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The Arachnet Electronic Journal on Virtual Culture
__________________________________________________________________
ISSN 1068-5723               March 22, 1993 Volume 1 Issue 1
                                                     EJVCV1N1 CONTENTS
This entire issue is available as EJVCV1N1 $PACKAGE

Table of Contents
_______________________

                FEATURE ARTICLES
                =================
Education, Cyberspace and Change.
by J.L. Lemke (JLLBC@CUNYVM)
         (available as LEMKE V1N1 1,140 lines)

Abductive Multiloguing: The Semiotic Dynamics of Navigating the Net.
 by Gary Shank (P30GDS1@NIU)
         (available as SHANK V1N1 797 lines)

                THE CYBERSPACE MONITOR
                ======================
edited by Algirdas Pakstas ([e-mail])
  (available as EJVCV1N1 MONITOR 2,206 lines)

EDITOR MESSAGE
MEDIA REVIEWS
        BOOKS:
        - INTERNET: GETTING STARTED
NETWARE REVIEWS (systems/hw/sw/services)
        SOFTWARE:
        - ELECTRONIC JOURNAL SYSTEM
        SERVICES:
        - INTERNET TALK RADIO
NETWARE TUTORIALS
        LISTSERV/LDBASE
MEETINGS/CONFERENCES/EXHIBITIONS/EVENTS
        PROJECTS:
        - INVITATION TO JOIN ONGOING RESEARCH PROJECT ON THE
        USE OF ELECTRONIC MAIL DISCUSSION LISTS
        CALL FOR PAPERS/PARTICIPATION:
        - INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY 1993
        - 16th IRIS (INFORMATION SYSTEMS RESEARCH SEMINAR IN
        SCANDINAVIA)
        - RUSSIAN FORUM/SEMINAR
        - NSC93: THE NETWORK SERVICES CONFERENCE
        - INTERNATIONAL INFORMATICS ACCESS '93
        - CALL FOR STORIES ABOUT U.S. NATIONAL INFORMATION
        INFRASTRUCTURE
        - THE ELECTRONIC JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION
        - NEW EJC ISSUE AVAILABLE FROM COMSERVE










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The Arachnet Electronic Journal on Virtual Culture
__________________________________________________________________
ISSN 1068-5723               March 22, 1993 Volume 1 Issue 1
                                                     LEMKE V1N1


             EDUCATION, CYBERSPACE, AND CHANGE


                        J. L. LEMKE

                City University of New York
            Brooklyn College School of Education
                Brooklyn, New York 11210 USA
                  [[e-mail]]


                          ABSTRACT

Possible new directions for education and related social and
cultural changes are discussed from the viewpoint of post-
modern perspectives on learning, information technologies,
and the dynamics of complex systems. A new model of educa-
tion in cyberspace rather than in school and classrooms is
formulated, together with key questions for a new educa-
tional research agenda. The potential impact of these
changes on cultural values and on the way humans interact
with the natural and built environment are considered.


                      INTRODUCTORY NOTE

This article was originally written to provide a starting
point for discussions of new perspectives on education made
possible by advanced technologies. That discussion was con-
ducted as an "electronic salon" on the internet organized by
Chris Bigum and Bill Green of Deakin University in Australia
in conjunction with a major conference held there in 1992.
The perspective and style of the contributions was explicit-
ly post-modernist. Some minor changes have been made to make
this version more accessible to a wider readership.


              A FRAMEWORK: ECOSOCIAL DYNAMICS

The functions of scholarship are not limited to the produc-
tion and validation of new knowledge and new theoretical
perspectives. As scholars we also have a responsibility to
articulate the social and cultural changes that new develop-
ments make possible, or even conceivable. These are not pre-
dictions, they are options; and we must argue for them on
the basis of value choices as well as factual determinations
and theoretical interpretation.

We have only a very limited repertory of metaphors for
change. Change is most often spoken of in the language of
movement. Whether as the progress of forward movement,
retrogression, circularity, or the dialectic of `two steps
forward, one step back', all these metaphors embody a decep-
tive semantics in which change seems voluntary, like walk-
ing, in which all directions seem equally "there" in princi-
ple, in which past steps determine where we are but not
where we go next, and in which there is always "somewhere"
to go to.

