networks is sometimes called Barlovian cyberspace, so named after John
Perry Barlow (Grateful Dead band member), who applied Gibson’s term
to CMC as a more complex kind of a space than that which is engaged in
a telephone conversation.
Today the Internet has consolidated into a ‘network of networks’.
Mostly originating from the USA, the major networks which have added
themselves to the Internet include ARPANET (government-funded), Fidonet
(alternative cooperative), Usenet, the WELL, the thousands of corporate
and government intranets, and the World Wide Web. CMC systems that
predated many of these networks, such as email, news groups and bulletin
board systems, are now carried with the expanded Internet network.
One also needs to distinguish between commercial and domestic net-
works of CMC. Commercial networks have long predated the domestic,
with IBM having its own global intranet some twenty years before the
Internet properly began.^5
Certainly, in America, ARPANET was one of the most instrumental in
pioneering the domestic conditions for today’s Internet. Built by a Boston
company under contract, 150 sites had been established across the USA
by the late 1980s. It was designed from the start to allow remote log-in by
passwords, a feature that co-developed with the accelerating speed of
computer modems in the home.
Of surprise to many of the architects of ARPANET was the fact that one
of the most popular sub-media to spring up was email. As Tim Jordan (1999)
explains:The key point about email is that rather than people using ARPANET to com-
municate with computers, as the designers expected, people used it to
communicate with other people. This was despite the fact that email was
not programmed into the system but was added unofficially in an ad hoc
way. Email emerged spontaneously as the basic resource provided by
ARPANET and this has been true of virtually all computer networks. People
connect to people using computers, which has given rise to the over-arching
term computer-mediated communication. (38)However, CMC does not just have to be point-to-point, as what the
various networks have allowed that was unachievable with pre-CMC
communication is correspondence from the many to the many – multiple
authors and readers for which there is no technical limitation. Such a form
of communication achieves an efficiency impossible in embodied form.
Three hundred people can more easily speak to each other in a listserve
conference where each message is recorded in a linear sequence of when
it was sent (an automatic queue for speech) than could the same three
hundred trying to have themselves heard at an embodied conference.
A CMC conference is just one example, therefore, why we should be
dissuaded from seeing cyberspace as merely an extension of social rela-
tions which occur outside of it, as clearly it is generative of new relations
that were not previously possible.Theories of Cybersociety 47Holmes-03.qxd 2/15/2005 10:31 AM Page 47