A segment of this research, entitled Nature Metaphors in Virtual Landscapes, is funded by the British Academy and
will take place during a Visiting Scholarship to the University of
California Santa Barbara in the Department of English in 2009.
Nature Metaphors in Virtual Landscapes
Cyberspace is a virtual entity generated by the imaginations of the
people who use it, but these imaginings in turn arise from their
knowledge and experience of real locations. Writing about an entirely
different imaginative space, Shangri-La, Peter Bishop suggests that
“Places are produced by a dialogue between cultural fantasy-making and
geographical landscape’[1] and Richard Mabey writes that ‘We constantly
refer back to the natural world to try and discover who we are.’[2] The Wild Surmise
will map the connections between the landscapes of cyberspace and their
origins in the personal geographies of those who create and imagine
them. According to Lakoff and Johnson ‘new metaphors have the power to
create a new reality’ and therefore play ‘a very significant role in
determining what is real for us’[3]. This is powerfully demonstrated in
the metaphors which have arisen around the virtual terrain of the
internet, commonly known as cyberspace. The term was coined by William
Gibson in 1984 in his science fiction novel Neuromancer, and its
emphasis on the connections between online culture and the urban
environment has had a profound influence on the popular imagination.
However, an examination of the language used by those who designed the
internet and those who now inhabit it reveals a contradiction.
The language and concepts adopted by many internet users exhibit their strong sense of the online world as a natural landscape, and rather than imagining themselves in a slick inner-city environment they often display an affinity with notions of exploration, homesteading and cultivation. They make frequent references to the body, as if virtuality has prompted them to remember, rather than forget, their earthly existence. Indeed, since its earliest beginnings computers and cyberspace have been saturated with images of the natural world: fields, strings, webs, streams, rivers, trails, paths, torrents, and islands. Then the flora - apples, apricots, trees, roots, branches, and the fauna - spiders, viruses, worms, pythons, lynxes, gophers, plus the ubiquitous bug and mouse. My preliminary research has revealed interpretations of the internet as a solar system, a jungle, a desert, a swamp, an archipelago, a subterranean world, an estuary or, to quote novelist Bruce Sterling, a ‘bubbling primal soup full of worms and viruses.’ The popular geography of online culture is an extremely important issue because although we have never encountered virtual space before it is already challenging much that until now has been taken as given. Today we face the growth of global collective intelligence with its concomitant threats and opportunities such as the ability to communicate across cultures and geographical boundaries, and the capacity for vast information storage. It is vital that we understand the cultural construction of virtual space.
The Wild Surmise will examine this phenomenon, including the impact
of the international spread of cyberspace upon the ways in which it is
conceptualised and imagined. Preliminary desk research (Barbrook,
Curtis, Davis, Laurel, Markoff) has shown that there is a great deal of
evidence for the widespread use of nature metaphors in the design both
of early computer interfaces and of the internet itself, and that many
of those influences originated in Silicon Valley and Southern
California. Indeed, the World Wide Web, invented by Englishman Tim
Berners-Lee working at CERN in Switzerland, was informed by a research
visit he made to Palo Alto and San Francisco in 1992. The same year,
the term ‘surfing the net’ was originated in Cupertino by journalist
Jean Polly Armour who has been commissioned by the Wilson Library
Bulletin to write an article explaining the internet and was searching
for a suitable metaphor. In 1990, the text-based virtual world
LambdaMOO was created at Xerox PARC, Palo Alto, and designed by
computer programmer Pavel Curtis as a replica of his own house and
garden. Today, many games and virtual worlds, such as Second Life, are
designed and built in California, and their default landscapes still
bear an uncanny resemblance to the Mojave Desert. It is inevitable that
the design of these new virtual geographies will echo the local
landscapes encountered by those who work in them. The section of my
research traces the history of these influences in California.
Research Objectives
- Collect personal accounts of the early development of nature-related language and concepts pertaining to the internet
- Visit significant locations where ideas were initiated and developed e.g. corporate and university campuses, private homes, natural landscapes.
- Present results and gather peer feedback.
[1] Bishop, P. (1989) The Myth of Shangri-La, London: Athlone Press Bishop p.9
[2] Mabey, R. (2006) Nature Cure, London: Pimlico p.19
[3] Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (1980) Metaphors We Live By, Chicago: University of Chicago Press p.8
