Introduction

When examining most human landscapes, cultural geographers inevitably observe a mixture of the "natural," or given elements, and those that are purely "cultural," or artificial. In the past, they tended to define the "built environment" of buildings, dwellings, and structures as "artificial," and the "given environment" of features such as rivers, hills, and forests as "natural." Today, of course, we know that humankind has never left "wilderness" or "nature" untouched, and beginning in the Neolithic era, we started redirecting the course of rivers, flattening hills, and replacing "native" plant species with "exotic" ones. Thus, cultural geographers are beginning to see the entire landscape as a cultural product - that the human impact on it is not always in terms of obvious artificial impositions. (Hirsch and O'Hanlon 1995.)

I mention this because today humans are busy erecting a new kind of landscape which is totally artificial: what many, following science fiction writer William Gibson, have called cyberspace. (Gibson 1984.) Though it can be used to simulate and model 'nature,' it also can exhibit properties never found in this or any other world. This new kind of space that people are coming to inhabit is curious in many ways. For one thing, it is a "no-space" because it is nowhere: a "consensual hallucination" in which people interact with widely distributed data through textual and visual representations. The laws of physics do not apply in cyberspace, and thus neither do standard limitations on human modes of locomotion, self-representation, or capabilities. Cyberspace is a cultural landscape where rivers can flow uphill and forests can be made of crystal trees - or things infinitely far more bizarre.

Since these new virtual worlds we are creating are cultural products, they are logical objects of study for cultural geography. While it might seem a stretch to apply the techniques of even the newest and most avant-garde forms of cultural geography to such a strange kind of human space, I suggest it's not unusual, because cultural geography has, as I've been suggesting, come to the realization that it had studied artificial worlds all along. The artificial worlds of cyberspace are made out of different structures (digital data) than other cultural landscapes, but those structures emerge out of patterns constrained by the technology available to designers (which is itself a cultural product) and the perceptual choices and preferences of both the users and creators of those structures - which also emerge out of culture. (Benedikt 1991.)

We can ask the same questions of cyberspace that we ask of other human spaces. How is cyberspace being used, and for what kinds of 'virtual' activities are its 'virtual' worlds being designed to facilitate? What patterns of social relations play out in the kinds of virtual spaces that exist in cyberspace? Are we erecting virtual agoras or simply electronic disneylands? How does power shape the nature and experience we have of cyberspace? What values and belief systems are embodied in the ways in which these virtual worlds are erected? How do people orient themselves and navigate their way through cyberspace in a way that is culturally meaningful? Does cyberspace simply reflect the ethnocentrism and cultural biases of the people (mostly Western computer programmers, but also some Japanese) primarily involved in its design? (Bruckman 1996.)

All of these questions are ones in which some of the ideas in both the new and old cultural geography can be applied. Cyberspace is made up fundamentally of numbers (binary bits and bytes) and is not only quantifiable, but in a sense almost made of quantity. Yet, through virtual reality, simulation, and visualization, people experience it qualitatively, even immersively, just like "reality." (Mitchell 1995.) Cultural anthropologists of space, and cultural geographers, need to visit this new "field" of human life - which is becoming the space of more and more key human activities, ranging from commerce to weddings to our own research. We need to start understanding it now, lest the sprawl of the information superhighway harm many more people than the unanticipated suburban sprawl (at least by most geographers) created from the 50s automobile highways.

Is Cyberspace Anyplace?

Though cyberspace can be understood as a mental space of attention where people are when they are engaged in electronic communication (thus even a person reading email or talking on the telephone is 'in cyberspace'), increasingly it has become synonymous with virtual reality and the immersive experience of computer-generated worlds (which was the sense in which Gibson originally used the word.) Since these virtual worlds are still in the process of being designed and implemented, they are of a variety of kinds. "Standard" VR technology involves the use of a headmounted stereoscopic display which places the computer-generated world in the full field of vision of the person. However, another type of virtual world could be the more widespread kind where the person views a rendered 3D-modelled universe through a 2-dimensional screen. Since this is usually viewed from a first-person perspective through a fairly large 'window,' it also can seem immersive. (Laurel 1991.)

This type of cyberspace is being implemented through the use of VRML (virtual reality modelling language) code on the World Wide Web, making it available to Internet users worldwide without much hardware (other than a compatible browser.) All sorts of virtual worlds right now suffer from the limitation of looking far from realistic or 'lifelike.' The headmounted-visor type of VR typically involves realistically rendered computer-generated objects, whose "refresh" rate (the rate at which the texture polygons are redrawn) usually fails to keep up with the movement of the person's head. They don't match his change in point of view quickly enough, which leads to some feeling of vertigo. (Weibel 1995.) In contrast, the static 3D simulations which people "move" through on the Web, however realistically rendered, still appear 2-dimensional because they do not engage the person's depth perception. Thus, in either case, the viewer has no sense of being anyplace "real," e.g. in the non-computer-generated world.

But most designers of virtual worlds have seen simulating reality as a hindrance. It prevents the most interesting features of virtual worlds from being implemented. One is that the person need not experience the perspective of the world from their standard point of view. They could see it from a bird's eye point of view, or if they experience it through 'avatar' technology, as a bird moving through the scene. Virtual worlds don't usually display the laws of physics in action - walls rarely have solidity, gravity is optional, the flow of time is unnecessary. (Hayward and Wollen 1995.) Within the parameters of the computer-generated reality, the person can move through the virtual world through almost any sort of navigation. There's no need for them to walk; in fact some virtual worlds allow the person to move in any direction in which they can point. Reinforcing this unreality is the fact that most of these worlds only engage only the senses of hearing and sight; rarely is touch invoked.

