WEBVTT 00:39.780 --> 00:48.600 But anyway, I'm here to talk about the cartographic imaginations of cyberspace. 00:49.220 --> 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. 01:19.320 --> 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. 01:32.240 --> 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. 02:00.940 --> 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? 02:08.420 --> 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. 02:19.960 --> 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. 02:35.600 --> 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. 02:41.720 --> 02:42.680 It's a good book. 02:43.380 --> 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. 03:06.780 --> 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. 03:18.500 --> 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. 03:37.040 --> 03:47.460 Another interesting book with lots of interesting little factoids about why it is that maps don't necessarily realistically represent space. 03:48.560 --> 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. 04:08.340 --> 04:13.760 So you've got a globe, the Earth, it's a complicated spherical object. 04:13.840 --> 04:21.660 There's an inherent challenge in taking that space and laying it out flat and depicting it for people. 04:21.660 --> 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. 04:39.800 --> 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. 04:52.460 --> 04:56.840 So this is sort of a very traditional map of the Earth. 04:56.940 --> 04:58.840 It's the Mercator Projection. 04:59.000 --> 05:04.740 How many of you recognize this image from your high school textbooks or your elementary school geography textbooks? 05:04.940 --> 05:06.200 Yeah, quite a few. 05:06.200 --> 05:09.680 The Mercator Projection is a really commonly used map projection. 05:10.880 --> 05:17.820 But its original purpose wasn't necessarily to provide the most realistic view of the landmasses of the Earth. 05:17.820 --> 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. 05:27.320 --> 05:32.120 But what happened was that it actually distorted the area of landmasses. 05:32.500 --> 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. 05:43.700 --> 05:50.360 So, keep an eye on South America and Africa, and I'm going to go forward one slide. 05:51.660 --> 05:56.280 This is an equal area world projection. 05:56.460 --> 05:58.800 This is very different from the Mercator Projection. 05:58.800 --> 06:02.580 Its goal is to preserve the area of the landmasses. 06:02.620 --> 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. 06:10.340 --> 06:14.060 You notice the diminutive size of the United States and Europe. 06:14.320 --> 06:15.780 I'll flip back. 06:17.160 --> 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. 06:28.820 --> 06:35.780 Now, the purpose of these equal area projections weren't just innocently trying to correct an error. 06:36.240 --> 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. 06:44.420 --> 06:51.440 In the Mercator Projection, they seem to be very important, but in the Hobo Dyer, they're much smaller. 06:51.460 --> 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. 06:59.300 --> 07:02.720 So there's a kind of a political project going on here as well. 07:11.080 --> 07:19.260 But beyond altering the scale projection of maps, they can often serve more explicit ideological purposes. 07:19.600 --> 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. 07:30.160 --> 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. 07:40.500 --> 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. 07:48.500 --> 07:53.840 They've oriented it north-south, or rather, west-east. 07:55.600 --> 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. 08:05.740 --> 08:10.220 Obviously in the Cuban Missile Crisis, proximity was another important theme and issue. 08:10.220 --> 08:16.960 And this is a CIA map that shows the relative ranges of nuclear missiles from Cuba to the United States. 08:17.120 --> 08:22.640 And here the scale, the color, really give a sense of imminent threat. 08:23.740 --> 08:26.740 Here's a use of a planar polar projection. 08:27.700 --> 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. 08:46.840 --> 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. 09:01.460 --> 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. 09:11.600 --> 09:18.020 And a good place to look for those kinds of power relations is in colonial maps of the world. 09:18.020 --> 09:20.820 Here's a map of Africa from 1771. 09:21.700 --> 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. 09:25.760 --> 09:32.760 It says, an accurate map of Africa from the latest improvements and regulated by astronomical observations. 09:32.760 --> 09:39.140 So they're purporting to have provided us the most accurate depiction of this continent possible. 09:40.180 --> 09:46.140 But of course, we know that it's really just a two-dimensional representation of a very complex space. 09:48.180 --> 09:52.180 Here's an example of how gender and race find their way onto these maps. 09:52.180 --> 09:57.400 Here's an artistic legend on another map of Africa in 1707. 09:58.960 --> 10:09.800 And essentially, depicting a bunch of imagined natives lounging around, burying their breasts and not doing a whole lot of work. 10:09.800 --> 10:17.060 This was supporting the European idea of racial superiority. 10:17.060 --> 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. 