Scientific discourses are not immune to these ways of talk-
ing (classical physics carries them to their utter limits),
but they have evolved in highly specialized contexts alien
to common experience. In their spectrum of divergence from
common sense, they have elaborated some useful new metaphors
for social and cultural change. I have described these in
detail elsewhere and suggested their possible usefulness for
models of cultural dynamics (Lemke, in press). Here I will
only briefly sketch a few of these which I plan to use as a
framework for this discussion.

Organic growth is another possible metaphor for change, very
different from the metaphor of motion. It belongs to a fam-
ily of metaphors for the dynamics of complex systems that
includes embryological development, ecological succession,
biological evolution, and the postmodern physics of so-
called chaotic systems (more specifically the nonlinear
dynamics of systems with complex webs of internal self-
coupling among their constitutive processes). These sorts of
systems share many dynamical features, and they have also
been described generically as autopoietic, self-organizing,
or non-equilibrium dynamic open systems (see Lemke, in
press, and references therein, especially Salthe 1985, 1989;
Harrison 1982; Odum 1983; Jackson 1989; Prigogine 1980, 1984
also cited below; less technically, on chaotic systems,
Gleick 1987). They include hurricanes, rainforests, cities,
and organisms, as well as stars, flames, and even dripping
faucets. In all cases the system is never a NOW, it is al-
ways a TRAJECTORY of development over time. It is not the
butterfly, but the larva-pupa-butterfly trajectory; not the
person-now, but the zygote-embryo-child-adult-dotard trajec-
tory.

The trajectories of particular systems follow an average
type-trajectory of development for their kind, modulated by
individuations. The type-trajectory for the kinds of systems
we are interested in cumulates and modifies over genera-
tions; it evolves. Evolution takes place when some initially
unique individuation becomes typical, and that happens, in-
terestingly, when latent possibilities for divergence along
the trajectory (potential side-routes not previously taken)
are activated by novel environments. Once the developmental
trajectory has evolved to follow a particular series of
stages, changes in the later course of development require
divergences earlier than the last relevant branching point,
or bifurcation. One consequence of this is that children, in
the course of development, can potentially advance cultural
evolution, precisely insofar as they do NOT recapitulate all
the stages of intellectual development of the previous gen-
eration. The earlier the divergence, the more profound the
possible changes in how the trajectory may ultimately devel-
op.

It is probably fundamentally wrong to imagine that the way
to "progress" is to educate each generation up to maturity
to be exactly like its predecessors, and then expect them to
radically innovate. That model is a recipe for inhibiting
social and cultural change. Encouraging children to do the
bizarre, the unthinkable, the immoral, and even the impos-
sible, would probably not rock social stability more than a
very little bit, but it could produce individuations that
history (i.e. the rest of us and our successors) would
ultimately edit into fundamental sociocultural change.

Another basic lesson of these models of postmodern dynamics
is that it is SYSTEMS that develop, and that systems are al-
ways systems of interdependent processes and activities (not
aggregations of interacting "things" or "persons" as such).
The trajectory-system for which one can formulate a dynamics
is always a bit arbitary in its boundaries, because to exist
it must transact with a sustaining, conditioning environ-
ment, together with which it forms a supersystem on a larger
scale, just as it is constituted in turn of interacting sub-
systems at smaller scales. All dynamical analysis must be
ACROSS SCALES (of time, space, energy-transfer, information-
transfer) as well as over the durational, or trajectory
"time" that these processes themselves engender.

So it is again fundamentally wrong to imagine that human so-
cial systems have an autonomous cultural dynamics; they can-
not. Human social systems are inextricably interdependent
with (and in many cases co-extensive with) systems of
material processes that include the physical-chemical-
biological ecosystem (both its biotic and abiotic com-
ponents), up the scale hierarchy, at least to Gaia (the
planet as a quasi-living, and conceivably quasi-conscious
system; cf. Lovelock 1989), and probably beyond. Cultural
practices are always also material processes; they construe
meaning and assign valuation, but they also participate in
eco-physical couplings (as well as in systems of purely
semiotic relations) and co-evolve over time as parts of a
larger, unitary "ecosocial system" (Lemke, in press).

