The Cyberspace

A New Definition of Space in Traditional Notion

By: Victor Leung @ Princeton University, May 2010.

As the popularity of digital communication channels and social network websites increase and

sprawl into everyday life of the society, they take the main role to become the social stage that

individuals depend to maintain social connection with each other. There is an increasingly clear

formulation of the notion of space in the digital world, either as channels for rapid

communication or as rooms where people encounter each other. Despite the development of

these intangible spaces are so new and revolutionary, their definition and construction showed a

close resemblance to that of physical space, which is demonstrated in the wide use of physical-

spatial terminology and their construction with reference to physical environments.

I would argue that the recent development of digital communication technology and social

networks creates an increasing connection between the digital world and the real world. Such

that, the definition and the construction of those sites still are strongly connected to the

traditional notion and perception of physical space. I will try to explore this relationship with

reference to cognitive science, terminology and more importantly the interdependence between

the digital world and the real world.

In order to demonstrate the effect of social network websites, I’ll use Facebook as a case study

because it had been the largest 1 social site at the time of writing and it is also frequently chosen

by scholars as a subject for social study.

Notion of cyberspace

Today, digital information technology has developed to a point where visiting websites became

daily routine for many. These websites can be classified in formal terms depending on how

information on the site is being generated and viewed. For example the most primitive shape of

website is where contents are created by one and viewed by many, which resembles the

authorship of a book. As network server increase in processing power, websites are able to

collect contents from multiple users, either in the form of stories or as feedback comments from

users, those sites acts as an archive for multiple inputs, but the presentation of such information

is still static, more resembles a notice board or a magazine. The best example is early newspaper

websites (note that in later years, newspaper websites all migrated towards encouraging user

generated content to gain user dynamics). As later developments allow more functions to be

incorporated into websites and allow more complicated user interaction to happen with the

server. Forums and social websites appear; their contents are almost entirely generated by users

and consumed by users, the role of the website acts as a framework for which information is

being collected and presented, the focus is shifted from solely the static content to the

connections between the site and users, and more importantly, the relationship among users

themselves. The success of these large social websites depends on its ability to create a

community of active users contributing to and further promoting the websites.

1
In terms of monthly active users. Date from Compete.com
Digital information exchange relies on electromagnetic signals that propagate through optic

fibers and copper cables. Despite the mode of transfer is abstract and intangible, the information

is presented through a graphic front end, on a computer screen, materialized by text, graphics and

articulations. It is well perceived that digital information delivery resembles a highway due to its

speed, and it is often called a tunnel due to the convoluted and intangible pathway that it travels

through. We can then metaphorically view the social network sites (Such as Facebook, mySapce)

as urban rooms or spaces, where they offer users a platform to exchange information and allow

interactions between users. Their functions share the same qualities as a real world space such as

a gathering room, where their primary function is acting as the social medium between people.

Nomenclature

It is quite interesting to study the terminology around cyberspace because they have a very short

history relative to the typical development of words in linguistics. Their strong notion of space in

the physical world highly resembles the description of physical objects. For example, the

communication ‘infrastructure’ (which involves physical machines running with communication

protocols), the ‘architecture’ of a website (the programming behind the scene of the system);

while these notion are easy to understand by laymen, these nomenclature are actually used by

professionals to describe them. At this point, I would suggest that the reason for seeking spatial

metaphor is not simply because they are easy to understand, but because of how we must

cognitively understand intangible concepts through traditional, tangible entity.

The closest metaphor for the digital cyberspace is the physical space. Location of machines

within an internet is expressed by IP address, a numerical label which signifies the arbitrary

location of a machine in the network; it is a cascading string (in format of

XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX in IPv4, six numbers in IPv6) which describes the digital route where the

location of the machine can be reached. This routing method of networking closely resembles the

hierarchy of physical locations in the physical world. The commonly used addressing method of

a website is URL (Uniform Resource Locator), it is structured with the help of domains

(example.com), sub-domains (www.example.com or mail.example.com) and path

(/content/page.html), which describes the location like a street address.

Dynamics

The notion of space can be viewed through the many way users use the system and how the

system is designed to accommodate it. In Facebook, every user has a page which mainly acts as a

message board, which is called ‘Wall’. The user’s resent activity is automatically generated from

the users actions and information related to them. For example “What’s in your mind” is a short

note that user can quickly post what is in their mind. “Photos” application will post photos that

relate to or contains the users, once the user is identified in any photos uploaded by anyone.

Conversation can also happen on the Wall when privacy is not a concern, history of such

conversation between the Wall’s owner and his or her friends are displayed to every visitor.

Despite the information is static, such as text, photo or video, the information is presented as

activities and is mostly dynamically generated by the system to represent the user’s actions. The

activeness of the information presented on the Wall creates a notion of space where spontaneous

things could happen; its spatial dimension is neither length nor height but are being shaped by

the variety of friends that contributes actions in the room, and by the never-ending ‘older post’
that visitors could keep viewing. 2 Visitors are encouraged to participate in actions that resemble

physically entering a room and start chatting with other people or performing some other actions

such as commenting or playing multiplayer games.

