 But anyway, I'm here to talk about the the cartographic imaginations of cyberspace And I'm I'm going to be bringing sort of my own disciplinary background as a geographer to take us through some some really sort of basic concepts about critical critically looking at at cartographic representations of real-world space and how some of those some of those theoretical Concerns might be brought to look at maps of cyberspace, which which of course have started to emerge in great numbers So traditionally geographers have just defined themselves In large part as as a group of people whose job it is to go out and make cartographic representations of space and We have a long and sort of problematic history in my discipline participation in things like the colonial project You know military cartography a land and sea trade and Basically supplying the the navigational tools and surveys and graphical representations to make these things possible And so when people say, oh, you know, I'm a geographer Oftentimes people say, oh well you guys make maps, right? Well, I mean that's sort of the traditional The traditional role of Geographers, but we've changed a lot Especially especially since since about the mid 20th century and one of the one of the more recent areas that we've started to explore It's actually sort of critically examined the practice of of map making So I'm gonna follow from a guy named Jeremy Crampton Who wrote a book called the political mapping of cyberspace is a good book Who talks about a sort of a divergence in geography between theory and practice Meaning that there's still a persists a group of people in in the discipline who's who still, you know practice the the job of graphically representing the earth and are very good at it and Increasingly use computers and computer technology to to make those maps But there's another group of us of which I'm a I'm a part Who are a little bit more concerned with the theoretical implications of what those other people are doing and I would say that this this sort of theoretical or critical approach to to cartography Probably has its roots in the late 80s with the cultural turn in geography and particularly with a book by a guy named Mon Monnier in 1991 called how to lie with maps Another another interesting book with sort of lots of interesting little factoids about sort of you know Why it is that maps don't necessarily? realistically represents space and I The simple reason why? We need to think about maps as representations rather than as actual you know realistic Basis for for reality is that basically maps are two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional space So you've got you've got a globe the earth. It's a complicated Spherical object. There's an inherent challenge in taking taking that space and Laying it out flat and depicting it for people Computers might might help solve some of those problems By enabling us to use 3d 3d visualization But we still we still face certain compromises and certain choices that that these people who are interested in the practice of map making Consciously or unconsciously make when they when they're making maps And as Mon Monnier pointed out They distort reality in very specific ways Through their use of scale their use of projection and the use of symbols So this is sort of a very traditional map of the earth. It's the Mercator projection How many of you? Recognizes this image from your high school textbooks or your elementary school geography textbooks Yeah, quite a few the Mercator projections really commonly used map projection But it's original purpose wasn't necessarily to provide the most realistic view of the land masses of the earth It was actually better suited as a sea navigational tool Because it maintained accurate direction between two points when you're traveling at sea But what happened was that it actually distorted The area of land masses So the shape of the continents that we come to recognize from our high school textbooks In the Mercator projection don't necessarily reflect the actual physical size of those of those features So Cape and I on on on South America and Africa and I'm going to go forward one slide This is a this is an area an equal area world projection This is very different from the Mercator projection Its goal is to preserve the area of the land masses. So here it's not very useful as a navigational tool But it gives a better idea of how much actual surface air is taken up by each of the continents You notice the diminutive size of the United States and Europe, and if I flip back You could see how How different the two are What a different idea of the shape of the earth each one provides Now the purpose really the purpose of these equal area projections weren't just innocently trying to correct an error There's a bit of a political Motivation behind making these maps and that is to kind of De-center the importance of Europe and North America in the Mercator projection. They seem to be very Very important, but in the in the hobo dire. They're much smaller I've even seen a hobo dire map that's been turned upside down To further subvert the Euro centrism of the of the Mercator projection So there's a kind of a political project going on here as well But beyond altering the the scale projection of maps They can they can often serve more explicit ideological purposes and in the series of the next few maps. We're gonna look at They're basically Thematically focus on the the theme of proximity to the Soviet Union. This was a theme that came up Quite a bit in graphical representations of the earth during the Cold War period was the real proximity of the Soviet threat To Western interests. So here they've they've manipulated the orientation of the map and this this is a Map that was originally published in Time Magazine in 1952. They've oriented it north south or rather West East and It gives the idea that the Soviet Union is just sort of right next to Western Europe and about to conquer Conquer these these territories Obviously in the Cuban Missile Crisis proximity was a was another important theme and issue and this is a CIA map that shows the Range the relative ranges of of nuclear missiles from Cuba to the United States and here the scale the color You know really give give a sense of imminent threat Here's a use of a play a planar polar projection and in the context of of sort of the The air war and the possibility that that wars might be fought using missiles rather than actually land troops These kinds of projections