1
00:00:39,780 --> 00:00:48,600
But anyway, I'm here to talk about the cartographic imaginations of cyberspace.

2
00:00:49,220 --> 00:01:14,920
And I'm going to be bringing sort of my own disciplinary background as a geographer to take us through some really sort of basic concepts about critically looking at cartographic representations of real world space and how some of those theoretical concerns might be brought to look at maps of cyberspace which of course have started to emerge in great numbers.

3
00:01:19,320 --> 00:01:32,240
So traditionally, geographers have defined themselves in large part as a group of people whose job it is to go out and make cartographic representations of space.

4
00:01:32,240 --> 00:02:00,940
And we have a long and sort of problematic history in my discipline of participation in things like the colonial project, military cartography, land and sea trade and basically supplying the navigational tools and surveys and graphical representations to make these things possible.

5
00:02:00,940 --> 00:02:08,060
And so when people say, oh, you know, I'm a geographer, often times people say, oh, well, you guys make maps, right?

6
00:02:08,420 --> 00:02:19,760
Well, I mean, that's sort of the traditional role of geographers, but we've changed a lot, especially since about the mid-20th century.

7
00:02:19,960 --> 00:02:28,360
And one of the more recent areas that we've started to explore is to actually sort of critically examine the practice of map making.

8
00:02:35,600 --> 00:02:41,720
So I'm going to follow from a guy named Jeremy Crampton, who wrote a book called The Political Mapping of Cyberspace.

9
00:02:41,720 --> 00:02:42,680
It's a good book.

10
00:02:43,380 --> 00:03:06,500
He talks about sort of a divergence in geography between theory and practice, meaning that there still persists a group of people in the discipline who still practice the job of graphically representing the Earth and are very good at it and increasingly use computers and computer technology to make those maps.

11
00:03:06,780 --> 00:03:16,440
But there's another group of us, of which I'm a part, who are a little bit more concerned with the theoretical implications of what those other people are doing.

12
00:03:18,500 --> 00:03:36,740
And I would say that this sort of theoretical or critical approach to cartography probably has its roots in the late 80s with the cultural turn in geography, and particularly with a book by a guy named Montmarnier in 1991 called How to Lie with Maps.

13
00:03:37,040 --> 00:03:47,460
Another interesting book with lots of interesting little factoids about why it is that maps don't necessarily realistically represent space.

14
00:03:48,560 --> 00:04:08,340
And the simple reason why we need to think about maps as representations rather than as actual realistic bases for reality is that basically maps are two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional space.

15
00:04:08,340 --> 00:04:13,760
So you've got a globe, the Earth, it's a complicated spherical object.

16
00:04:13,840 --> 00:04:21,660
There's an inherent challenge in taking that space and laying it out flat and depicting it for people.

17
00:04:21,660 --> 00:04:39,160
Computers might help solve some of those problems by enabling us to use 3D visualization, but we still face certain compromises and certain choices that these people who are interested in the practice of mapmaking consciously or unconsciously make when they're making maps.

18
00:04:39,800 --> 00:04:50,460
And as Montmarnier pointed out, they distort reality in very specific ways through their use of scale, their use of projection, and the use of symbols.

19
00:04:52,460 --> 00:04:56,840
So this is sort of a very traditional map of the Earth.

20
00:04:56,940 --> 00:04:58,840
It's the Mercator Projection.

21
00:04:59,000 --> 00:05:04,740
How many of you recognize this image from your high school textbooks or your elementary school geography textbooks?

22
00:05:04,940 --> 00:05:06,200
Yeah, quite a few.

23
00:05:06,200 --> 00:05:09,680
The Mercator Projection is a really commonly used map projection.

24
00:05:10,880 --> 00:05:17,820
But its original purpose wasn't necessarily to provide the most realistic view of the landmasses of the Earth.

25
00:05:17,820 --> 00:05:27,060
It was actually better suited as a sea navigational tool because it maintained accurate direction between two points when you're traveling at sea.

26
00:05:27,320 --> 00:05:32,120
But what happened was that it actually distorted the area of landmasses.

27
00:05:32,500 --> 00:05:42,480
So the shape of the continents that we've come to recognize from our high school textbooks in the Mercator Projection don't necessarily reflect the actual physical size of those features.