These functions not only enables users to engage with others, but are designed to capture the

users attention. The ‘News Feed’ provides a long list of news from a users friends, news may

include newly updated photos, status, comments and even discussions between mutual friends.

These news may not all be interesting to the user but the overwhelming number of them will

eventually captures the users attention to give feedback. Recently, Facebook even designed to

track what friends you most interact with, and display those friends’ news at such order –

branded as ‘Top News’. These features provide users an easy platform to manage their social

assets while seducing them to invest time to perform their social interaction over the digital

space. This can be confirmed by the exponential increase of Facebook’s active user over the last

two years. 3

A research note by Trier 4 in 2008 examines email record from Enron archive and came to a list

of conclusion. He describes that a high level of volatile and temporal elements happens within

the email communication between the members of the company. With a visualization method he

created, he showed that there is a network of relationships created behind the emails with

different actors and they spontaneously formed into subgroup (even through the very primitive

functions in an email system: Recipient, CC, BCC, etc.)

2
The Wall page only displays a number of recent activities. One new function on the Wall, is the ability to see older
post just by clicking the ‘Older post’ button. The page will extend its length to include more posts. One can click the
button unlimited amount of time to view a long page which showed the history of activities of that user.
3
Facebook Online Pressroom, Company Timeline: Oct07-50mil; Aug08-100mil; Sep09-300mil; Feb10-400mil.
4
Trier, M. 2008. Towards dynamic visualization for understanding evolution of digital communication networks.
Information Systems Research 19, (3): 335.
Commetrix - Exploring Dynamic Network Evolution with Social Network Intelligence Software,

Matthias Trier

With Facebook – a much more sophisticated social application that has the ability to allow

temporal events being staged on the website, I would suggest that a form of volatile congregation

is assembled that even more resembles a real world situation then in Trier’s study. For example a

random discussion around a newly uploaded/tagged photo on Facebook could gather a dozen of

people hanging on the same page. With synchronous web page technology 5, discussions by

5
Such as AJAX technologies which fetch information from the server in regular time frame and perform updates.
multiple actors in the event would seamlessly appear/popup (without a refresh of the page), such

discussion maybe very volatile and the group maybe disassembled unnoticeably within minutes.

In April 2008, Facebook introduced an instant messaging feature called “chat”, users can chat

one to one with another online user. This enables users to stay on any page of the site, while

placing themselves at the center of their friends. This convenience of communication between

people articulated the whole site as a big space, like a plaza or forum, within that, individual

pages can be perceived as multiple rooms in the plaza, all being connected through the ease of

chatting.

Moreover, we could imagine it as an idealistic ball room, where each member can precisely

choose to interact with any other person; quickly see their related information such as

backgrounds, interests, photos and previous conversation with other people. You can chat with

anyone privately (through private message or chat) or publicly (on the wall) which may

potentially attract interest of other members and create a larger discussion. These possibilities

that are designed by the site enable users to easily adapt their real life social experience into how

they interact through the site with other people, thus it is not difficult to imagine that those

functions resembles: Whispering, chatting, poking, shouting, announcing and displaying, and the

medium where these actions happen – the website, is articulated with spatial notions.

Structural Dynamics

However, the invention of hyperlinks that moves visitors from page to page is a relatively new

concept, high school computer lesson (at least in Hong Kong) used to teach student how to

organize pages in a website in a tree structure or a corridor structure, where hyperlinks are used

to travel between rooms along the tree branch (up/down notion) or corridor (forward/backward
notion). But as websites become more and more dynamic, and evolve into an application instead

of sole information display, the mentioned structure become inefficient to act as an organizing

method. For example Wikipedia’s front page displays no navigating elements; featuring over 3

million articles, the site decided to display daily featured articles for visitors as a starting point.

While most visitors will start by using search function to find exact information, the huge

amount of hyperlinks in each page’s content serves the purpose of guiding visitors to other

relevant pages.

Facebook users navigate in similar link-guided fashion. The arriving page for users displays

news feed about their friends, and provides hyperlinks to follow on the news, which will usually

brings you to another person’s page (either wall or photo page) . The linkages between different

people’s little world is the most important part of the website, because it is where all the

encountering happens. Despite the linkages cannot be visualized by notions from a physical

world, but the notion of traveling between different user’s territory still exist.

Nicole B. Ellison et al found 6 that “the social linkages (that are materialized as hyperlinks

mentioned above) on Facebook are associated with the formation and maintenance of social

capital with the strongest relationship being to bridging social capital.” Such need is being

satisfied partly through the function that displays friends and mutual friends among friends, and

the ease to allow relationship being made or strengthened. 7 Facebook successfully materialize

the complicated nature of social bonds which are never tangible in the real world, which I

6
Ellison, N. B., Steinfield, C., & Lampe, C. (2007). The benefits of Facebook "friends:" Social capital and college
students' use of online social network sites. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12(4), article 1.
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue4/ellison.html
7
It should also be noted that Facebook successfully created an impression of a safe environment for its users to
share their personal information and discussion, where such large scale sharing had never existed before.
believe is most revolutionary. It recreates the notion of small world 8 and world village, where

everything is related to everything else. Under the huge Facebook site, it is obvious that users are

no longer possible to be arranged in any meaningful structure, neither age, sex, race,

geographical location, school, workplace are sufficient to classify the users into categories.

