cyber-social-science, cybersociology, cyber-sociology, cyber-soc, cybersoc, cybersociety, cybergeography, cyberanthropology, cyberpsychology, cyber-psychology, psyber-psychology, cybereconomics, cyber-economics, cyber NEAR "cultural studies", sociology NEAR cyberspace, web-sociology, websociology, social-informatics, internet-economics, internet-history, ...
My list of possible keywords has been growing rapidly during this project, and I noted the lack of standardized terminology across academic disciplines. The reason for the predominance of keywords including 'cyber' is due to my attempt to exhaust this type of terminology before continuing on to different types of keyword combinations -- Social + (Internet, Informatics, Information Technology, Information Science, Networks ...).
He called this structure a "navihedron," and in 1997 his operation was spun out of John Moores University into Amaze Ltd., a 100-employee Web design shop with offices on the banks of the Mersey. Last year Stringer published his concept on the Web, along with some prototypes, inviting other Web designers to try it.
Today about 2,000 navihedrons exist, visible at www.navihedra.com, but most are experimental. Many of Amaze's clients shun the navihedron in favor of traditional site design. Stringer, Amaze's "chief hypermedia architect," admits it will be a struggle to get the world to scrap the old browser. "We have 20,000 years of hierarchy in our systems. It goes back to kings and queens. Those sorts of hierarchical mechanisms in society are very strong in our psyche," he says.
(See my example.)
Stringer's experiment points up a growing dissatisfaction with the way the Web looks and works. Many critics blame the browser and are trying to develop an entirely new way of navigating the Internet. Excite at Home, the Web portal, runs a handful of skunkworks projects, including one aimed at creating three-dimensional Web interfaces. Microsoft is pursuing a 3-D design, as well. At the World Wide Web Consortium, scientists are working on a voice-driven browser.
Now Stringer, a Liverpool native who dropped out of school at age 16 and never attended college, is accelerating his crusade to one-up the browser. This summer Amaze releases its software free for any Web site to use, so long as it plugs Amaze on-screen. Later this year it will debut its own browser, free of charge and specially geared to run animation and video.
But displacing such a pervasive, if antiquated, software tool as the browser will be a huge challenge. First designed under the name Mosaic at the supercomputer lab of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in 1993, it inspired Netscape's Navigator and Microsoft's Explorer and is still the only game in town. Netscape, now owned by America Online, just introduced its sixth major release in six years, and it boasts such whiz-bang features as integrated messaging and search functions. But it's still essentially the same thing Marc Andreessen helped create.
The resulting data in the InternetPulse provides a logical performance map of the Internet. The InternetPulse matrix is updated every 15 minutes. Any time the delay between two networks exceeds a threshold, a color coded alert indicates the level of the performance problem. Users can drill down to see specifically where the delays are occurring by clicking on any of the color coded boxes in the display.
The numbers in the display represent latency between networks in milliseconds. The total in each box is the geometric mean of all the data points collected between the networks during the specified interval.
Hyperdemocracy today conjures up images of e-mail voting, widespread electronic referenda, and lively online town meetings and debates. It is even reasonable to predict that elected representatives themselves may eventually govern through wired, cyberspatial assemblies, accessed by computer while they remain in their remote electoral regions.
The feeling of being on the threshold of something materialises with the returnof space, although at the same time we dream of societies in which we can live in peace. Even those who fight against technology, wanting to lead us back into the wilderness and its immense spaces, dream of this. For example, the recently caught Unabomber shares with all net enthusiasts the hope of creating new, comprehensible communities in which the individual still has value. The Unabomber's attacks were directed against the anonymous structures of mass societies of the industrial age in order to return the possibility of autonomy to the individual on the margins of big cities and their big organizations. Even if his utopia consisted of "untamed nature" and flesh, whose importance gets recuperated in it, he also tried to revive the idea of the "frontier" and with it, the omnipresent obsession for individual freedom in an open space, an idea also widespread in cyberculture.