were very persuasive because they showed that actually Canada the United States weren't so far from From the Soviet Union at all if you one went over the North Pole So the planar projection was a was a sort of a subtle way to show politically how important Things like spending on air defense budgets really were during the Cold War An author Jillian Rose has brought our attention and geography to the possibility that race and gender relationships might also find their way on to the map sheet and A good place to look for those kinds of power relations is in colonial maps of the world here's a map of Africa from 1771 and I'm not sure if you can read what it says in the upper right hand corner So I'll read it up for you It says an accurate map of Africa from the latest improvements and regulated by astronomical Observation so they're purporting that to to have provided us the most accurate depiction of this this continent possible But of course, we know that it's really just a two-dimensional representation of a very complex space Here's an example of how gender and race find their way onto these maps Here's a an artistic legend on another map of Africa in 1707 and essentially depicting a bunch of a Bunch of imagined natives lounging around bearing their breasts and Sort of not doing a whole lot of work. This was sort of you know supporting the European Idea that that you know of racial superiority so we can see how Early colonial maps of Africa racialized gendered and even eroticized Place through their representations Linking imaginary people to imagine places Here's an example of sort of the extension of colonial power onto the landscape in postage stamps It was quite common up until the mid 20th century to to put graphical depictions of figureheads on beautiful African landscapes sort of cementing the the European supremacy of these of these places So what I'm proposing in my own work, and I'm really still in the preliminary phases of thinking this through it's to follow follow crampton's challenge of really critically looking at at what we do when we map and really to take apart this this progressivist Objectivist treatment of maps as mirror images of reality and to say well, you know What what really goes into the creation of these maps what what kinds of power relations are embedded in the in the in these representations and replace that kind of that kind of understanding of cartography with one that's more historically contingent and Cognizant of the possibility that social relations and power relations are embedded in maps and these can be racial Gendered capitalist nationalistic the list goes on So let's look at some maps of cyberspace Since that's what we're here for So here's a here's an early Graphical representation of use net traffic in 1993 and the next the next three images by the way are taken from dodge and kitchens 2002 Atlas of cyberspace you find it online, and it's also available By order for a hard copy. This is a very very interesting book lots of cool pictures I picked out a few that I thought were really interesting and sort of iconic this one's a depiction of use net traffic in 1993 and what I want to draw your attention to is sort of the the difficulty that this map maker has had in in Trying to reconcile a real-world spatial geography that's that's outlined with the You know the continents and a sort of new geography of cyberspace It seems like like the two don't necessarily fit very well together in one hand you have this sort of disembodied diffuse Instantaneous network of telecommunications and is overlaid on top of a world of real spatial Places and real bodies Located in that space but looking at this map you get the impression that somebody in San Diego Chile could instantaneously interact with somebody from New York City Even though there's you know thousands of miles and and social difference between those two individuals So the map sort of sort of suggests this liberating Possibility for the for this technology a lot of people have probably seen this map It's widely reproduced. It's a map of early NFS net traffic As one observer noted the arc map is one of the best examples of a representation of the net that goes beyond the practical and taps into deeper aesthetic feel for what cyberspace looks like so there's something iconic about this kind of depiction of the internet as a series of of Trails leading through the sky this one's this one To its credit and unlike the Mercator projection seems to de-center Europe in the United States Also because in the original the user was able to manipulate it and turn it around and zoom in on any portion of the map that they Wanted there wasn't a static representation here. You could it was user interactive but nevertheless what emerges from from this picture is is definitely a very very clear example of the global digital divide There are places that are completely dark that are unplugged that are not connected to the space of international money and culture flows And there are spaces that are that are that are very brightly lit on this map Now enough in a in a further development of mapping cyberspace some some cartographers have preferred to just drop the Drop the real-world cartography all together Let it go in favor of focusing on the topological relationship between points and just map out the arcs and nodes of the information backbone so here's an example of the 3d digitalization of skitter data from from kata and It kind of looks like a globe, but there's absolutely no real-world geographical reference so here what I would point what I would point out to you is is the the way that this is kind of a Almost a spatial the distances in the the actual places Matter less than the connections in the network logic that links all these points together There's a there's a very intense sort of disembodied Feeling that we get from looking at this kind of representation And I'll argue in a few moments that this kind of disembodied diffuse networks Cartography of cyberspace has very specific political ramifications Some good and some bad Here's one that a lot of you probably seen hanging out at conferences like this. I I was reminded of one of these when I went to a security conference up in Canada and It seems I've seen these around quite a few places a sort of a network security schematic that Again, de-territorializes cyberspace and represents it as a series of interconnected symbols And here we get a sense of sort of you know the the blue cool region of the corporate land