Cyberspace and Virtual Places

摘要: A vocabulary of place - the nouns room, hall, highway, and frontier; verbs such as dwell, enter, inhabit, surf, build is increasingly employed to describe new communications media their use. This trend encompasses a range media, from television radio novels academic writing. As Laura Miller states, "However revolutionary technologized interactions on-line communities may seem, we understand them by deploying set very familiar metaphors rich figurative soup American culture" (1995, 50). Place most commonly applied computer networks include electronic frontier, cyberspace, information superhighway. Participation in described quotidian terms drawn every imaginable environmental situation, suggesting not simply virtual but an entire geography, with off-ramps, rooms, lobbies, dungeons, dens, lairs, cafes, pubs, offices, classrooms. Computer users are so consumed language ideas that 1993 one medium-sized network hosted seventeen different conferences on these topics (Rheingold 1993, 44). Most imply action over time, exploration, settlement, habitation. Enthusiasts speak dwelling networks. Some even think themselves hybrid beings combining human machine components, selves spread out through space along wires, waves, optical fibers. For cyborgs (cybernetic organisms; Caidin 1972) codes at root identity likely be located CD-ROM DNA, constituent elements including microcircuits, nanotechnology, cells. Three major types virtual-place associated world: architecture, cyberspace. Before exploring these, however, meaning functions general bear examining. METAPHOR By traditional definition, metaphor makes sense something tying it another, more image. An alternative model holds creates association between dissimilar things, inflecting disjunct meanings create new, third, meaning. The first "A represents B," captures immediate has applying metaphor. second like B" means C, consonant widely recognized premises structural linguistics, which "the omnipresent principle language" (Richards 1936, 92) because "everything end comes down differences, also groups" (Saussure 1983, 127). geographer Trevor Barnes dismisses models, arguing issue what mean they do: "Metaphors, precisely patently false absurd, cause us stop thereby possibly lead do things than have done past" (1996, 154). statement draws work Donald Davidson, who interprets based utility rather representation. metaphor's usefulness lies revealing about reality producing cognitive jolt affecting beliefs. Yi-Fu Tuan agrees, for soon say "society organism," then "proceed explicitly detail ways society is, not, organism" (1978, 369). On this account does contain meaning; provides starting point construction linking two previously unlinked, destabilize taken-for-granted realities, bringing changes environment relationships social relations. Metaphors deployed powerful face destabilizing technological change (Marvin 1988), use tool control always subject contestation, "captured" any society's interest groups used further its particular goals. …