Reports from the Electronic Frontier: Introducing Information Spaces, 1 Tom Maddox Two or more prolonged, almost musical tones; a sudden rush of white noise; one beep, another (or, depending on your system, any of a variety of tones--an eep, a clank, a quack): one modem has successfully connected to another, and your computer is no longer something that sits isolated on your desk. It now has, shall we say, companions. It has connected to another computer, which may, in turn, connect to others. However, though as an sf writer I am delighted by the idea of a computer having companions, the truth here and now is more mundane: in fact, one person connects to another. Keep that in mind. It is people who connect and their intentions that give meaning to the mere interface of computer to computer. Across large parts of the world, computers sit ready to feed you data. You can read electronic versions of journals such as Postmodern Culture and Quanta. You can download shareware or freeware programs for your IBM-compatible computer from White Sands or Finland or for your Macintosh from Stanford, the most recent release of Macintosh system software from Apple's own Internet computer or the latest version of Disinfectant, a free virus killer, from Northwestern University. You can search the library catalogs of a number of huge, connected repositories, including branches of the University of California. From the Gutenberg Project you can obtain electronic copies of the Bible or Alice's Adventures Underground. On any number of bulletin boards and conferencing services, you can ask about cyberpunk, cooking, dogs, "Twin Peaks," or the Space Shuttle- -and generally get answers, some of them well-informed, even authoritative; also, you can read outrageous opinions on virtually any topic of controversy, and you can write them for tens, hundreds, thousands of others to read, depending on your connection. You can exchange electronic mail with any number of people, depending upon how gregarious you are in this medium and how much time you are willing to spend. You can participate in semi-private discussion groups on medieval history, future culture or Finnegans Wake. Learning the networks, using the networks, you can while away the hours in work or play or something that is a little bit of both--the only partly understood mode of interaction that is a human being at a computer terminal. This may be good for you or bad for you, or a bit of each: the jury's still out, and no one is even sure what constitutes evidence in this regard. The cyberpunk future of self-aware Artificial Intelligences and networked virtual realities seems far off, and at present most of us are restricted to clumsy desktop machines, slow modems, and the pedestrian exchange of texts and computer files. However, though you have not donned your goggles and gloves, once connected you are nonetheless occupying cyberspace, at least a primitive, Wright Brothers version of it. However, odds are you haven't had this experience--it requires coming to terms with modems and communications software and phone hookups and is in general a pain in the rear, particularly for a novice. Not only do you have to be a computer user, but also you have to be schooled in at least a few of the higher arcana of telecommunications. For most people most of the time, the effort required to get online simply isn't worth it. In fact, this principle applies to much of the existing information technology. Though something you may be extremely interested in exists, you may not be able to find it, and if you find it, you may not be able to use it, and if you can use it, you may not be able to use it well. For instance, one of the common complaints about Usenet is that it simply is too huge: the amount of information that passes across it daily cannot be read. In the despairing words of Steve Steinberg, editor of Intertek, a savvy journal about cyberspace and its culture, "Reading USENET is like drinking from a firehose. . . ." So, to use information technology well, you must learn how to limit what washes over you, how to filter it. In order to do so, you must first understand a bit about the environment you'll be exploring.=20 I've referred casually to the "networks," not only begging for the moment the question of what they are and how they function, but also leaving unsaid a primary truth about them. The networks themselves are manifestations of a larger process which we might call the emergence of worldwide information spaces-- provisionally defined as the space of all electronic media and all connections among them. Computers connect to other computers, and that's the network part of it, but there are things happening here that transcend networks. For instance, new possibilities in science and technology have emerged because computers exist.=20 James Gleick makes this point in his Chaos, concerning the study of non-linear dynamic systems; without getting at all technical, let's just say that all those pretty pictures of Mandelbrot and Julia sets and those eerie fractal landscapes are made possible by computer technology. Stephen S. Hall's Mapping the Next Millennium: The Discovery of New Geographies takes the point further afield, into projects such as mapping the ocean floor, the human body, the human genome, the universe. Feed in the data points, get a picture of the Strange Attractor, currently my favorite object in the macro-world. In Hall's words, "It does not deposit any photons on optical telescopes, leaves no bark of static for radio telescopes to detect. That is in part because it itself is a forest of galaxies, incredibly dense and unimaginably large, lying off at a distance of 150 million light-years." Without computers, the Great Attractor would have remained invisible. The computer's ability to perform astounding numbers of calculations in short order and to present