Cyberspace Does Not Exist:
Toward a Theory of the Embedded Internet

Philip E. Agre
UCLA

The Internet is commonly understood by academics and popular culture alike
as "cyberspace" -- a digital territory separate from the ordinary corporeal
world.  This conception of the Internet, however, is a transient artifact
of the Internet's experimental early days.  Now that the Internet is rapidly
becoming integrated with the institutional world around it, we must reckon
with the remarkably profound influence of the cyberspace ideology on our
language and thinking.  This talk clears some ground toward a social theory
of the Internet as something embedded in society and institutions.  Among
other things, it considers and rejects the legal theory of cyberspace as
a distinct jurisdiction.  A more useful approach is to analyze how information
infrastructure coevolves with social institutions, and to identify analytical
categories that help us comprehend the genuine changes that accompany new
digital technologies while transcending the boundaries of particular media.

Philip E. Agre is an associate professor of information studies at UCLA.
He received his PhD in computer science from MIT in 1989, having conducted
dissertation research in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory on
computational models of improvised activities.  He taught at the University
of Chicago, the University of Sussex, and UC San Diego before arriving
at UCLA earlier this year.  He is the author of "Computation and Human
Experience" (Cambridge University Press, 1997), and the coeditor of
"Technology and Privacy: The New Landscape" (with Marc Rotenberg, MIT Press,
1997), "Reinventing Technology, Rediscovering Community: Critical Studies
in Computing as a Social Practice" (with Douglas Schuler, Ablex, 1997),
and "Computational Theories of Interaction and Agency" (with Stanley
J. Rosenschein, MIT Press, 1996).  In addition, he edits an Internet
mailing list called the Red Rock Eater News Service that distributes useful
information on the social and political aspects of networking and computing
to 4000 people in 60 countries.