Our review of the current state of Internet indicators is followed by a look at infrastructure that complements the Internet. Again, we observe rapid growth accompanied by disparity and note the relationship between wired and wireless telephony, personal computers, and the Internet. The paper concludes with a discussion of the difficulties of measurement and a proposal for the formation of a decentralized community for regularly measuring the state of the Internet.
1.Framing the research question 2.Sampling 3.Statistics 4.Research design, particularly controlling threats to internal and external validity 5.Writing the report, i.e., the new format for citations.
Communication which took several days or was virtually impossible can now be accomplished in a matter of seconds. In 10 seconds (or often less), we can have the world literally at out fingertips with the click of a mouse, the touch of a dial pad or the flick of a remote control. Places that were once unreachable can now be brought into our living rooms and even the most remote locations, such as Antarctica, are now accessible via electronic mail. Despite turmoil, technology has allowed communication to continue during events such as the 1991 Russian Coup and the Bosnia-Serbia War, where e-mail communication remained possible when other communication was not. This is the age of globalization.
Discussions of Gilder's concept of telecosm
History teaches that at such rare moments when - for any of a number of reasons - barriers to entry drop, media often lend themselves to a wholly unaccustomed range of political causes and ideological perspectives. Is the Internet a case in point? Not a few critics and activists certainly think so. They can point to such phenomena as the National Public Telecomputing Network, or the Association for Progressive Communications - which collectively manages a variety of interlinked systems such as Peace Net, connecting activists round the world. Citing the Internet's utilization by insurgents in Chiapas, Mexico, Howard Frederick and others argue that "the advent of decentralizing communication technologies such as computer networking" marks the emergence of a significant new force in international relations, which "circumvents the hegemony of markets and of governments."
It would be curmudgeonly to scoff at such assertions; more important, it would be wrong. The Internet is far from impervious to alternative and oppositional activity; and we must try to keep it as open and accessible as it now is. Are we entitled, however, to abstract from the undoubted occasions when Internet access has furnished new leverage against social domination, toward a projected new era of decentralized, democratic interchange?
The proposed new commission intends to provide an international forum for the study of geographical aspects of emerging information societies. As such it will permit the broadening of discussion and participation on the one hand, while providing geographers with an organizational forum for the development and discussion of a most contemporary social and geographical trend. Needless to say that this subject lends itself easily to collaborative studies with economic and urban geographers, and, thus, the proposed commission will seek cooperation with other relevant IGU commissions and study groups.
This study is about evaluating the theoretical concept of space in the context of cyberspace, a term that was introduced by William Gibson in his classical science fiction novel Neuromancer. This 'collective hallucination', as Gibson puts it, has had an enormous impact on the academic interest of social and cultural scientists during the final years of the second millennium. I approach the issue both through theoretical evaluation and qualitative empirical evidence. It is essential to recognise that at the moment, in the postmodern reality, the life spans of individual studies, especially in the field of rapidly changing information technology, are often very short. However, the purpose of this research is to evaluate the 'cyberspaces' of today and critically examine the factors behind the visible in order to present a geographical idea of space in the electronic world.
Emergence of the Intelligent Environment and Pervasive Computing
Section 2 of this discussion paper covers the importance to the goal of universal access, of the true relationship between the importance of implementing accessible design solutions and compatibility with low bandwidth. Section 3 examines the critical issues of telecommunications deployment and elucidates the complex and critical issues around peering and the next generation Internet. Section 4 looks at the importance of e-commerce to emerging economies. Section 5 provides further recommendations with a comment on legal barriers. Section 6 provides the Final Conclusions.
It is the Internet Society's hope that this discussion paper will serve as a precursor to actions undertaken by UNESCO for developing policies and formulating basic principles for a broad, modern concept of universal access for the twenty first century.
- In what way does hypertext reflect the human mind? By committing ourselves deeper to cyberspace reality, are we going towards traditional and universal human ideals or against them? In what way is hypertext like the mind?
- What creates hypertext space? What are virtual roads and highways? What mechanism creates a navigation stop zone or parking space? Do hypertext edifices need maintenance?
