In your parlance, then, I'd be careful of using a mailbox as an
example of an "iconographic" object. In the USA, freestanding federal
mailboxes are blue and rectangular with a curved top. In the U.K.
they are red and cylindrical, with a crown-like enlargement at the
top. Yet again, the mailboxes of private citizens all over the world
vary enormously in shape and design. Some have flags on them, others
don't. Some have slits, others have doors that open. Some are mere
slits in doors. Others have keys. Since there are no tremendous
visual similarities among mailboxes the world over, the fact that
something is a mailbox is a "codified" property and not anything
demonstrably "real" or "iconographic," as you put it.
You could phrase it another way: blue mailboxes are "real" only to
people in the USA.
That being said, note that people the world over have pretty much
agreed on "envelopes with stamps on them" as really being mail. It's
a code established quite awhile ago, but it's still just a code.
There's no reason in principle that people couldn't have decided to
ship "mail" inside of hollowed-out gourds, and thus to say that that's
what mail "really is." Gourds might have practical advantages for
shipping in many climates. But instead we have rectangular envelopes
with rectangular stamps on them, and rectangular packages with
rectangular stamps on them, and an international mail system. So
that's what mail "really is," for us.
So I would suggest that an "icon," in your usage, is really just a
picture of a very commonly understood code. There really aren't any
icons, just codes that different groups of people recognize more or
less readily.
The problem for cyberspace architects (and other authors) is that there is
very little precedence to build a spatial vocabulary on.
The Anthropologist's answer to that is one word: "rubbish." :-)
For instance, how does one
make a object to signify 'link' that is readily understood by most
visitors?
Give them a wall with a doorway to enter. People all over the world
understand walls with doorways through them. Or a window in a wall to
look through, so they can see what's beyond.
You can't =8A yet; until a spatial language is formed this will be
impossible.
Human beings already have plenty of codified spatial languages. The
trick is to use codes that are general enough, cross-culturally
speaking, that lots of people can understand them. As long as you've
got widely recognized codes available, you might as well use them.
For instance, because of the historical accident of Colonialism, all
of the world is now familiar with the basic concepts of Western-style
architecture. It wasn't always that way; in fact, a lot of the
conquest of various Colonialists was about conquering the native
conventions on how to set up a landscape. Can't have those messy
round huts grouped in clusters with little twisty paths between them
now, can we? It wouldn't bode well for the Cartesian world view....
Cheers,
Brandon