Colonizing Virtual Reality

The statements do not describe the nature or features of an actual product--they introduce the new idea by comparison to familiar, comfortable cultural icons. They compare VR with "a work of art," "a dream," "an additional reality" and a "new continent." With just a few words they have invoked the traditions of art and representation, psychology and metaphysics, ontological philosophy, discovery, colonization and the frontier.

Perceiving much wider applications than flight simulation and remote control, researchers coined the term "virtual reality," and promoted it as a paradigm shift for computers, and even for the whole society. The shift, though, was not into empty terrain: it was into such existing fields as entertainment, art, architecture, design and medicine. While proponents claimed the idea of VR was new, they positioned it as a natural and inevitable outgrowth of the past by making connections to familiar values, ideology and myth. They emphasized its unique advantages over other technologies, but packaged it in familiar cultural wrapping, constructing a historical narrative with VR as its necessary conclusion. They then projected VR's development into a utopian future. Moving from marginal cultural tributaries into the cultural mainstream, though, VR itself had to change; it needed to remove its uncomfortable associations with social criticism, drugs and insanity.

As I will show, between 1984 and 1992 "virtual reality" and "cyberspace" underwent a transformation from marginal, speculative concepts into a (relatively) mainstream, institutionalized discourse. Another important concept, from literary origins, is that of tropes: clusters of meaning associated with a phenomenon, or networks of cultural connections. Trope is a broader and more ephemeral category than discourse. I will show how proponents of virtual reality consciously associated VR with existing myths, positioning VR in the context of preexisting cultural tropes to naturalize the new discourse.

Virtual reality emerged from several contexts: the computer industry, the military, NASA, science fiction, the arts, and counterculture. The idea of "jacking in" to a dataspace originated in William Gibson's 1984 novel Neuromancer. This novel introduced the term "cyberspace": the "consensual hallucination" of high-definition immersive graphical representation of data. Virtual reality is now widely recognized as a credible technology, and has a tangible discourse. It has this identity even though very few people have experienced it, and in spite of the lack of actual demonstration of the claims about its revolutionary potential. VR has gone from being a speculative vision to being broadly perceived as almost an inevitable development. speculative vision to being broadly perceived as almost an inevitable development.

Virtual reality had its origin to a great extent in the imagination of science fiction writers and readers. The ideas of hyperspace from Star Wars, transporter beams from Star Trek, cyberspace from Gibson, and many others were familiar fantasies. Science fiction is often a critical and oppositional fictional form, however. The ostensibly alien setting licences writers to discuss contemporary social issues without referring directly to what they criticize. Sci fi often presents dystopic visions of alienation and struggle against impossible problems. Extending the consequences of social trends can be more incisive than overt criticism. Sci fi in its critical mode can show that things perceived as natural and normal are in fact cultural constructs. Neuromancer was intended as social criticism, rather than prediction.

Technology is alienating and out of human control. Gibson saw massive social inequities, huge corporations, and an economy based on ephemeral computerized network space, and extended the tendencies into a possible future. Many fans of science fiction, though, do not read it as criticism, or at least they put this element aside. They enjoy it for its sense of fantastic possibilities--for the imaginative technologies it seems to predict. It is somewhat ironic that Gibson's dystopic nightmare has become inspiration for computer scientists to create the entity he feared (it's just like a twist in a science fiction plot, really).

Counterculture: VR emerged partly as a product of a dialectic between the growth of Silicon Valley high-tech industries and the social and political ideals of the Californian counterculture. The counterculture, established in the 1960s around Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, has continued in various forms since. Building a new reality inside a computer is a new form of technological utopianism. When changing social reality seems too hard, why not create a new reality? They envisioned technologies which could be so powerful they would force the mainstream to change its perceptions about reality.

Jaron Lanier: He argued "Virtual reality is the first medium to come along which doesn't narrow the human spirit..."27 and "All you can do is be creative in Virtual Reality..." He said VR would free the imagination of the masses, "help people to communicate" and bring a new kind of spiritual understanding.
The faith in computers as liberators has deep roots in US and California. Virtual reality is the battlecry of latest generation of technological advocates. In previous cases, however, dreams of social change have not been fulfilled. Successive visionaries have envisioned technological solutions to the political questions of social movements. By ignoring the political questions, though, the process of implementing the ideas has often transformed their visions into caricature. Computers have indeed become more widespread, but the domination of the industry by large corporations has continued. The technology has not been socially revolutionary.

Drugs: Stories appeared in the mainstream press warning of the dangers of addiction to VR experience, and troubled by the potential psychic damage VR might cause. The actual danger of addiction to VR had no clinical basis--the technology barely existed. The debate resulted largely from the metaphors used to talk about the technology, and from the associations the technology had with the Californian drug subculture. The cyberpunk enthusiasm for "cyberdelic" experiences was echoed in inverse by the anti-drug fraternity.

To reach a mainstream market VR developers had to deny these associations, and move away from the counterculture from which VR had emerged. Meanwhile, the counterculture saw the shift of the technology and became cynical about its mass marketing, and VR lost its attraction for those who had seen it as a means of social change. The developers had to make it palatable and attractive to the mainstream, and demonstrate VR had serious applications such as medicine, architecture and design.