- How do people find things in hypertext? Does it take training? How do people navigate or get around in hypertext? How do they use hypertext?
- What is the social or philosophical significance of hypertext? Does it have a spiritual connection?
- Social aspects of emerging technology
This is the real cutting edge. These sites contain information on the ramifications the Net will have for our society and how it has, and will, shape it. - Information on legislation that will affect the Net
We've come this far without much government intervention, but with the Net's increasing visibility it is being subjected to ever more legislation. These sites are concerned with informing users of events that concern the Net. - Security and Privacy on the Net
As we use networks to communicate ever more critical information, issues concerning privacy and secure transmission crop up. Here you can find links to sites with encryption software, and others with basic security tips.
- current state of the Internet
- trend toward complex, interconnected systems
- increased concern for information integrity and information survivability
- adaptive, self-correcting systems
- new approaches in survivability research
- the need for increased public awareness
- defense in depth and decentralization
- survivability: the future of security technology
Those were the days. At the time, it was widely believed that the Internet would help undermine authoritarian regimes, reduce governments' abilities to levy taxes, and circumvent all kinds of local regulation. The Internet was a parallel universe of pure data, an exciting new frontier where a lawless freedom prevailed. But it now seems that this was simply a glorious illusion. For it turns out that governments do, in fact, have a great deal of sovereignty over cyberspace. The Internet is often perceived as being everywhere yet nowhere, as free-floating as a cloud‹but in fact it is subject to geography after all, and therefore to law.
The idea that the Internet was impossible to regulate dates back to when its architecture was far simpler than now. All sorts of new technologies have since been bolted on to the network, to speed up the delivery of content, protect networks from intruders, or target advertising depending on a user's country or city of origin. All of these technologies have mundane commercial uses. But in some cases they have also provided governments with ways to start bringing the Internet under the rule of local laws.
One thing is clear. While entirely of human design, the emerging network appears to have more in common with a cell or an ecological system than with a Swiss watch. Many diverse components, each performing a specialized job, contribute to a system that is evolving and changing at an incredible speed. Increasingly, we are realizing that our lack of understanding of the Internet and the Web is not a computer-science question. Rather it is rooted in the absence of a scientific framework to characterize the topology of the network behind it.
The paper reviews
- tools in communication and knowledge management,
- how we should design and use them in a way that secures transparency, and
- whether the image schemas of humans and the systems we create, are compatible and comparable. Another focus is on how we see new potentials and challenges, such as virtual realities and cyberculture.
This poster was based on a famous magazine cover depicting the "New Yorker's view of the world," and which has been replicated hundreds of times for various cities, states, and regions. The obvious joke and subtle truth of these posters is that the residents of cities see their homes as all-encompassing and overwhelmingly important despite the tiny fraction of the earth's surface they occupy. Such biased representations of the earth's surface might not be a bad thing. If you spend ninety percent of your life in one city, or as is more often the case, in one borough of a city, such a slanted map would be much more practical than the traditional map of the world showing great stretches of uninteresting ocean and inaccessible deserts. Whether a map is useful or accurate depends on your interests: Are you looking for a streetcar stop, or are you sailing around Cape Horn in a thirty-foot sloop?
Network has become a new basic point for the development and prosperity of a country and nation, at the same time, it is also pregnant with a new crisis for them. Experts have pointed out: Only by establishing an independent national information network while making use of the internet and instituting the pattern of "one country, two networks", can the security interest of our country and nation be guaranteed under the new opening situation. Globalization or an "earth village" does not at all mean universal harmony in the world.
- investigate the economic, social, and political forces that shape application and use of information technology (IT), and the impact of IT on economy and society.
- be a catalyst for research and analysis of IT and its impacts through workshops, collaborative projects, and dissemination of findings.
- translate current research and analysis of IT into undergraduate and graduate courses and materials.
- develop an international network of policy makers, researchers, and industry representatives to analyze the impact of IT from a wide range of disciplinary, social, and political perspectives.
