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From: randolph@cognito.Eng.Sun.COM (Randolph Fritz)
Newsgroups: comp.org.eff.talk
Subject: Re: The city of mind, cyberpunks, and privacy
Summary: City!  Frontier!  Duck Season!  Rabbit Season!
Message-ID: <6411@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM>
Date: 22 Jan 91 22:06:49 GMT
References: <7134@crash.cts.com>
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Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mt. View, Ca.
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Jon Lebkowsky, writes:

  Possible that 'city' and 'frontier' analogies are both
  inappropriate. The virtual community is unlike the city or the
  frontier in an important sense, the sense that it is in fact
  'virtual,' with its own sense of space and time. When I am online I
  don't feel that I am in a 'place'; rather, I feel that I am inside
  an *intelligence.*

Hmmm, interesting.  That is much the sense I get when I walk the
streets of a busy city.  Only some people respond to cities in that
way; Jane Jacobs, say, did, but I don't think Frank Lloyd Wright did,
or rather he felt that cities as we built them were terribly sick
intelligences.

I was more using the metaphor of city to get at some of the ways in
which social behavior is controlled in information-intensive social
environments.  For me, that's the important difference and what makes
cyberspace more city-like than frontier-like.  Clearly the metaphor
only works for some people and most people raised in car-oriented
cities miss the point entirely, since car-oriented cities are designed
to discourage casual social contact; crowds in such places are crowds
of cars.

Well, it's been an interesting discussion anyhow.

   nd t
 ou    ui
R Press  T  __Randolph Fritz  sun!cognito.eng!randolph || randolph@eng.sun.com
 ou    ui     Mountain View, California, North America, Earth
   nd t