Modest Reviewer Goes on Virtual Voyage: Some Recent Literature of Cyberspace

What is this thing called cyberspace? According to some, we are witnessing the emergence of the global mind: a revolutionary change in human practice of no less import than the invention of printing, or, before it, of language. Most of the contributors to the five books under review here adopt this position—though, like a box of fireworks into which a lighted match has been thrown, they go off dazzlingly, dizzyingly, and often dementedly in different directions from this central starting point. ¹ According to another view, more sparsely represented in these works, we are doing much the same sorts of things we have always done but with a new spectacle (in the sense of show) to distract our attention from the material world. Those of us surfing the Web also get bad backs and repetitive strain injury and end up working longer hours for relatively less reward.

These volumes hold something like sixty-eight separate contributions, and no single review can hope to do justice to all of them. What I will do is characterize each volume very broadly and then develop two themes that emerge out of them all: one, the contrast between the literal and the figurative in the analysis of cyberspace; two, the consequent revisioning of the body and the self.

Let me note at once that none of these books contain any history of computing artifacts, either hardware or software. What they all do is endeavor to give an understanding of what might be called the cultural ecology of Internet technologies: how and why people use the Internet, and how their use of this infrastructural technology affects how they understand themselves, their society, and their science. This is a very rich area for historians of technology in general. We are witnessing a set of basic changes in the ways in which we use information technologies in our daily lives. Who thirty years ago could have foreseen the number of hours a day that a goodly portion of our population would spend glued to a computer screen? These works provide some useful ways of thinking through the ramifications of these changes.

Most contributors to these books would agree that the phenomena they address are not local, accidental modifications to our work and play practices, but rather that uses of the new information technologies are radically altering the cultures and societies in which they are embedded—for example, by changing what it is to be a “community” (witness the emergence of the strange phrase “virtual community”). While these books are often not historically sophisticated, they do occasion a series of historiographical reflections about how to think through such far-reaching changes. As important, they provide evidence for the changes. I will pay particular attention to the modes of historical evidence used by the authors—for instance, exploring in detail the use and misuse of attributions to alleged precursors—in their exploration of current changes.

A central figure in all these books is Donna Haraway, and as hers is both the only single-author work in the set and the most interesting theoretically I will pay a lot of attention to it. Though it requires a bit of unpacking, Haraway’s title perfectly sums up her book’s contents: Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan©Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience. Most readers will recognize the form: this is a parody of an E-mail address—a site in cyberspace. The first part of the title/address draws on Steven Shapin’s development of the educated gentleman as witness to scientific experiments; the analyst, that is, should neither claim nor advocate a privileged position. ² The modest witness is encountering a new conjuncture in human history—at the second millennium—that involves the redistribution of social (especially race and gender) categories, as in the creation of “FemaleMan,” and natural categories, as in the genetic creation of “OncoMouse,” a patented organism. Haraway’s book synthesizes recent work in the sociology and anthropology of science and technology on the one hand and feminist studies on the other to produce a political reading of the...