The cyberspace metaphor.

EACH DAY AT WORK, I buy my lunch with the help of a computer network. Rather than pay cash, I use a card with a magnetic strip. After the cashier has entered my culinary choices into her computer-cash register, she "swipes" my card through a special card "reader." In a second or so, the network, in its omnipotence, checks the amount of money in my prepaid account, deducts the cost of today's lunch, makes a record of where and when I used the card, and then grants me the fight to eat this lunch by sending a message to the cashier.

When I think about it, I find few words to describe this process of a computer network acting as a gatekeeper to my lunch. Where, for example, does the information about my purchases go? I actually took my classes on a "field trip" to find out. The information goes through special wires to a computer in the campus ID office, which is the hub of this system. There, a very nice woman whom we had never seen before can tell us when and where we had lunch each day of the semester, and how much we paid.

As computer networks spread into more and more areas of our lives, our language has to struggle to keep pace. We are faced with a new and unfamiliar situation, unsure of its potentials or implications. The situation cries out for metaphors.

In order to comprehend any new technology, we routinely describe it in terms already familiar to us. For example, we call the calculating power of the electronic computer intelligence. This is a metaphor, one which leads to a whole set of language-guided inferences about what these smart machines can do. I think many of the consequences of this metaphorical identification of human intelligence with machine calculation are unfortunate, leading to a devaluation of what is genuinely human.(1) But the metaphor is powerful. It has captured the imaginations of specialists and laypersons alike, and it is here to stay.

We do not yet have a similarly powerful and widely accepted metaphor to describe what is created when these intelligent computers link up over telephone lines into vast networks. But there is a strong candidate in the semantic field: the term cyberspace.

Cyberspace is the "space" behind your computer screen. Cyberspace is where telephone conversations occur -- somewhere between the phones.(2) The term was coined in the early 1980s by science fiction writer William Gibson, in his trilogy of novels about computer users in the near future who are able to leave their bodies and ride through cyberspace. How they did this was not quite clear, but the imagery was sharp and powerful, as users floated by towering computer systems of the mega-corporations, protected by shimmering walls of "ice," or computer security. Cyberspace in the Gibson novels was also populated by disembodied Artificial Intelligence systems, which had agendas of their own.(3)

Cyberspace is a metaphor because it identifies the region where electronic communication occurs as being a kind of space. We can analyze it using the terminology of I. A. Richards: "vehicle" and "tenor." The vehicle, or actual term used for the metaphor, is a combination of the morphemes "Cyber" (a trade name for computers which has become generalizable to all things computer related) and "space" (which covers a lot of territory: outer-space, inner-space, euclidean-space, non-euclidean-space, and others). The tenor, or underlying situation referred to in the metaphor, is the strange but real region created within an electric network of telephones and computers.(4)

Author Bruce Sterling refers to cyberspace as not exactly "real," but being a genuine place where things happen with actual consequences.(5) Careers are made in cyberspace, thieves prowl in cyberspace, increasingly complete records of our lives are stored in cyberspace.

The legal system is struggling to apply our notions of property and privacy -- developed in the space of the external world -- to the new world of cyberspace. What about privacy in cyberspace? What about property rights? What about trespassing? Theft? Impersonation? The cyberspace metaphor helps us talk about many real issues posed by computer networks.

What is cyberspace really like? What potentials, beneficial or detrimental, does it have for us? We are dealing with a metaphor, which describes something we do not really understand yet. Therefore, the temptation is great to construct the meanings of that metaphor in accord with our preconceptions, our fantasies, or desires about how things should be. In the language of psychology, we "project" our desires into cyberspace.

Author William Gibson projected his visions into cyberspace when he created the term for his novels. Gibson's cyberspace was a frontier where latter-day cowboys rode electronic steeds through a video-game landscape, breaking into and entering the vaults of corporate computers.

The cyberspace metaphor migrated from science fiction to public discourse in the late 1980s. It was popularized by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a group of computer professionals and others devoted to a certain vision of how "life in cyberspace" should be. The name of their organization -- Electronic Frontier Foundation -- derives in part from the Gibson interpretation of the cyberspace metaphor. They see cyberspace as a Jeffersonian frontier, peopled by many small freeholders, all with equal rights. They want to keep the cyberspace frontier open to all, and are lobbying to insure universal access to the coming great electronic networks. May the force be with them.

This vision of cyberspace leads to a set of predictions about the effects of computer networks upon organizations and society. Cyberspace as wide-open-frontier leads one to predict that computer networks will decentralize authority. Under this construction of the cyberspace metaphor, computer networks will flatten bureaucratic pyramids, empower individual employees, and reduce the role of centralized management. This interpretation of the cyberspace metaphor underlies many of the current predictions regarding the future of business and society.

I sincerely hope that cyberspace can, in fact, produce a neo-Jeffersonian frontier of freedom for all. However, there is another possible interpretation of the cyberspace metaphor -- another way to construct the possible meanings of cyberspace.

For it is possible that computer networks will lead to greater centralized control, not less. Computer networks have the potential to place very great power in the hands of a very few. Under this scenario, cyberspace resembles George Orwell's 1984 much more than a wild west frontier.

To describe this other potential effect of computer networks, I would set aside the cyberspace metaphor and pose another metaphor: the cyberfiber. Here we combine the prefix "cyber" with the term "fiber," from fiber optics, the material that will be used in most computer networks. I know this term lacks the excitement of cyberspace, and I doubt it will catch on widely. But it does point out some aspects of the situation I think cyberspace misses.

A "fiber" is a much more enclosed region than a "space." It's not so hard to control what goes on in a fiber from some centralized vantage point. And the fiber can always be cut fairly readily.

In fact, a computer network is not a wide-open, uncharted Wild West. It is completely the creation of engineers and programmers. Furthermore, every action you take on a computer network leaves a trace. It's getting more and more difficult to "hack" your way around a network -- the controls are becoming more pervasive, and automated. What appears to be a wide-open cyberspace can quickly shrink into the cyberfiber.

So...is it cyberspace where the democratic explorer can roam freely and carve out a living on an electronic frontier? Or cyberfiber, where an anonymous, all-seeing program keeps track of your every move, and some day may unplug you?

These two metaphors describe two choices for the future design and implementation of computer networks. They probably don't exhaust the possibilities, but may anchor the ends of a continuum. I myself would prefer to live in cyberspace, rather than be tethered by the cyberfiber.

But it is sobering to remember what happened in the real American West. Many of those frontier settlements grew up to become company towns. They were dominated by one large enterprise which exercised economic, political, and social control over the descendants of those Jeffersonian frontier people. A similar fate may await us on the electronic fiber frontier.

REFERENCES

1. Raymond Gozzi, Jr. (1989). Metaphors that Undermine Human Identity, ETC., 46, (1), p. 49-53..

2. Brace Sterling (1992). Hacker Crackdown. New York. Bantam Books.

3. The three William Gibson novels are: Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive. My personal opinion is that Count Zero is the most thought provoking of the novels, but it has received the least critical attention.

4. We may also use the terminology of Max Black to describe the metaphor. Here, we have a phrase in a frame: "space" in a frame: "cyber."

5. Hacker Crackdown, Intro.

Dr. Raymond Gozzi, Jr., is Associate Professor in the Television-Radio Department at Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York.