Making reality a cyberspace

Kellogg, W. A., Carroll, J. M., and Richards, J. T. 1991. Making reality a cyberspace. In Cyberspace: First Steps, M. Benedikt, Ed. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 411-430.

I can’t pretend to be able to approach this chapter without bias: nice paper, Dad!

So I will for now just quote some bits (bits I like), which I’ll try to assimilate for fully later.

• “The evolution and application of this technology is already occurring and it is incumbent upon us now to begin to envision and understand cyberspace as such: what people might do with it and in it, its potential and limitations in furthering human goals” (411: emphasis added).
• “This strategy essentially inverts the design problem: rather than asking how cyberspace might be realized, it asks how the ordinary practices and objects of reality might be cyberized. We propose a distributed, augmented reality rather than an enclosed, simulated reality, a reality in which cyberization is integrated seamlessly into people’s everyday activities, and real-world objects take on virtual attributes and behaviors that support and enhance those activities. The essence of this proposal is to bring cyberspace to the people, rather than the people to cyberspace” (412-13).
• “Considering virtual realities as part of reality as opposed to apart from reality expands the virtual world design space” (413).
• “Domains where there is a high need for the person to remain integrated with normal reality will be natural candidates for augmented rather than simulated realities” (414).
• “Augmenting reality (rather than replacing it with a simulated reality) means asking how real-world objects, inherently dispersed and disconnected, can be made sensitive to personal or cultural distinctions, in a way that can be directly experienced or acted upon by a person” (419).
• “We propose that realization of at least the following principles will be necessary for creating significant and usable distributed cyberspaces: richness, connectivity, persistence, and direct interaction”(419).
• “Virtual worlds do not exist solely in some enclosed cyberspace: they exist in human culture, knowledge, and values as well” (430).
• “Designers and implementers of enclosed cyberspaces for everyday human practices, no less than designers of spreadsheets or word processors, will have to take care to make contact with the real world and existing nontechnological virtual worlds if their creations are to be successful” (430).