The Evolution of Cyberspace: Virtual Worlds

By Craig Harm

Cyberspace 2020.  What will it be like?  Can we even contemplate what our “web presence” will be like?  Less than ten years ago Facebook, Twitter and MySpace did not exist.  And while they may have seemed to just appear, there was actually a logical evolution to their emergence.  Following and logically extending this evolution may help us postulate how our cyberspace interactions will look ten years from now.

It’s amazing how history can repeat itself, even in cyberspace.

Let’s first look at what may have been the beginning of internet-based direct social interactions, instant messaging (IM).  Peer-to-peer functions like IM and chat started as early as the 1980s with bulletin board based chat.  But it was in the early 1990’s with the modern network connectivity that Internet-wide, GUI-based messaging clients really began to take-off. 

ICQ, AIM (formerly AOL Instant Messenger) and Windows Messenger were just a few examples of this capability.  These services offered similar capabilities allowing users to create profiles, add users as friends, conduct real-time live chats via text services, exchange files and even conduct video chats.  They allowed the development of true, though virtual social networks between people that had perhaps never physically met.

As technological capabilities continued to grow, so too did the evolution of IM.  With the introduction of voice-over-IP (VoIP) new IM services began to take hold.  Systems like Skype and Vonage allowed users to connect to telephones, both landlines and mobile, thus expanding the virtual social network capabilities even further. 

Internet-based social networking began as only something “geeks” did and it was based on generalized online communities such as Theglobe.com (1994),] Geocities (1995) and Tripod.com (1995).  But as the desire, capability and social culture evolved, new methods of social networking emerged.  By the end of the 1990’s, technology was helping to develop more advanced features to meet the growing user need to find and manage friends on-line: to enhance a social network. 

Out of the development of these new social networking methods a new generation of social networking sites began to emerge.  One of the first, Friendster, soon became part of the Internet mainstream.   Followed by MySpace and the professional’s social networking systems, LinkedIn there was a rapid increase in social networking sites' popularity. 

Launched in February 2004, Facebook, a social network service website now with more than 600 million active users, is rapidly becoming symbolic of what internet-based social networking is about.    In Facebook, users create a personal profile, add other users as friends and exchange messages, including automatic notifications when they update their profile.  Additionally, users may join common interest user groups, organized by workplace, school, or college, or other characteristics.   Facebook, the subject of the recent film The Social Network has garnered our interest, participation and consumed our on-line attention unlike any cyber phenomena, so far. 

Enabled by expansive technological advancements, virtual, highly social worlds are emerging to meet evolving user needs for social interaction.  Second Life (SL), launched in June 2003, is a virtual world accessible through the Web.  Users, called “Residents”, interact with each other through personally created profiles called avatars.  Residents create a personal profile, add other users as friends and exchange messages.  In addition to these functions, which are similar in purpose to Facebook, residents can also explore, meet other residents, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, and create and trade virtual property and services with one another, or travel throughout the world.   SL is designed on the premise that users can build virtual objects, either fictional or based on real items, and share, trade or sell them throughout the system.

Ever since two computers could be connected together, people have found new ways to compete with each other in games.  Initially just point-to-point, person-to-person, over the last 10-15 years gaming has evolved to connect substantial numbers of players through the Web.  With the emergence of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG), enabled by high-speed networking and Flash- and Java- based technologies, an Internet revolution has occurred where websites can utilize streaming video, audio, and a whole new environment for user interactivity. 

In the last 5 years or so, online gaming has exploded in popularity.  Computer role-playing games in which a very large number of players interact with one another within a virtual game world are running on a constant presence through services such as Xbox Live (23 million members) and games like Runescape (150M) and World of Warcraft (12M).  With so many members, online gaming is a serious cyberspace presence.  When you couple this immense cyber presence with the $5-10 monthly membership fees, MMORPG is also BIG business.

But, like all other technology-enabled cyberspace capabilities there is an evolution on-going.  Powered by concepts discussed previously in these blogs (exchange, emergence and self-organization) online gaming is evolving.  Social networking capabilities which previously required multiple services are routinely “packaged” into on-line gaming systems. 

Enabled through a user-created avatar, players within Xbox Live, World of Warcraft and Runescape can now maintain social contact with friends on-line…in fact, they actually have to maintain and leverage these social networks to achieve objectives in the games they play! 

Text, voice and video chat, status-updates, and profile creation are integral components of these online game systems.  Users no longer need to go to separate individual sites and systems to maintain their social network.  Convergence and coevolution are definitely at work in these environments.

For people though, the real evolution is not the integration of technical capabilities.  It is the emergence of culture acceptance and user comfort with interacting with others inside of virtual worlds.  Today’s younger generation processes an evolved skill set, mental accommodation, and social acceptance of interacting within these virtual worlds.  They are in these worlds every day, for hours at a time. 

For many users, the only interaction they have with some of their friends is within these worlds, where they are maintaining contact and staying informed of real world activities and events.  It is as though there is an overlap for them of the real world and these virtual worlds, and the so-called barriers between them seem to blur through continued presence in virtual environments.

