howard: The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (HarperPerennial, 1994) This classic study of community in cyberspace needs updating — what has become of those communities since the years have past? — but Rheingold's observations and assessments still make for thoughtful reading.

Samples:

" 'The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.' " --John Gilmore, quoted on page 7

"We [the founders of the WELL, an early, all-text virtual community] kept concluding that simple, corny, all-powerful love was the only way to make a community work when it is diverse, thus guaranteeing friction, and at the same time committed to free expression, which can and does get out of hand." -- page 53

6) Rochlin, Gene: Trapped in the Net: The Unanticipated Consequences of Computerization (Princeton University Press, 1997) The most recent of skeptics of, the nay-sayers to, digital culture and design, following in the traditions of Neil Postman (Technopoly), Theodore Roszak (The Cult of Information), Cliff Stoll (Silicon Snake Oil) and others

Samples:

"Word processing was an interesting task to perform on a computer, but not fundamentally different from what could be done (at least in principle) with whiteout, scissors, and paste." -- page 28

"The ability of users to educate, to communicate, to share, and to find extended networks of other people with the same interests and opinions was and remains unprecedented, even if the quality of that interaction is debatable." -- page 45

7) Rushkoff, Douglas: Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace (HarperSanFrancisco, 1994) The first part of the book contains some radical speculations about the nature of "Cyberia," with a leaning toward Gaia theories of the earth-mind. The last part of the book, though, is heavily anecdotal, and will probably be of interest only to followers of rave culture (especially the Toon Town scene) in San Francisco

Samples:

"Cyberians interpret the development of the datasphere as the hardwiring of the global brain. This is to the the final stage in the development of 'Gaia,' the living being that is the Earth, for which humans serve as the neurons... Evolution is seen more as a groping toward than a random series of natural selections. Gaia is becoming conscious." -- pages 5 and 82

"The fractal is the emblem of Cyberia. Based on the principles of chaos math, it's an icon, a metaphor, a fashion statement, and a working tool all at the same time. It's at once a highly technical computer-mathematics achievement and a psychedelic vision... Mandelbrot's main insight was to recognize that chaos has an order to it. -- page 21

8) Stoll, Clifford: High Tech Heretic -- Why Computers Don't belong in the Clasroom and Other Reflections by a Computer Contrarian (Doubleday, 1999) -- the title says it all. But Stoll is not a Luddite. He's a scientist who is an expert at programming and using computers and a curmudgeon who has very definite ideas about what they cannot and should not do.

Samples:

"Corporations have found the ideal electronic entryway into the classroom: the perfect way to target kids for cereals, candy bars, and clothes." -- page 8

"The old saw still rings true: What requires the least effort is the least cherished. Yet somwhow we expect a simple, easy, fun digital education to be both lasting and valuable." -- page 22

"What's the cost of computers in the classroom? Around the country, communities float thirty-year bond issues to buy computers which will be obsolete within five years. Wiring a school typically costs thousands of dollars per classroom; and it will have to be redone within a decade, as communications systems evolve. Classroom sfotware has a surprisingly short life, as curriculum, computers, and educational climate change. Then there's the need for technical support -- it's silly to expect English teachers to install and maintain the high school's file servers." -- page 23

"I've invested my life in science and technology. But I'm a skeptic. My questioning grows not from a distate of computing, but rather because I love computers. I worry that the field is mired in hyperbole and overpromotion. The absurd predictions create inflated expectations and ultimately, the loss of credibility" -- page 111

9) Turkle, Sherry: Life on the Screen (Simon and Schuster, 1995) A very suggestive series of case studies of identity, gender, sexuality, artificial intelligence and artificial life, and community in the social dimension of cyberspace

Samples:

"A decade ago, Frederic Jameson wrote a classic article on the meaning of postmodernism. He included in his characterization of postmodernism the preference of surface over depth, of simulation over the 'real,' of play over seriousness, many of the same qualities that characterize the new computer aesthetic," -- page 44

" 'In real life, control is the thing. I know that it is very scary for me to be a woman. I like making my body disappear. In real life that is. On MUDs, too. On the MUD, I m a sort of a woman, but I , not someone you would want to see sexually. My MUD description is a combination of smoke and angles. I like that phrase 'sort of a woman.' I guess that's what I want to be in real life too." -- Anonymous female MUDder, quoted on page 215

URLS

Electric Minds: http://www.minds.com/
   "A worldwide community of conversationalists" founded by Howard Rheingold
Cyborganic: http://www.cyborganic.com/
   A real-life and networked commune in San Francisco
SFRaves: http://www.hyperreal.org/raves/sf/shkindex.html
   "An electronic Virtual community of Ravers"
MEME: http://www.memex.org/welcome.html
David Bennahum's excellent biweekly ezine about cyberspace issues

Back to the cyberspace/Humanities Portal Page