10:30.520 --> 10:36.040 Here's an example of the extension of colonial power onto the landscape in postage stamps. 10:36.320 --> 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. 10:56.070 --> 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. 11:12.430 --> 11:20.310 And really, to take apart this progressivist, objectivist treatment of maps as mirror images of reality. 11:20.310 --> 11:25.970 And to say, well, what really goes into the creation of these maps? 11:26.010 --> 11:31.810 What kinds of power relations are embedded in these representations? 11:32.170 --> 11:38.370 And replace that kind of understanding of cartography with one that's more historically contingent. 11:38.370 --> 11:44.850 And cognizant of the possibility that social relations and power relations are embedded in maps. 11:44.850 --> 11:48.490 And these can be racial, gendered, capitalist, nationalistic. 11:48.490 --> 11:49.990 The list goes on. 11:50.890 --> 11:55.630 So let's look at some maps of cyberspace, since that's what we're here for. 11:58.980 --> 12:04.720 So here's an early graphical representation of Usenet traffic in 1993. 12:04.800 --> 12:11.260 The next three images, by the way, are taken from Dodge and Kitchen's 2002 Atlas of Cyberspace. 12:11.260 --> 12:16.320 You can find it online, and it's also available by order for a hard copy. 12:16.320 --> 12:18.860 It's a very interesting book, lots of cool pictures. 12:18.860 --> 12:21.800 I picked out a few that I thought were really interesting and sort of iconic. 12:21.800 --> 12:25.420 This one's a depiction of Usenet traffic in 1993. 12:26.200 --> 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. 12:43.940 --> 12:47.160 It seems like the two don't necessarily fit very well together. 12:47.160 --> 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. 13:02.280 --> 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. 13:15.560 --> 13:21.440 So the map sort of suggests this liberating possibility for this technology. 13:23.240 --> 13:25.840 A lot of people have probably seen this map. 13:25.840 --> 13:28.080 It's widely reproduced. 13:28.080 --> 13:31.240 It's a map of early NFS NAT traffic. 13:31.920 --> 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. 13:43.500 --> 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. 13:50.500 --> 14:00.460 This one, to its credit, and unlike the Mercator projection, seems to de-center Europe and the United States. 14:00.460 --> 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. 14:06.980 --> 14:08.940 There wasn't a static representation here. 14:08.940 --> 14:11.440 It was user interactive. 14:12.200 --> 14:20.240 But nevertheless, what emerges from this picture is definitely a very clear example of the global digital divide. 14:20.240 --> 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. 14:27.980 --> 14:31.940 And there are spaces that are, that are very brightly lit on this map. 14:40.300 --> 14:49.300 Now, in a further development of mapping cyberspace, some cartographers have preferred to just drop the real world cartography altogether. 14:50.200 --> 14:54.940 And let it go in favor of focusing on the topological relationship between points. 14:54.940 --> 14:58.860 And just map out the arcs and nodes of the information backbone. 14:59.180 --> 15:04.100 So here's an example of a 3D visualization of skitter data from KEDA. 15:04.100 --> 15:10.000 And it kind of looks like a globe, but there's absolutely no real world geographical reference. 15:12.260 --> 15:19.680 So here what I would point out to you is the way that this is kind of almost aspatial. 15:19.820 --> 15:26.880 The distances and the actual places matter less than the connections and the network logic that links all these points together. 15:27.260 --> 15:33.340 There's a very intense sort of disembodied feeling that we get from looking at this kind of representation. 15:33.340 --> 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. 15:45.860 --> 15:47.580 Some good and some bad. 15:50.450 --> 15:54.570 Here's one that a lot of you have probably seen hanging out at conferences like this. 15:54.570 --> 16:00.070 I was reminded of one of these when I went to a security conference up in Canada. 16:00.830 --> 16:04.290 And it seems I've seen these around quite a few places. 16:04.290 --> 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. 16:13.030 --> 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. 16:26.390 --> 16:32.530 And this is a type of cartography as well, I would argue, even though it's abstracted. 16:33.110 --> 16:41.090 So what does it mean that we've progressed from trying to overlay cyberspatial cartography on top of real-world geography? 16:42.330 --> 16:47.990 Well, I would say that geographic imaginations of cyberspace have political and foreign policy implications. 16:47.990 --> 16:50.350 And we're starting to see some of those currently. 16:50.350 --> 16:53.810 And they've evolved, I think, since about the 1990s. 16:53.810 --> 17:01.270 One of them has been a focus on connection to the global network as both a source of security and threat. 17:01.270 --> 17:03.230 So what do I mean by that? 17:04.150 --> 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. 17:18.310 --> 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. 17:26.490 --> 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. 17:41.110 --> 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. 