Cyberspace is not anywhere in our physical reality. It also does not really even exist "within" the computer or data network. The truth is, it is an illusion, a consensual hallucination , created by interface technology which "translates" digital data into a world that can be experienced by the human sensorium. It is, as some people have suggested, a no-place; it exists solely within "headspace." (Moser 1996.) However, it is not purely sollipsistic. People can share this same hallucination, in a way that is fully interactive and mutual. Through connection to the same virtual environment through the same interface, people can have all kinds of interactions, limited only by their imaginations. Needless to say, the public imagination has been captured by the possibility of "cybersex," and undoubtedly the development of technology to make this "interface" achievable will push the development of other systems.

There can be (and perhaps must be) a geography of cyberspace, for the simple fact that it (like the real world) is discontinuous. People cannot experience a virtual world in its entirety all at once. However, it may not be meaningful to "map" virtual worlds in terms of Cartesian coordinates or latitude and longitude. Still, virtual worlds can contain a multitude of places, each of which are perceived and experienced differently, and thus there must be ways in which we can 'map' cyberspace, however arbitrarily. To do the cultural geography of cyberspace, we must accept the fact that it is not a space that can be measured by simple linear units. Movement from place to place in cyberspace can only be described in terms of difference of experience - but we should not be surprised that those kinds of experience can include feelings of the uniqueness, importance, and meaningfulness of places. (Holtzmann 1994.)

Shaping Cyberspace: Design and Implementation

Creators of virtual worlds make a number of choices in how the design their computer-generated realities. The most important one might be the sort of world they are. Immersive worlds fill the field of vision of the person, which is usually accomplished through a stereoscopic headmount. 3D worlds are typically experienced through a window on a screen, but on a large enough monitor, they can fill a large amount of a person's field of vision. (Hamit 1993.) If staircases, walls, etc. are rendered in a lifelike enough way, the compelling nature of 'screen worlds' can still make a person feel as if they are fully' inside' that world. People are clearly more fascinated by and absorbed within the immersive type of virtual world. It eliminates the ordinary barrier between the viewer and 'scene' imposed by the screen. Were it not for the bulky hardware that facilitates the experience, the person might (given sufficient realism) presumably assume they are still someplace in the 'real' world.

Akin to this implementation choice is that of point of view for experiencers. They can experience it (as they do in many video games) in "third person" through some sort of icon or 'avatar' that represents them. This avatar could be some sort of humanlike form that resembles them, or it could be anything else. People might traverse the virtual world in the form of a crab, a wolf, a bird, or something even stranger. They might be viewing the actions of their representative from behind, or below, or above - perhaps even shift their perspective. In some simulations, the person does not view their own avatar, but it appears visible to the point of view to other persons, duplicating their movements, speaking when they speak, imitating their mannerisms. Most people generally prefer this sort of "first person" experience of cyberspace - where at most they might see those elements of their own body which are normally visible to a person looking straight ahead (usually only a hand or an arm.) All they see are the elements of the virtual world as they would appear from their 'real world' point of view (tracked by sensors.) The "first person" view heightens the sense of realism. (Schweber 1995.)

Another is the way in which people traverse or navigate through cyberspace. Virtual worlds can be spatially or non-spatially navigated. Hypertext worlds can be navigated through clicking on text, a mode of movement through words. An extensions of this concept is navigation through hypermedia (such as on a CD-ROM), where the person enters different parts of the experience through clicking on icons, images, or even regions of sound (where the cursor movement generates a certain musical pattern.) This is the way most people 'move' through the World Wide Web. But in spatially navigated 'zones' of cyberspace, the question then becomes how the person 'moves' through that space. Do they walk through it? Fly through it? Transport to different areas using "teleportation portals?" Many simulations generally allow the person to navigate through space using some type of implement - a joystick, trackball, or pointer, or perhaps pointing using a 'data glove.' Or clicking by mouse on a region of space is assumed to indicate an intent to move toward that region. Depending on the 'laws of physics' in the simulation, different kinds of movement are facilitated. The person may move through it in some kind of vehicle, such as a light cycle, hovercar, or marching robot. (Hayward and Wollen 1995.)

Yet another choice is the level of interactivity. As with many of these other design choices, it depends on bandwidth and processor power, because the number of simultaneous users and the variety of interactions users can have with each other put strains on both. Some gaming simulations allow only two simultaneous users, competing for some sort of goal (perhaps the elimination of the other user, as in a Doom DeathMatch.) Other simulations, like Lucasfilm's Habitat, allow many people to simultaneously participate, usually interacting through conversation and movement toward private or nonprivate "rooms." Some simulations limit users to have a rote variety of responses toward other users. A person clicks on an action and their 'avatar' responds appropriately. High-interactivity simulations allow a wide variety of simultaneous interactions with a large number of people - which is akin to what we experience in the "real world." But this requires a great deal of flexibility in the system that governs the unfolding of the virtual world. (Barlow 1991.)

Last but not least is the choice of the designer of how closely to approximate "realism." How realistic the person feels the virtual world is depends on all these other factors, but most importantly on how lifelike the elements of the world seem. Do the movement of other characters seem fluid and intelligent, or awkward and jerky? Are techniques such as shading, rendering, and lighting used to give the virtual objects a sense of solidity and depth? Do actions in the virtual world produce the same sorts of consequences that typical "real world" actions do? (Benedikt 1991.) Designers are coming up with ways to even give (through tactile 'dataglove' interfaces) virtual objects a physical texture, perhaps even a feeling of weight and mass. Still, we are a long way from having people 'sit' comfortably in a virtual chair. But it's clear that people prefer simulations that are convincingly 'lifelike,' and designers tend to cater to that choice, so this is driving the technology in that direction.