VR technologies (immersive navigable computer simulations with head-mounted displays and multiple input devices) do not compare in significance with the development of print, light bulbs or flight. VR is one part of a broader set of computing and communications technologies which have developed in the past ten years. VR would not have been possible if the computer operating systems and graphics, portable displays, communications protocols and infrastructure, input and tracking devices, had not been available. Each of these new technologies are very significant, and the combinations they will be put into are likely to have deep social impacts. Focussing particularly on VR is misleading, because it tends to ignore the significance of each component of the enabling technologies. They also overplay the significance of head-mounted displays, for example, which are too cumbersome and expensive to be likely to have long-term, widespread appeal. Grouping all technologies under one title tends to gloss the strengths and limitations associated with each.

Science: The goal of VR is to fool people's senses into believing they are in the artificial "environment," so developers naturally looked to psychology and physiology for ideas on the way processes of perception operate. For visual "realism" various VR systems have taken into account factors such as stereo-optical vision, accommodation, spatial and motion depth cues and perspective. The goal of VR is to fool people's senses into believing they are in the artificial "environment," so developers naturally looked to psychology and physiology for ideas on the way processes of perception operate. For visual "realism" various VR systems have taken into account factors such as stereo-optical vision, accommodation, spatial and motion depth cues and perspective.

Virtual reality claimed to be both a science and an art (possibly to escape rigorous examination as either). Linear history always oversimplifies processes of causation. In each case, the history is written in a way which privileges a central character or theme: in this case virtual reality. History as a cultural text is not neutral. Metaphor influences the meanings associated with the history, but the text does not acknowledge that it is in fact a construction. The historical narrative was useful for proponents of virtual reality. It communicated a sense of scale and importance, and created an aura of intellectual authority. It posed historical problems which proponents duly showed that VR could solve. It projected a future of VR as a natural extension of the historical process which they described. The history was an important foundation, but it remained crucial that the discourse move into more tangible applications, and colonize the mainstream.

Frontier myth: The idea of virtual reality as a cyberspace establishes its continuity with these previous frontiers. The comparison associates the new technology with freedom, opportunity, progress and individualism. VR and cyberspace find particular resonance within US culture because of its spatiality. Text-based hypermedia cannot claim the same.

Claiming authenticity for the metaphor is an important way of making the technology appear natural and relevant. By appealing to the US cultural imagination's attraction to space, and perceived opportunity, they attracted attention to the technology. Once the connection had been made, VR proponents tried to reposition the tropes (reality, space) from a relationship of metaphor to synonymity.

VR transcended two of the most serious limitations of interacting with a computer simulation: the lack of a sense of space, and the distance from direct experience, by claiming their technology could create a new form of space and a new kind of experience. The language of Lanier, Walser, Gullichsen and Rheingold fostered the perception that VR can provide direct experience rather than encoded or mediated knowledge.

Digital colonization of the analog dataspace: Another process of colonization associated with cyberspace is what I call the digital colonization of the analogue dataspace. By envisioning a world where all information is infinitely accessible irrespective of place, the implication is that absolutely everything can and should be represented in digital form. The technologically built global village, newly incarnated as cyberspace, implies a potential that VR could be a new space for liberation and universal understanding, with access to all wisdom and truth anywhere at any instant: "Inclusion and unconstrained realities."

Another process of colonization associated with cyberspace is what I call the digital colonization of the analogue dataspace. By envisioning a world where all information is infinitely accessible irrespective of place, the implication is that absolutely everything can and should be represented in digital form. The technologically built global village, newly incarnated as cyberspace, implies a potential that VR could be a new space for liberation and universal understanding, with access to all wisdom and truth anywhere at any instant: "Inclusion and unconstrained realities."

Limitations: While it is possible to represent text, sounds, still and motion graphics and 3D modelled objects digitally, not all knowledge or all experience can fit this form. Meanings change with context, and digitisation tends to remove information from its context. Standardisation of the manner in which information is presented will impose a culturally loaded form on what really are diverse data. Its consistent form (whether that is ASCII text, graphics, or a fully graphical matrix) imposes a homogeneity of form which implies similarities where there are none. Types of knowledge which cannot be codified and digitized will become invisible in virtual space.

There is a danger that this virtual space will alienate minority perspectives in a similar way: not from direct policy, but by the economics and practice of access to the technology. From under a head-mounted display it is easy to ignore the people outside the cyberspace: excluded by economics, language and subculture. The level of diversity of opinion and perspectives within cyberspace is a product of who has access.

If this is an alternative reality, a crucial issue is who creates that reality. This means not only access to the information within cyberspace, but access to inputting and changing that information. The world views contained within cyberspace will be a consequence of who gets to down-load the information there. Therefore the diversity of people who have access is crucial. These considerations should temper some of the utopian rhetoric about cyberspace's liberating potential.