28
00:05:43,700 --> 00:05:50,360
So, keep an eye on South America and Africa, and I'm going to go forward one slide.

29
00:05:51,660 --> 00:05:56,280
This is an equal area world projection.

30
00:05:56,460 --> 00:05:58,800
This is very different from the Mercator Projection.

31
00:05:58,800 --> 00:06:02,580
Its goal is to preserve the area of the landmasses.

32
00:06:02,620 --> 00:06:10,340
So here it's not very useful as a navigational tool, but it gives a better idea of how much actual surface area is taken up by each of the continents.

33
00:06:10,340 --> 00:06:14,060
You notice the diminutive size of the United States and Europe.

34
00:06:14,320 --> 00:06:15,780
I'll flip back.

35
00:06:17,160 --> 00:06:26,040
You can see how different the two are, and what a different idea of the shape of the Earth each one provides.

36
00:06:28,820 --> 00:06:35,780
Now, the purpose of these equal area projections weren't just innocently trying to correct an error.

37
00:06:36,240 --> 00:06:44,420
There's a bit of a political motivation behind making these maps, and that is to kind of de-center the importance of Europe and North America.

38
00:06:44,420 --> 00:06:51,440
In the Mercator Projection, they seem to be very important, but in the Hobo Dyer, they're much smaller.

39
00:06:51,460 --> 00:06:59,300
I've even seen a Hobo Dyer map that's been turned upside down to further subvert the Euro-centrism of the Mercator Projection.

40
00:06:59,300 --> 00:07:02,720
So there's a kind of a political project going on here as well.

41
00:07:11,080 --> 00:07:19,260
But beyond altering the scale projection of maps, they can often serve more explicit ideological purposes.

42
00:07:19,600 --> 00:07:30,160
And in the series of the next few maps we're going to look at, they basically thematically focus on the theme of proximity to the Soviet Union.

43
00:07:30,160 --> 00:07:40,380
This was a theme that came up quite a bit in graphical representations of the Earth during the Cold War period, was the real proximity of the Soviet threat to Western interests.

44
00:07:40,500 --> 00:07:48,500
So here they've manipulated the orientation of the map, and this is a map that was originally published in Time Magazine in 1952.

45
00:07:48,500 --> 00:07:53,840
They've oriented it north-south, or rather, west-east.

46
00:07:55,600 --> 00:08:04,960
And it gives the idea that the Soviet Union is just sort of right next to Western Europe and about to conquer these territories.

47
00:08:05,740 --> 00:08:10,220
Obviously in the Cuban Missile Crisis, proximity was another important theme and issue.

48
00:08:10,220 --> 00:08:16,960
And this is a CIA map that shows the relative ranges of nuclear missiles from Cuba to the United States.

49
00:08:17,120 --> 00:08:22,640
And here the scale, the color, really give a sense of imminent threat.

50
00:08:23,740 --> 00:08:26,740
Here's a use of a planar polar projection.

51
00:08:27,700 --> 00:08:46,780
And in the context of the air war and the possibility that wars might be fought using missiles rather than actually land troops, these kinds of projections were very persuasive because they showed that actually Canada and the United States weren't so far from the Soviet Union at all if one went over the North Pole.

52
00:08:46,840 --> 00:08:57,440
So the planar projection was a subtle way to show politically how important things like spending on air defense budgets really were during the Cold War.

53
00:09:01,460 --> 00:09:10,540
An author, Gillian Rose, has brought our attention in geography to the possibility that race and gender relationships might also find their way onto the map sheet.

54
00:09:11,600 --> 00:09:18,020
And a good place to look for those kinds of power relations is in colonial maps of the world.

55
00:09:18,020 --> 00:09:20,820
Here's a map of Africa from 1771.

56
00:09:21,700 --> 00:09:25,760
I'm not sure if you can read what it says in the upper right-hand corner, so I'll read it out for you.

57
00:09:25,760 --> 00:09:32,760
It says, an accurate map of Africa from the latest improvements and regulated by astronomical observations.

58
00:09:32,760 --> 00:09:39,140
So they're purporting to have provided us the most accurate depiction of this continent possible.

