Footnotes
- The Parisian flâneur made his literary debut in Baudelaire's famous essay "The Painter of Modern Life" (1863). He was a man of the boulevards: he strolled them to observe the life of the great city and by so doing also put himself on display. [to text]
- The Greek agora is the prototype urban public space. In the ancient Greek city, the agora was a central, open space where public life was enacted. Having an agora was essential to being a city rather than merely a settlement. [to text]
- After being overrun and destroyed by the Persians in 494 B.C., the Ionian city of Miletos was rebuilt, beginning in 479 B.C., according to a master plan by the Milesian architect Hippodamos. It was sited on a rocky peninsula on the Aegean coast of what is now Turkey. Streets were laid out in a regular grid, and there was a magnificent agora in the center, adjacent to the harbor. Aristotle credited Hippodamos with being the inventor of "the art of planning cities." [to text]
- The software performs the basic functions of storing messages at some central location as they arrive, then forwarding them to the addressee's personal computer or workstation when requested. Voice mail and video mail systems operate in similar ways. [to text]
- Sometimes a domain that is closely associated with a particular group- for example media@mit - does acquire a certain cachet. As network usage grows, it may be that some access providers will attempt to distinguish themselves by providing premium service (faster machines, fancier interfaces) and trade on their snob value. But at least for now the basic point remains valid: logical connection matters much more than physical location. The compendium E-Mail Addresses of the Rich and Famous (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1994) does not define any particular cyberspace neighborhood. [to text]
- Finger files are maintained by many of the host computers on the Internet. (Some hosts, for security or privacy reasons, do not provide access to them.) Internet users can, for example, finger me by typing finger wjm@mit.edu. This yields my full name, mailing address, and phone number - just as if they looked me up in the printed MIT phone directory. If they are resourceful and knowledgeable, they can construct a fairly detailed description of me (or practically anybody else who uses Internet) by piecing together fragments of information from various accessible <->databases. [to text]
- For example, the San Jose Mercury News maintains an online database of personal ads (not that you will find me on this one). Give the command "Search RSVP personals" and you will be greeted with the message, "Type words that describe what you are looking for, then click List Ads. For example, 'men and 'non-smoker.'" [to text]
- For information on the Usenet Oracle, send e-mail to oracle@cs.indiana.edu with the word "help" in the "Subject" line. [to text]
- See Erving Goffman's classic The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1959) for a discussion of the many and complex ways in which we acquire information about general socioeconomic status, competence, trustworthiness, attitude, and so on in face-to-face interactions. [to text]
- Even before text became digital, printed text created some space for these games. George Eliot and Henry Handel Richardson played them with panache. But the network greatly expands that space. [to text]
- Some early published stories of this sort of thing quickly attained the status of cyberspace morality tales. A 1985 Ms. magazine story by Lindsy Van Gelder, for example, told the story of "Joan," a disabled older woman who participated in the Compuserve network's "Between the Sexes" online conference. "Joan" was eventually unmasked, to the shock and dismay of many of the other conference participants, as a middle-aged male psychiatrist. Then, in summer 1993, the news media reported widely on "The Case of the Cybercad" on the WELL (a popular Bay Area online conferencing system). After he teleromanced several women at the same time (without telling them of the others), the women tumbled to his deceptive game and publicly denounced him in a WELL conference space. These tales recall similar ones from the early days of the telephone, when "phonies" began to take advantage of the telephone's elimination of visual cues, and people's inexperience in dealing with this, to set up swindles. [to text]
- Students of cyberspace culture might, then, do well to take a close look at the gay studies literature. [to text]
- Such agents are discussed in detail in the "Intelligent Agents" special issue of Communications of the ACM 37: 7 (July 1994). In 1994 the idea began to go commercial in a significant way; for example, General Magic introduced the Telescript language intended for programming practical software agents. See John Markoff, "Hopes and Fears on New Computer Organisms," The New York Times, Thursday, January 6, 1994, D1, D5. [to text]
- Joseph Bates, "The Role of Emotion in Believable Agents," Communications of the ACM 37: 7 (July 1994): 122-25. [to text]
- Apple Computer's famous promotional videotape The Knowledge Navigator provided an early dramatization of this idea. It featured a bow-tied agent called Phil, who looked a bit like a talking passport photo and who supposedly performed librarian and resource-management tasks. [to text]
- There is now a technical answer of a sort. We can use encryption techniques to put verifiable digital "signatures" on electronic documents. But this does not alter the basic fact that telecommunication distances us from the flesh-and-blood bodies of those with whom we communicate and puts constructed electronic masks in their place. [to text]
- This already happens with machines. The existence of once-popular but now obsolete types of computer terminals, such as teletypes and DEC VT-100s, is regularly simulated by software running on more up-to-date hardware. [to text]
- Mitch Kapor (in an e-mail note after reading a manuscript draft) has chided me for being a bit silly about this. He may be right. Many of the early, grand promises of artificial intelligence have gone unfulfilled and will continue to be unfulfilled unless there are spectacular breakthroughs of a kind that do not seem imminent, so we cannot expect to get to Gibsonian silicon immortality by extrapolation of current technology. But it is certainly worth noting, at least, that existence on the Net radically extends the kind of pseudo-immortality that authors gain from having their books published. [to text]