My concern in this paper is with ecosocial change, with
changes in the practices and institutions we call education
in the context of changes in the practices and institutions
we call information technologies. But both these foci must
be embedded in much larger and more complex systems, if we
are to truly imagine the nature of likely and possible
changes.


        DEVELOPMENT UP TO NOW: SCHOOL v. CYBERSPACE

Ecosocial dynamics readily accommodates the classic princi-
ple of "uneven development", i.e. within the same system, at
the same stage of overall wide-scale development, different
subsystems will have followed different trajectories of
local-scale development, and the system as a whole will be
"patchy": a mosaic of elements that show diversity of every
sort, including the co-existence of contradictory elements,
often from different periods of evolutionary history. In the
same city you will find architecture, and even plumbing,
from different decades and different centuries, side by
side. In the same system of personal semiotic practices you
can find a monarchical religion, a bourgeois economics, a
classically socialist politics, and a postmodern
epistemological stance, all happily co-habiting. In our
postindustrial societies you can find on-line database tech-
nologies and textbook-based schooling.

Schools as we presently understand them hardly existed much
before the 19th century, and it is hard to imagine that they
will continue to exist in any recognizable form by the end
of the 21st. All social institutions, as part of their
legitimization, endow themselves with an aura of perpetuity.
Modernism imagines that what are in their origins essential-
ly 19th century bourgeois institutions continue to be in-
finitely flexible and adaptable, their principles so in-
herently correct that they will continue to serve useful
functions in all possible futures, forever and ever, world
without end (_pace_ Ozymandias).

The fundamental assumptions of academic education are incom-
patible with the present, much less the likely future needs
of a postmodern society. Schools will continue to exist in
patches, but they will grow sparser, less relevant to the
system as a whole, to its futures. This trend has been evi-
dent at least since the 1960s, when anti-establishment views
had a substantial hearing (e.g. Illich, 1971). The dominant
information technology in the Age of Schooling was the
printed book. The technology advanced until large numbers of
books could be had at reasonable cost by large numbers of
people (subsidized by the death of forests, the toxic pollu-
tion from paper mills and synthetic inks). This information
availability made read-only print literacy a cultural prac-
tice of gradually widening social value to individuals and
institutions. Schools were instituted to teach reading, and
with textbooks came curricula that, in principle at least,
still consist essentially of learning to read one subject-
specific register or another. Academic examinations are
basically tests of what is supposed to be read in textbooks.

Schooling today is a full-service institution. Like the fam-
ily, it serves a multitude of economic, social, political,
and ideological functions. But as a mode of education, it
still relies heavily on its assumption that education is
about reading textbooks. Apart from some areas of higher ed-
ucation, textbooks (i.e. books written for and read only by
school students and their teachers) are pretty much all that
is read in schools. Textbooks are the specialized technology
of print publishing for selecting and organizing a very
small subset of all the information around. Great political
(and pseudo-intellectual) battles are waged about what gets
into them, and how much of it.

The currently dominant ideology of curricular selection and
priority holds that there are, in every subject, certain key
abstract concepts which once "grasped" by students, can then
be transferred or applied to novel situations throughout the
rest of their lives. Postmodern, semiotic constructivist
epistemologies undermine the logic and the interpretations
of evidence for this older theory (see, e.g. Lave 1988, von
Glasersfeld 1991; Lemke, forthcoming), which in retrospect
seems not much more than a rationalization for the academic
status quo.

People learn to do things by DOING them; not by talking
about concepts abstracted from doing them. What we actually
do learn in school is simply what we DO in school. The fact
that academics can construct post-hoc similarities between
school activity types (semiotic practices) and those in the
rest of human life does not imply that developing individu-
als will automatically reconstruct the historically con-
tingent ways in which their culture has decided that two
distinct activity types involve applications of "the same"
concept. It is only AFTER we have learned new activities
that we can be taught to construct their "similarity" to
prior activities, according to the conventions of our par-
ticular culture and community.