Cyberspace as Cultural Landscape

We can begin to differentiate cyberspace in several ways. Besides the technical features of its implementation, we can also look at the kinds of activities it supports, of the kinds of users who "inhabit" it, the kinds of "real world" spaces it emulates, and the kinds of social relations it facilitates. Thus, we might have 'electronic agoras' as envisaged by researchers in the MIT Media Lab (Negroponte 1995) -- places of civic discourse and community discussion; or simple 'digital shopping malls' where the main interactions are asking people where to find the best products. However cyberspace might be designed, the ultimate question becomes whether it is merely a diversion or entertainment, or if people can employ it for other purposes. The pattern has usually been (on the Internet) to introduce technologies for academic purposes, which are then diverted into diversions, and then ultimately into other social purposes.

Thus, the first electronic conferencing systems were used by researchers for academic collaboration. This was followed by the use of MUDs and MOOs for people to people to "live out" the imaginary worlds of their favorite fantasy and science fiction novels. After that came simulations which were designed to be experiments in creating community, such as Diversity University, which was designed as a "living laboratory" for multiculturalism. What seems to be happening with the Internet now as a whole is also curiously complicated. Originally designed as a defense command and control network (when it was DARPANet), it became a government research network (as NSFNet), and now seems to be becoming a corporate network, with people constantly coming up with ways to use it to advertise, promote, and sell products and engage in "electronic commerce." Along the way, there was another vision - of the Net as a tool to foster 'virtual community', a vision which was lived out in cyberspaces such as San Fransciso's Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (WELL) - but which seems to be fading by the wayside. (Laurel 1991.)

The design of virtual architectures, just as is the case with real landscapes, communicates social messages of power. Who lays down the terrain of cyberspace? Who assumes the responsibility of guiding people through it? How much choice is left in the hands of the user and how much is created for him by the creators of virtual content? What kinds of activities are permitted, discouraged, banned, facilitated, encouraged? It is social choices that determine what cyberspace becomes used for - whether as a space for electronic commerce (a marketplace), civil society (public discussion and participation), places of belonging (virtual communities), creative interchange (interactive media display), 'forbidden' interactions (such as cyberporn, the computer underground, or trade in 'illicit' information), or experimentation (role playing different identities). (Lauria 1995.) But these choices are not made 'freely' - they are constrained by the infrastructure of cyberspace, which is at once its hardware, software, and standards of enforced conduct for users.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) chose their name deliberately because of the way they analogized cyberspace to the Western frontier on the 19th century. It is in many ways a wild, outlaw territory. But most importantly, it is also "wide open" (in a way that the Western frontier never really was, because there were Indians and other people already living there), waiting to be settled by people adventurous to begin what some people see as the next inevitable phase of human existence - electronic embodiment. (Barlow 1991.) Like the frontier, cyberspace is thought to be a place full at the same time of both promise and danger. There is the chance for people to have a new start, to "homestead" virtual communities in a "virgin" space, but there also plenty of bandits, predators, and people prepared to waylay the unwary. The choices we make in cyberspace now will doubtless shape what it looks like for a long time to come, but on the other hand, it is also (unlike the Western frontier) a theoretically infinite space, which will not "close" anywhere in the near future.

Cyberspace is a cultural landscape par excellence because, in ways unlike any other landscape, its form embodies totally the values and perceptual biases of its creators. Since it is being shaped digitally ex nihilo, there is no pre-existing natural landscape on which human agency is being imposed. What is fascinating for so many about cyberspace is that it is a metaphysical space of pure mind, a construct of pure cyberculture - hence the feelings people report of disembodiment, transcendence, and transformation. In the realities being erected in virtual worlds, we can see the ethics and ideals of the largely hermetic community of hackers, sysops, multimediacs, and digerati taking shape. Still, these virtual worlds also reflect so much of popular and public culture, so they are not a closed cultural process. (Weibel 1995.) The needs and desires of the largely computer-illiterate community of users for transparency, for versimilitude, and for social interaction are also pushing cyberspace in new directions.

For some people, there are utopian expectations for cyberspace; others see more practical imperatives for the "information superhighway." Almost all acknowledge that as with previous technologies (radio, television, etc.) the utopian promises for cyberspace may fall short, but the dystopian dangers will also be remote. Most of the social changes will be far-ranging, and unexpected. The point I want to emphasize is that the cultural changes wrought by cyberspace cannot be seen as purely accidental. They are the result of social choices; they occur through the agency of the institutions that are allowed to direct how cyberspace is developed and used. (Lauria 1995.) If Detroit had a heavy hand in shaping our interstate highway system, and the media corporations helped "dumb down" television, we should not be surprised when telecommunications and media multinationals start trying to take over the development of cyberspace "for the benefit of the consumer," as suggested in the recent U.S. Telecom Bill.

