But anyway, I'm here to talk about the cartographic imaginations of cyberspace.
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.
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.
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.
And so when people say, oh, you know, I'm a geographer,
often times people say, oh, well, you guys make maps, right?
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.
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.
So I'm going to follow from a guy named Jeremy Crampton,
who wrote a book called The Political Mapping of Cyberspace.
It's a good book.
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.
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.
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.
Another interesting book with lots of interesting little factoids
about why it is that maps don't necessarily realistically represent space.
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.
So you've got a globe, the Earth, it's a complicated spherical object.
There's an inherent challenge in taking that space and laying it out flat
and depicting it for people.
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.
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.
So this is sort of a very traditional map of the Earth.
It's the Mercator Projection.
How many of you recognize this image from your high school textbooks
or your elementary school geography textbooks?
Yeah, quite a few.
The Mercator Projection is a really commonly used map projection.
But its original purpose wasn't necessarily to provide
the most realistic view of the landmasses of the Earth.
It was actually better suited as a sea navigational tool
because it maintained accurate direction between two points
when you're traveling at sea.
But what happened was that it actually distorted the area of landmasses.
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.
So, keep an eye on South America and Africa,
and I'm going to go forward one slide.
This is an equal area world projection.
This is very different from the Mercator Projection.
Its goal is to preserve the area of the landmasses.
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.
You notice the diminutive size of the United States and Europe.
I'll flip back.
You can see how different the two are,
and what a different idea of the shape of the Earth each one provides.
Now, the purpose of these equal area projections
weren't just innocently trying to correct an error.
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.
In the Mercator Projection, they seem to be very important,
but in the Hobo Dyer, they're much smaller.
I've even seen a Hobo Dyer map that's been turned upside down
to further subvert the Euro-centrism of the Mercator Projection.
So there's a kind of a political project going on here as well.
But beyond altering the scale projection of maps,
they can often serve more explicit ideological purposes.
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.
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.
So here they've manipulated the orientation of the map,
and this is a map that was originally published in Time Magazine in 1952.
They've oriented it north-south, or rather, west-east.
And it gives the idea that the Soviet Union is just sort of
right next to Western Europe and about to conquer these territories.
Obviously in the Cuban Missile Crisis, proximity was another important theme and issue.
And this is a CIA map that shows the relative ranges of nuclear missiles
from Cuba to the United States.
And here the scale, the color, really give a sense of imminent threat.
Here's a use of a planar polar projection.
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.
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.
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.
And a good place to look for those kinds of power relations
is in colonial maps of the world.
Here's a map of Africa from 1771.
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.
It says, an accurate map of Africa from the latest improvements
and regulated by astronomical observations.
So they're purporting to have provided us the most accurate depiction
of this continent possible.
But of course, we know that it's really just a two-dimensional representation
of a very complex space.
Here's an example of how gender and race find their way onto these maps.
Here's an artistic legend on another map of Africa in 1707.
And essentially, depicting a bunch of imagined natives lounging around,
burying their breasts and not doing a whole lot of work.
This was supporting the European idea of racial superiority.
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.
Here's an example of the extension of colonial power onto the landscape
in postage stamps.
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.
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.
And really, to take apart this progressivist, objectivist treatment of maps
as mirror images of reality.
And to say, well, what really goes into the creation of these maps?
What kinds of power relations are embedded in these representations?
And replace that kind of understanding of cartography
with one that's more historically contingent.
And cognizant of the possibility that social relations and power relations
are embedded in maps.
And these can be racial, gendered, capitalist, nationalistic.
The list goes on.
So let's look at some maps of cyberspace, since that's what we're here for.
So here's an early graphical representation of Usenet traffic in 1993.
The next three images, by the way, are taken from Dodge and Kitchen's
2002 Atlas of Cyberspace.
You can find it online, and it's also available by order for a hard copy.
It's a very interesting book, lots of cool pictures.
I picked out a few that I thought were really interesting and sort of iconic.
This one's a depiction of Usenet traffic in 1993.
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.
It seems like the two don't necessarily fit very well together.
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.
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.
So the map sort of suggests this liberating possibility for this technology.
A lot of people have probably seen this map.
It's widely reproduced.
It's a map of early NFS NAT traffic.
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.
So there's something iconic about this kind of depiction of the internet
as a series of trails leading through the sky.
This one, to its credit,
and unlike the Mercator projection,
seems to de-center Europe and the United States.
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.
There wasn't a static representation here.
It was user interactive.
But nevertheless, what emerges from this picture
is definitely a very clear example of the global digital divide.
There are places that are completely dark, that are unplugged,
that are not connected to the space of international money and culture flows.
And there are spaces that are, that are very brightly lit on this map.
Now, in a further development of mapping cyberspace,
some cartographers have preferred to just drop the real world cartography altogether.
