Topic: Community/Culture

Finally this is what cyberspace is all about. It is, in a way, the revenge of the architects, urbanists, and environmentalists upon the media moguls, computerists, and developers. Even as the world we know becomes placeless under their ministrations, and even as we fight to preserve and enrich it, so we must construct another one which we have not yet fully seen, a world in another image and from a material that is actually the universe’s oldest and only material: information itself.

40 million simultaneous phone calls, with or without video, don’t make cyberspace unless the people making them can hear or not hear each other, see or not see each other “isovistically,” as a function of position and orientation in a virtual space given by the system itself. Design is required. Architecture is required; and not just to cope with the impact of cyberspace on the surface of the earth, but to give shape to the spaces flowing out of the information flowing between real places and real people.

Cyberspace is a geography constructed of information, a new planet with an atmosphere no less breathable for being imaginary. Its topography is undeveloped, as yet still locked into the intrinsic dimensions of its nodal points. It lies compressed and unrealized in our vaults of tapes and discs of data, in our books and dreams, in the very way we appear to each other on screens, pages and telephone lines. To unfurl and organize all this, to bring it to light in cyberspace, spatiology must complement archeology, immersion must complement observation.