You Are Here (30 page)

Virtual spaces constructed using clever Web-based metaverses like Second Life are only the most recent progeny of a trend in the human transformation of space that began with Alexander Graham Bell’s scratchy command to his assistant, Thomas Watson, to “come here,” accelerated with Guglielmo Marconi’s remarkable question sent in Morse code across the Bristol Channel, “Are you ready?” and began to take over entire realms of human consciousness when, in 1929, Pem Farnsworth appeared as a shaky image on the first television set designed and built by her husband, Philo.

Before any of these developments, the speed of communication between one human being and another had a hard upper, biological limit—the speed of a running human being, a flying bird, or a fast horse. With our conquest of the electron has come light-speed transmission of signals, beginning with sparse codes and scratchy voices, but now filled with images and interactivity.

Many warehouses could be filled with all the books that have been written about the far-reaching implications of these changes in how we send information from one place to another, and justifiably so. The instant, widespread dissemination of scenes that would normally be beyond our immediate visual grasp has completely transformed how we know about the world, and it has had an especially dramatic impact on human engagement with physical space.

In his influential book on the effect of new media on human experience,
No Sense of Place
, sociologist Joshua Meyrowitz uses an architectural metaphor to help readers begin to get a sense of how visual media such as television have influenced our lives.
⁴
Imagine, he says, that all the walls of our buildings simply vanished. There would be no more private or public spaces or any other influence of physical place on our social lives, nor on our perceptions of how the world is
put together. We would no longer have the option of framing social interactions by putting them into particular physical locations. Meetings “behind closed doors” would no longer be an option. The advent of television has had a similar effect on our lives. Though the connections are one-way, any two places connected by a camera and a television set are linked as if by wormholes through space. Furthermore, the fact that television broadcast signals are propagated through the air (at least for a little while longer) means that the manner in which space is folded in upon itself by these invisible waves is completely democratic. Anyone who has the appropriate technology to receive the signals and who sets up equipment within range can obtain and view the content of the images. Without making a judgment about whether television has exerted a net positive or negative influence on our modern way of life, there can be no question that the steady flow of content through the airwaves has transformed us in almost every way. Most important, television has worked hand in glove with other types of technology, such as rapid transit, that allow us to move our bodies quickly through space.

Collectively, these human inventions have made huge inroads on the natural relationships between place, movement, and position. Now, I can transport myself from my living room to any other location on the planet for a live view of a war, catastrophe, concert, or sporting event. Benefit concerts, journalistic coverage of war zones by “embedded” journalists, World Cup soccer matches, and award shows bring unfathomably large numbers of viewers together into one single shared view of the world before the electronic hearth. Just as rapid transit, especially air travel, can be perceived as having made the world a smaller place, wireless transmission of images in the form of television signals can be argued to have shrunk the world, perhaps making space disappear completely as a significant factor in our lives. But, just like rapid transit, the influence of electronic
media on our perception of space is more complex than this. Spaces are connected to one another using sets of rules that have more to do with politics, power, and preference than with physics. When Marshall McLuhan, a pioneering Canadian thinker in media studies and author of the influential slogan “the medium is the message,” described the impact of new media as having converted the world into a kind of “global village,” this is precisely the kind of transformation in the use of space that he meant. Like villagers, we form allegiances, links, and unions with other individuals, but the far reach of invisible waves makes physical distance irrelevant to the formation of these connections.

The mind-warping power of television has in some ways worked in concert with other space-devouring developments of the past century. In previous chapters, we saw how the designs of suburban homes and neighborhoods have discouraged us from venturing outside the front door. Monofunctional designs have given us few real destinations, and the quiet streets that result have produced a social isolation and physical torpor that prevents the growth of healthy minds and bodies. The availability of a constant stream of images from across the globe has given us a much-craved window on the world that is intelligible to us mostly because of our mind’s penchant for the virtual. We find it so easy to slip and slide through space that there is little effort involved in our letting the two-dimensional images that flicker across our living rooms stand in place of real life. Though the medium of television has not lived up to its early utopian promise to educate generations of cosmopolitan, connected human beings, this is less an intrinsic failure of the medium itself and more, perhaps, a failure of our own imaginations mixed in with a good amount of greed. It didn’t take long to discover that televised images were incredibly powerful tools to entice us to buy things, and, public broadcasting notwithstanding,
this has been the main use of television throughout most of its almost eighty-year history.

It’s almost a shock to recognize that the Internet is less than twenty years old. Given its deep penetration into almost every aspect of our lives, it is hard to imagine how we ever managed to limp along without it.

My first use of the Internet for anything other than to read in newsgroups about the future promise of the Internet was to settle a debate that I was having with my wife about the rules of cribbage. I entered “cribbage” into the rudimentary search engine of the day (does anyone remember Gopher?), waited for what would by current standards be an intolerably long time—long enough now to download a full novel—and there, to my astonishment, sat before me on the screen a simple text document outlining all rules of cribbage. The only thing that fascinated me more than that the search engine had been able to turn up this document from somewhere within the network was that somebody had bothered to write the document and to make it available to all.

