4. STRUCTURES OF CYBERSPACE



As a whole, cyberspace is an irregular structure and it is clearly developing as a decentralized organism. Attempts made towards imagining cyberspace as a whole, unified structure probably derive from a natural instinct, a desire to sort and organize things that surround us. Also important seems to be the fact that the emergence of cyberspace is accompanied by overwhelming chaos, and a natural human reaction is an attempt to organize it.

4.1. Kenton Musgrave’s concept

Kenton Musgrave suggests that the best visual manifestation of cyberspace should be a system that is familiar to the average user and does not cause confusion in navigation, as well as responding to the specific features of cyberspace:

Requisite features of a "natural" cyberspace:
1) It should be locally two-dimensional, like the surface of the Earth.
2) On intermediate scales it should be spherical, like a planet.
3) On the largest scale it should be three-dimensional, like the universe we inhabit.
4) The geometry used for its representation should be, for the most part, fractal.

Musgrave believes that two-dimensional environments seem to be the most natural and intuitive for the average person. Global context, however,  is natural in the reference to the physical world, as it is the context of the planet. There is also another advantage of this geometrical solution - this space is topologically very convenient. The surface of the sphere is finite, but unbounded. This means that we can have our locally-planed geometry, without worrying about falling off the edge of our necessarily finite world.

Three-dimensional space is, according to Musgrave, the best way to organize the layers of cyberspace in the largest scale, not only because it maximizes the total usable space, but also because it can vastly increase the local density of information.


4.2. Michael Benedikt’s concept

Michael Benedikt, in his book Cyberspace. First Step describes his idea for the construction of cyberspace in detail.

He encourages the use of the torus to form its structure. A torus is a two-dimensional surface or solid formed by rotating a closed curve, especially a circle, around a line that lies in the same plane but does not intersect it. Benedikt argues:

The absolute size of this form is computable, but unimaginable. The detailed description will have to wait. [1]

Cyberspace in the shape of a torus is convenient, because it may contain multiple internal spaces - the spaces within the spaces - giving the opportunity to develop one of the basic features of cyberspace - infinite variety. It can therefore accommodate an infinite number of interconnected areas.

Cyberspace is designed with the ‘top-down’ method and then 'embedded' in the network. It happens by adding particular constructions one to another, creating a new place without the context, not by building up at a designated area according to the existing rules. Each piece of cyberspace does not need be in any way similar to the previous one. Cyberspace has no development plan. Because the site is unrestricted and (theoretically) infinite, probably no plan is needed, and its further development will occur spontaneously in the same way as before. Therefore, trying to imagine cyberspace as a form of geometry, analogous to a planet or galaxy system, seems to be meaningless.

In the case of a network environment that is cyberspace, we should then abandon dreams of planning and control of the whole system and give more attention to its own characteristics, so different from those governing the physical world.

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[1] Cyberspace, First step, Benedikt M., ed., MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1992