---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 30 Jul 1994 12:50:23 MDT From: Rob Slade 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 prior@mitvma.mit.edu Maureen Curtin, Int'l Promo. - curtin@mit.edu "Cyberspace: First Steps", Benedikt, 1991, 0-262-52177-6, U$18.95 benedikt@vitruvius.ar.utexas.edu 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. ------------------------------