59
00:09:40,180 --> 00:09:46,140
But of course, we know that it's really just a two-dimensional representation of a very complex space.

60
00:09:48,180 --> 00:09:52,180
Here's an example of how gender and race find their way onto these maps.

61
00:09:52,180 --> 00:09:57,400
Here's an artistic legend on another map of Africa in 1707.

62
00:09:58,960 --> 00:10:09,800
And essentially, depicting a bunch of imagined natives lounging around, burying their breasts and not doing a whole lot of work.

63
00:10:09,800 --> 00:10:17,060
This was supporting the European idea of racial superiority.

64
00:10:17,060 --> 00:10:28,940
So we can see how early colonial maps of Africa racialized, gendered, and even eroticized place through their representations, linking imaginary people to imagined places.

65
00:10:30,520 --> 00:10:36,040
Here's an example of the extension of colonial power onto the landscape in postage stamps.

66
00:10:36,320 --> 00:10:52,880
It was quite common up until the mid-20th century to put graphical depictions of figureheads on beautiful African landscapes, sort of cementing the European supremacy of these places.

67
00:10:56,070 --> 00:11:11,430
So what I'm proposing in my own work, and I'm really still in the preliminary phases of thinking this through, is to follow Crampton's challenge of really critically looking at what we do when we map.

68
00:11:12,430 --> 00:11:20,310
And really, to take apart this progressivist, objectivist treatment of maps as mirror images of reality.

69
00:11:20,310 --> 00:11:25,970
And to say, well, what really goes into the creation of these maps?

70
00:11:26,010 --> 00:11:31,810
What kinds of power relations are embedded in these representations?

71
00:11:32,170 --> 00:11:38,370
And replace that kind of understanding of cartography with one that's more historically contingent.

72
00:11:38,370 --> 00:11:44,850
And cognizant of the possibility that social relations and power relations are embedded in maps.

73
00:11:44,850 --> 00:11:48,490
And these can be racial, gendered, capitalist, nationalistic.

74
00:11:48,490 --> 00:11:49,990
The list goes on.

75
00:11:50,890 --> 00:11:55,630
So let's look at some maps of cyberspace, since that's what we're here for.

76
00:11:58,980 --> 00:12:04,720
So here's an early graphical representation of Usenet traffic in 1993.

77
00:12:04,800 --> 00:12:11,260
The next three images, by the way, are taken from Dodge and Kitchen's 2002 Atlas of Cyberspace.

78
00:12:11,260 --> 00:12:16,320
You can find it online, and it's also available by order for a hard copy.

79
00:12:16,320 --> 00:12:18,860
It's a very interesting book, lots of cool pictures.

80
00:12:18,860 --> 00:12:21,800
I picked out a few that I thought were really interesting and sort of iconic.

81
00:12:21,800 --> 00:12:25,420
This one's a depiction of Usenet traffic in 1993.

82
00:12:26,200 --> 00:12:43,740
And what I want to draw your attention to is sort of the difficulty that this mapmaker has had in trying to reconcile a real-world spatial geography that's outlined with the continents and this sort of new geography of cyberspace.

83
00:12:43,940 --> 00:12:47,160
It seems like the two don't necessarily fit very well together.

84
00:12:47,160 --> 00:13:02,280
On one hand, you have this sort of disembodied, diffuse, instantaneous network of telecommunications, and it's overlaid on top of a world of real spatial places and real bodies located in that space.

85
00:13:02,280 --> 00:13:15,560
But looking at this map, you get the impression that somebody in Santiago, Chile could instantaneously interact with somebody from New York City, even though there's thousands of miles and social difference between those two individuals.

86
00:13:15,560 --> 00:13:21,440
So the map sort of suggests this liberating possibility for this technology.

87
00:13:23,240 --> 00:13:25,840
A lot of people have probably seen this map.

88
00:13:25,840 --> 00:13:28,080
It's widely reproduced.

89
00:13:28,080 --> 00:13:31,240
It's a map of early NFS NAT traffic.

90
00:13:31,920 --> 00:13:42,980
As one observer noted, the ArcMap is one of the best examples of a representation of the net that goes beyond the practical and taps into a deeper aesthetic feel for what cyberspace looks like.

