A description of a virtual company can be found in the book Beep! Beep! Competing In The Age Of The Road Runner, by Chip R. Bell and Oren Harari (http://www.harari.com/bioo.html).

By Tim Walker on Monday, June 24, 2002 - 12:46 am:

I think that part of the reason that cyberspace seems like a space is that it can include (if not contain) structure. Outer space can include a three dimensional structure such as the rings of Saturn-cyberspace includes web rings. But are there other possibilities? In his book Interface Culture Steven Johnson spoke of the "Eureka! moment" when one discovers links. It is, he wrote, the first punctuation mark invented in centuries. But he wonders if it is the only sort of link possible. At present it is as if one must write a book using only semi-colons for punctuation.

By dweinberger on Monday, June 24, 2002 - 07:55 am:

Yes but ... a card catalog has structure but it doesn't strike us as a space. So there has to be more going on. I think.

By Tim Walker on Wednesday, June 26, 2002 - 12:05 pm:

I think there is a clue in your description of the Web as a public space. And it seems like a public space because people seem to be there. The format resembles that of an old fashioned bulletin board. But Paul Levinson (who analyzed media in his books The Soft Edge and The Digital McLuhan) has pointed out that posts more closely resemble the spoken word than traditional writing.

By Nance Cedar on Friday, July 05, 2002 - 08:38 am:

It has bothered me in the last few years to see "cyberspace" envisioned as actual space, as if it was somehow a virtual parallel to city streets and skyscrapers. You see this a lot in films. I wish we could create a visual image of the Web closer to what it is, shared minds, ideas and desires. I know the Web by the people I share it with, not by the computers it rests in.

By dweinberger on Friday, July 05, 2002 - 09:09 am:

Nancy, I agree with you. In one of my earlier drafts, I started a chapter by disputing the Snow Crash vision of cyberspace as a literal landscape. (Hmm, did I leave that in the final draft? I gotta reread my book sometime! : ) And, yes, the Internet doesn't give us good ways to see the social network it instantiates. I see that as a big opportunity and have been deeply involved with two startups that tried to address it (and failed). So, I agree with you.

By AndrewHinton on Monday, August 26, 2002 - 10:32 am:

I got into some thinking about that on my own blog...in some random thoughts left over after I wrote the review for Boxes and Arrows. Now, Snow Crash and Neuromancer are to the Internet as Metropolis and the 1939 Worlds Fair (or the Jetsons, for that matter) are to urban development.
The idea that space wouldn't be perceived as space, but as relevance, is something I don't think anybody could've presupposed. Maybe they did, but I didn't run across it.
In my discipline, Information Architecture, this distinction, and the confluence of "documents and buildings" discussed in the book, are still a little too weird for most practitioners to get their heads around. But we're getting better.

By Tim Walker on Tuesday, August 27, 2002 - 11:32 pm:

Perhaps we percieve a space because we are looking at a screen. This is a little like looking at a television, which may show a scene of the real world or a set, either of which is an actual three dimensional space. Futhermore, people depicted by a television will eventually reveal their personalities-this is also true from what people post, even though we don't see images of them or hear their voices.

By dweinberger on Wednesday, August 28, 2002 - 08:39 am:

Tim, certainly looking at a screen helps us to view the Web as a space. And there is a sort of spatiality to the other stuff we see through our computer screen, e.g., our desktop. But the 3D-ness of TV is due to its projection of 3D images onto a 2D surface, something we've been trained to interpret since we first scratched pictures on a wall. The spatiality of the Web doesn't appear that way. Something else has to be going on...and that's what Chapt 2 is about.