Reading Cyberspace

Just as many cultural geographers have treated the physical landscape as a text, so now can they start to 'read' cyberspace, on multiple levels. One way might be just to 'read' it as binary digital code, or as higher-level programming code. However, most people don't relate to cyberspace as a series of 0s and 1s, anymore than they relate to text in a book as a series of light and dark dots. Another way to 'read' cyberspace might be naively, literally as a product of the intention of its designers. (Moser 1996.) In this view, cyberspace is a top-down construct, and so we can study how this or that space is put together, assembled from various kinds of software and programming imperatives. The designers are trying to "communicate" something authoritative to the users of the system, and thus everyone will come away with cyberspace influenced by their goals.

But, just as reader-response literary critics, "viewer-poacher" media critics, and new cultural geographers are coming to realize, there are any number of possible readings of cyberspace, mainly because of its intrinsic mutability. Castles can "morph" into hovels, and users can "port" from room to room. What is being brought down the fiber optic line to the user is a series of bits - what gets done with those bits is up to the user. (Negroponte 1995.) It's possible to allow someone to customize their experience in cyberspace, so that the nature of it is as much a product of their choices as the "producer" of those digital bits. Unlike with broadcast media, the synchronous nature of Internet communication provides for near-instaneous feedback, allowing cyberspace experiences that continually update based on the preferences and previous actions of the user. True interactivity truly gives every user their own interpretation of the virtual world.

What the operators of online services have realized, however, is that people want cyberspace to be more than aesthetically pleasing and sensually immersive. They want to interact with other people, and perhaps even AIs (artificial intelligences) or agents that manifest some of the personality features and behaviors of other people. They want a customized way of 'reading' cyberspace, of 'navigating' its landscapes, but not in such a sollipsistic way as to avoid having contact and interaction with other people. The 'spaces' of cyberspace that become most quickly occupied often surprise its designers. When France started up its Minitel service, the last thing they expected to see take off in popularity was its chat rooms. Sure enough, the popularity of its so-called "pink chat rooms" (where people engaged in attempting virtual or IRL amorous liaisons) almost ended up crashing the system. (Barlow 1991.)

What most cyber-geographers have realized is that with cyberspace, what most people are "reading" is the interface. Human-computer interface design has been an important element of cyberspace construction for twenty years. The realization that people more easily could "read" (and interact with) an interface of windows and icons transformed the nature of the personal computer industry, where 90% of all computers run such an interface. People "read" a great deal into the interface, and they can interpret difficulty of use and lack of transparency as an almost obtuse "unfriendliness" on the part of the computer. Since none of us have "brain jacks" that can pipe in digital data directly, all of us have to experience cyberspace through some sort of interface. And the nature of that interface will affect how we relate spatially and otherwise to cyberspace. In the future, it may respond not just to our typing and our mouse clicks, but perhaps also our voice, our touch, maybe even our thoughts. (Laurel 1991.)

In textual simulations, we are forced to "read" their imaginary geographies. On a MUD, we know that going west takes us to the parlor, and up to the cellar, and so we can form a mental map of the virtual world described to us solely in textual terms. Likewise with BBSes, that often divide up their system into several "areas" around an implicit spatial structure such as a pyramid, a house, or a space ship. Some BBSes try and develop a "sense of place" and uniqueness which separates them from other systems. The Bay Area WELL system, for example, is a place which particularly appeals to Deadheads, counterculturalists, and hackers, and is "laid out" in a way that makes them feel comfortable and welcome. But more importantly, the WELL tries to create a sense of community in its users, and it has policies (such as "you own your own words") and other features that help people relate to the system and its other users in this way. (Rheingold 1994.)

Though the more explicitly spatial cyberspace geographies leave less to the imagination, they may not necessarily leave themselves less open. Like many MUDs, there may be virtual worlds that allow people to create their own objects, dwellings, and artificial companions. Cyberspace will truly be an ever-changing text, because it will be a never-ending story that people are constantly adding to and taking away from. Conferencing systems designed for government bureaucrats may be taken over by cyberpunk hackers and turned into outlaw chatsubos. It will be to the advantage of cyberspace designers to build some degree of adaptability to the system. There will always be an openness in the reading of cyberspace that could never really exist with a paper book or concrete building, and thus the "sense of place" for people in cyberspace may always be changing. (Schweber 1995.)

Living @ Digital Worlds

The new world of cyberspace will undoubtedly change the role of geography in civic life. Originally, even in the Greek polis, geography was destiny, and who you could interact with was limited by where you lived. Today, in theory, there is no cyberspace barrier (except an email filter or alias) between you and the mayor or any civic elites. Cyberspace levels distance of space and social position. No one knows where you are logging in from, although they can often infer many things from cues you provide. A person's email address is not a fixed point in cyberspace - it's allows them to communicate from anywhere, to anywhere, sort of like a phone number that follows you everywhere. (Mitchell 1995.) Through synchronous communication systems like Internet Relay Chat or voice conferencing systems like Maven, instantaneous "face-to-face" communication becomes more a matter of time (who logs in at the same time) than spatial distance. It will be possible for civic leaders and the community to hold "electronic town hall meetings," like was only previously possible in the small towns of New England.

Cyberspace will also continue the collapsing of physical time and space that has begun in the 20th century. There are already numerous (somewhat humorous) stories of people logging into the Net, losing track of time, and "emerging" from cyberspace hours or even days later, realizing that they've forgotten to pick up their children or spouse. The clock is a convenient means of getting people all in the same place at the same time, which in 13th century monasteries of 20th century industrial factories is essential. But with people working at home, "telecommuting" in their "electronic cottages," the eight hours they put in a day may not necessarily be the same eight hours others do. There may not even need to be a physical office where people meet on a regular basis, if the equivalent (a place where management can interact with employees and find out about progress on projects) exists in cyberspace. Peoples' schedules may start being driven more by the Tokyo stock market and Budapest radio schedule than the hourly rhythms of where they live. (Negroponte 1995.)

