I wrote this essay in May 2006 for my university course. I found it by far the most interesting of all the topics I studied during my time there, and it got my highest mark too I’ve copied it wholesale, typos and hungover-sleep-deprived-student bits included, and would be interested to hear opinions and thoughts on it. Any comments – please add to this post about my presentation on the same topic from BarCampLondon4.

Space, time and technology:
What kind of space is cyberspace?

Space and place have traditionally been treated as much the same thing. The key geographical papers of Ratzel (1896) and Mackinder (1904), for instance, emphasize the importance of space as a physically measurable area, an illustration that “historically, special importance as been attached to the power to fix the locations of events, places and phenomena on the surface of the earth and to represent these on maps” (Derek Gregory in Johnston et al, 2000). However, the rapid increase of technology in the 20th century, in terms of physical distribution, accessibility and power, has meant that the notion of space as an interchangeable entity with place is no longer valid.

While the expansion of telephone and postal networks heralded new possibilities for fast and easy communication, it is difficult to argue that any technology has changed the nature of space and communication more than the Internet. While telephones allowed the spread of conversations and postal networks allowed the spread of written messages, the Internet has created a phenomenal number of interlinkages regionally, nationally and internationally. These linkages demonstrate vividly the break of space from place; these new place-to-place networks of the Internet can be viewed as an entire space of their own.

The infrastructure of cyberspace

Before examining the nature of the space and place of the Internet, the underlying history and structure must be considered. As Townsend (2001) explains, the Internet grew out of the ARPANET, a study funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the US Department of Defense. APRA expanded the network to cover the whole of the continental United States throughout the 1970’s, but it was not until the National Science Foundation (NSF) took over responsibility for it in the early 1980’s that it began to form international links with Europe and became known as the Internet.

The Internet is built on underlying, existing communications technology. Initially, this was the copper telephone lines of the 1980’s but later the satellites, optical fibres and mobile phone networks which have become so common in carrying our everyday phonecalls. However, Townsend notes that “unlike a telephone transmission, which sets up a dedicated circuit that remains open between caller and receiver, Internet data travel in discrete, destination-marked packets more similar to the way letters are transmitted through a postal system.” This simplified explanation, however, does not fully explain the complexities of the transmission system, whereby a method such as Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) breaks a piece of data (such as an image or e-mail) into smaller parts (“packets”) and then transmits these many constituent packets across the network. As Townsend briefly mentions, an Internet communication differs significantly from a telephone one, in that these packets are all marked with a “delivery address” (as with the postal system) at which point they are reassembled into the original, larger piece of data. The key point is that all this data – all these packets of information – do not necessarily take the same route to the destination, but instead navigate their way through a complex maze of interlinked computers.

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