Schooling is starting to unravel. Schooling is reverting to
the oral tradition from which it began: the teacher reads
the textbook and gives an oral exposition of its contents,
sometimes in dialogue with students. Fewer and fewer stu-
dents actually read their textbooks, or learn how to con-
struct meaningful discourse patterns by doing so. Students
have other sources of information now about the amazing,
horrifying, and often dangerous world in which we live.
Sources whose content is more convincingly relevant: televi-
sion programs and movies (with a residuum of comics and mag-
azines). Video sources are oral and visual; they do not re-
quire print literacy.

These sources are well-adapted to convey startlingly novel
information through sensory-interpretive channels that are
(unlike print literacy) evolutionarily old, and whose use is
second-nature. Those channels have been extended; you have
to learn how to see video, it is a highly conventionalized
semiotic medium. Its verisimilitude is only the sign of its
success in accessing/extending the old channels. The rule of
ecosocial change is: one step back in order to go two steps
forward (_reculer pour mieux sauter_; retrogressive re-
potentialization). Back from print literacy to oral-visual
communication in order to go forward to video, cyberspace,
and virtual realities.

Today's students have already diverged, in interaction with
video media, from the developmental track (as much a cultur-
al as a biological one, clearly) that formerly led to print
literacy. This same divergence is one that better prepares
them, compared to previous generations, for what is coming
next. That is how typical developmental trajectories evolve.

I am not predicting the demise of written language in the
near future; but it will be fused ever more closely with
other semiotic modalities of communication and representa-
tion. We used to wean children away from picturebooks. Adult
books, scholarly books needed no pictures. Back one step:
scholarly work, by the end of the next century, will be con-
sidered incomplete if it consists of written text alone.
Forward, diverging, two steps: to multimedia hypertext, and
then to virtual realities in cyberspace.

I am arguing that schooling is not likely to continue to
function as the dominant form of education, certainly as the
dominant mode by which society makes available what it con-
siders important information for society-wide dissemination.
Illich (1971) long ago argued that schools could be replaced
by libraries as the dominant educational institutions. Li-
braries, of course, will themselves be very different by the
time this has happened (my guess: 50 years).

Libraries will exist in cyberspace, and they will contain,
not printed text-only books, but all electronically stored
information which is publicly accessible. They will, un-
fortunately, probably no longer be free, though it might be
worth fighting for this. For a fee, more will be accessible.
The library will merge with the bookstore, and both with the
electronic database, which will hold not just text and num-
bers, but pictures, graphic representations, videos, music,
and virtual realities. Television, telephones, and computers
will be absorbed into the new institution as well (while
continuing to exist independently in the patchy way of un-
even ecosocial development).

In embryo, all this already exists. Any inexpensive com-
puter, with another $50 for a telephone modem connection,
can already link to a worldwide amateur network (Fidonet) of
bulletin-board systems (BBSs) that are pioneering the cul-
tural practices which establishment institutions (the Inter-
net) will follow, just as  the "Ham Radio" of the 1950s
pioneered the Global Village long before sattelite televi-
sion. BBSs are themselves often run on very inexpensive,
jury-rigged computer systems. And they already have
graphics, and music, and CD-ROM on-line. Video and virtual
reality (VR) await only the fiber-optic cable network (or
digital telephonics, or super data-compression schemes) that
will replace present telephones lines and television (broad-
cast and cable, picturephones and HDTV). Japan will have it
first, thanks to being younger as a technological society
(its trajectory individuating in more modern/postmodern con-
ditions) and having been pushed "one step back" in WW2.

Neoteny is extended immaturity, and hence prolonged capacity
to diverge developmentally (cf. Gould 1977, Montagu 1981).
College students, and adventurous faculty, have already dis-
covered that even the primitive Internet can get you access
to vast libraries of world-diverse information (though main-
ly only text and numbers yet; pictures are just arriving).
This capacity will grow exponentially in the next few years.
Younger "hackers" discovered 10-20 years ago that a little
innocent larceny could get you into even the proprietary
databases of corporations and governments. Not textbooks,
but authentic information in its customary forms. Not what
someone else thinks you should know, but what you choose to
find out. Not one controlled version of the truth, but as
many versions as you care to examine. Not a test to evaluate
whether you have learned the content of the textbooks, but
value judgments about the worth of whatever it is you have
learned. By you, by others; for specific, definable pur-
poses.