So what do I think Cyberspace 2020 will look like?  Based on this evolution we’ve just discussed, I envision a cyberspace where users will no longer log onto a machine, open multiple applications, and interact with the Web via a browser.  

In 2020, I see us “logging” into the Web through personalized devices directly into our virtual world.  Many of us may even stay logged on constantly!

Acting through personally created profiles (through our avatars), we will interact with our social network just as we would face-to-face.  It’s almost certain that we will even see our avatars empowered with new capabilities that allow them to interact on our behalf, buying movie tickets, making dinner reservations and so on.

Our virtual world will be our interface to the rest of the World Wide Web and people everywhere!  Cyberspace 2020 will likely be even more interconnecting and more social, but it will almost certainly change the way we live, work and play.

Stay connected for more on the impacts of virtual worlds right here in the SENDS blogs.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Cyberspace

by Bob Schapiro

Words conjure images – we think in images and symbols.  Any good taxonomy of cyberspace must begin with that reality, or else it will likely join the junk pile of history.  At best, its terms would enter the ranks of words that people know but never use.  (Elementary school is nearly a universal experience, but when was the last time you said “tardy” or “lavatory” out loud?  For that matter, “taxonomy” always makes me think of April 15^th…or a stuffed beaver.)

As SENDS develops the foundations of a Science of Cyberspace, we invite your contributions to a new, hopefully universally accepted vocabulary that builds on what works today.  We’ll give you the email address at the bottom of this column, along with our hidden agenda.  (Please excuse me, but I used to produce television newscasts; I have to tease what’s coming up, it’s in my DNA.)

On television, I confront the need to visualize the concept of cyberspace.  I mean, how many images of fingers on a keyboard can you stand?  Fortunately there are many stock animations available on the topic.  You’ve seen them.  Usually you are zooming into some abstract space, sometimes with zeroes and ones flashing past you.  The concept is clear:  In order to deal with cyberspace, you have to move through space.

This is not the best definition, but certainly understandable.  “Space” is right there in the term.  For that reason, some people use the term “cyber realm” or “cyber domain.”  I’ve heard more than one theorist ask if cyberspace existed before we had computers to see it.  Hmmm…in outer space, Saturn had moons before we had telescopes to see them.  Amoebas existed before we had microscopes.  Did my email exist when I was still using a typewriter?  Somehow I don’t think that this is what the theorists meant…

Email is perhaps a better place to begin.  Cyberspace is a big, heavy-duty concept.  Email has obvious analogies to other experiences; these may offer insight and solutions.  For example, is spam just junk mail on steroids?  If so, solutions that mitigate junk mail might reduce the problem.  But what exactly is spam?

An inclusive definition might be “unwanted and unsolicited messages.”  This would include unwanted tweets and Facebook messages...and exclude emails from a magazine to which we actually subscribe.  After all, by subscribing, aren’t we just asking for it?

There are certainly similarities between spam and traditional junk mail.  Both often masquerade as official business, on the theory that if they can just get me to open it, I won’t mind discovering that they tried to mislead me.  (Well, if I open it, they succeeded in misleading me, but I don’t like to admit that.)

Of course, none of the junk mail that the postal carrier brings to my door ever causes my toaster to burn the bagels…or ransacks the address book in my desk drawer.  Obviously there are categories of spam, but there is no similarly accepted four-letter word for “email messages that contain malware” – well, none that we can print in a family blog.  We need a word.  Words are symbols and we think using symbols.  Cognition improves when we have precise, well-understood definitions.

I promised you a hidden agenda.  We actually have two.  The first is that a wide cross-section of folks should come up with these terms or else the lawyers will.  Yes, the scientists will try, but if the words don’t feel right to a lot of people, the lawyers will prevail.  Probably federal lawyers.  Probably committees of federal lawyers.  Do the users of cyberspace really deserve that?

The second is that we’re going to try to make the Internet a more hospitable place with a voluntary “SENDS Seal of Approval”...an early effort to ensure our “Science of Cyberspace” is truly open-source science as we've said in other blogs.  Pardon the hubris, but someone needs to say it: cyberspace belongs to all of us and we all need a say.  If we succeed, you and I will not have to create “accounts” every time we buy something and we won’t confront an unfathomable array of cookies after an hour on the web.

Yes, we are that optimistic.  But we know it will only work if we have a precise and popular terminology, with words that we all can easily understand and remember.  Just send us your suggestions at words@sendsonline.org.

Don’t be shy.  Remember that the term “cyberspace” itself was only coined in 1982.  The science-fiction author William Gibson created it as an “evocative and essentially meaningless” buzzword, as any student of Wikipedia knows.  In fact, Wikipedia needs cyberspace to even have an audience.

There’s an emerging, rich history out there and cyberspace—despite its humble origins—is a concept that is coming to define much of our lives.  You can help define cyberspace.  Send us your thoughts at words@sendsonline.org.

