Creating Cyber Places

Creating CyberPlaces:
Notes on Creating Public Space

by Fred Johnson
October 16, 2002

Cyberspace is a euphemism for the technology used to co-ordinate production, consumption and the accumulation of wealth across the globe. Flows of information move through abstracted space, connecting to nodes in specific places. We hear cyberspace is unbounded, collapsing space and time through the speed of telecommunications. It is suggested cyberspace is uncharted and ungendered, without distinctions of race, class, and regional difference. We never hear much about Cyberplaces, the nodes to which information flows connect.

Cyberplaces are indeed bounded, by the restraints of policy and scarcity economics, and by differences of race, class, gender and region. Cyberplaces are the places connected to telecommunication networks where information is created, stored and retrieved. They are libraries and television production centers, schools and the command and control centers of the multi-nationals. A key challenge of a world that is being reorganized onto telecommunications networks is creating democratic Cyberplaces.

Cable television made the first cut into the seamless technical and cultural domination of broadcast television In the 70s and 80s. The expanded spectrum space created by the 'television of abundance', as cable was then called, provided the initial political rationale used to pressure authorities for the deregulation of telecommunications in general and particularly television. The policy discussion in those times was awash with talk of electronic democracy and voting, electronic classrooms --- the same old technocratic song of 'free information, everywhere, anytime' that is now being recycled for the implementation of the Internet.

Now because of the changing technology and political climate cable franchising takes place in a broader context of telecommunication planning and infrastructure building. Cable systems have become hybrid technologies using fiber optic and coaxial cable. The have become essentially switched networks capable of delivering data, voice and video. This has brought new players into the policy discussion, the strategies and tactics used by local telecommunications activists are changing. It is Media Working Group's hope that writing published in Creating CyberPlaces will make a contribution to dialogue and common agendas among the organizations and people working to create Cyberplaces in a 'Network Society'.