Re: cyberespace mirror-city

Shig the Unmentionable (shig@pd.net)
Thu, 29 Jun 1995 15:36:53 -0400

> While I admire Pesce and the work he's done, this is one of his
>concepts that I have disagreed with since he first proposed it. I think
>that trying to mimic real-world constructs in a virtual environment is
>too limited. While I agree that this would be one useful type of virtual
>world, he proposes that this would be the primary way for people to
>interact with the net in the future. In Johnny Pneumatic :) the main
>character makes a phone call by pulling out a world map and selecting the
>city. This is possibly the worst way I can imagine people contacting
>each other. The makeup of cyberspace should based more on semantic
>relationships and less on spatial, but I'm ranting...

While I agree that a more "plastic," less rigid layout than the one Mr.
Soler (?) proposes would be desirable, I rather like the idea of *some*
geographic grouping. At the very least, grouping sites within national
boundaries in the same virtual "space" would be a good idea. My concern is
that, as more and more people worldwide go online, English will become less
and less the "official" language of the Net; and connecting elements
haphazardly might lead to confusion. Maybe. I don't know quite how this
is supposed to work, not having actually *seen* anything directly related
to vrml.

Another consideration is lag time. With the WWW, particularly with
browsers that show a link's site before trying to open it, we have the
advantage of being able to choose not to follow links that are
geographically distant from our home site and would therefore take longer
to download. Hence the advantage of the world map from Johnny Moronic. :)

>There has been a big spike in subscriptions in the last coupla days,
>anyone know what's up?

As a recent subscriber, I can say with certainty that I have no idea. :) I
found out about the list from one of the VRML web resources; I only
recently discovered VRML in an old issue of MONDO.

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