Contrast my early fumbling efforts with the present-day deep penetration of Wikipedia, Google searches, and YouTube in our home and even our working lives. Anyone within reach of an Internet portal has at their fingertips an astonishing mass of text, image, and sound that can be delivered to their screen in milliseconds.

Radio and television networks are mostly owned by large economic stakeholders who maintain a firm grip on what is and is not presented to their audiences. The Internet, at least for now, is not only accessible from almost anywhere in the world but also simple enough that any garden-variety user can post content. Even when repressive governments attempt to control what content is available
to their citizens, clever users quickly find ways to skirt around such restrictions (witness the recent efforts of Internet users to publicize the efforts of the Chinese government to quash unrest in Tibet). It is this interactivity and collective ownership of the content of the Internet that so distinguishes it from other types of mass media, and these are also the features that fill it with potential to have a positive transformative effect on our relationship with physical space.

In a way, the Internet poses the same space-squashing conundrum as any other form of electronic communication. The enormous expenditures of energy that underpin the computers, servers, fiber-optic cables, air-conditioning, cooling fans, and service vehicles driving around on freeways to repair chewed wires and broken switches enable us to be completely shielded from the real distances that are involved when we press a button on a keyboard and suddenly find ourselves looking through a live webcam at a lion dozing in the sun in Kruger National Park.

In fact, navigation from website to website by a series of clicks mirrors the way that our mind processes space. Internet sites are connected to one another as nodes in a topology. When we click on a link, we normally have no idea of the distances or directions that separate the sources of the sites that we’re viewing, nor do we care about them. This is just a more extreme version of our tendency to collapse the geometry of space to a simple topology as we navigate our way through our everyday lives, and it may be one of the reasons why point-and-click Web browsers are so intuitive and easy for us to learn to use. I’ve watched my 80-year-old father and my two-year-old son master browsers with equal facility, and, like everyone else, I’ve seen them become tangled in a thicket of distracting visions, losing track of where they started and where they were trying to go. (Tech watchers have an official name for this behavior: WWILFing, for “What was I looking for?”) This ability of
websites to engulf and “lose” us in content is even something that Web designers strive to include in a site. Just as casino designers or shopping mall architects might try to build physical spaces that make it easy for us to enter and hard to leave, cyber-architects have as much social control (and presumably economic benefit to gain) when they tap into the way that our minds compute virtual spaces.

The main difference between the Internet and more passive electronic media is its capability for personal interactivity. Though many websites are set up to be simple digital versions of print media (some newspaper websites are a good example), others are designed to encourage users to willfully and actively navigate to different parts of a site, building the shape of their overall experience on the fly. Just as we may wander from room to room in a gallery to gaze at the offerings on display, we can do the same kind of thing on the Internet by choosing which parts of a site to visit and how long to linger. Many sites also allow us to structure our experiences according to more complex user inputs than simple mouse clicks on links. We might be asked to answer questions, for example, and our answers might be used to steer us on a particular path through the content of a site. So although electronic communication via computer networks distorts space in the same way as any other technology that allows us to move our virtual selves at light speed from one place to another, there is much more potential for involving the user in a richer mental experience than simply gazing at a centrally controlled flow of images. This means that there are real prospects for using this technology to effect positive changes to human mental states, including our conceptions of the organization of space and the connections between ourselves and other parts of the world. These prospects have been enhanced considerably in the last decade by the widespread availability of geocoded data on the Internet.

In 1995, the United States announced the completion of a remarkable project that had evolved slowly over the previous three decades. The deployment of 24 space satellites composing what was called the NAVSTAR Global Positioning System made it possible for an electronic device on the surface of the earth to calculate its location to within a few meters.
⁵
One of the main motivations for the system was its envisioned military uses, and for the first few years of its existence, an error was deliberately introduced into the GPS signals offered to civilians so that these signals could be accurate only to within about 30 meters. During the Gulf War, a shortage of military-grade GPS receivers prompted the U.S. military to remove this source of error so that more widely available commercial GPS receivers, bought mostly by boaters and hunters, could be used on the battlefield. Since that time, the distorting error has remained inactive, and GPS signals have become a mainstay of air and marine navigation. Indeed, though the military retains the capability of blocking the GPS signals from reaching any part of the globe, to do so would probably lead to catastrophe. Today, the evolution of remarkably accurate and tiny GPS receiver chips (about the size of a pinkie fingernail) has meant that these signals are widely available in a variety of consumer products, including laptop computers, pocket computers, cell phones, cars, and digital cameras. The wide availability of GPS-enabled devices, along with geographic software that is useful for professionals but user-friendly enough for casual users, has led to sharp interest in tagging objects with information about location. Google’s stunning free software Google Earth, which enables users to view everything from a snapshot of the entire globe to detailed street-level views of major urban centers, has led to a craze for what some refer to as “geo-everything.”