91
00:13:43,500 --> 00:13:50,280
So there's something iconic about this kind of depiction of the internet as a series of trails leading through the sky.

92
00:13:50,500 --> 00:14:00,460
This one, to its credit, and unlike the Mercator projection, seems to de-center Europe and the United States.

93
00:14:00,460 --> 00:14:06,980
Also, because in the original, the user was able to manipulate it and turn it around and zoom in on any portion of the map that they wanted.

94
00:14:06,980 --> 00:14:08,940
There wasn't a static representation here.

95
00:14:08,940 --> 00:14:11,440
It was user interactive.

96
00:14:12,200 --> 00:14:20,240
But nevertheless, what emerges from this picture is definitely a very clear example of the global digital divide.

97
00:14:20,240 --> 00:14:27,980
There are places that are completely dark, that are unplugged, that are not connected to the space of international money and culture flows.

98
00:14:27,980 --> 00:14:31,940
And there are spaces that are, that are very brightly lit on this map.

99
00:14:40,300 --> 00:14:49,300
Now, in a further development of mapping cyberspace, some cartographers have preferred to just drop the real world cartography altogether.

100
00:14:50,200 --> 00:14:54,940
And let it go in favor of focusing on the topological relationship between points.

101
00:14:54,940 --> 00:14:58,860
And just map out the arcs and nodes of the information backbone.

102
00:14:59,180 --> 00:15:04,100
So here's an example of a 3D visualization of skitter data from KEDA.

103
00:15:04,100 --> 00:15:10,000
And it kind of looks like a globe, but there's absolutely no real world geographical reference.

104
00:15:12,260 --> 00:15:19,680
So here what I would point out to you is the way that this is kind of almost aspatial.

105
00:15:19,820 --> 00:15:26,880
The distances and the actual places matter less than the connections and the network logic that links all these points together.

106
00:15:27,260 --> 00:15:33,340
There's a very intense sort of disembodied feeling that we get from looking at this kind of representation.

107
00:15:33,340 --> 00:15:45,740
And I'll argue in a few moments that this kind of disembodied, diffuse networks cartography of cyberspace has very specific political ramifications.

108
00:15:45,860 --> 00:15:47,580
Some good and some bad.

109
00:15:50,450 --> 00:15:54,570
Here's one that a lot of you have probably seen hanging out at conferences like this.

110
00:15:54,570 --> 00:16:00,070
I was reminded of one of these when I went to a security conference up in Canada.

111
00:16:00,830 --> 00:16:04,290
And it seems I've seen these around quite a few places.

112
00:16:04,290 --> 00:16:12,930
It's sort of a network security schematic that, again, de-territorializes cyberspace and represents it as a series of interconnected symbols.

113
00:16:13,030 --> 00:16:25,490
And here we get a sense of the blue, cool region of the corporate land being protected from the unknown exterior potential hacker.

114
00:16:26,390 --> 00:16:32,530
And this is a type of cartography as well, I would argue, even though it's abstracted.

115
00:16:33,110 --> 00:16:41,090
So what does it mean that we've progressed from trying to overlay cyberspatial cartography on top of real-world geography?

116
00:16:42,330 --> 00:16:47,990
Well, I would say that geographic imaginations of cyberspace have political and foreign policy implications.

117
00:16:47,990 --> 00:16:50,350
And we're starting to see some of those currently.

118
00:16:50,350 --> 00:16:53,810
And they've evolved, I think, since about the 1990s.

119
00:16:53,810 --> 00:17:01,270
One of them has been a focus on connection to the global network as both a source of security and threat.

120
00:17:01,270 --> 00:17:03,230
So what do I mean by that?

121
00:17:04,150 --> 00:17:17,990
Well, by security, I am thinking of the sense that connection to the global marketplace renders countries more amenable to, say, American foreign policy interests.

122
00:17:18,310 --> 00:17:25,570
I've heard the oft-quoted phrase that no two countries with McDonald's have ever gone to war with one another, and I'm sort of reminded of that here.

123
00:17:26,490 --> 00:17:41,110
Some researchers, Robert Secor and Spark, have argued that what's going on now in foreign policy circles in the United States is that certain parts of the world are being characterized as non-integrating.

