Communication Theory Media, Technology and Society

at one and the same time. A particular kind of reading must choose

between them ... no spoken reading of cspace can elide cyberspace with

space. Furthermore, a silent reading of the text on the page must unpack

and mentally vocalize cyberspace, codify the visual sign with acoustic

value, in order to hear it. (51)^12

For Tofts, ‘cspace’, which is initially announced as a concept, rapidly

progresses to an ontology which has ‘manifestations’ such as the everyday

division between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ (51) of technological worlds,

whether this be ‘jacking into the matrix’ or ‘speaking on the telephone’.

Cspace is heralded as a kind of ancestral trope, the inside and outside of

alphabetic writing, which is said to invoke Socratic fears about language

having spatial architectures that cannot be controlled by the subject. For this

reason ‘cspace’, it is repeated, is no less than the ‘ur-concept of technolo-

gized consciousness, as well as the grammacentrism of cyberculture’ (51).

A very different but equally inflated conflation of a nomenclature

with an ontology is that of ‘cyberpower’, put forward by Tim Jordan

(1999). Writing at the end of the 1990s, Jordan felt confident enough to

proclaim:

The patterns of a virtual life are clear enough to be mapped. The virtual

world and its social order can be traced now in its entirety, from pole to

pole. This does not mean all areas are per fectly known. Sometime in the

future we will probably look back at this map and see where it has equiva-

lents to the dragons and the sea monsters faithfully represented on early

maps of the world. (3)

This nevertheless does not prevent a self-assured vision of cyberspace as

a totality:

However, we can produce an over view of all of cyberspace’s multifarious

life, the first globe of cyberspace. This book is such a globe. It is a carto-

graphy of the powers that circulate through virtual lives, a chart of the forces

that pattern the politics, technology and culture of virtual societies. These

powers set the basic conditions of virtual lives. They are the powers of

cyberspace and together they constitute cyberpower. (3)

As the book proceeds, cyberpower turns from being a map of power

relationships on the Internet, to being indistinguishable itself from the

form of this relationship: ‘Cyberpower is the form of power that structures

culture and politics in cyberspace and on the Internet’ (208). The merit of

Jordan’s book is that it does break down the forms of recognizable power

relationship that operate in cyberspace in useful ways: individual, social

and imaginary. But as with Tofts’ fixation with his own solipsistically

invented ‘monster concept’ of cspace, Jordan valorizes cyberpower into a

theoretical dragon too indeterminable to have any analytic value.

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