the results in visual form enables the discovery of new facts and, more importantly, new modes of understanding. Also, the increasingly flexible power of computers to do a number of simple things such as lay out and print out text and graphics will certainly rewrite fundamental practices in our culture, such as publishing, and fundamental ideas, such as intellectual property. It is easy to extrapolate a situation not too far away when every one of us can become his or her own publisher on a desktop, own distributor on the networks. However, you don't have to lament the disappearance of the publisher just yet. Attempts to do pure electronic publishing are embryonic, to say the least, and publishers remain invaluable to getting published. ("Yes," says an imp. "Who else will provide bad cover art, no advertising, and a firm commitment to keeping books in distribution for an entire month, maybe even five weeks?"=20 I, of course, think none of these things, because I really like my publisher, several of whose representatives will likely read these words.) And of course the book itself may well become as quaint an artifact as the stone tablet. Emerging technologies, in my opinion still more cute and interesting than genuinely useful, can present books on computer screens. William Gibson's "Sprawl" novels will be available soon electronically. Without going into the large and unresolved controversies about the death of the book right now (though I will later), I will merely note that a book stored electronically can be searched, indexed, and cross-referenced in a huge number of ways; can be turned into hypertext, however you define that. Finally, to wrap up this glance into information space, there is multi-media, the combination of text, pictures still or moving, music, and whatever else you can digitize. Examples include Voyager's versions of Mozart's The Magic Flute and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, both of which allow you to dip into the composer's life and times and to perform such seemingly magical acts as clicking on a line of musical notation to hear what it sounds like. In short, the emerging computer environment is about new ways of assembling and distributing information. In one sense, you might regard information as anything on your computer disks or held in its memory: that collection of 0s and 1s rigidly quantifiable into bits, bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, and so on. When your floppy or hard drive is full of it, well, there's no arguing with the drive, no telling it that information is a relative or elastic notion, that some information is valuable, other worthless. (You can quite often "squeeze" that information, that is to say, code it in a more efficient way, and so gain disk space, but the same principle applies: given any sort of coding, your disk will only hold so much, and there are limits to how much it will hold no matter what the form of coding.) Most of us, however, think of information in more qualitative ways. When we possess it, we know something we didn't before. Some bits of it are more valuable than others. Some of it is timely, some of it is particularly pleasing, funny, alarming, disgusting, astonishing. The computer networks make possible the very fast distribution of unprecedented quantities of information to a very large number of people. Limited primarily by your knowledge of what is available, and where and how, you can fill up your hard drive or stacks of floppies quicker than would seem possible or reasonable. The world has become information- abundant and information-quick, and the computer networks are major conduits for the dense, fast information flow. There's no quick, easy way of coming to terms with this information density, no sudden way of knowing what's of interest to you on the various networks and how to get it. The electronic frontier can't be explored overnight. If you try to master it all at once, you risk a peculiarly modern overload:=20 you'll be disoriented out there in cyberspace, unable to remember where you are or why you came there, and the information glut will wash over you like an electronic flood. Too many newsgroups, roundtables, echos, mailing lists; too many different menus structures or command-line possibilities; too much electronic mail: all of it, simply, too much. The issue here is personal bandwidth, or how much information you can absorb in a given measure of time--how quickly you can drink from the firehose. You have to find what rate of information transfer feels right for you given personal factors such as your "spare time" (for many people these days a phrase that can only be used ironically), overall knowledge of computers, ability and willingness to concentrate on learning the electronic frontier, and patience. You also need to find a congenial territory within the electronic frontier and get to know that locale well. Some places will probably seem too wild to you, others too tame, and many will almost certainly appear boring.=20 However, there's lots of space out there, from the totalitarian but quiet Prodigy, to the vast, complex anarchy of Usenet, which offers startling freedom but can require steady nerves and a strong stomach. Thus my next column will introduce to you the major electronic networks. I will not be concerned so much with the technical details as I will with the overall environment, the kind of social life or culture, provided by each. My aim will be to describe them in terms general and accurate enough that you can make a reasonable guess at which ones might appeal to your needs and tastes. Then when you hear the hissing and beeps, you'll have some idea what comes next.  ======================================================================= This document is from the WELL gopher server: gopher://gopher.well.com Questions and comments to: gopher@well.com .