In our lifetimes, in the lifetimes of our students, and
their students, people will learn what they need to know by
accessing global electronic databases, and local proprietary
databases, that will contain the totality of available in-
formation, in forms that will organize that information, or
allow us to reorganize it, into whatever forms may be most
useful for our immediate purposes. The successor to print
literacy will be the set of skills needed to locate and use-
fully organize information, for ourselves and for others, in
cyberspace. (For further discussion, see Lemke 1993.)

What we today marginalize as "informal education" (museum
displays, library use) and auto-didacticism will become
tomorrow's norm; formal schooling will become rarer and more
old-fashioned. It is already impossible to convincingly jus-
tify any particular selection of information as THE cur-
riculum. Recent efforts to do so have either been reaction-
ary attempts to return to the curricula of pride and
prejudice, or else fanciful flights of abstraction seeking
to teach non-existent, universally applicable intellectual
processes (pseudo-universal problem-solving skills, higher
literacy skills, etc.). Both essentially deny the diversity
of human experience and seek to substitute for it impossible
claims of universality.

There are no useful universals. Universal claims are always
either parochial power-plays or abstractions of so high an
order as to say almost nothing about individual instances.
Where them seem to do so it is only because they conceal
critical instance-specific information in the unacknowledged
procedures for linking abstractions to instances (more ob-
vious when we remember that an abstraction is itself only a
set of procedures for linking instances to other instances).
There will be no common curriculum in the future, except
what is artificially maintained by political power. Educa-
tion will not be the foundation of a common global culture;
only shared technologies will interface between diverse com-
munities. Each local community will be less stable because
of this, but the global community will be better able to
survive and prosper.

People will create for themselves and others unique and dis-
tinct educations. Each person will be knowledgeable about
some particular collection of topics and practices, accumu-
lated along their biographical trajectory; people will com-
municate and collaborate in shorter- and longer-term com-
munities, distinguishing less and less between those we
today call "real" or "virtual". Many people will be "ex-
perts" in esoteric interests of varying value to others.
They will share those interests and their expertise with
those who come looking for it or are willing to barter for
it, as suits them or as they need. This information-culture-
cum-barter-economy already exists among the BBSs and on the
USENET and specialist conferences of the Internet.


        EDUCATION IN CYBERSPACE: THEORETICAL ISSUES

We have arrived at a moment when research on education in
schools has limited usefulness for the human future. Just as
there was a time when research on horse-drawn carriage de-
sign, or vacuum-tube circuitry, gave way to automotive
engineering and solid-state electronics, so the future re-
search questions of education will increasingly be about how
people will educate themselves in cyberspace.

Educational theory has resisted this shift, not surprising-
ly. We can claim, against traditional CAI, that human social
interaction is a necessary element of education, but cyber-
space will be a virtual place FOR human social interaction.
We can claim that people interact with other people in fun-
damentally different ways, probably necessary for learning,
from how they interact with artefacts and natural objects,
including today's computers. But we also know that people
can learn in additional ways if a base of social learning is
provided: by observing, by listening, by reading, by video
viewing, by manipulating objects, by experimenting, by writ-
ing, by drawing, by calculating, etc., etc. And in cyber-
space all of these, and more, will be available. You could
even re-create virtual classrooms in cyberspace (though
hopefully only for databases on the history of schooling).

Educational theory now has to deal with new issues:

What IS a teacher? What features would a program, an artifi-
cial intelligence, in cyberspace have to have to fulfill the
various essential functions of teachers? What features will
tend to cue students to interact with the AI as if interact-
ing with a person rather than an object? How, precisely, do
people, in fact, now interact differently with other people
than they do with artefacts like books, pictures, museum
displays, and computer programs? And how do they consequent-
ly learn differently?