124
00:17:41,110 --> 00:17:48,950
These are rogue regimes that have no interest at all in connecting up to the global flows of capital, and as such, they represent a threat.

125
00:17:49,570 --> 00:17:55,970
So in this new logic, it's disconnection from the network that is the real threat, not connection to it.

126
00:17:57,690 --> 00:18:12,330
But on the other hand, as we saw with the security schematic here, there's a sense that if we do connect ourselves up to this global network, this aspatial global network, that we open ourselves up to a whole bunch of unsavory possibilities.

127
00:18:13,170 --> 00:18:21,110
And definitely the global war on terror has assumed many of the same metaphors and symbols that are employed in the Internet security field.

128
00:18:21,830 --> 00:18:35,990
For example, the White House administration has repeatedly cited the diffused and networked architecture of terrorist organizations as support for the continued military aggression and restriction of movement by citizens into and outside of the country.

129
00:18:36,530 --> 00:18:46,430
Here's a map of the 9-11 hijackers, and it's laid out like an arc node map similar to ones that we've seen, the earlier cyberspatial maps that we've seen.

130
00:18:46,430 --> 00:18:54,750
So there's definitely a sort of rhetorical linkages, I think, between terrorist networks and electronic networks, which I think is very interesting.

131
00:18:58,390 --> 00:19:04,190
Actually, I've got an interesting quote.

132
00:19:04,190 --> 00:19:07,890
This is from a congressional testimony in 2003.

133
00:19:07,890 --> 00:19:20,670
This is a network security expert testifying before Congress about the threat that our nation's computers face when exposed to foreign hackers.

134
00:19:20,670 --> 00:19:27,590
He says, Many more malicious and widespread viruses are seen in the wild on the Internet on a daily basis.

135
00:19:27,610 --> 00:19:31,670
Many are written with Russian, Chinese, and other language comments in the code.

136
00:19:31,810 --> 00:19:35,330
Some have direct ties to organized crime, especially outside the U.S.

137
00:19:35,330 --> 00:19:44,810
Many are propagated from commonly known havens for virus writers where there's no fear of legal prosecution, or where the technical skills of the government to prosecute are minimal or non-existent.

138
00:19:46,230 --> 00:19:52,130
So, again, this is sort of reiterating the sense of cyberspace as a space of threat.

139
00:19:56,110 --> 00:20:03,570
What do I mean when I say that network architectures enable both territorialization and deterritorialization?

140
00:20:04,630 --> 00:20:10,450
Well, definitely, in the big Kaida jellyfish model of the Internet, there's an intense deterritorialization.

141
00:20:10,650 --> 00:20:22,790
There's a sense that the Internet frees us from our bodies, makes the cultural, social, and actual physical distances between us irrelevant, and renders physical space less important than this new virtual space.

142
00:20:23,410 --> 00:20:26,730
I think of that as a kind of deterritorialization.

143
00:20:27,050 --> 00:20:32,330
But I think that the Internet also enables various particular kinds of territorializations.

144
00:20:32,670 --> 00:20:36,850
One example is here in IP geocoding.

145
00:20:36,850 --> 00:20:38,610
I understand there's going to be somebody talking about that.

146
00:20:38,610 --> 00:20:40,310
I hope that I didn't miss their talk.

147
00:20:40,470 --> 00:20:42,550
I hope that's going to be in the coming days.

148
00:20:43,710 --> 00:20:51,810
But essentially, using people's IPs to grant them access or not grant them access based on the country in which they live.

149
00:20:51,810 --> 00:21:00,390
So now there's a re-linking of real-world geography to the cyberspatial geography that actually has real material physical outcomes.

150
00:21:00,390 --> 00:21:07,970
Here, this is a map of which countries were allowed to access www.georgebush.com prior to the 2004 election.

151
00:21:08,070 --> 00:21:13,970
And you can see that only Canada and the United States were granted access and successfully blocked everybody else.

152
00:21:14,410 --> 00:21:19,970
Actually citing terrorist and disruptive threats from foreign hackers.

153
00:21:23,410 --> 00:21:28,030
And definitely the Army, the United States Army, is interested in cyberspace.