Undoubtedly, cyberspace is causing the collapse in many ways of traditional geographic identification. Some commentators greet the apparent disappearance of nationalism emerging through the rise of global cyberspace. On the other hand, others point to the way in which people are neglecting their own neighborhood communities (the physical places where they live) while turning to virtual communities for companionship - places where, some claim, the webs of mutual obligation and reciprocity that compose "true" community are not found. (Rheingold 1994.) Some see the disappearance of the idea of identity through geography (you are who you are based on who lives in the same place you do) with horror; others see it as an antidote to xenophobia and ethnocentrism. What seems to be happening in cyberspace is that people are starting to identify themselves through virtual addresses - "oh, I'm an AOL user" - based on their point of access to the Net. Parochial judgements are taking on new forms, as when all AOL users are thought to be clueless bumpkins and 'newbies' who don't know their way around.

The fragmentation of identity which people often claim is a feature of postmodern life seems to be amplified in cyberspace. A person need no longer be "embodied" in one self in one place. They may have any number of virtual "selves" in various cyber-locations, personae which they can adopt whenever they feel the need. You truly can be in more than one place; and it's common for Internet users to be "multiply connected" with friends through a number of modalities, chatting on the Internet Relay Chat in one window while simultaneously trying to shoot down an opponent in a Doom DeathMatch. This may force cultural geographers to rethink the relationship between self and space. (Bruckman 1996.) For a long time, humans have been accustomed to being "rooted" in a place, either through birth or special attachment. But in cyberspace, people might find themselves multiply existent, in any number of concurrent virtual worlds.

To some, the idea of any metaphysical significance to the reality of cyberspace is all hype. Still, there can be no doubt that cyberspace is qualitatively different from any other kind of space which people have inhabited. Gibson's dream, of corporeally entering cyberspace (depicted in the movie Lawnmower Man), drives a lot of people, including the VR coders at Autodesk, Inc. (Hamit 1993.) To the pioneers of virtuality, there is a sense that this all could be a whole new phase of human evolution. All this talk about "downloading" personalities into digital form represents, in a new form, the human ambition for transcending the body and cheating death. As long as human identity is something fixed in space and time, this may not be possible. Cyberspace holds out the tantalizing possibility that this need no longer be the case. But also the terrible flip side - which is that the difference between us and our digital constructs may not be as great as we think.

Conclusions

People working in the anthropology of space and cultural geography have "fertile territory" to survey in cyberspace. Unlike so many other landscapes, this is one which is being built right before their eyes. Observing how people perceive, locate themselves, find meaning, and identify themselves in cyberspace, may help us understand the analogous processes of how this occurs in 'realspace.' However, cyberspace provides more than a testing ground for existing hypotheses about how social-cultural relations emerge in space. It is a new kind of space that is emerging, and will force the rethinking of old assumptions about place and space. Deciding how to do the cartography of a place that is nowhere and everywhere at the same time may be a redoubtable task; even moreso, analyzing and explaining the new kinds of identities and interactions that emerge in such a new, unforeseen place.

It may be argued for a long time whether we are in the midst of a post-industrial/information-age/postmodern social revolution. No one knew during the Renaissance or the Industrial Revolution that a revolution was taking place. Still, electronic media are revolutionizing what we think of as literacy, robots and AIs may soon start taking on characteristics we reserved for 'humanity' alone, and various artificial life experiments are causing us to rethink the basis of life and consciousness. (Complexity and self-organization?) In the same sense, cyberspace may be erasing what we think we knew about space. What it means to be in some place and not another is changing. People may start living more and more in the "no-place" of cyberspace. So in the future, any geographer who ignores cyberspace and its impact on the human ordering of space may be doing so at their own peril.

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'Technology is dangerous, but less dangerous than the geniuses of the place' Emmanuel Levinas

Introduction

Before addressing the important relationship between cyberspace and bio- technology as a distinct cultural form it is necessary to examine some of the basic presuppositions which underlie the concept of cyberspace itself. The relationship between the imaginary and the real is of crucial importance in this respect. We can ask what is the mode of existence of cyberpsace? Is it imagined or is it real or indeed is it a juxtaposition of the two? In some ways the formulation of the question is problematic since its suggests us to extract from it fixed and marked terms. When asked whether cyberspace is imaginary or real, the realist will naturally only see 'hard' data and the computational props of new bio-technologies, whilst the metaphysician will see an aesthetic place with unassignable interstices between bodily space and bodies in space. Either way we would suggest that the focus should not just be one cyberspace a system of cultural expression, or what Lefebvre (1991) calls "r! epresentational spaces" which embody complex symbolisms, are rule bound and coded. Instead, we would begin further back by asking whether cyberspace is a force for cultural transformation and creation which is made to create enigmas or to elucidate them?

Cyberspace, the Imaginary and the Real

In the discussion that follows, however, we shall avoid these important analyses and focus instead on the rhetorical devices and presuppositions about cyberspace which are made in relation to various notions of the relation between the imaginary and the real.