And let it go in favor of focusing on the topological relationship between points.
And just map out the arcs and nodes of the information backbone.
So here's an example of a 3D visualization of skitter data from KEDA.
And it kind of looks like a globe, but there's absolutely no real world geographical reference.
So here what I would point out to you is the way that this is kind of almost aspatial.
The distances and the actual places matter less than the connections
and the network logic that links all these points together.
There's a very intense sort of disembodied feeling
that we get from looking at this kind of representation.
And I'll argue in a few moments that this kind of disembodied, diffuse networks cartography of cyberspace
has very specific political ramifications.
Some good and some bad.
Here's one that a lot of you have probably seen hanging out at conferences like this.
I was reminded of one of these when I went to a security conference up in Canada.
And it seems I've seen these around quite a few places.
It's sort of a network security schematic that, again, de-territorializes cyberspace
and represents it as a series of interconnected symbols.
And here we get a sense of the blue, cool region of the corporate land
being protected from the unknown exterior potential hacker.
And this is a type of cartography as well, I would argue, even though it's abstracted.
So what does it mean that we've progressed from trying to overlay cyberspatial cartography
on top of real-world geography?
Well, I would say that geographic imaginations of cyberspace have political and foreign policy implications.
And we're starting to see some of those currently.
And they've evolved, I think, since about the 1990s.
One of them has been a focus on connection to the global network as both a source of security and threat.
So what do I mean by that?
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.
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.
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.
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.
So in this new logic, it's disconnection from the network that is the real threat,
not connection to it.
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.
And definitely the global war on terror has assumed many of the same metaphors and symbols
that are employed in the Internet security field.
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.
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.
So there's definitely a sort of rhetorical linkages, I think,
between terrorist networks and electronic networks,
which I think is very interesting.
Actually, I've got an interesting quote.
This is from a congressional testimony in 2003.
This is a network security expert testifying before Congress
about the threat that our nation's computers face when exposed to foreign hackers.
He says,
Many more malicious and widespread viruses are seen in the wild on the Internet
on a daily basis.
Many are written with Russian, Chinese, and other language comments in the code.
Some have direct ties to organized crime, especially outside the U.S.
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.
So, again, this is sort of reiterating the sense of cyberspace as a space of threat.
What do I mean when I say that network architectures
enable both territorialization and deterritorialization?
Well, definitely, in the big Kaida jellyfish model of the Internet,
there's an intense deterritorialization.
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.
I think of that as a kind of deterritorialization.
But I think that the Internet also enables
various particular kinds of territorializations.
One example is here in IP geocoding.
I understand there's going to be somebody talking about that.
I hope that I didn't miss their talk.
I hope that's going to be in the coming days.
But essentially, using people's IPs to grant them access
or not grant them access based on the country in which they live.
So now there's a re-linking of real-world geography
to the cyberspatial geography
that actually has real material physical outcomes.
Here, this is a map of which countries were allowed to access www.georgebush.com
prior to the 2004 election.
And you can see that only Canada and the United States were granted access
and successfully blocked everybody else.
Actually citing terrorist and disruptive threats from foreign hackers.
And definitely the Army, the United States Army, is interested in cyberspace.
Here's a quote from a report by the Project for the New American Century
writing on rebuilding America's defenses.
And they consider cyberspace to be one of the key places
where they want to extend their control.
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.
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.
So there's a sense of militarizing
and potentially territorializing cyberspace.
And definitely .mil is becoming an increasing and growing presence online.
So I don't have any really groundbreaking conclusions yet.
I'm still in the process of writing all this up.
But I think the issues that I've talked about
raise a few concerns that might be relevant to us as an audience.
And one is, again, to reiterate the question that we should think about.
How are power relations that are implicated in real world maps
also possibly implicated in the production of cyberspacial maps?
How are hackers and other online groups
impacted by this emerging war on cyber terror?
And specifically, how do the graphical representations
of the online space that accompany this war
impact our freedom and our civil rights?
What might alternative efforts to map cyberspace look like?
Again, this is an important question.
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.
How can we potentially subvert these dominant maps of cyberspace
and produce our own? Thank you.
One second before I answer any questions.
Is there a moderator around who can tell me if I've got enough time to do so?
I've got eight minutes?
Well, I'll answer some questions then.
You're kind of imagining a real-world, old-style cartographic representation
of relative internet freedom by country.
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.
You only see the connections. You don't see the blockages.
Yeah, that's a cool idea.
Any other questions?
Yeah, that's a really cool idea. I'd love to talk to you after
and find out where I can access that to have a look at it.
It sounds like a really interesting sort of political project.
Similar to that hobo diary, you know, turning the world upside down.
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.
Bad English, yeah.
Any more questions? Yeah, in the back.
All right, well, if there's no other questions,
I look forward to talking to you guys one-on-one after the presentation.
Thanks very much.