This is beautifully demonstrated by one of the great problems of “virtual reality” – not-at-all-virtual nauseau induced by bodies’ refusal to let go of physical reality.

I could go on, this being one of my pet topics, but if you are interested in this approach there’s a lot more in my thesis.

(You might also enjoy the blog of a guy who sails around the world fixing those cables on which it all depends … A View From the Bridge.)

I was already reading Sharon’s excellent Early Modern History blog before her comment (and I’ve just bookmarked her long list of sources on the British East India Co for later perusal), & now I’ve added her to the blogroll on the right so you can find her too. Dr. K is too modest to link to herself, but she’s the brains behind this and this. Bryant (he’s already on the blogroll, as Population: One gave me a crash course in all the stuff I was pretending to know about in the above post over beers at the Thirsty Scholar last week. It was great. More on that to come. And I don’t have contact info for Andrew, but Andrew, thanks much for your comment and the Saudi Arabia links. I’ve had a number of conversations lately about the crumbling “Great Firewall of China,” but the Saudi version actually seems rather more effective. Interesting times.

So the question for the class today is: are there physical aspects of the internet, or the modern telecommunications universe, that talk of “cyberspace” and an “invisible empire” and a “wireless web” ignore? Are there technical bottlenecks in the system that give some interests leverage over others? Do the messy realities of meatspace provide any access points for actors that we might otherwise dismiss as irrelevant to the allegedly ubiquitous, intangible, global net?

Well, outside of North America, there are places where the supposedly aspatial internet is being regulated in part through the control of physical space. An example from a March 1999 New York Times article on Saudi Arabia:

Censorship in Saudi Arabia is even more overt. Under a system that took two years to develop, all Internet connections in the country have been routed through a hub outside Riyadh, where high-speed Government computers block access to thousands of sites catalogued on a rapidly expanding blacklist….

To enforce the rules, the Saudi Government has assumed the role of parent, using commercial software like Smart Filter, by Secure Computer, to screen all requests and block contact to sites it wants kept off-limits. The software is updated every day, Saudi officials say, as Riyadh-based technicians add new sites to the blacklist, in part by watching to see which sites Saudis seek out.

Of course, people are developing ways to get around these protections – in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere – but governments are fighting back. Where do companies stand on this? Some have been working to get around the restrictions but others have actively competed to strengthen the internet walls.

So much for the idea of a naturally democratizing internet, annihilating space with no regard for political, business, and personal (or even personnel) decisions. This is not to say that the internet cannot proceed along decentralized and democratic lines – only that people must choose to make that happen, and that their choices will have a real impact on, and be subject to the limitations of, the physical world.

(Incidentally, you’re right, the Times archive is great. When I sat down to write this comment all I remembered was reading about Saudi Arabia in the paper a few years ago. And the articles I’ve linked are what turned up in a quick search. Unfortunately, each of these links requires an institutional subscription to the archive, so not everyone can read them for free.)

I also smell a whiff of “Well, I don’t see race/gender/ability/whatever”, i.e. a desire to not see who does what, or the messiness of physical facticity, in technological developments. It’s so much easier to focus on the intangible as an extension of our technological ‘Magination. But really, whose hands are getting splinters from that telephone pole?

Uh huh huh. Pole.

Some will remember Richochet, a wireless modem company popular in the 90s. They had fairly good coverage (at fairly slow speeds) in Silicon Valley and… perhaps Seattle? They put their nodes on, you guessed it, telephone poles. In the end it proved too expensive for a smallish startup to put physical infrastructure all over the place, particularly since DSL/cable modems were suddenly providing high bandwidth at competitive prices.

The unlicensed spectrum which powers 802.11 technologies was freed from regulation in 1985. Pretty shocking move, in some ways. People proceeded to argue about how to do wireless in that chunk of the spectrum for years and years until a consortium made some decisions and Apple said “deliver us a card for under $100 and we’ll put a card slot in every laptop we sell.” The rest is history.

WiMax is the new WiFi, with better range and better speed. It uses spectrum which is in large part owned, and the FCC did not free that up… so while technologically the standard is better, I am uncertain that it will catch on in the way that WiFi’s been able to.

And the wireless promise really just shifts the last mile problem a little ways down the road. I happen to have a DSL connection that I can legally share with as many people as I like. Most people don’t, so where do you terminate your wireless mesh?

The best experiment in wireless meshes I know of is run by my old boss, Tim Pozar, out in San Francisco: http://www.archive.org/web/sflan.php

For around $1000 you can put a wireless node on your roof, which extends network coverage to anyone within a certain distance of you. Bandwidth is paid for by nice people. Which is one way to solve the problem.

Great blog, great post, great that comments are up. Look forward to much more of the same in future.

But my dinner is ready…