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i N f O r m aT i O N Ca r TO g r a P h y Visualizations of Internet Spatiality and Information Flows Jason Farman The term cyberspace has evoked the process of navigating and embodying the spatiality of the internet since the word was coined by William Gibson in his cyberpunk fiction. In spatial terms, cyberspace has also been understood as an emerging “frontier space” that users are able to construct freely to fit their particular needs. It is a space of exploration, of possibility , and of social connection on a global scale. While most internet users identify with the notion of “navigating” this space, the process by which this navigation occurs bears little resemblance to the ways we chart and move through material space. The physical world has historically navigated and understood the world around it by charting it with maps. In fact, maps have even defined the space at points (see, for example, Hartley’s discussion of the symbolic ownership of an area by an empire through designating it on a map). Instead, users navigate the internet typically using a web browser, search engines, and hyperlinks. One link leads to another, and the user is wandering the internet in a situationist-style dérive with no clearly charted route or destination. Such a process of navigation is attributed to the massive tangle of links (attributed to another metaphor of the web). This study aims to identify the possible uses of internet maps, what such visual representations might look like, and how they might serve the purpose of representing the inequalities present in the transmission of information on a global scale. Drawing from several internet maps with differing approaches to information visualization, this paper analyzes the problems facing the mapping of information flows and how internet cartography can address these problems through visualizing information not as raw data but as a lived social space experienced in a situated and embodied way. Ultimately, I demonstrate that the creation of an internet map must always account for the visual and data limitations of maps in general. (As Monmonier’s studies argue, all maps “lie”). As we seek to theorize what a useful user map might look like, we must address how users engage cyberspace on multiple levels and in diverse ways to create visualizations suited to their specific goals. 5 86 composing (media) = composing (embodiment) Th E SPaCE O f CybErSPaCE In her study of embodiment in mediated spaces (and technology as prosthesis ), Stone argued that “what was being sent back and forth over the wires wasn’t just information, it was bodies” (176; emphasis in original). While it may seem commonsense to argue for the internet as an embodied space, many cyberpunk writers, cyborg artists, and technology theorists have argued that the body is obsolete in the digital age (such as Moravec’s Mind Children, STELARC’s homepage that welcomes visitors with a banner that reads “THE BODY IS OBSOLETE,” and Kroker’s thought that we are transcending the body through digital technologies). The assumption that there can be a cyberspace without bodies overlooks a central component of the production of space. Space, as Lefebvre argued in The Production of Space, is not simply a container into which we place objects and people ; instead, space is coproduced with bodies and objects. Lefebvre writes, “Each living body is space and has space: it produces itself in space and it also produces that space” (170; emphasis in original). Space is dependent upon bodies and bodies upon space. If users understand a sense of movement through the internet, then they are experiencing the embodied space of cyberspace. Movement and navigation require space and conceived space requires bodies. The internet is not an easily charted space the way material space can be. The objects that make up this landscape not only function in extremely diverse ways (from HTML, Flash, and VRML web pages, to videos, images , music, currency, data of all types, the list is seemingly endless), but these objects are in constant motion. As Dodge and Kitchin write, Whilst some aspects of telecommunications infrastructure and cyberspace are relatively easy to map, such as plotting the networks of service providers onto conventional topographic maps . . ., other aspects are very difficult. This is because the spatial geometries of cyberspace are very complex, often fast-changing , and socially produced. Cyberspace offers worlds that, at first, often seem contiguous with geographic space, yet on further inspection it becomes clear that the space-time laws...

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