We think it uncontestable and basic that cyberspace is at some substantive axis composed of images, be they auditory, sensory, tactile or visual. Let us concentrate on unpicking the later since it seems to us to be the most obvious element for elucidation. Ordinary visual images have something peculiarly to do with the visual system, and in particular, with the properties to which that system is characteristically sensitive. For cyberpsace, as well as other new electronic media, which rely on ordinary visual images, the two most important properties are those of light/colour and space. In his discussion of visual images Rey (1981) claims that "the central property here is associated with light (and/or colour). But at least for human beings, other properties that are reliably indicated by light also seem to count importantly as visual properties. These are especially spatial properties" (p.118). For example, visual images are represented by propositions that incorporate vario us spatial relations (e.g., '"left of", "above", etc).

He goes on to detail these as including: length, width, depth, proportion, composition and orientation of parts. The visual images entailed in cyberspace are forms or patterns that posses at least some spatial properties. Visual images in cyberspace are ordinary images in the sense that they are images of something. As Rey note out "This 'of' relation, however, can be quite diverse: an image can be of the thing(s) it resembles, or of thing(s) that played a certain role in its production, or of thing(s) that it is used to represent; and these things may be the same or different in different cases" (pp118-119). The point being made here is that visual images depict the relation between an image and the spatio-temporal particular it purports to represent. Therefore visual images in cyberspace are particular kinds of representation. Leaving aside questions of imagery resolution, processing capacity and clarity, which ar e technical considerations, cyberspace fulfills a representation role through the exploitation of certain correspondences between its properties of an Y- depicting image and the properties of an Y- it represents.

Thus the Web page of a map of Berlin depicts the place of Berlin by virtue of certain visual properties of it (such as the length of the street lines) which correspond to and represent Berlin itself (such as the lengths of the actual streets). As Rey states "the correspondence is systematic in that it is lawlike, supporting a certain range of inferences and counterfactuals...many properties [of Berlin] can be inferred" (p.119) and he calls these correspodences forms of "compositional exploitation" with Y- depicting properties which are different from Y- denoting or Y- describing properties. The concept of compositional exploitation allows us to distinguish cyberspace as an imaginary representation from other non imaginary representations.

In much of the literature on cyberspace, and within cyberpunk fiction, the imaginary demands to be taken as the real. This applies just as much to the speculative theorist as it does to the extrapolative computer scientist. However, 'to be taken as real' is something that can occur in two very different ways. It means that the imaginary world of cyberspace takes the place of the real entirely, is substituted for it and somehow effaces it; this we know, is the ideal of an atomised model of technological progress that aims to take hold of the cybernaut subject, cast a spell on her, reduce her entirely to a cyberspace condition. The sort of cyberspace it seeks, in short, is to be so enthralling that is renders whoever embarks on it within its spell. But secondly, this also means that cyberspace has value to the extent that it passes, albeit in a discontinuous way, for 'the real'; therefore deriving its value from its equivalence or commensurability with things that exist in re! al spatial forms, and thus in return it has a value in reality. From this perspective cyberspace gives reality its meaning. Here the two poles of opposition between the imaginary and the real are complementary; together they build a commensurate totality; with each giving the other what it lacks . This of course, is particularly true of certain claims made about cyberspace for enhancing relations of sociability, gender and community. Either way in each of these accounts cyberspace is characterised as a representational form which is derived from compositional exploitation which mixes image with reality and relies upon some notion of a reflexive subject forming a part of the cleavage.

We find that with some of the more exaggerated claims for 'cyberspace as community' the aim is to represent the true relations between human beings as an embodiment of their social meaning and spatial positioning. This ambition to express the meaning of human reality is founded paradoxically on the unreality that constitutes the way of being of things in cyberspace; being imaginary it is in the nature of these things to remain always at a distance, set aside from what they are, from what they would be if they truly were. It is this setting aside of reality which simultaneously gives cyberspace its own reality and allows it to make present the process whereby meaning comes to the things in the world, a process which, precisely is possible only through a retreat from those things and in their setting aside . In addition, paradoxically, cybernauts, being always at a distance from themselves, can retain that essential characteristic only by becoming real equivocally, and the role of the imaginary is to make them real, albeit, as we have seen, in a mode of ambiguity and contestation.

Indeed, as McHale (1992) points out in his essay 'Towards a Poetics of Cyberpunk' both Gibson's Neuromancer and Cadigan's Mindplayers attempt to resolve the ontological ambiguity we have detailed above between the imaginary and the real by constructing "a two- tier ontology by juxtaposing a primary reality plane with an inset cyberspace world" which makes possible "metafictional reflection by the text on its own ontological procedures" (pp.252-253).

In the latter 'bad copy' version of cyberspace we may recall the critique of Platonic forms offered by Deleuze. Those who remain faithful to the Platonic ideal of 'good' and 'bad' images would regard cyberspace as been an inadequate resemblance to the real and as only an inferior simulacrum. That is, as an unauthorised and inadequate copy of the real. In this theory of images there is a value judgement which relegates cyberspace to the position of a dubious fabricator and inauthentic expression of the human condition. In Logique du Sens, Deleuze reverses this perspective by positively proclaiming the simulacrum and praising the fictionalist for the inadequacies of her forgeries. Here the bad copy version of cyberspace is celebrated precisley because of its limited resemblance to the real. Lecercle (1985) illustates this Deleuzian point when he says that "The simulacrum, because it rejects, or is denied, any direct relationship with the Idea, loses that permanence, that capac ity to be encompassed by the limits of reality: it is mobile, animated by the irrepressible movement of fiction, and it escapes the control of its creator, because it avoids the action of the Idea (p.97).