- apply Michigan State University's land grant mission to address compelling social and economic issues arising from IT policy design and application.
Professionals and academics from a wide range of backgrounds report findings, views and ideas. Together, they describe the architecture of a postmodern paradigm: how swiftly mutating and proliferating technology applications have begun to interact with the construction and reading of space in architecture, economics, geography, history, planning, social science, transport, visual art - but also in the newer domains that have joined this spectrum through the very nature of their impacts: information technology and telecommunications.
The Collaborative User Experience (CUE) Research Group is looking at ways to reinvent the tools used to access email so that they take advantage of these changes. These new tools include gestural filtering, threading, and visualizing and displaying email in fresh ways and on new devices. Exploiting these tools can help users prioritize and manage their messaging more efficiently.
Charter
The purpose of the Working Group is to promote best-known practices based on peer-to-peer computing. As computers become ubiquitous, ideas for implementation and use of peer-to-peer computing are developing rapidly and gaining prominence. But issues of interoperability, security, performance, management, privacy and many more issues may stifle the growth of innovation. Many of these issues relate to infrastructure, where no value will be gained from proprietary solutions. Best-known practices will promote ubiquity that is essential for peer-to-peer computing success.
Traceroutes are sourced from 800 vantage points hosted by nearly 300 traceroute web servers. We started by mapping 10 ISPs, in Europe, Australia and the United States. In that process, we constructed a database of over 50 thousand IP addresses representing 45 thousand routers in 537 POPs connected by 80 thousand links. For the ISPs we studied, we believe we have the most detailed maps available, except for the ISP's own.
We also examine determinants of Internet diffusion. We find that the Chinese Internet has benefited from economic and trade reform begun in the late 1980s, a strong government commitment to the Internet, complementary human and capital resources, etc. The two nations have very different governments and policies, leading to differing approaches to the introduction of telecommunication competition and infrastructure development. China has pursued a strategy of competition among government-owned organizations while India has set policy via recommendations of publicly visible task forces. It remains to be seen whether India's relatively transparent and market driven approach to Internet policy (and access) will prove effective in the long run.
India and China have approximately 40 percent of the world population, and most of their inhabitants live in rural villages that lack basic telephone service. If the Internet is to succeed in raising the level of human development and curtailing migration to teeming urban centers, it must succeed in India and China. What we learn there may enable us to provide communication and information to the world's 1.5 million unconnected villages.
They are the people who are capable of rapidly exchanging ideas and information via this network. This new 'person-to-person' interface induces both excitement and despair. Many of the people who have met each other via Internet have never met each other in reality. Often they don't know at all what the persons looks like with whom they exchange useful or misleading information and interesting or trivial opinions on a more or less regular basis. However, without this Internet they would probably never have met.
Building on Greg Staple and Zack Schrag¹s "Circadian Geography of the Network" (Telegeography Inc. 1998) I propose that, by replacing the contingent of network use with chat room use, and rejecting the idea that binary flow can be representative of discursive flow, we can gain an insight into the ways in which this disjuncture is disproportionately inclined towards data flow. Hence, this paper exposes the underlying biases of resource based quantitative studies that effectively belie the character and geography of virtual interaction.
This paper argues that rather than seeing the 'death of distance', the increasing popularity of chat rooms has led to a fractured temporality between 'virtual time' and 'real time' which is still grounded upon the geographical base of the user.
Traceroutes are sourced from 800 vantage points hosted by nearly 300 traceroute web servers. We started by mapping 10 ISPs, in Europe, Australia and the United States. In that process, we constructed a database of over 50 thousand IP addresses representing 45 thousand routers in 537 POPs connected by 80 thousand links. For the ISPs we studied, we believe we have the most detailed maps available, except for the ISP's own.
We start by defining telegeoinformatics and providing an overview of latest developments in key telegeoinformatics technologies including geoinformatics, mobile computing, and wireless networks. We then present representative telegeoinformatics applications and discuss the theoretical challenges and issues and strategies in integrating technologies to optimally meet applications¹ requirements. Finally, we end the chapter by discussing the organization of the book and by giving an overview of the subsequent chapters.