Jaron - Wired 1.02

The guy helps spearhead one of the most sensational new media technologies extant -- one with profound social and philosophical implications for the 21st century. He launches a company that enters the marketplace powered by such a hot media buzz that panting investors are lined up to hand him huge wads of cash. He becomes a cult-figure-media-star by enthralling audiences with his articulate, if overheated visions of the vast applications of his magical new toy.

Even if you're totally cyber-illiterate, unplugged, and offline; even if you only recognize the names of the top luminaries in the Silicon Valley pantheon -- Gates, Jobs, Sculley -- it was always Lanier, the visionary high priest of VR, who seemed to possess the most compelling and mysterious personality; the one who engendered the most heated reactions, pro and con. But you have to wonder: Why all the controversy? Why the dedicated Jaron-watching? Why the inordinate fascination with the personal details of his life?

"virtual reality is a major indicator of the coming paradigm shift, and Jaron Lanier is identified with it like no one else. He's set the standard for the industry and the culture by making VR systems that work, and by providing accessible software. And in the public mind he's been the guy who's hyped it into the ground.

"I was interested in using interactive animated computer graphics to represent mathematics in notation -- partially to teach it better, but also to see if you could represent math without all these symbols and instead use these sort of graphical models as the fundamental representation."

To do the study he had to learn computer programming, and although he says programming per se bores him stiff, he quickly recognized its similarity to mathematical notation in that both depend upon a language of symbols that may not be necessary.
"The truth is," he says, "programming language sucks. In mathematics, even on the deepest levels, it's not clear that you can get rid of notation, whereas with programming it's really clear that the language is junk and all you're doing is telling the computer to do something and there might be a hundred other ways to tell it."

The basic problem that he kept running into while developing his new programming language was that a computer screen simply wasn't big enough to encompass the visualizations he wanted to employ. So, together with some friends like Tom Zimmerman, Chuck Blanchard, Young Harvill, and Steve Bryson -- the initial research cadre of VPL -- Jaron built a primitive little virtual reality system with a head-mount display containing the TV screen eyepieces and a wired glove for manipulating the "virtuals object" in electronic cyberspace.

What's the matter with real reality? "We as a culture are deeply, hopelessly, insanely in love with gadgetry. And you can't fight love and win. I think of it in this way: The 20th century has been a unique time, a critical, transitional century and also a weird one in that for the first time, most interaction between people has ceased to take place in one-on-one conversations and has started to take place through media technology. However, very early, premature forms of media technology, such as TV, didn't allow for two-way communication and encouraged central bottlenecks of information flow. I'm hoping that in our work, not just at VPL, but in the Silicon Valley world of media technology, weUll build a stage in the next century that has the same niche between people that the physical world does, but that also has an enormously quick flexibility.

But with VR, when the tools for creating the content of the virtual world become good enough, all of a sudden you have a new, shared objective world where people can co-create the interior with a facility similar to language. And this is what I call post-symbolic communication, because it means that instead of using symbols to refer to things, you are simply creating reality in a collaborative conversation, a waking-state, intentionally shared dream. You're going directly to the source, avoiding the middleman of the symbol and directly apprehending the craftsmanship of that other person combined with your own, without the need for labels."

"From Wires to Waves" G. Gilder

The fact is that the universality of telephones iscrucial to their usefulness; yet universal service usingcurrent technology is totally uneconomical and impractical.

It simply does not pay to lay, entrench, string, protect,test and maintain miles of copper wire pairs, each dedicatedto one household that uses them on average some 15 or 20minutes a day.

Butbecause the lines are short and often bundled together, citytelephony benefits from economies of scale and convenience.In rural areas, however, the copper lines cost between 10and 30 times as much per customer as they do in cities.

What saves us is socialism. Closing the hugedifferential between the costs of serving rural and urbancustomers is a Byzantine web of cross-subsidies, wherebyinner-city and business callers in urban areas subsidize theworthy citizens of Kirby, Vt.; Vail, Colo.; Mendocino,Calif.; Round Rock, Texas, and Tyringham, Mass., among otherbucolic locales, to the tune of billions of dollars.Overall, subsidies from business and urban customers torural and other expensive residential users total some $20billion a year. In case the cross-subsidies do not sufficeto guarantee universality, Congress has established a $700million "Universal Service Fund." For all that, some 5% ofhomes still lack telephone service (compared with 2%unreached by TV, which faces no universal servicerequirement).

The minimum replacement cost ofthese lines deployed over the last 50 years or more--andstill being installed through the mid-1990s at a rate of atleast five million lines a year--is some $300 billion. analysts termed telephony a naturalmonopoly because the system could handle additional callsfor essentially zero incremental cost and because networkexternalities ensured that the larger the number ofcustomers, the more valuable the system. These assumptionshad led to government endorsement of the Bell monopoly as acommon carrier committed to universal service.

Regulators, politicians and litigators always imaginethat they can control the future of telecom, awardingmonopoly privileges in exchange for various high-minded goals, such as universal or enriched services. But theiractual role is mostly to promote monopoly at the expense of such values as universality,which ultimately depend not on law but on innovation. As a form of tax, regulations reduce the supply of the taxed output. It is technological and entrepreneurial progress,impelled by low tax rates and deregulation, that brings once-rare products into the reach of the poor, always the world's largest untapped market.