In this account cyberspace is an antagonistic counter-flow which germinates from and corrupts reality by investing in bastardized spatial forms with inexact representations, flawed spatial boundaries and uncertain outputs. Cyberspace come to resemble magical realism in its fusion of opposing representations, the splicing together of fantasy and fact and the mixing of solemnity with comic detachment. Here cyberspace stands against real spatial forms and is indifferent to those representational significations and processes which constitute it in 'the real'. This closley resembles simulated learning modes in neural network application research which positively relies on error and contradiction for achieving desired outcomes. With unsupervised learning or what is sometimes ca lled 'self-supervised learning', neural networks use no external influ ences to adjust their weighted inputs. 'Hidden layers' of processing elements, are immunised from external influence and have no direct contact with the 'real' environment. Their neural architecture often relies on stochastic learning and procedures to achieve pattern recognition and disease syptom diagnosis of external world phenomena.

From the above we can see that cyberspace is thus destined to attract two contradictory sorts of evaluation: first, for being too true to life or second, for not being so. Or put in another way for being an inexact depiction through being fantastical or an unfaithful one through being too faithful. This can be taken to reveal two ethical positions around the imaginary-real axes and the claims that are made for cyberspace for increased sociability. First is the claim that an overly formulaic construction of characters in cyberspace will be so one-dimensional and utility bound that it is deprived of the living force of individual beings. Hence in the world itself they take on the life which they lack, or which is refused them in cyberspace. The second claim is that cyberspace will give reality to the world of cultural forms with such imaginary scope and such inspirational power that cyberspace truly appears to be in rivalry with the 'real' world and to be capable of entering i! nto competition. Thereby granting the cybernaut who enters therein theillusion of being able to dwell there for almost her whole life. This claim resembles the Lacanian concept of the 'symbolic relation' in which cyberspace takes the place of the real; it is not complementary to the real world at all, but instead takes the place of the lack in the other. However, as Zizek (1989) notes whilst it "embodies what is lacking in the other" we discover that "the opposites, the poles of the symbolic relation, each in a way returns to the other its own lack; they are united on the basis of their common lack" (p.172). Whichever claim one prefers, the signifying power to which cyberspace advocates propose does not exist either as a pure interior or exterior of cyberspace, rather it retains a primary reference to dialectic of imaginary and real and a 'real' presentation, that is, to a perception and positing of existence, to a set of cultural politics in general.

The Politics of Cyberspace and Bio-Technologies

The cyberspace enthusiast is thought to undergo an advanced bio- technological and reflexive enchantment. In cyberpunk literature this is no less active in those novels, such as Gibson's Neuromancer, where Case undergoes a renconciliation with himself, than in those such as Jeff Noon's Vurt where the hero Scribble, in searching for his sister Desdemona, gets lost in cyberspace never to return. Cyberspace claims to be an instrument of knowledge, in the sense that its visual and spatial properties may contain information from which knowledge can be derived. But in its rhetorical form this is a knowledge which has as its starting point the void of fascination, a discovery that presupposes the authority of a far reaching ignorance, what Blanchot (1947) calls "a way of apprehending being whose condition is the reign of absence of being, an absence that seeks to be everything and become real in the dual and paradoxical form of absence and absence of everything" (p.72). He goes on t o critically ask "In this universe of enchantment and fascination, what becomes of the contribution of individual beings, their ways of understanding themselves and each other, and of living?".

Here our phenomenological reading of the imaginary and the real can be complimented by a cultural narrative. The return to what Weber called the charismatic spirit and its link to cyberspace is helpful in understanding this process of existential enchantment with bio-technologies. There has been a veritable celebration of certain everyday urban rituals and their concommitant existential passengers of the postmodern landscape in recent cultural studies literature. Carnivalesque, the flaneur, panic sex, unruly bodies, nomadic parasites, bodies without organs and hybridization are all chic terms which spring to mind in defining the postmodern terrain of the new cultural politics. These are complimented by their cyberspace equivalents of space-cadets, cowboys, hackers, sundogs and techno- geeks. What each of these loosley connected terms have in common is their emphasis on the adventurer-hero as a romantic searcher of authenticity. We examine the frontier langauge as a search for authenticity more closlely below, but for now to further paraphrase Blanchot we can ask are not the enthusiasts of cyberspace, who cast a spell on us in order to become our partners in the cyber game, obliged in their turn "to fall prey to this fascination, to be fascinating because they are themselves fascinated, incapable of controlling themselves even when displaying the greatest mastery and lucidity" (ibid.) Like E.P. Thompson's Chartists, cyberspace might be terribly good for cybernauts even though they never get to go to cyberspace.

At the heart of discussions about the political, social and reflexive potential of cyberspace and particularly of full blown embodied virtual technologies is the idea that these have a transformative capacity to disclose or reveal new political possibilities for human identity and social relationships. For example, the Critical Art Ensemble (1994) celebrate the emerging electronic media and virtual reality as exemplary instances of power as nomadic. They claim that "the electronic voice is potentially the most powerful in the exercise of free speech" and that "electronic work addresses questions of identity, environmental catastrophe, war and peace and other issues associated with activist representation" (p.121). Their political reading of sedentary power notes that "Technology is the foundation for the nomadic elite's ability to maintain absence, acquire speed, and consolidate power in a global system" but rather more optimistically that "New tactics and strategies of civi! l disobedience are now possiblem ones that disturb the virtual order" (p. 142). However, Simpson (1995), regards this technological leap of faith, like all others, as a response to our finitude, that is, "to the realization that we are vulnerable and immortal and that our time is limited" (p.14).