154
00:21:28,910 --> 00:21:36,630
Here's a quote from a report by the Project for the New American Century writing on rebuilding America's defenses.

155
00:21:36,630 --> 00:21:42,510
And they consider cyberspace to be one of the key places where they want to extend their control.

156
00:21:43,150 --> 00:21:55,010
They say, much as control of the high seas and the protection of international commerce define global powers in the past, so will control of the new international commons be a key to world power in the future.

157
00:21:55,330 --> 00:22:03,690
An America incapable of protecting its interests or that of its allies in space or the infosphere will find it difficult to exert global political leadership.

158
00:22:04,630 --> 00:22:11,370
So there's a sense of militarizing and potentially territorializing cyberspace.

159
00:22:11,750 --> 00:22:16,730
And definitely .mil is becoming an increasing and growing presence online.

160
00:22:19,620 --> 00:22:24,320
So I don't have any really groundbreaking conclusions yet.

161
00:22:24,320 --> 00:22:26,760
I'm still in the process of writing all this up.

162
00:22:27,000 --> 00:22:34,340
But I think the issues that I've talked about raise a few concerns that might be relevant to us as an audience.

163
00:22:35,300 --> 00:22:38,360
And one is, again, to reiterate the question that we should think about.

164
00:22:38,360 --> 00:22:46,640
How are power relations that are implicated in real world maps also possibly implicated in the production of cyberspacial maps?

165
00:22:47,280 --> 00:22:52,500
How are hackers and other online groups impacted by this emerging war on cyber terror?

166
00:22:52,500 --> 00:23:02,820
And specifically, how do the graphical representations of the online space that accompany this war impact our freedom and our civil rights?

167
00:23:04,000 --> 00:23:07,240
What might alternative efforts to map cyberspace look like?

168
00:23:07,240 --> 00:23:08,560
Again, this is an important question.

169
00:23:08,680 --> 00:23:15,300
I'm going to leave open to everybody to either comment on now or hopefully come and talk to me later if you have any ideas.

170
00:23:16,320 --> 00:23:23,120
How can we potentially subvert these dominant maps of cyberspace and produce our own?

171
00:23:23,500 --> 00:23:24,280
Thank you.

172
00:23:31,190 --> 00:23:32,790
One second before I answer any questions.

173
00:23:32,790 --> 00:23:36,730
Is there a moderator around who can tell me if I've got enough time to do so?

174
00:23:36,730 --> 00:23:39,390
I've got eight minutes?

175
00:23:39,930 --> 00:23:42,050
Well, I'll answer some questions then.

176
00:24:19,850 --> 00:24:30,410
You're kind of imagining a real-world, old-style cartographic representation of relative internet freedom by country.

177
00:24:47,390 --> 00:24:58,930
Right, and you raise a very important point, one that I forgot to really underline in my talk, which is that on this jellyfish map, you don't see any potential barriers to connection.

178
00:24:58,930 --> 00:25:00,030
You only see the connections.

179
00:25:00,030 --> 00:25:01,470
You don't see the blockages.

180
00:25:06,400 --> 00:25:10,460
Yeah, that's a cool idea.

181
00:25:10,940 --> 00:25:12,020
Any other questions?

182
00:25:55,220 --> 00:25:56,460
Yeah, that's a really cool idea.

183
00:25:56,460 --> 00:25:59,280
I'd love to talk to you after and find out where I can access that to have a look at it.

184
00:25:59,280 --> 00:26:01,300
It sounds like a really interesting sort of political project.

185
00:26:01,460 --> 00:26:04,380
Similar to that hobo diary, you know, turning the world upside down.

186
00:26:04,420 --> 00:26:14,840
They're saying, well, you know, let's point out the fact that English is the dominantly spoken language online and that the United States gets most of the news coverage.

187
00:26:15,200 --> 00:26:16,220
Bad English, yeah.

188
00:26:18,100 --> 00:26:19,160
Any more questions?

189
00:26:19,160 --> 00:26:20,040
Yeah, in the back.

190
00:27:02,970 --> 00:27:07,810
All right, well, if there's no other questions, I look forward to talking to you guys one-on-one after the presentation.

191
00:27:07,970 --> 00:27:08,830
Thanks very much.