In the "above-890-megahertz" decision of 1959, madepossible by new Klystron tubes and other devices that openedup higher frequencies to communications, the FCC permittedcreation of private microwave networks. On the surface, itwas a narrow decision affecting a few large corporations.But it represented a clear break from the previous principles of common carriage,cross-subsidy and nationwide price averaging in thetelephone network. Combiningmicrowave with fiber, long-distance telephony became atechnologically aggressive and openly competitive arena;AT&T's monopoly was a thing of the past.

After the invention of cellular at Bell Labs in 1947, some34 years passed before the FCC finally began grantinglicenses for cellular telephony. However, the FCC allocated half themetropolitan licenses to existing RBOCs, which had nointerest in using wireless to attack the local loopmonopoly. The other licenses it assigned by lottery togamblers and financiers with no ability to create analternative local loop. The process of buying out thespectrum speculators required leading wireless carriers tohobble themselves with huge amounts of junk-bond debt. As a result, the idea persists that wireless telephonyis an expensive supplement to the existing copper colossusrather than a deadly rival of it.

At the foundation of the information economy, from computersto telephony, is the microcosm of semiconductor electronics. In computers, engineers lay out the wiresand switches across the tiny silicon substrates of microchips. In telecommunications, engineers lay out the wires andswitches across the mostly silicon substrates of continentsand seabeds. But it is essentially the same technology,governed by quantum science and electrical circuit theory.

The elements of quantum physics intrinsically combinethe characteristics of particles--definite specks ofmass--with the characteristics of waves-- an infinite radianceof fields and forces. Entirely unlike particles, wavesmerge, mingle and mesh in vectors and tensors propagatingboundlessly through space. It is this paradoxical combination of the definite withthe infinite that gives the microcosm its promise as amedium, not only for computation in one place, but forcommunications everywhere. Spectrum unfolds in a globalethersphere of interpenetrating waves that reach in a self-similar fractal pattern from the plasmas of semi-conductorlasers through the ethers of the planet.

Wires may seem more solid and reliable than air. But thedistinction is largely spurious. In proportion to the sizeof its nucleus, an atom in a copper wire is as empty as thesolar system is in proportion to the size of the sun. Whether insulated by air or by plastic, both offerresistance, capacitance, inductance, noise and interference.In thinking about communications, the concept of solidity ismostly a distraction. The essence of new devices emergesmore and more as manifestations of waves.

The world of the telecosmis subtly shifting from electronics, with its implicitprimacy of electrons, to what might be termed spectronics,seeing the particle as an expression of the wave rather thanthe other way around--moving from Bohr's atom andHeisenberg's electronic uncertainty to Maxwell's rainbow andSchrodinger's wave equation.

Using new digital radio technologies, such as codedivision multiple access or smart and directional antennasystems, you can similarly beam the same frequencies throughthe atmosphere, insulated by air. The chief difference isthat the wire system costs far more to install and inhibitsmobility.

One fiber thread the width of a human hair canpotentially use about 25 trillion of those hertz forcommunications (the rest tend to be fraught with moisture).This span is enough to carry all the phone calls in Americaon the peak moment of Mother's Day, or to bear three millionsix-megahertz high-definition television channels--all downone fiber thread the width of a human hair.

The Shosteck chart is a bellcurve relating the incomes of the world's households totelephone penetration rates. He shows that telephony has sofar penetrated only to countries representing the top tailof the curve, where national wealth suffices to reduce thecost of telephony to a threshold of between 4% and 5% ofincomes. As incomes rise around the globe, more and morepeople cross the telecom threshold. A chart of GDP in realdollars per capita versus telephone penetration shows that a40% rise in incomes could bring a 1,600% increase inpotential customers.

But telephony is becoming a branch of the computerindustry, which doubles its cost effectiveness every 18months. The wireless convergence of digital electronics andspectronics will allow the industry to escape its coppercage and achieve at least a tenfold drop in the real priceof telephony in the next seven years.

By transforming the technical landscape ofcommunications, spectronics are also transforming thelawscape. Indeed, by entirely closing the gap between thecosts of serving rural and urban customers, digital wirelessphones will obliterate the need for cross-subsidies thatunderlie the entire regulatory edifice.

Today, in the name of deregulation, politicians arepreparing to impose a series of new competitive requirementsupon the Bell operating companies, on the assumption thatthey still wield monopoly power. Pundits still seem tobelieve that the copper cage protects local telephonecompanies from outside competition. But in fact, the cageincarcerates them in copper wires, while the world preparesto pass them by.
The digital future is not wired or wireless. It isspectronic and spectacular. To participate in thisexplosive market, all telephone companies will have toescape from their copper cages into the infinite reaches ofthe spectrum.

Chapter 1: Digital Futures

Digital Futures

Brave New World v 1984. In 1984, total control over the exploited population is maintained through surveillance, terror and the fear of terrible punishment; in BNW control, no less totalitarian, is exercised through 'the more effective methods of reward and scientific manipulation' of individual minds. In both books the entire population is under constant surveillance and the methods of ideological manipulation are similar - the mass media play a central role in disseminating the regimes' propaganda. In 1984 it was the telescreen: a 2-way mechanism for instruction and surveillance that could never be turned off, while in BNW it was 'non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature'. Huxley's conclusion based on observations of English society in the 1950s: 'A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time ... in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap oepra, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those who would manipulate and control it'.