17:49.570 --> 17:55.970 So in this new logic, it's disconnection from the network that is the real threat, not connection to it. 17:57.690 --> 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. 18:13.170 --> 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. 18:21.830 --> 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. 18:36.530 --> 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. 18:46.430 --> 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. 18:58.390 --> 19:04.190 Actually, I've got an interesting quote. 19:04.190 --> 19:07.890 This is from a congressional testimony in 2003. 19:07.890 --> 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. 19:20.670 --> 19:27.590 He says, Many more malicious and widespread viruses are seen in the wild on the Internet on a daily basis. 19:27.610 --> 19:31.670 Many are written with Russian, Chinese, and other language comments in the code. 19:31.810 --> 19:35.330 Some have direct ties to organized crime, especially outside the U.S. 19:35.330 --> 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. 19:46.230 --> 19:52.130 So, again, this is sort of reiterating the sense of cyberspace as a space of threat. 19:56.110 --> 20:03.570 What do I mean when I say that network architectures enable both territorialization and deterritorialization? 20:04.630 --> 20:10.450 Well, definitely, in the big Kaida jellyfish model of the Internet, there's an intense deterritorialization. 20:10.650 --> 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. 20:23.410 --> 20:26.730 I think of that as a kind of deterritorialization. 20:27.050 --> 20:32.330 But I think that the Internet also enables various particular kinds of territorializations. 20:32.670 --> 20:36.850 One example is here in IP geocoding. 20:36.850 --> 20:38.610 I understand there's going to be somebody talking about that. 20:38.610 --> 20:40.310 I hope that I didn't miss their talk. 20:40.470 --> 20:42.550 I hope that's going to be in the coming days. 20:43.710 --> 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. 20:51.810 --> 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. 21:00.390 --> 21:07.970 Here, this is a map of which countries were allowed to access www.georgebush.com prior to the 2004 election. 21:08.070 --> 21:13.970 And you can see that only Canada and the United States were granted access and successfully blocked everybody else. 21:14.410 --> 21:19.970 Actually citing terrorist and disruptive threats from foreign hackers. 21:23.410 --> 21:28.030 And definitely the Army, the United States Army, is interested in cyberspace. 21:28.910 --> 21:36.630 Here's a quote from a report by the Project for the New American Century writing on rebuilding America's defenses. 21:36.630 --> 21:42.510 And they consider cyberspace to be one of the key places where they want to extend their control. 21:43.150 --> 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. 21:55.330 --> 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. 22:04.630 --> 22:11.370 So there's a sense of militarizing and potentially territorializing cyberspace. 22:11.750 --> 22:16.730 And definitely .mil is becoming an increasing and growing presence online. 22:19.620 --> 22:24.320 So I don't have any really groundbreaking conclusions yet. 22:24.320 --> 22:26.760 I'm still in the process of writing all this up. 22:27.000 --> 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. 22:35.300 --> 22:38.360 And one is, again, to reiterate the question that we should think about. 22:38.360 --> 22:46.640 How are power relations that are implicated in real world maps also possibly implicated in the production of cyberspacial maps? 22:47.280 --> 22:52.500 How are hackers and other online groups impacted by this emerging war on cyber terror? 22:52.500 --> 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? 23:04.000 --> 23:07.240 What might alternative efforts to map cyberspace look like? 23:07.240 --> 23:08.560 Again, this is an important question. 23:08.680 --> 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. 23:16.320 --> 23:23.120 How can we potentially subvert these dominant maps of cyberspace and produce our own? 23:23.500 --> 23:24.280 Thank you. 23:31.190 --> 23:32.790 One second before I answer any questions. 23:32.790 --> 23:36.730 Is there a moderator around who can tell me if I've got enough time to do so? 23:36.730 --> 23:39.390 I've got eight minutes? 23:39.930 --> 23:42.050 Well, I'll answer some questions then. 24:19.850 --> 24:30.410 You're kind of imagining a real-world, old-style cartographic representation of relative internet freedom by country. 24:47.390 --> 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. 24:58.930 --> 25:00.030 You only see the connections. 25:00.030 --> 25:01.470 You don't see the blockages. 25:06.400 --> 25:10.460 Yeah, that's a cool idea. 25:10.940 --> 25:12.020 Any other questions? 25:55.220 --> 25:56.460 Yeah, that's a really cool idea. 25:56.460 --> 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. 25:59.280 --> 26:01.300 It sounds like a really interesting sort of political project. 26:01.460 --> 26:04.380 Similar to that hobo diary, you know, turning the world upside down. 26:04.420 --> 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. 26:15.200 --> 26:16.220 Bad English, yeah. 26:18.100 --> 26:19.160 Any more questions? 26:19.160 --> 26:20.040 Yeah, in the back. 27:02.970 --> 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. 27:07.970 --> 27:08.830 Thanks very much.