Past visions of cyberspace
Jul. 17th, 2003 11:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinAs a science-fiction fan, I am, of course, interested in expired visions of the future. History keeps generating fresh ones.
Before Clay Shirky made that speech that I mentioned earlier, he wrote an essay that made many of the same points. In it he mentioned something that I've found fascinating for some time:
Shirky goes on to point out that it hasn't turned out that way. For one thing, identity is far less fluid. People can change their identities all the time, but (apart from messing with cosmetic trappings, while maintaining identifiability) it's regarded as aberrant behavior and doesn't do good things for their reputations.
And the 3D cyberspaces haven't taken over. Actually, they're far from dead; later-generation immersive 3D environments have emerged, such as some of the MMPORGs and unclassifiable things like Second Life. But most people who goof around on the Internet don't do most of their social interaction in there; they're probably doing something more or less textual instead. And nobody's going to reengineer the whole Internet into an overarching spatial metaphor like in an Eighties (or early Nineties) cyberpunk novel; that would be counterproductive.
So it pays to ask: why did people ever think it would be that way? Shirky points to one possible reason:
1. This was a nerd vision of the future and it's not just for nerds any more.
But I think that's only part of the answer. After all, your real hardcore techno-geeks tend to prefer the command line. Here are some other possibilities:
2. William Gibson.
Gibson's short story "Johnny Mnemonic" and his 1984 novel Neuromancer started a small revolution in written science fiction, which later spilled over into other parts of popular culture. Gibson wrote of a world in which people would "jack in" and experience the world of computer networks as a 3D "consensual hallucination" that was variously called "cyberspace" or "the matrix" (oddly, the latter term had previously been used on Doctor Who to mean something similar). That ended up conditioning expectations of the Internet of the future for decades to come.
This is a variant of the Star Trek Fallacy: assuming that because something works well as a science-fiction plot device, it will work well in reality. The reasons that Gibson's cyberspace worked this way had nothing to do with plausibility. It tied in with the video-game craze of the 1980s, and also meant that the abstract activities of system-crackers and computer security systems could be dramatized as exciting, highly visual chase-and-attack adventures in a virtual world. It was also a rotten user interface, and anything built around it would be well-nigh unusable in the real world. The most obvious problem: In order to create danger in his virtual world (always a problem in these stories), Gibson had his users paste electrodes to their foreheads for a direct brain interface, which could kill them if they encountered hostile "black ice". Few users would actually submit to that, especially considering that the visuals so obtained could be gotten as easily with some harmless video display or immersive headgear. But Neuromancer and its successors did mean that there was some desire to experience something like this, even if it wasn't a place you'd want to go to accomplish anything.
3. The concerns of academics in the humanities in the 1990s.
Reading old papers on the subject, like this one, can be a frustrating experience. I found that article while searching for more on the 1970s Communitree, an early online community described by Shirky in his speech. It entertainingly summarizes some of the interesting phenomena that arose then (culminating in the self-destruction of Communitree), but doesn't go on to speculate much about whether they were avoidable and how. Instead the author uses this to explore all sorts of concerns about the body and sex, gender and ethnic identity, where you really are when you're in a virtual space, and something called "cyborg envy". There's a historical overview that treats Gibsonian cyberspaces as a natural endpoint.
Lots of the writing from the era is like this. Academic presses put out whole collections of these papers on virtual reality and gender and the body. There are valid concerns and interesting subjects being talked about there, and you can see the seeds of some stuff that became relevant-- concerns over online sexual predators and porn and AIM romance and video-game heroines with big boobies. But from the point of view of 2003 it seems to be missing much of the interesting dynamics of virtual communities in and of themselves, which actually has little to do with whether they're immersive 3D cyberspaces or textual chatrooms. At the risk of stereotype, I think I can safely say that academic humanities departments in the early 1990s were deeply interested in these body, sex and identity issues, and when they theorized about the future of online society they saw it through that lens. Since game-like 3D cyberspaces in which you have a visible virtual body are the most interesting kind in that regard, they were a focus of study.
Nobody predicted that a major component of online expression, attracting mass media attention in the early 21st century, would be little personal pages on which you post little text articles in reverse chronological order with a special tool.
I'm not sure what to conclude, except to say that I expect more surprises, and any assumptions we make today are probably just as wrong.