Contradictions apparent in new media technologies. On one hand, they hold the promise of a bright, abundant future; on the other is the threat of increased surveillance, even greater monopoly over resources, and greater control over our political selves-our citizenship.

Keeping up with the future

Mobile phones are no longer just phones-they are GPS tracking devices, video and still cameras, wireless Internet connections, and pocket calculations. In the US all mobiles are now fitted with GPS. Is technology moving too fast?


The process of convergence-the melding of one technology with another-produces a range of new hybrid technologies that can either make our lives easier, or as Huxley and Orwell warn, lead to a nightmare future of more effective social manipulation and control.



Kingsley Amis New Maps of Hell - writtenin 1960 when promise of a bright tech-driven future was real, though overshadowed by the Cold War. He suggested that modernist sci-fi often portrayed human society 'groaning in chains of its own construction'.



In a techno-positivist vein, some scientists are predicting that future technologies will make it possible to radically re-engineer human DNA to 'blend ourselves with machines in unprecedented ways ... ranging from homogenised humans to alien-looking hybrids bred for interstellar travel'.



The techno-positivist future relies on the argument that tech somehow equals 'progress' and that once we've ironed out a few difficulties-like inequality of access-the world can look forward to eliminating the social ills of poverty, war and pestilence. Aus govt's strategic framework document for the 'information economy' is clearly in the utopian camp, asserting that successful adjustment to the new techs will 'create a platform for long-term national competitiveness, the renewal of regional communities and stronger social cohesion'.



In this future, the convergence that produces digital comms technologies is seen as a process that can expand democracy and shrink the world to what Marshall McLuhan called the global village.

The alternative future is less ideal. Increasing role that digital techs play in everyday lives doesn't lead to abundace and world peace. Instead moves us inexorably towards a totalitarian world state, in which divisions b/w wealthy and poor are as wide as ever and tech enslaves us to the machine. Dig techs move from being comm-oriented to surveillance-oriented.

Either future is possible. Technologies don't exist in a vacuum; they are imagined, invented, and implemented in an imperfect world of inequality and social divisions.

The type of future we leave will not be determined by the tech itself, but by the legacy of the social conditions in which these techs are developed and exploited. Technology itself-as a series of intersecting scientific methods, discoveries, and practices, often embodied in 'things'-has no inherent social values. Reverse is true: the values of the dominant societies on earth will shape the ways in which comm techs and practices of the present and in the future are invented, distributed, consumed and controlled.

Broadcast to Narrowcast: The age of mass broadcasting (incl print publishing) is perhaps coming to an end. Instead we are looking at a future of mass comm that involves highly targeted narrowcasting-the mass audience is split into its individual (atomic) particles, the single receiver-consumer. The first widely available tech that began the seismic shift was the Internet. The mobile phone and the digital set-top box are the latest and perhaps more important techs that cement in place the narrowcasting future.

Dialectical method and a philosophical outlook that asks us to examine the interconnected and contradictory elements of tech as they exist in a social context. The dialectic is found in nature, but is also a driver of social change. It is a clash of ideas, and a clash of social forces. More fundamentally it is the clash of social forces with the forces of nature. Alex Callinicos: the need to control nature through the implements created by technology is a constant in the history of hte human species. All human societies, from the primitive cave dwellers of the Stone Age to the sophisticated urbanites of the 21st-C sprawl, have harnessed nature in order to produce the means of their own social reproduction.

An Overview of the Digital Society

In the 1980s the solution was quicklv found: a networK. Computers could be connected with a wire, some hardware and software to make communication possible at a specified
location. The Local Area Network was born. Sharing files and programs was now possible and coordination problems seemed solved.
The solution was using teleyhone lines: a modem connected the machines to the phone line and bulletin board software (BBS) made it possible to login at the other machine and send files. Journalists in the 1980s used this system to deliver files from home or other venues such as sporting grounds back to the newsroom.

ARPANET - Because it had no control centre, each packet of information could still travel in the direction of its final destination through any node still functioning, no matter which particular routes had been knocked out. Decentralisation is still the fundamental model of the Internet.

Convergence - Some Internet users employ Internet Relay Chat or IRC, which allows people to "talk" over the Internet via email. But as technology improved, more and more people .were trying Interphone and video conferencing. Netmeeting, integrating chat, whiteboard, sending
and receiving files together with a voice connection were also becoming popular.

To function as a machine that calculates, a computer needs information in a digitalised format, that is, in numbers. But because a computer calculates in a specific way; the numbers need to be in binary format: 0 or 1. A byte consists of 8 bits. This is sufficient to define one character. With 8 bits, 256 different combinations (2 to the 8th power) can be made, which is more than enough
for the various characters in use. This standard set of binary codes for various characters is called ascii.