Some Thoughts on Topics, Trends, and Science

by Jack Holt

Some of the main topics within the federal government right now, and have been for the past 18 months, are transparency, participation and collaboration stemming from President Obama’s Jan 21, 2009 memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies. Social Media is the enabler for these interactions with the public in an effort to listen to the public discourse and guide our efforts to inform the public understanding of what our departments and agencies do for them.

In order to effectively use social media as an enabler for dialogue with the public, we should also explore using it as the enabler for knowledge management of the departments and agencies. Web 2.0 improperly cast winds up knotted on the floor of the Knowledge Management boat. There are some efforts underway to study social media within DoD and we’re finding that social media is enabling more agile and effective operational responses. We need more studies. We need a social science look at Intelink, milSuite, and any of the other efforts being generated as well as an organizational science look at how these tools are affecting our operations. I expect them to be positive effects as my personal experience has been postitive. These spaces help me to define my tasks, enlist help, and to gather knowledge to complete my mission.

To have a robust dialogue with the public, we must have a robust network to dialogue among ourselves to have a robust and effective response.

So the topics are Open, Transparent, Collaborative, Effective, Efficient and Responsive Government; and the trends are in using social media to meet this vision.

Now is the time to apply the science to understand what it means to our organizations and our ability to respond.

The Social Network: Art Imitating Life Imitating Art

By Carl Hunt

Last night I invested a couple of hours watching the recently released movie The Social Network, the story about the origins of Facebook as developed by its main celebrity, Mark Zuckerberg. It was a good investment of time, both for the distraction well-produced movies offer in general and for the insights it revealed about life in cyberspace.

Since a big part of SENDS is about better understanding, exploring and exploiting life in the interactive connectivity of cyberspace, it seemed worthwhile to experience the birth of an apparently successful social networking environment in a visually entertaining way. And, I wanted to see how better understanding the past helps to design the future.

If you’ve been following this blog, you’ve seen numerous references to emergence and the quest to better understand it before, during and after its manifestations. Emergence is life in action, and science, art and design are important parts of the way in which we will be able to better predict it. Science explains, art visualizes and design blends in harmonious and novel ways.

There have been many attempts to explain why Facebook has achieved its success. The NY Times, for example, has numerous stories in the last few weeks about Facebook, the new movie and even Zuckerberg himself. NY Times columnist Robert Wright wrote his own analysis of the successes of Facebook and Mr. Zuckerberg in yesterday’s online column called “Zuckerberg: Non-Evil Non-Genius?” in which he hypothesized that Facebook successes were based primarily in “being in the right place and the right time,” and benefitting from a well-known phenomenon called positive network externalities (a concept Wright explains in the same column so I won’t repeat it here). I will defer the questions about Facebook’s designers gaining success through unethical behavior to others.

Certainly, one can begin to explain these successes in terms like Mr. Wright’s, but there’s more to it than that. Based on the models presented in other blogs in this series (here, here and visually here), we may also consider explaining the successes of the Facebooks, the Microsoft Windows, the VHSs and similar stories in terms of emergence, enhanced by the environment of cyberspace and the massive connectivity it offers. In the case of VHS versus Beta, this should tell you that cyberspace has really been around for some time, even if more massive interactive forms of connectivity have not!

If the artistry in the movie captured the emergence of the “life” of Facebook (discounting the rise of “intelligent machines” for the time being), it did it because it helped us see how Zuckerberg and other visionaries were able to interact through cyberspace and become more sensitized to what users really wanted in social networking (while confirming that they really did want social networking). They learned through experimentation and experience how to connect people to each other in compelling ways. They designed an environment that not only connected but encouraged the emergence of relationships and sharing of personal information and interests.

Facebook and other social media deserve even more study to learn how people ultimately find what they seek in the connected age. Most seek to explore and exploit the value connectivity offers while some just seek to exploit it (for their own gain all too often). The same principles of exchange and emergence connect them both. It’s hard to make progress in the study of bad connected behavior without understanding all connected behavior, a main focus of SENDS.

In any event, technologies such as Facebook and VHS tapes are outcomes of exchange-driven emergences. Connectivity, in differing forms, enhanced the acceptance of both. Science helps to explain these outcomes but often not until well after the fact. This accounts for why emergence is so tough to predict, particularly when accommodated by the connective fabric of a technological environment like cyberspace.

Harold Morowitz notes that the “role of technology in science is summed up in this statement: steam engines have taught us more about thermodynamics than thermodynamics has taught us about steam engines” (Morowitz, The Emergence of Everything, Oxford, NY, 2002). Sometimes, you just have to build the steam engine, VHS tapes or Facebook to serve as your laboratory to see the emergence after it occurs. In fact, technology is often a manifestation of art and science converging (with design in mind one hopes).

In SENDS of course, we also think you should be able to see glimpses of these emergences in models and simulations, but there are limits to life imitating art. It would be really tough to build a simulation the scale of Facebook and get it right without a lot of experimentation.

Indeed, there are limitations to everything and for that reason we need both the arts and the sciences (and the technologies their interactions emerge). And, as noted elsewhere in these blogs, we must hope they work together in elegant design, to understand life as humans really live it. The movie The Social Network gives us a good example of that: Art Imitating Life Imitating Art.