--------------------------------------------------------------------------- ####### ######## ######## ########### ### ### ## ### ## # ### # Interpersonal Computing and ### ### ## ### ## ### Technology: ### ### ## ### ### An Electronic Journal for ### ######## ### ### the 21st Century ### ### ### ### ### ### ### ## ### ISSN: 1064-4326 ### ### ### ## ### April 1996 ####### ### ######## ### Volume 4, Number 2, pp. 47-52 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Published by the Department of Education University of Maryland Baltimore County Additional support provided by Georgetown University This article is archived as CAPO IPCTV4N2 on LISTSERV@LISTSERV.GEORGETOWN.EDU ------------------------------------------------------------------------- + Page 47 + BOOK REVIEW OF _COMMUNICATION AND CYBERSPACE: SOCIAL INTERACTION IN AN ELECTRONIC ENVIRONMENT_ Edited by Lance Strate, Ronald Jacobson, and Stephanie B. Gibson 368 pages. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 1996 Cloth ISBN: 1-57273-050-1 $69.50 Paper ISBN: 1-57273-051-X $28.50 Reviewed By James A. Capo, Ph.D. Associate Professor Communication and Media Studies Department Fordham University Bronx, NY 10458 capo@murray.fordham.edu INTRODUCTION This review of _Communication and Cyberspace_, edited by Strate, Jacobson and Gibson highlights the collection's cultural and humanistic approach to concepts of computer mediated communication. It analyzes the function, form and meaning sections of the book through an assessment of the editors' own essays in these sections. At the heart of this review is how essays in the book deal with the differences between the "realities" of culture before computer mediated communication (CMC) and the "prospects" for communication and culture in the emerging inter-networked reality CMC generates. + Page 48 + REVIEW One day after President Clinton signed the Telecommunications "Reform" Act of 1996, John Perry Barlow, Grateful Dead lyricist, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and cyberspace pioneer, wrote: "This bill was enacted upon us by people who haven't the slightest idea who we are or where our conversation is being conducted." He went on to declare: Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. . . . You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not Lie within your borders. . . . Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere . . . .(1) Before dismissing this declaration as simplistic, one should digest its kernel of truth: None of us (including those who virtually "live" there like Barlow himself) precisely understand the phenomenon of cyberspace. _Communication and Cyberspace_ offers a photo of what is known or hypothesized now about this inter-networked reality according to 25 established and emerging communication scholars. This edited work systematically lays out a communications' approach to computer mediated communication (CMC) via electronic networks. First it offers different perspectives on cyberspace (including essays on relationships between "cyber" and "real" spaces, control and ownership in cyberspace and virtual reality). Then major sections attend to the function, form and meaning of this new communicative and cultural phenomenon. In their introduction, Strate, Jacobson and Gibson promise to concentrate on "the processes by which human beings create messages, transfer information, and make meanings" (meaning?); "the ways in which individuals form relationships and create communities" (function?); and "our capacity to construct identities and realities through discourse" (form?). They view CMC from a media ecology perspective, based on theorists such as McLuhan, Innis, Ong, Postman and Meyrowitz. In this book, "cyberspace represents the culmination of McLuhan's arguments about electronic media: that through this extension of our nervous system we become members of a global village, that we replace individual identity with role playing, and that our forms of perception and sense of our own bodies are altered." Although the editors concede that their collection could be treated like a hypertext, they see it as a book--structured in a linear fashion that first 'locates' cyberspace, and then presents various approaches to its function, form and meaning. + Page 49 + For this reviewer, the book's most valuable feature is its tone of self-reflection and critical distance, exemplified, for example, in Postman's epilogue ("Cyberspace, Shmyberspace") which calls for _humanistic_ solutions to contemporary problems rather than technological ones. While familiar with the lingo, implications and directions of electronic networking technologies, these essays demonstrate that thoughtful, systematic, playful at times and humanistic approaches go far to shed light on CMC developments. Instead of a section-by-section treatment of the collection, the remainder of this review "links" to the essays contributed by the three editors. (It may or may not be a coincidence that each editor's essay appears in a different section of the book.) Jacobson's piece, "'Are They Building an Off-Ramp in My Neighborhood?' and Other Questions Concerning Public Interest In and Access to the Information Superhighway," appears in the "Function" section. Other essays there consider: institutional foundations and cultural clashes that shaped cyberspace's development; the relationship between communications and money in the capitalistic sector of cyberspace; the challenges to constructing virtual organizations in this environment and the implications of MUDs for community. Jacobson's approach reminds us that phrases like "global village" or "new home of the Mind" are always tempered by political, economic and social realities in a particular culture. "Cyberspace for all" gets defined through wrangles among the projected visions, policies and practices of government, industry and public interest groups Though written before passage of the Telecommunications Reform Act, Jacobson predicts that industry interests will maintain the upper hand and that universal embrace of cyberspace is an impossibility anytime soon. The first materials virtually available to all will not be the public knowledge or communal possibilities of the Net, but private data and entertainment features interspersed with ads and channeled to consumers. Quoting Schrage, Jacobson observes that the Net is "just aching for . . . some aspiring mogul who can redefine the hodgepodge of globally interconnected machine intelligence into a formidable commercial medium . . . ." Is the Web that medium? While he lists the pre-1996 hopes of less powerful government and public interest groups, he envisions cyberspace as an arena initially available to those with income, education or employment, and increasingly controlled by commercial interests. Given this view, it comes as no surprise that chapters follow on money as communication or on concepts of community engaged in the entertainment of MUDs. + Page 50 + As part of the "Form" section, Gibson considers whether a transition from communication via print to interaction via hypertext changes the forms, procedures and relationships that characterize learning today. For Gibson, ideas about contemporary pedagogy have been "anchored firmly in a paradigm informed by the printed word." Her essay speculates about what happens once traditional ideas about teaching