Since the computer stores all information in digital bits, the computer can retrieve text, sound and pictures and doesn't really care which it is dealing with. Multimedia and the new possibilities of the Internet, sparked by digitalisation of information, have caused a merger flurry among publishing, broadcasting and computer companies.

Most time in Western societies is spent at work, but communication is the second largest activity. The Internet had to fight its way into traditional patterns of communication. How these patterns will change depends on whether the Internet becomes a new medium, comparable to TV. Much depends on technological development, such as the convergence of TV and computers and the availability of digitaltelevision. Web TV, which uses a TV set to display the Internet,
was to appear in Australia in 1999.

The transistor and the microchip and their use in various electronic circuits after the Second World War heralded the third wave, the Digital Revolution. The change from a production economy to a service economy is an important characteristic, along with the use of modern electronics and robotics in production. Post-industrial society is service-oriented because of autofnation. Production has less need for labour, so widespread unemployment has become a fact of modern life in many countries.

The French Revolution gave a second impetus to the development of the press and journalism. Democratic theory demanded that the political willbe based on the preferences of an informed and enlightened public. Only the press could play the vital role of informing the public, and
it became a bulwark against tyranny and oppression.

As well, radio could update it hourly, which left the once-a-day newspaper far behind. Newspapers continued to cover news, of course, but they also began providing context, background and analysis of the news - aspects that broadcasting could not cover. Collectively, the news and entertainment media became known as the mass media, and communication
through them became known as mass communication.

In other words, this new communication is highly interactive. Discussion and debate over all kinds of issues can be enhanced by the new digital media.

The traditional way of writing was based on linear storytelling. The classical news story has a summary lead and presents the details in order of decreasing importance. Hypertext makes it possible to write multi-dimensional stories.
Journalists may have to learn to write and appreciate this new grammar. One could defend the proposition that the change from linear to multi-dimensional story writing is related to another way of thinking as well. Linear writing is related to analytic reasoning and multi-dimensional writing is based more on association. Hypertext links are often build on this associative process.

More information does not equal more knowledge.
Although the information society is said to have blossomed because of the digital revolution, this society is not automatically asociety of better-informed people.
Data consist of a collection of unrelated facts. Facts without theory are of little use. Facts are important only if they are related to theories guiding behaviour and understanding. Although computers make searching for facts easy, these facts do not automatically enhance the level of knowledge.

In the Digital Age. then, information is abundant. Society is experiencing information overproduction. an information glut. Previously, information was scarce, and information was power. Well, information is still power, and because information is drifting away from governments into the hands of such people as journalists, power will drift in the same direction.

A Rape In Cyberspace

For the Bungle Affair raises questions that -- here on the brink of a future in which human existence may find itself as tightly enveloped in digital environments as it is today in the architectural kind -- demand a clear-eyed, sober, and unmystified consideration. It asks us to shut our ears for the time being to techno- utopian ecstasies and look without illusion upon the present possibilities for building, in the on-line spaces of this world, societies more decent and free than those mapped onto dirt and concrete and capital. It asks us to behold the new bodies awaiting us in virtual space undazzled by their phantom powers, and to get to the crucial work of sorting out the socially meaningful differences between those bodies and our physical ones. And perhaps most challengingly it asks us to wrap our late-modern ontologies, epistemologies, sexual ethics, and common sense around the curious notion of rape by voodoo doll -- and to try not to warp them beyond recognition in the process.
To be more precise about it, LambdaMOO was a MUD. Or to be yet more precise, it was a subspecies of MUD known as a MOO, which is short for "MUD, Object-Oriented." All of which means that it was a kind of database especially designed to give users the vivid impression of moving through a physical space that in reality exists only as words filed away on a hard drive.

The precise tenor of that content, however, its mingling of murderous rage and eyeball-rolling annoyance, was a curious amalgam that neither the RL nor the VR facts alone can quite account for. Where virtual reality and its conventions would have us believe that exu and Moondreamer were brutally raped in their own living room, here was the victim exu scolding Mr. Bungle for a breach of "civility." Where real life, on the other hand, insists the incident was only an episode in a free-form version of Dungeons and Dragons, confined to the realm of the symbolic and at no point threatening any player's life, limb, or material well-being, here now was the player exu issuing aggrieved and heartfelt calls for Mr. Bungle's dismemberment. Ludicrously excessive by RL's lights, woefully understated by VR's, the tone of exu's response made sense only in the buzzing, dissonant gap between them.

Netsex, tinysex, virtual sex -- however you name it, in real-life reality it's nothing more than a 900-line encounter stripped of even the vestigial physicality of the voice. And yet, as many a wide-eyed newbie can tell you, it's possibly the headiest experience the very heady world of MUDs has to offer. Amid flurries of even the most cursorily described caresses, sighs, or penetrations, the glands do engage, and often as throbbingly as they would in a real-life assignation -- sometimes even more so, given the combined power of anonymity and textual suggestiveness to unshackle deep-seated fantasies. And if the virtual setting and the interplayer vibe are right, who knows? The heart may engage as well, stirring up passions as strong as many that bind lovers who observe the formality of trysting in the flesh.