Before Clay Shirky made that speech that I mentioned earlier, he wrote an essay that made many of the same points. In it he mentioned something that I've found fascinating for some time:
When the internet was strange and new, we concentrated on its strange new effects. Earlier generations of social software, from mailing lists to MUDs, were created when the network's population could be measured in the tens of thousands, not the hundreds of millions, and the users were mostly young, male, and technologically savvy. In those days, we convinced ourselves that immersive 3D environments and changing our personalities as often as we changed socks would be the norm.
Shirky goes on to point out that it hasn't turned out that way. For one thing, identity is far less fluid. People can change their identities all the time, but (apart from messing with cosmetic trappings, while maintaining identifiability) it's regarded as aberrant behavior and doesn't do good things for their reputations.
And the 3D cyberspaces haven't taken over. Actually, they're far from dead; later-generation immersive 3D environments have emerged, such as some of the MMPORGs and unclassifiable things like Second Life. But most people who goof around on the Internet don't do most of their social interaction in there; they're probably doing something more or less textual instead. And nobody's going to reengineer the whole Internet into an overarching spatial metaphor like in an Eighties (or early Nineties) cyberpunk novel; that would be counterproductive.
So it pays to ask: why did people ever think it would be that way? Shirky points to one possible reason:
1. This was a nerd vision of the future and it's not just for nerds any more.
But I think that's only part of the answer. After all, your real hardcore techno-geeks tend to prefer the command line. Here are some other possibilities:
2. William Gibson.
Gibson's short story "Johnny Mnemonic" and his 1984 novel Neuromancer started a small revolution in written science fiction, which later spilled over into other parts of popular culture. Gibson wrote of a world in which people would "jack in" and experience the world of computer networks as a 3D "consensual hallucination" that was variously called "cyberspace" or "the matrix" (oddly, the latter term had previously been used on Doctor Who to mean something similar). That ended up conditioning expectations of the Internet of the future for decades to come.
This is a variant of the Star Trek Fallacy: assuming that because something works well as a science-fiction plot device, it will work well in reality. The reasons that Gibson's cyberspace worked this way had nothing to do with plausibility. It tied in with the video-game craze of the 1980s, and also meant that the abstract activities of system-crackers and computer security systems could be dramatized as exciting, highly visual chase-and-attack adventures in a virtual world. It was also a rotten user interface, and anything built around it would be well-nigh unusable in the real world. The most obvious problem: In order to create danger in his virtual world (always a problem in these stories), Gibson had his users paste electrodes to their foreheads for a direct brain interface, which could kill them if they encountered hostile "black ice". Few users would actually submit to that, especially considering that the visuals so obtained could be gotten as easily with some harmless video display or immersive headgear. But Neuromancer and its successors did mean that there was some desire to experience something like this, even if it wasn't a place you'd want to go to accomplish anything.
3. The concerns of academics in the humanities in the 1990s.
Reading old papers on the subject, like this one, can be a frustrating experience. I found that article while searching for more on the 1970s Communitree, an early online community described by Shirky in his speech. It entertainingly summarizes some of the interesting phenomena that arose then (culminating in the self-destruction of Communitree), but doesn't go on to speculate much about whether they were avoidable and how. Instead the author uses this to explore all sorts of concerns about the body and sex, gender and ethnic identity, where you really are when you're in a virtual space, and something called "cyborg envy". There's a historical overview that treats Gibsonian cyberspaces as a natural endpoint.
Lots of the writing from the era is like this. Academic presses put out whole collections of these papers on virtual reality and gender and the body. There are valid concerns and interesting subjects being talked about there, and you can see the seeds of some stuff that became relevant-- concerns over online sexual predators and porn and AIM romance and video-game heroines with big boobies. But from the point of view of 2003 it seems to be missing much of the interesting dynamics of virtual communities in and of themselves, which actually has little to do with whether they're immersive 3D cyberspaces or textual chatrooms. At the risk of stereotype, I think I can safely say that academic humanities departments in the early 1990s were deeply interested in these body, sex and identity issues, and when they theorized about the future of online society they saw it through that lens. Since game-like 3D cyberspaces in which you have a visible virtual body are the most interesting kind in that regard, they were a focus of study.
Nobody predicted that a major component of online expression, attracting mass media attention in the early 21st century, would be little personal pages on which you post little text articles in reverse chronological order with a special tool.
I'm not sure what to conclude, except to say that I expect more surprises, and any assumptions we make today are probably just as wrong.