Communication Theory Media, Technology and Society

the element of community’, because he maintains that a single person does

not exist in cyberspace, but in virtual reality (Ostwald, 1997: 132).

According to James Carey (1995), and, later, Jon Stratton, the most prim-

itive but original place to find the ‘origins’ of cyberspace is in ‘nineteenth-

century attempts to speed up circulation time’ (Stratton, 1997: 254). Therefore

the most fruitful place to look, says Stratton, is to the advent of the tele-

graph in the first half of the nineteenth century. In the observation of

James Carey: ‘The simplest and most important point about the telegraph

is that it marked the decisive separation of “transportation” and “com-

munication”’ (cited in Stratton, 1997: 254). Stratton contends that it is not

the emergence of the computer and the microchip per se which inaugu-

rates the production of cyberspace, ‘but the increase in the speed of com-

munication over distance to a point where the time taken for a message to

traverse the distance reduces to a period experienced by the receiver, and

sender, as negligible’ (254). By Stratton’s reading, therefore, the develop-

ment of global telecommunication and of cyberspace is inextricably

intertwined.

Among the major precursors of computer-mediated cyberspace tech-

nologies, the telephone can also be counted. As a twentieth-century innova-

tion on the telegraph, the telephone exhibits virtual kinds of features as an

electrically sustained low-bandwidth medium, whilst enabling a limited

kind of electronic assembly. Such an assembly, whilst generally only mutual

for a few persons at a time, nevertheless facilitates a sense of a meeting

place, a place that is augmented by voice mail and answering machine ser-

vices. The telephone also exhibits a limited number of features of virtual

reality insofar as it is semi-enclosed (a given conversion cannot be heard

simultaneously by anyone other than the interlocutors) and it translates the

voice into a ‘meta-signal’, electrical pulses which convey analogue sounds.

With regard to this latter quality, one of the first theorizations of ‘virtual

reality’ can be found in an early classic on telecommunication by Herbert

and Proctor. The second edition of their work Telephony(1932) distinguishes

electrical current and electrical voltage from what they name as a separate

‘virtual’ current and ‘virtuvoltage’. This distinction is an – albeit crude –

attempt to signify the fact that a telephone exchange, in which individuals

are jacked in to each other by way of operators or agents, purveys an envi-

ronment that transcends the purely electrical. This other environment stands

somewhere between the human voice and the electrical medium, but lacks

the comprehensiveness of mediums which today earn the appellation of

cyberspace.

Cyberspace and the Internet

The fact that cyberspace is so often conflated with the Internet belies the

fact that there have long been other networks before the Internet which

qualify as domains of the ‘matrix’ or cyberspace. The sum total of these

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