While everyone owns a metaphorical territory on the website, the linkage became the most

important element that connects the dispersed rooms together.

Among 370 Friends I have on Facebook, there are 15678 links between them.

Retrieved and visualized by Friend Wheel - a Facebook application.

8
May also known as the theory of 6 degree of seperation.
The discourse of the two spaces

From above examples, we can see that the major reason for the interchangeable use of spatial

notion in the two worlds is the close relationship between the digital and the physical. There has

been more and more digital tools and technology which not only allow one to navigate in the

digital space but to use such tools as mediation between the digital and the physical.

The most popular non-game application on Facebook is Facebook for iPhone 9 and Facebook

Mobile 10, which allows one to use Facebook while away from the computer. It allows sending

and receiving the ‘Wall’s’ messages, which provides a direct and uninterrupted connection with

the ‘social room’. The technology enables one to remotely connect to the familiar digital room

while they are on the go. Information is routed form a cell phone through the changing

transmission station (as one moves) to the vast network and vice versa, but there is a clear

connection that one transcend from physical to digital and back to the notion of the space – the

room. Being made possible by the technological miniaturization, small portable devices such as

smart phones and wearables will further increase such interdependency between the digital space

and the real world.

There are also applications on Facebook that explicitly deal with the connection to the real

world, for example, TripAdvisor - Cities I've Visited™ 11, which creates a travel map to share

with friends and help them plan their trips. Where I've Been is map, showing where one have

went, lived and want to go. Concerts is an application which suggests popular concerts around

your physical location. Together with applications on other portable device such as GPS-map,

9
33,006,112 monthly active users as in the time of writing. Source http://www.appdata.com/facebook/apps/
10
20,131,814 monthly active users as in the time of writing.
11
5,279,818 monthly active users as in the time of writing.
restaurant/theater locating applications, traffic report, gas price report, even cookbooks; the

boundary between what the digital world can offer and the spatial limit of the physical world is

being quickly infiltrated. This means that digital devices are not only existing in our physical

world but are becoming part of the way we live.

In the old days, a fireplace is the social center of a home, later radio and television taken over

such role. Nowadays, family members are scattered in different locations in the house facing the

digital world through different screens. This may indicate that the social stage had shifted from

the physical world to the digital while the above mentioned applications and devices which

create links between the two worlds encouraged this to happen.

Mutual relationship

The main category of games application that made a success on Facebook is simulation games

that carry forward the notion of space. Because of the subtle notion of space that the Facebook

room offer to its users, there seems to be no coincidence that the top application is a farm

simulation game called FarmVille 12, which markets itself by saying, “Come on down to the Farm

today and play with your friends. We got plenty of land for everyone.” The 3rd position game is a

restaurant game called Café World which simulates opening a restaurant in the digital space,

where the gamming interface draws a street corner and the player’s restaurant occupies a certain

floor area. Furniture can be designed and real life friends may visit your restaurant.

12
80,560,299 monthly active users as in the time of writing. As compaired to 2nd top game 29,617,559, a poker
game.
These games aim to gain a larger audience through required collaboration among friends, players

are encouraged to seek help from friends who also play the game or are willing to join the game,

this design strengthened the social impact of the game and also Facebook by creating new, or

more importantly, fostering already-made social connections. I believe the reason these game

gained a great success is partly related to the spatial articulation within the social site; but also

partly due to the gamming method which requires you open the game page for a long period of

time.

Both FarmVille and CaféWorld have elements which relates to time. For example in CaféWorld,

players need to cook dishes from time to time to keep the virtual restaurant vibrant, the cooking

time ranges from 5 minutes to a few days, players have to visit the game online, to perform some

maintenance from time to time. There are also certain actions that a player can only perform

once a day. The idea that real world time is being reintroduced in the digital space, is to create

more legitimate player experience, but there is another more sophisticated argument behind the

scene. The designer utilized another real world element - other than space - which is ‘time’ to tie

the player to the game. The daily or hourly routine in which the player engages with the game

creates perception that the game is part of the players’ life. The combined effect of the space-

time relationship between the simulation and the real world provides linkages to the player’s life,

which constitute the additive nature of such games and contribute to their success. This

demonstrates the use of spatial notion to create beneficial relationship and interdependence

between the two worlds.

Conclusion

The number of examples mentioned demonstrated that digital information technology had

developed to the degree that it is interdependently connected to our life. However the notion of

spatial description is still persistently staying in our understanding towards this new media. It

may be the cause of the relatively short and quick period of digital development, or the close

connection between the digital world and real world as demonstrated by examples from

Facebook. What is certain is that this phenomenon is not weakening as the technology progress,

but rather being stronger and stronger as the two worlds converge from the way we used to

approach them.

"This paper represents my own work in accordance with University regulations." Victor Leung