Telecom/1996-04-telecom-walnutcreek.iso/book.reviews/cyberspace.first.steps

Text File | 1995-01-05 | 5KB | 103 lines

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Date: Sat, 30 Jul 1994 12:50:23 MDT
From: Rob Slade <[e-mail]>
Subject: Book Review: "Cyberspace: First Steps" by Benedikt


BKCYBRSP.RVW  940506

The MIT Press
55 Hayward Street
Cambridge, MA  02142-1399
Robert V. Prior, Editor - Computer Science [e-mail]
Maureen Curtin, Int'l Promo. - [e-mail]
"Cyberspace: First Steps", Benedikt, 1991, 0-262-52177-6, U$18.95
[e-mail]

William Gibson is generally credited with the invention of the term,
"cyberspace," although I recall vague discussions of its prior use by
others within the science fiction genre.  No matter: Gibson's
influence on the term holds primacy in the public mind.  Thus, while
seasoned Internauts tend to use the term as a rather rough shorthand
for the access to information and communications that take place
without regard for spatial proximity, the general populace holds a
view which tightly couples the mythical Information Superhighway with
Virtual Reality.  This is a pity.  While virtual reality holds promise
both as a teaching tool and in studies of the human machine interface,
its products still lie in the future.  Computer-mediated communications,
if one will accept some slight crudities, is here now and used by a signif-
icant minority of the computer-using public.  Still, there seems to be
little point in trying to loosen the cyberspace/virtual reality
binding, and this collection of papers promotes it.

The first of the essays of the book proper, third in the table of
contents, is an anthropological study of rites and symbols as means of
communications and group identity.  One is rather suspicious of a
paper which relies primarily for source material on a couple of
science fiction books.  (Carelessly read, too.  Tomas states that
security programs "periodically mutate into independent creative
entities" in Gibson's work.  This happened once in the works cited,
although it is also alluded to in "The Difference Engine.")  In
reality, there are very few culturally agreed graphical
representations of data, let alone meaning.  Since we are using
science fiction as sources, I refer you to the galactic works of David
Brin, where characters experience the data of the Library as
*meaningless* graphics, and must build referents to guide themselves
therein.  I also find very few "rites of passage" in the Interact
community.  Tomas' view of "jacking in" and out of cyberspace as
ritual is also unconvincing: just this week, I changed network access
to my major Internet contact point and it has not made any appreciable
difference to the process, once I've logged on.

The fourth paper is an enthusiastic and subjective view of virtual
reality as utopia.  This cyberspace siren song is completely
uncritical, and reminds one of the recent article which stated that to
appreciate virtual reality it was only necessary to fail to grasp
reality, itself.  I suspect the author doesn't fully grasp the irony
in the fact that she starts off by comparing computer animation with
the effects of hallucinogenic drugs.

Heim's paper, fifth in the series, starts out by asking significant
questions about the nature of representations in virtual reality, and
even touches, at one point, on computer ethics.  Unfortunately, again
using a single novel as a source, he confuses erotic passages in a
fictional work with substantive characteristics of VR entities.

In "Will the Real Body Please Stand Up," Stone raises some provoking
and often frightening questions about the psychological relation of
the user to the system, and of the capacity humans have for denying
reality.

Benedikt's "Proposals" propose no less than the "laws of physics" for
cyberspace, itself, They are well thought out and psychologically
sound, forgetting only one factor: his proposals severely limit the
usefulness of virtual reality for universal data representation, and
ignore the multi- logical, non-spatial relationships of data.  The
next (eighth) paper essentially proposes to do the same thing, but
slightly differently, and in far less detail.  Wexelblat's
contribution briefly addresses the multi-logical nature of data under
the term, "semantic spaces."  It is difficult, however, to relate it
to the previous items, given the radical shift from the language of
poetry to that of mathematics.

One of the most interesting papers is a report on Habitat, Lacasfilm's
attempt at a multi-user virtual reality system.  Intriguingly, given
the book's disregard of real networks in favour of VR explorations,
the essential lesson here is that the personal interactions define the
space much more thoroughly than any technical advances.

Papers eleven to thirteen give some starting ideas on technical
aspects of cyberspace.  These are conceptual in nature, rather than
detailed.

Essay fourteen is a typical "day in the life" article on the use of
cyberspace in a corporate environment.  Fifteen is similar, but
concentrates on recreation and education.

Although the lack of familiarity with the realities of technology
contributes to some unrealistic views and proposals, a number of the
essays prompt questions about the nature of virtual reality, and would
be good discussion starters.  This would likely be useful as an
adjunct text in a course on virtual reality or user interface studies.
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