Since getting the wizards to toad Mr. Bungle (or to toad the likes of him in the future) required a convincing case that the cry for his head came from the community at large, then the community itself would have to be defined; and if the community was to be convincingly defined, then some form of social organization, no matter how rudimentary, would have to be settled on.

Parliamentarian legalist types argued that unfortunately Bungle could not legitimately be toaded at all, since there were no explicit MOO rules against rape, or against just about anything else -- and the sooner such rules were established, they added, and maybe even a full-blown judiciary system complete with elected officials and prisons to enforce those rules, the better. Others, with a royalist streak in them, seemed to feel that Bungle's as-yet-unpunished outrage only proved this New Direction silliness had gone on long enough, and that it was high time the wizardocracy returned to the position of swift and decisive leadership their player class was born to.

Consider, for another thing, that many of the biologically female participants in the Bungle debate had been around long enough to grow lethally weary of the gag-and-get- over-it school of virtual-rape counseling, with its fine line between empowering victims and holding them responsible for their own suffering, and its shrugging indifference to the window of pain between the moment the rape-text starts flowing and the moment a gag shuts it off.

Needless to say, a pro-death penalty platform is not an especially comfortable one for an anarchist to sit on, so these particular anarchists were now at great pains to sever the conceptual ties between toading and capital punishment. Toading, they insisted (almost convincingly), was much more closely analogous to banishment; it was a kind of turning of the communal back on the offending party, a collective action which, if carried out properly, was entirely consistent with anarchist models of community. And carrying it out properly meant first and foremost building a consensus around it -- a messy process for which there were no easy technocratic substitutes.

Many were the casual references to Bungle's deed as simply "rape," but these in no way implied that the players had lost sight of all distinctions between the virtual and physical versions, or that they believed Bungle should be dealt with in the same way a real-life criminal would. He had committed a MOO crime, and his punishment, if any, would be meted out via the MOO.

Only with time and the acquisition of a fixed character do players tend to make the critical passage from anonymity to pseudonymity, developing the concern for their character's reputation that marks the attainment of virtual adulthood. But while Mr. Bungle hadn't been around as long as most MOOers, he'd been around long enough to leave his newbie status behind, and his delusional statement therefore placed him among the second type: the sociopath.

After all, anyone the least bit familiar with the workings of the new era's definitive technology, the computer, knows that it operates on a principle impracticably difficult to distinguish from the pre-Enlightenment principle of the magic word: the commands you type into a computer are a kind of speech that doesn't so much communicate as make things happen, directly and ineluctably, the same way pulling a trigger does. They are incantations, in other words, and anyone at all attuned to the technosocial megatrends of the moment -- from the growing dependence of economies on the global flow of intensely fetishized words and numbers to the burgeoning ability of bioengineers to speak the spells written in the four-letter text of DNA -- knows that the logic of the incantation is rapidly permeating the fabric of our lives.

The Economy of Ideas

If our property can be infinitely reproduced and instantaneously distributed all over the planet without cost, without our knowledge, without its even leaving our possession, how can we protect it? How are we going to get paid for the work we do with our minds? And, if we can't get paid, what will assure the continued creation and distribution of such work?

This vessel, the accumulated canon of copyright and patent law, was developed to convey forms and methods of expression entirely different from the vaporous cargo it is now being asked to carry. It is leaking as much from within as from without.

Throughout the history of copyrights and patents, the proprietary assertions of thinkers have been focused not on their ideas but on the expression of those ideas. The ideas themselves, as well as facts about the phenomena of the world, were considered to be the collective property of humanity.

The point at which this franchise was imposed was that moment when the "word became flesh" by departing the mind of its originator and entering some physical object, whether book or widget. The subsequent arrival of other commercial media besides books didn't alter the legal importance of this moment. Law protected expression and, with few (and recent) exceptions, to express was to make physical.

Thus, the rights of invention and authorship adhered to activities in the physical world. One didn't get paid for ideas, but for the ability to deliver them into reality. For all practical purposes, the value was in the conveyance and not in the thought conveyed.

Even the physical/digital bottles to which we've become accustomed - floppy disks, CD-ROMs, and other discrete, shrink-wrappable bit-packages - will disappear as all computers jack-in to the global Net. While the Internet may never include every CPU on the planet, it is more than doubling every year and can be expected to become the principal medium of information conveyance, and perhaps eventually, the only one.

Furthermore, the increasing difficulty of enforcing existing copyright and patent laws is already placing in peril the ultimate source of intellectual property - the free exchange of ideas.

The greatest constraint on your future liberties may come not from government but from corporate legal departments laboring to protect by force what can no longer be protected by practical efficiency or general social consent.

digital technology is also erasing the legal jurisdictions of the physical world and replacing them with the unbounded and perhaps permanently lawless waves of cyberspace.
In cyberspace, no national or local boundaries contain the scene of a crime and determine the method of its prosecution; worse, no clear cultural agreements define what a crime might be.

Since it is now possible to convey ideas from one mind to another without ever making them physical, we are now claiming to own ideas themselves and not merely their expression. And since it is likewise now possible to create useful tools that never take physical form, we have taken to patenting abstractions, sequences of virtual events, and mathematical formulae - the most unreal estate imaginable.