These questions begin as the direct extension of such simple
present-day questions in CAI as what sort of helpfiles
should be provided to students, or how best to design an on-
line tutorial for the use of an application system. Granted
that we are still some years away from AIs that will be able
to flexibly dialogue in natural language (10-20 years), the
identification of what such systems will need to do to func-
tion as tutors is a present problem. Long before such AI
tutors exist, there will be sophisticated instructional sys-
tems that will show users what can be done with an applica-
tion, what knowledge is available and how it can be ac-
cessed, manipulated, and transformed, where to get further
information on specific topics, etc. When natural language
AI tutors appear, they will represent only incremental
change.

How do students at various levels of experience explore
large databases? What are their strategies? What sorts of
assistance would make it easier for them to pursue these
strategies? How do the strategies shift in the presence of
various facilities? How can access to databases be made more
natural (i.e. easier to execute by extensions of evolved hu-
man capacities for, say, spatial exploration, or verbal
metaphoric association)?

How do people co-organize information in multiple semiotic
modalities (spoken language, written text, sound-music,
diagrams, photo images, video sequences, spatial movements,
tactile and other sensations, object manipulations, social
activity sequences, etc., etc.) to produce complex
"presentations" for themselves and others, for various pur-
poses?

What sorts of action environments would people construct to
try out various imaginary action possibilities (simulations,
experimentation, social interactions, etc.)? And what sorts
of action environments should be made available to facili-
tate learning various sorts of cultural practices? This is
rather like the classic "learning environments" or "learning
activities" problem in educational theory, except that in
cyberspace one is no longer limited by the physical class-
room and its resources. While it will be a long, long time
before cyberspace virtual realities will have anything ap-
proaching the complexity of interactional possibilities of
material realities, they will quickly exceed those of the
average school classroom. Cyberspace will be a convenient
place to practice for, and review recordings of, participa-
tion in material social settings and activities. Education
will take place partly in cyberspace and partly by direct
participation in social practices. Both will be superior to
classrooms, as experience with clinical-practical education
and realistic simulations has long shown.

What should be the hierarchy of referral of student/user
queries? to on-line helpfiles, AI database systems, expert
conferences, peer conferences, human tutors, AI tutors,
etc.?

What should be the function of full-presence VR (or material
co-presence) group interactions? i.e. when and why should
students and human tutors either physically meet to dialogue
and work together or meet in cyberspace as if fully physi-
cally co-present? What can be accomplished in this way that
cannot be by any of the other available modes of social in-
teraction in cyberspace? (One interesting possibility is
that of being able, at will, to re-view a scene or a datas-
cape from the perspectives, visual and conceptual, of anoth-
er participant.)

How can systems be provided that will enable people to test
their mastery of various topics and practices? Will this be
necessary? Will some cyberspace conferences, for example,
only be open to contributions from people who meet certain
criteria? There will probably be a vast testbank, each of
whose test systems will be recognized by varying numbers of
institutions. It is as likely that a person would submit a
list of tests they had passed, and the tests then be
evaluated as establishing criterial equivalencies, as that
they would be asked to submit to a specific test. It is also
possible that resumes and individual educational portfolios,
would prove more useful and valid than tests for such pur-
poses, once methods of automating the application of various
sets of criteria to the same portfolio are developed. The
portfolio is in effect a personal-accomplishment database,
subject to query and evaluation for many possible purposes,
according to many possible value schemes.


              CYBERSPACE AND VIRTUAL REALITIES

What IS cyberspace? The answer, to the extent there is one,
makes more sense with a first understanding of the technol-
ogy of virtual reality (Rheingold 1991; Benedikt 1991). VR
is, most fundamentally, a type of interface between humans
and computers. Just as typing at a keyboard replaced submit-
ting punched "IBM cards" and looking at a screen replaced
reading "printouts", just as the mouse and the point-and-
click graphics screen (and soon the pen-stylus) changed this
second interface still further; so, in the next full genera-
tion of change, the computer will sense our head- and hand-
positioning and show us 3-D images. When the 3-D image fills
our field of view and automatically shifts in real time as
we shift our gaze or move head and shoulders, a remarkable
effect occurs: the sense of presence in a virtual, computer-
generated reality.