The book is divided into tow parts: Part I is on Theory and Technologies and Part II is on Applications and Users. In each part, a set of related topics is assembled and treated in detail addressing current trends and future directions in this emerging filed. We have invited prominent researchers and professionals who are leaders in different aspects of telegeoinformatics to write chapters related to their own perspective fields. The book is intended for a broad audience from many different backgrounds and interests. Researchers, upper undergraduate and graduate students, and professionals who are interested in keeping abreast of new and challenging knowledge are the primary audiences of the book. To the best our knowledge, at the time of writing this is the only book on this topic.
Yet just as the development of wired digital network infrastructure slowed, wireless technologies emerged as a more flexible, intuitive, and efficient form of connecting users to networks in everyday urban settings. As a result, an untethered model for digital networks emerged which combined the capacity and security of wired networks over long distances with the flexibility and mobility of wireless networks over short distances. This new hybrid infrastructure provided the technology needed to begin widespread experimentation with the creation of digitally mediated spaces, such as New York City's Bryant Park Wireless Network.
Although the Web is still a work in progress, it has accumulated enough of a history to permit meaningful analysis of the trends characterizing its evolution. The Web's relatively brief history has been steeped in predictions about the direction of its future development, as well as the role it will ultimately play as a communications medium for information in digital form. In light of the persistent uncertainty that attends the maturation of the Web, it is useful to examine some of the Web's key trends to date, in order both to mark the current status of the Web's progression and to inform new predictions about future developments.
This article examines three key trends in the development of the public Web - size and growth, internationalization, and metadata usage - based on data from the OCLC Office of Research Web Characterization Project, an initiative that explores fundamental questions about the Web and its content through a series of Web samples conducted annually since 1998.
The field of (IIS) (sometimes referred to as Populated Information Terrains, or PITs) overlaps that of Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) as CVEs are one of the preferred inmplementation techniques for visualisation information in a collaborative way. However, IIS does not necessarily imply the use of virtual environments technology - for example, it is possible to imagine a system that enables co-located groups to co-operatively work with information by using a dispaly projected onto physical artefacts.
The key point is that the space used to represent the information is also inhabited by the users of that information whether virtual (via avatars) or by their normal physical presence. This book will consider all variants on ISS, the technology required to make it work and the social and psychological issues raised by such work.
Geography has enfolded parts of other fields (geology, history, economics, and critical theory to name a few). Geographical theories based in Marxism have questioned the traditional political representations of landscapes. Systems theory has attempted to write geography in the language of Euclidean and Cartesian geometry. Poststructuralism, postcolonialism, deconstruction, and feminisms have problematized and productively challenged the authoritative stance of Western geographical studies. These evolutions have in turn sent geographers to study ever more "new spaces".
Remote sensing and geographical information systems have provided us with more detailed descriptive maps than ever before. But today, rather than being completely informed and complacent, we face no shortage of challenge, for the more we learn, the more we study and apprehend the vast complexity of our world, the less we actually can claim to know for sure, especially about the meanings of socially produced spatial objects.
The new realm of "Cyberspace" is the interest of this essay. Cyberspace is a new word, perhaps even a new world. It is, I propose, an important, contemporary, socially produced spatial phenomenon, one of the "new architectures" in Jameson 's terms. What I want to present here is a limited set of views on the character and history of this new space, how it is deployed physically and interactively by and with human action, and finally a provisional synthesis toward a social understanding of cyberspace through geographical analysis.
My name is Anthony Bennett. I am Head of Geography at Isaac Newton School, Hull (England) . I have been teaching for six years. I completed a BA (HONS) degree in Geography.
My interests include Geography (surprise surprise!), The Internet, walking and reading.
I believe in sharing knowledge and resources to further people's understanding and enjoyment of geography. This is the main reason for the development of Internet Geography. Also, so much good work is produced by teachers I feel that we should share good practice more often. I would like Internet Geography to develop into a centre for shared geographical resources and knowledge.
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