- For the early history of asynchronous communication systems (using runners, chains of men with loud voices, pigeons, drums and horns, fire, semaphore, ships, the Pony Express, and so on), see Prakash Chakravati, "Communications from Cave Messages to Mail Messages," IEEE Power Engineering Review 12: 9 (September 1992): 29-31. [to text]
- In Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1934) Lewis Mumford dated the synchronous city back to the thirteenth century, when monasteries introduced mechanical clocks, began to ring out the hours, and so started to impose orderly routines on urban life. [to text]
- There is a growing literature on the relationship between telecommunications and the use of time in modern urban societies. See D. Gross, "Space, Time, and Modern Culture," Telos 50 (1981): 59-78; D. Gross, "Temporality and the Modern State," Theory and Society 14 (1985): 53-82; A. Kellerman, Time, Space, and Society: Geographical Societal Perspectives (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989); A. Kellerman, "The Decycling of Time and the Reorganization of Urban Space," Cultural Dynamics 4 (1991): 38-54; G. Raulet, "The New Utopia: Communication Technologies," Telos 87 (1991): 39-58. [to text]
- The first teleport was developed by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey in the late 1970s; Manhattan office buildings were connected via fiber-optic links to a telecommunications park in New Jersey. On teleports generally, see A. D. Lipman, A. D. Sugarman, and R. F. Cushman, eds., Teleports and the Intelligent City (Homewood, IL: Dow Jones-Irwin, 1986). [to text]
- L. Qvortrup, "The Nordic Telecottages: Community Teleservice Centers for Rural Regions," Telecommunications Policy 13 (1990): 59-68. [to text]
- For a brief introduction to the geography of communications satellites, see A. Kellerman, "Microwave and Satellite Communications," Telecommunications and Geography (London: Belhaven, 1993), pp.38-47. [to text]
- For a lively analysis of the issues involved here, see Nicholas Negroponte, "The Bit Police: Will the FCC Regulate Licenses to Radiate Bits?," Wired 1:2 (May/June 1993): 112. [to text]
- As I wrote these words, despite endless talk in the popular press about the Information Superhighway, most American schoolrooms did not even have telephones. [to text]
- Actually, of course, we are talking about a great many more bits. From a telecommunications viewpoint, intimacy is a matter of using all sensory modalities and opening up the bandwidth as far as possible. Conversely, stripteases (look, don't touch) and other rituals of erotic titillation often depend on shutting down a few sensory channels. [to text]
- Bandwidth becomes particularly important here since the rough telecommunications rule of thumb is that good video requires about a thousand times as much bandwidth as speech. A picture is truly worth a thousand words. [to text]
- One current approach is to combine a gesture-sensing glove with arrays of tiny switches known as tactors. When the tactors are stimulated by a current, they press on the fingertips. Pneumatic cylinders that provide variable resistance to the fingers as air pressure is regulated by computer have also been tried. Yet another approach is to employ servomotor-driven joysticks that vibrate to simulate movement across rough and bumpy surfaces, and push back when solid objects or force fields are encountered. At a larger scale, flight simulators and motion-based amusement rides use hydraulic rams to accelerate riders over short distances and so subject them to g-forces similar to those experienced in moving vehicles. Perhaps the most effective early application of force feedback, though, was in the Atari videogame Hard Drivin', which transmitted through a steering wheel the feel of a racecar in motion. [to text]
- For example, stationary exercise bicycles have incorporated increasingly sophisticated computer monitoring of the user's physical response, together with automatic adjustment of the level of difficulty of the simulated terrain. And NEC's "virtual skiing" laboratory in Tokyo has developed a system that senses head position, leg movements, and pole movements, as well as blood flow and stress; it simulates actual slopes and adjusts them according to the user's ability. See Kimiko Eastham, "Everything but the Broken Bones," Wired 1: 3 (July/August 1993): 29. [to text]
- Postmodern prostitution is a pretty hackneyed fantasy by now (though journalists never seem to tire of pop-eyed speculation about it); Frederik Pohl explored it in his 1966 short story "Day Million." For a survey of interactive computer porn in the 1990s, see John Tierney, "Porn, the Low-Slung Engine of Progress," The New York Times, Sunday, January 9, 1994, section 2, pp.1, 18. [to text]
- For a comprehensive survey of the relevant technologies, see Grigore Burdea and Philippe Coiffet, Virtual Reality Technology (New York: John Wiley, 1994). [to text]
- Paul Virilio, The Lost Dimension (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991), p.60. [to text]
- Once again, pen >> sword. This word does not have a respectable technical pedigree, but was introduced by William Gibson in his 1984 novel Neuromancer. Many old computer hands detest it for the conceptual vulgarities that it has come to connote. But it has won out against all the plausible alternatives and has succeeded in taking possession of its semantic niche, so I shall use it. [to text]
- A literary subgenre, analogous to the western pulp novel, has already developed to chronicle the tales of this territory. Basic sources on the topic are John Perry Barlow, "Crime and Puzzlement" (June 8, 1990) and "Crime and Puzzlement Part 2" (July 21, 1990), available by FTP from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff@well.sf.ca.us). [to text]
- Most of the research and fact-checking for this book was done by browsing, searching, and retrieving information in this way. My research assistant, Anne Beamish, spent most of her time surfing the Net to search library catalogues, bibliographies, and databases and to download papers, news stories, and press releases. [to text]