This sense of presence derives from the evolutionary adapta-
tions that make us feel at home "in" material reality, that
make our state of internal neurological activity "feel" like
there is a real, external world around us. This sense is en-
hanced by the ability to move around in this world (and have
it seem to correspondingly shift around us as we do so) and
to affect it, mainly by physical actions of touch. It is the
COUPLING between efferent, active nervous activity and af-
ferent, perceptual signals that we interpret as being in a
real external world. It is the ADDED INFORMATION at the
point-of-turnaround between efferent and afferent, the con-
tribution our bodies do not normally signal as coming from
"us," that we learn culturally to interpret as an "other,"
real on the same order as we feel ourselves to be real. When
the computer mediates between our actions and our percep-
tions, the nervous system and its cultural programming in-
terpret this as an external reality and provide us with a
sense of presence in this "virtual" reality.

A virtual reality is then a possible world, as real to the
senses and responsive to actions as the material world, but
more protean. It is a domain where magic works, where a word
or gesture can change local reality, much as now a click of
the mouse can transform a graphic image on the screen. Any-
thing semiotically constructable can exist in virtual
reality. Any semiotically constructable transformation can
take place in virtual reality. And virtual reality can be
semiotically, and physically (analogue coupling inputs),
coupled to material reality, so that it can constrain our
possible constructions in ways that will work outside VR as
well as inside it. But in VR we can decide in just which
ways we will allow it to constrain us.

Through VR we can explore databases collected in interaction
with material phenomena, and we can operate remote robots in
the material world, seeing through their eyes, being where
they are, acting with their effectors. We cannot move the
robots instantaneously from site to site, but we can move
our own sense of presence from robot to robot with a word,
or a glance. We could also turn around and look, from a new
viewpoint, at ourselves.

We can limit ourselves to the possibilities inherent in a
set of material-world data, but we can also learn to under-
stand that data better by altering it and seeing, from the
inside, how the world the new data describes would then be
different.

Material-world data will include 3-dimensional recordings of
human activities and events that we can enter, move around
in to see from any point-of-view, touch, and manipulate in
every conceivable way, as data. They will also include
recordings of phenomena never before experienced by human
beings, transduced for human senses. And through VR inter-
faces, and remote effectors, we will be able to act on
phenomena in places and at scales, where the sense of human
presence has never gone before.

Cyberspace is the space of interactive computational pos-
sibilities. It is, in one sense, a network that makes all
participating computers and their accessible contents (data,
programs) available to the users of any participating com-
puter, anywhere. It means that all the information on earth
and every strategy for transforming information ever con-
ceived anywhere are in principle available to every user all
the time. It is not just a storage space, it is a space in
which you can do things. You can create, or borrow, a vir-
tual room, and meet other users there face-to-face, body-to-
body, (realistic or fantastic) virtual-image to virtual-
image. You can move around in this room; you can touch and
feel virtual people and things. You can create images,
sounds, language, objects, people, actions, events, from
recordings of material reality or by direct construction ex
nihilo. You can expand the room, or shrink it, change your
viewpoint by "flying" above it, or below it.

If it proves the case, as many people now believe, that hu-
mans can better navigate in search of cyberspace resources
(databases, programs, specific computers, users, confer-
ences, etc.) when these are represented in a visual-spatial
way, then there may come to be, in the Network, a standard
CYBERWORLD where computer nodes appear as spatially separate
boxes or fanciful shapes coded to their types (super-
computers, corporate systems, BBSs, PCs, etc.) in distinct
locations, where users' addresses have virtual spatial loca-
tions, where databases and other resources are visible as in
a 3-D map, where there are signposts or other systems to
help you find your way around, where proprietary data is
guarded, or hidden, and where there are Worlds within Worlds
at various scales (fractal cyberspace). This master CYBER-
WORLD will be cyberspace in another sense, or at least its
standard VR representation.

Ultimately, cyberspace is what you can do in it, the space
of possibilities for computation and interaction, for the
creation, storage, and transformation of information -- in a
domain where everything meaningful is information. VR simply
makes cyberspace feel familiar to the learned extensions of
our evolved human capacities for perception and action.