and learning are reconfigured by hypertext. Other essays in this section review comparable aspects of life: ecology of self, health, experience in digital reproduction, death and cinema. Gibson contrasts the differences between textbooks and hypertext as instructional tools and analyzes the impact of these differences on classroom, curriculum and canon. For her, the shift to hypertext appears inevitable since it better holds student interest, offers dynamic multiple approaches to educational material and seems to give users a choice about how the material will be experienced. As the professionals relinquish control over learning materials, student-teacher relationships will shift. Students will now access both primary texts and scholarly critique. They can easily pursue "links among ideas that may or may not be planned as part of the course material." In effect, hypertext democratizes learning and changes expectations of performance. Collaborative learning, linkage rather than memorization, open classrooms, etc. may all get emphasized in revised pedagogical theories. For Gibson, the introduction of hypertext makes control issues central in classroom learning and reconfigures the "canon" to include lesser known texts and other disciplinary approaches to the subject. Yet print's replacement with hypertext may not generate a paradigmatic shift in learning. Hypertexts can be more structured and "deadly boring" than traditional print: "When the reader does not know the possibilities of the text, it is possible to program gates within the text that do not allow progress through the program until certain other nodes have been read and/or questions . . . have been answered." Although the prospect of a "nation of expert linkers able to draw connections, but without original thought" looms as a danger if rigid ideological or commercial interests control education, Gibson anticipates neither. She believes that the new encoded potentiality of hypertext will prevail, even if the need for a "sense of authority, authorship, and authenticity will not fade softly away." Whether hypertext's emergence generates desirable pedagogical shifts remains uncertain, but questions about appropriate shifts will persist. If Jacobson examines the _prospects_ of CMC in the face of social realities and Gibson focuses on _tensions_ between educational realities and a prospective educational paradigm, Strate's + Page 51 + substantive essay addresses the _realities_ of CMC. Inherent in CMC is the concept of "cybertime," a site for human interaction in the computer age. Strate argues that computers like clocks "manufacture no physical products, but instead produce pure information." This suggests that the notion of "cyberspace" may be too wedded to cultural traditions of space (with constructs of physical possessions, transportation, exploitation and domination) to encapsulate usefully the CMC experience. For Strate, cybertime resides in the "computer's time-telling function," "representational function" and "computing function." He makes this argument in the book's "Meaning" section among essays on identity, relations, social influence, and persuasion in cyberspace. Absolute, digital and quick, cybertime in the terms of Newton "flows equably without regard to anything external." Within the computer, cybertime enables "a high level of synchronization," while externally the speed of computer activity "makes it a powerful technology of control." It is "polychronic time," involving many things simultaneously. Strate contrasts this concept (characteristic of some non-Western cultures) with "monochronic time, a linear, one-thing-at-a-time sense of the temporal." The implications cannot be ignored: while today's "technologies are synchronized in their use of time" (polychronic) "our societies are still largely working with a 19th-century system of time keeping" (monochronic). Moreover, "the computer also functions as a medium" that conveys "a sense of time that is not necessarily _the_ time . . . ." Indeed, the computer represents distinctively different modes of time, enabling users to control those modes, as well as immersing users in them through VR technology. For Strate, one interesting feature of this representational function is its capacity to be experienced in both multiple and fractional dimensions: "Cybertime is not characterized by any fixed dimensionality, but rather is open to a wide variety of dimensional modes, to metadimensionality." Thus CMC "favors the dissolution of history as a narrative form." For Strate, it replaces memory as we have traditionally known it with total recall, a kind of totalitarian surveillance of all with the capacity to project back and forward and to replace possible future physical realities with computerized simulations. In a real sense "past and future collapse into the present" in cybertime, leading to "hubris and isolation from the natural time world" and undermining established notions of past and future. A third function of cybertime is based on interaction with the computer. Online, one generates a double, a digital "cyberself . . . made not of flesh and blood, but of data and information" which inhabits multiple time dimensions and synthesizes the + Page 52 + conscious and unconscious in ways that alter traditional notions of community. If Strate's concept about three functions of cybertime receives empirical substantiation, the prospects for dramatic cultural change seem certain. This collection of original essays approaches the phenomenon of CMC as communication, culture and identity construction itself. Its depth and range, critical distance and humanistic orientation distinguish it from available texts. After mastering the essays of this work, one begins to understand better what Barlow and other activists sense is at stake in the struggle for definition and control of this emerging site of human interaction and societal meaning. ----------- (1) Barlow, John Perry. "Barlow's Cyberspace Independence Declaration." action@eff.org (9 Feb 1996). ----------------------------------------------------------------- BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE: James A. Capo directs the graduate program in Public Communications at Fordham University, where he also serves as Associate Director of the Donald McGannon Communication Research Center for Ethics and Policy Issues. He teaches graduate courses on the societal role of public communications, on communications law and on using the Internet for Public Communications research and action. He is studying the role of voluntary associations in the shaping of America's national information infrastructure and has presented some of his findings in this area in _Media Ethics Update_ and to the Social Ethics Seminar. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Interpersonal Computing and Technology: An Electronic Journal for the 21st Century Copyright 1996 University of Maryland Baltimore County. Copyright of individual articles in this publication is retained by the individual authors. Copyright of the compilation as a whole is held by the University of Maryland Baltimore County. It is asked that any republication of this article state that the article was first published in IPCT-J. Contributions to IPCT-J can be submitted by electronic mail in APA style to: Susan Barnes, Editor IPCT-J SBBARNES@PIPLELINE.COM