Cyberspace as a Technology of Disclosure

It seems to us that it is not merely a matter of ascertaining how little or how much these new technologies can offer in the way of increased opportunities, such as, greater authenticity in social relations built on trust and exchange, or whether these can be quantified as deeper expressions of political democracy, in the sense that greater public access to information will significantly empower people as citizens and thereby extend their rights and responsibilities. Clearly, whilst these are important considerations for evaluating the likely impact of new electronic and bio- interactive media, we would argue that a more important and prior set of ontological questions should first be addressed which focus on the sense of the disclosing potential of cyberspace itself. That is, what theoretical assumptions are made for the acts and the project(ion) of cyberspace disclosure as a mediating phenomenon for new political and social arrangements? Put simply, what presuppositions are at stake and what is meant by or seized hold of through the concept of spatial disclosedness as providing the ground and the foundation for the possibility of the discovery of new political and cultural forms?

These questions rest on a common-sense understanding of knowing-how and not on a propositional knowing-that of things that cyberspace can disclose to us? We suggest that the foremost consideration is the question of how cyberspace can disclose new human possibilities is an ontological issue of making sense of how things are possible and not explaining how they work. We have noted in a previous discussion that an engagement with cyberspace is often given by both social theorists and technophiles alike as an exaggerated poetics of space or a creation without a prior grounding, pace Bachelard, and we went on to argue that this is in effect a reduction which is projected through and on to new bio-technologies in terms of what Husserl calls "wonderment in the face of the world". It seems to us that we can learn more about this phenomenon of the in-potentia of cyberspace through a closer reading of Heidegger's concept of disclosure.

Much of the literature on cyberspace which gives the new electronic technology a positive value reads its potential in terms of a capacity for change and transformation, not as an activity of disclosing in itself. In this sense affirmative commentataries on cyberspace amount to a form of cognitivism which posits the relationship between social and technological phenomenon in terms of what Heidegger refers to as 'occurrent elements'. That is, as a capacity for basing all forms of transformation upon the supposedly self-evident and directly intelligible ways of being of occurrent technology plus occurrent mental predicates. There is, however, a deeper sense of articulating the in-potentia of cyberspace, which comes very close to Heidegger's own understanding of ontological disclosure and discoveredness. Cyberspace as a territory of spatiality generated by bio- technological advancement is often set out as a shared clearing, a local situation and a "there" in which objects of po tential can be encountered.

Here discovery through cyberspace can be read as being entirely consistent with the way in which things are discovered by Dasien, which for Heidegger, is fundamentally the activity of disclosing. The problem for cyberspace enthusiasts, however, lies in the kinds of claims that are made for the potential space of new technologies of disclosure and it is here that they depart from Heidegger's conception of Dasien as a derivation of truth. In his discussion of existential untruth as the opposite of disclosedness Heidegger tells us that the former is based on some kind of concealment. As Dreyfus (1994) notes this existential untruth is linked to Heidegger's notions of primordial evidence and falling:

Primordial evidence is for Heidegger experiencing something present just as it is. If, however, we try to stabilize such evidence and preserve it in language beyond the time and place in which it occurs, we lose this primordial relation (p.274)

But the disclosedness of space in affirmative accounts of cyberspace also suggest movement, a more radical "crossing over" and a processes of reflexive transition. These are not just transitions from one state to another, or from the quality of one experience as it is turned into or replaced by another, but something of an quasi-ontological 'cross-over' which entails the related but seemingly contradictory notions of withdrawal and open-ness. The juxtaposition of the French repli as "withdrawal" as in the French expression "replie sur soi-meme" with depli as "opening up" or "unfolding" best captures what we have in mind with this phenomenological movement. Implicit in cyberspace language is the idea that cyberspace both "opens up" new frontiers and possibilities in the act of disclosure and that we must simultaneously "withdraw" from the real and into cyberspace as a way of deteritorialising, re-presenting or recoding. We temporarily or permanently hide in the enclosed womb of cyberspace. Withdrawal can also imply disappearance from the social world. For instance, in The Electronic Disturbance (1994), the manifesto for cyberspace, Heidegger's definition of disclosure is paraphrased to promote the idea of active retreat in the face of cyborg technology:

Anxiety in the face of cyborgs must not be confused with fear in the face of virtual demise. This anxiety is not an accidental or random mood of "weakness" in some interface; but, as a basic state-of-media of Cysein, it amounts to the disclosedness of the fact that Cysein [Dasein] exists as sliding Being towards its disappearance. (p.146)

This might be seen by some as a retreat from old solutions or sterile remedies of dominant world-views and letting things be seen in their uncoveredness. To be closed off and covered up 'in the real' belongs to what Heidegger has called Dasein's facticity. Cyberspace becomes a 'potential (em )bodied space' for letting something be other than it already is. Again the Critical Art Ensemble illustrate this point of letting things be other than they are and proclaim the potential for virtual technologies lifting the ideological veil:

Reality engines came to screenal man naturally and as a matter of course... We are thus prepared to find that screenal man transposed the structural conditions of his own data nets into the virtual world, and we may attempt to reverse the feedback and put back into the human mind what reality engines teach as to the nature of things (p.145).

It is with these two related presuppositions which join theoretical thinking to a hypothetical ecology of spatial experience in which the promises held out for cyberspace can be situated. By joining frontier language with Stoical ascetic metaphors, we have with cyberspace, a heady mixture of suggestiblility and enigma for the restructuring of cultural experience. But what exactly do we encounter in these two significations of the potential space of social relations and the positive alignment of new technologies with cultural politics?