       CYBORG EVOLUTION: ECOCYBERSYSTEMS AND SURVIVAL

Can a community learn? Can a species? Do we educate
societies as we do individuals? If so, what are the implica-
tions of cyberspace technology for education in this larger
sense?

"Education" and "learning" are rather old-fashioned ways of
talking about some aspects of developmental processes of in-
dividuation in dynamical systems. These processes, for indi-
vidual human organisms, are "epigenetic" (Waddington 1957,
1969; Lemke 1984, in press), i.e. they are processes in the
development of more inclusive systems that must be defined
across many scales from our DNA and its biochemical interac-
tions with a cellular and organismic environment to our
human-scale semiotic and material interactions with other
humans and with the rest of our ecosocial environment.

The individual organism is not a sufficient substrate system
to discuss even "learning," much less "education". "Learn-
ing" is not a process that takes place INSIDE the system we
call a human organism; its semantics is highly misleading.
People do not learn. Learning is not an internal process.
People participate in larger systems and those larger sys-
tems undergo developmental processes; in interaction with
their own relevant environments, they create the conditions
for their own further change along evolved, type-specific
and individuating trajectories. Some things change inside
people as they participate in these processes, and other,
internal developmental processes of the same kind are going
on within us among our own subsystems, coupled to our par-
ticipation in these larger processes. What fundamentally
changes, what we call learning, is how people interact with
and participate in the larger ecosocial systems that sustain
them.

Learning is, consequently, neither a "mental" nor a "cogni-
tive" process (cf. Thibault 1986, Lemke 1989, Geertz 1983),
unless we view cognition and the mind as themselves essen-
tially interactional processes extending beyond individual
human organisms -- as social and transactional phenomena, in
which individual brains and bodies participate, but which do
not take place "in" individuals, but only between them and
their ecosocial environments (cf. Cole et al. 1971, Cole &
Scribner 1974, Lave & Rogoff 1984, Lave 1988).

What then can it mean for a COMMUNITY to learn? Simply that
it participates in a still larger ecosocial system and un-
dergoes development in interaction with it. The community
learns in the sense that its ways of interacting with the
larger system, and some aspects of the internal interaction
of its constituent subsystems (e.g. of individuals, but more
basically of the activities and processes in which individu-
als participate), change. Of all the possible kinds of de-
velopmental change, we tend to call only those learning
which exhibit increased complexity of response, an enlarged
combinatorial space of action possibilities, and an in-
creased long-term adaptedness to the environment. Develop-
ment in general, of course, also includes senescence, also
includes fatal innovations.

A species is a type. An organism, or a community, belongs
categorially to some type, inheriting characteristics shared
with other systems descending from the same lineage, but is
a token of the type, an instance of the category. Tokens de-
velop. Types evolve. The evolutionary trajectory of a type
is an envelope of the successive developmental trajectories
of its tokens over generations (Salthe 1985, 1989; Lemke, in
press). Tokens individuate in development, becoming unique
while staying somewhere in the vicinity of the average de-
velopmental trajectory characteristic of their type. When
that average changes, as a result of systematic shifts in
the individual development of tokens over generations, we
say that the type has changed, has evolved. Species learning
is thus an evolutionary process.

Once again, however, learning is not a process internal to
the species. Species co-evolve as components of ecosystem-
types. Just as individuals do not learn, so neither do
species. But just as individuals participate in the develop-
mental processes of larger ecosocial systems, so do the
type-specific behavioral trajectories of species evolve
along with the ecosystem types in which they participate.
The notion of a species, however, while formally just a
synonym for type, has tended to mean a type of individual
organism, and that, as we have seen, is not the right unit
of analysis for education, unless we treat it transactional-
ly. What a species learns in evolution, if anything, is how
to participate differently in its ecosystem-type, how to re-
late differently to its typical environments.

It is fashionable today to speak of "cyborgs". This metaphor
(e.g. Haraway 1991) reminds us that we are not just
organisms, we are organisms constituted by our interactions
with our environments, and increasingly those environments
are artefactual. We are made by doing-with, and the things
we d