Humans have not inhabited cyberspace long enough or in sufficient diversity to have developed a Social Contract which conforms to the strange new conditions of that world. Laws developed prior to consensus usually favor the already established few who can get them passed and not society as a whole.

In the United States one can already see a parallel economy developing, mostly among small, fast moving enterprises who protect their ideas by getting into the marketplace quicker then their larger competitors who base their protection on fear and litigation.

Information is an activity. Information is a life form. Information is a relationship.

Information is an action which occupies time rather than a state of being which occupies physical space, as is the case with hard goods.

Information Is Experienced, Not Possessed. Even when it has been encapsulated in some static form like a book or a hard disk, information is still something that happens to you as you mentally decompress it from its storage code.

Information that isn't moving ceases to exist as anything but potential...at least until it is allowed to move again.

Information Is Conveyed by Propagation, Not Distribution. The central economic distinction between information and physical property is that information can be transferred without leaving the possession of the original owner.

Memes: They self-reproduce, they interact with their surroundings and adapt to them, they mutate, they persist. They evolve to fill the empty niches of their local environments, which are, in this case the surrounding belief systems and cultures of their hosts, namely, us.

Information Replicates into the Cracks of Possibility.
Like DNA helices, ideas are relentless expansionists, always seeking new opportunities for Lebensraum. And, as in carbon-based nature, the more robust organisms are extremely adept at finding new places to live. Thus, just as the common housefly has insinuated itself into practically every ecosystem on the planet, so has the meme of "life after death" found a niche in most minds, or psycho-ecologies.

Information wants to change: Digital information, unconstrained by packaging, is a continuing process more like the metamorphosing tales of prehistory than anything that will fit in shrink-wrap. From the Neolithic to Gutenberg (monks aside), information was passed on, mouth to ear, changing with every retelling (or resinging). The stories which once shaped our sense of the world didn't have authoritative versions. They adapted to each culture in which they found themselves being told.

Information Is Perishable.
With the exception of the rare classic, most information is like farm produce. Its quality degrades rapidly both over time and in distance from the source of production. But even here, value is highly subjective and conditional. Yesterday's papers are quite valuable to the historian. In fact, the older they are, the more valuable they become. On the other hand, a commodities broker might consider news of an event that occurred more than an hour ago to have lost any relevance.

Information has a relationship: Each such relationship is unique. Even in cases where the sender is a broadcast medium, and no response is returned, the receiver is hardly passive. Receiving information is often as creative an act as generating it.
The value of what is sent depends entirely on the extent to which each individual receiver has the receptors - shared terminology, attention, interest, language, paradigm - necessary to render what is received meaningful.

In fact, information, in the economic sense of the word, consists of data which have been passed through a particular human mind and found meaningful within that mental context.

Most soft goods increase in value as they become more common. Familiarity is an important asset in the world of information.

The problem with a model that turns the physical scarcity/value ratio on its head is that sometimes the value of information is very much based on its scarcity. Exclusive possession of certain facts makes them more useful. If everyone knows about conditions which might drive a stock price up, the information is valueless.

In a world of floating realities and contradictory maps, rewards will accrue to those commentators whose maps seem to fit their territory snugly, based on their ability to yield predictable results for those who use them.

But, as we become fixated upon information commerce, many of us seem to think that originality alone is sufficient to convey value, deserving, with the right legal assurances, of a steady wage. In fact, the best way to protect intellectual property is to act on it. It's not enough to invent and patent; one has to innovate as well. Someone claims to have patented the microprocessor before Intel. Maybe so. If he'd actually started shipping microprocessors before Intel, his claim would seem far less spurious.

However, as we increasingly buy information with money, we begin to see that buying information with other information is simple economic exchange without the necessity of converting the product into and out of currency.

Until the West was fully settled and "civilized" in this century, order was established according to an unwritten Code of the West, which had the fluidity of common law rather than the rigidity of statutes. Ethics were more important than rules. Understandings were preferred over laws, which were, in any event, largely unenforceable.

Both of these economic systems required stability. Their laws were designed to resist change and to assure some equability of distribution within a fairly static social framework. The empty niches had to be constrained to preserve the predictability necessary to either land stewardship or capital formation.

Instead, I think that, as in the case cited above, compensation for soft products will be driven primarily by practical considerations, all of them consistent with the true properties of digital information, where the value lies in it, and how it can be both manipulated and protected by technology.

In any case, whether you think of yourself as a service provider or a performer, the future protection of your intellectual property will depend on your ability to control your relationship to the market - a relationship which will most likely live and grow over a period of time.
The value of that relationship will reside in the quality of performance, the uniqueness of your point of view, the validity of your expertise, its relevance to your market, and, underlying everything, the ability of that market to access your creative services swiftly, conveniently, and interactively.

Interactivity will be a billable commodity even in the absence of authorship. As people move into the Net and increasingly get their information directly from its point of production, unfiltered by centralized media, they will attempt to develop the same interactive ability to probe reality that only experience has provided them in the past.