Before you can conquer new territory, you need to know where you are going Leon Forde Creating an accurate map of infinite, abstract cyberspace is not the easiest task for cartographers. Cyberspace, of course, does not exist. It is, to paraphrase novelist William Gibson, a consensual hallucination of space and surface – our brains perceive space when we surf the Internet and communicate with other users around the planet, but what we perceive as space is actually binary code, buried in vast worldwide corridors of information. “There’s the screen, then that goes into the wire and then where is the rest of the Internet? For most people it’s just invisible. It’s just under the road and in anonymous server rooms,” says Martin Dodge, a researcher at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London. For three years, Dodge has curated his own cyber atlas online at www.cybergeography.org/atlas, a collection of maps of virtual space from a disparate group of researchers. Until recently a lot of cybermapping has viewed computers as fixed points on a map, treating cyberspace as a tangible object anchored to the physical world by the networks and phone lines that form its backbone. But as the Internet is moving away from the fixed to the fluid-access model (the use of palm-top devices for Internet access, for example), cybermappers are having to rethink the way virtual space is viewed. This is also changing our urban environments, the way we travel, the way we communicate, the way information is disseminated and the way we are targeted as consumers. “The information landscape of the city is just as important as its transportation grid or housing stock, yet we understand very little about its actual shape and form,” says Anthony Townsend, a research scientist at Taub Urban Research Centre, New York University. “Such understanding is likely to radically reshape the way we plan and accommodate future growth and change in urban areas.”
As fluid-access penetrates further into the market, the computers plug-ged into the phone lines will stop being our gateway into the Net as we ourselves – just by carrying our cellphones – become the entry points. Just how are we to think about and visualise cyberspace when it is a morphing entity, its shape constantly affected by millions of fluid-access users, all moving in different directions and accessing cyberspace at different times and for different reasons? These questions pose some real problems for cybermappers.
“In my mind it seems to be a real paradox,” says Dodge. “Fluid-access in one way is the dream that geography and location doesn’t matter now, but the question everybody asks you when they ring is, ‘Where are you?’ And the whole WAP (Internet via cellphone) thing seems to be about giving geography back to you – look at local navigational devices. Geography doesn’t matter, and yet when people use cellphones geography seems to matter even more.”
In one sense this could mean that cybermapping may move away from abstraction towards becoming a very organic discipline indeed – as people become the entry points to cyberspace, surely maps of cyberspace will use people as landmarks? “I see no technical reason why this is not possible,” says Townsend. “The challenges come from summarising so much information in a visually coherent way.” And the nature of mobile devices means that mapping and tracking the individual is totally possible. “It’s a fantastic way to track people,” agrees Dodge. “If you’re monitoring cellphone communications you see how pedestrians move and how traffic flows and how they live their daily lives. Potentially that is fantastic data.”
The kind of data that details the daily routine of every Net-connected individual would be invaluable to businesses and marketers. A chain sushi restaurant, looking to open a branch in central London for example, could look at an animated cybermap of mobile Internet users and pinpoint the location where most 19- to 25-year-old female office workers go for lunch.
But this kind of information can also be a bad thing. “It’s a huge invasion of privacy, potentially,” says Dodge. “The companies running the networks have valuable data – they’ve got your billing address, so they know your financial lifestyle and then they know your geographic lifestyle throughout the day. Huge implications. And I don’t know if people are aware that is coming.” It is a view shared by Townsend: “A number of firms that already operate wireless data networks routinely monitor their customers’ location. In the United States, the E911 service will require wireless operators to be able to pinpoint the location of a cellphone within 100m or so. There is no doubt that once the necessary technology to implement this service is deployed, it will be used and resold by the wireless operator to third parties to target consumers based on their geographic location.” Currently, mapping fluid-access cyberspace is still in its infancy. But the possibilities have been realised. It is only a matter of time before cartographers overcome the visual problems of mapping millions of people in flux and start creating crucial maps that, aside from revolutionising marketing and commerce, will help us visualise and understand the way we live, interact and process information collectively.