being protected from the sort of the unknown exterior You know potential hacker So and this is a type of cartography as well, I would argue even though it's it's abstracted So what does it mean that we've we've progressed from kind of trying to overlay cyberspatial cartography on top of real-world geography? Well, I would say that geographic imaginations of cyberspace have political and foreign policy implications We're starting to see some of those currently and they've evolved I think since since about the 1990s One of them has been a focus on connection to the global network as both a source of security and threat So what do I mean by that? Well by security I am thinking of these the sense that Connection to the to the global marketplace renders Countries more amenable to say American foreign policy interests I've heard the oft-quoted phrase that no two countries with the McDonald's have ever gone to war with one another and sort of reminded of that here Some researchers Robert Secor and spark have argued that what's going on now in in foreign policy circles in the United States is That certain parts of the world are being Characterizes non integrating these are these are a rogue regimes that have no interest at all in connecting up to the global flows of capital And as such they represent a threat So in this new logic, it's disconnection from the network that that is the real threat not connection to it But on the other hand as we saw with the security schematic here There's a sense that if we do connect ourselves up to this global network this a spatial global network That we open ourselves up to a whole bunch of you know unsavory possibilities and Definitely the global war on terror has assumed many of the same metaphors and symbols that are employed in the internet security field For example, the White House administration is repeatedly cited the diffused and networked architecture of terrorist organizations as Support for the continued military aggression and restriction of movement by citizens into and outside of the country Here's a here's a map of the The 9-11 hijackers and it's laid out like an arc node map similar to ones that we've seen The earlier cyberspatial maps that we've seen so there's there's definitely a sort of a rhetorical linkages I think between terrorist networks and electronic networks, which I think is very interesting now. What do I? Actually, I've got an interesting quote. This is this is from a congressional testimony in 2003 This is a network security expert testifying before Congress about the threat that our nation's computers face when exposed to When exposed to Foreign hackers He says many more malicious and widespread viruses are seen in the wild on the internet on a daily basis Many are written with Russian Chinese and other language comments in the code Some have direct ties to organized crime, especially outside the US Many are propagated from commonly known havens for virus writers where there's no fear of legal prosecution Or where the technical skills of the government to prosecute are minimal or non-existent So again, this is this is sort of reiterating the sense of the sense of the cyberspace is a space of threat What do I mean when I say that? Network architectures enable both territorialization and de-territorialization Well definitely in the big Kaida jellyfish model of the internet there's an intense de-territorialization There's a sense that the internet frees us from our bodies You know makes the the cultural social and actual physical distances between us irrelevant and renders physical space less Important than this new virtual space. I Think of that as a kind of detailed de-territorialization But I think that the internet also enables a very particular kinds of territorializations one example is here in in IP geocoding I understand there's gonna be somebody talking about that. I hope that I didn't miss their talk I hope that's going to be in the coming days but essentially using using people's IPs to To grant them access or not grant them access based on the country in which they live So now there's a relinking of real-world geography To to the cyberspatial geography that actually has real material physical outcomes here This is a map of of which countries were allowed to access www.georgebush.com prior to 2004 election and you can see that only Canada and the United States were granted access and successfully blocked everybody else Citing actually citing terrorists and disruptive threats from foreign hackers and Definitely the the the army the United States Army is interested in cyberspace Here's a here's a quote from a report by the By the project for the new American century Writing on rebuilding America's defenses and they they consider cyberspace to be one of the key places where they want to extend their control They say much as control of the high seas and the protection of international commerce defined global powers in the past So will control of the new international commons be a key to world power in the future on America incapable of protecting its interests or that of its allies in space or the infosphere We'll find it difficult to exert global political leadership So there's a sense there's a sense of of militarizing and potentially territorializing cyberspace and definitely dot mill is becoming an increasingly an increasing and growing presence online So I don't have any Really groundbreaking conclusions yet. I'm still in the process of writing all this up but I think I think the issues that I've talked about raise a few a few concerns that might be relevant to us as an audience and One is one is again to reiterate the question that we should think about how our power relations that are implicated in real-world maps Also, possibly implicated in the production of cyberspatial maps How are hackers and other online groups impacted by this emerging war on cyber terror and specifically? How to how do the graphical representations of the online space that accompany this war? impact impact our freedom and our civil rights and What might alternative efforts to maps cyberspace look like and this is this is an important question I'm gonna leave open to everybody to either comment on now or or hopefully come and talk to me later if you have any ideas How can how can we potentially? You know subvert these dominant Maps of cyberspace and produce our own Thank you One second before I answer any questions. Is there a is there a moderator around who can tell me if I've got enough Time to do so I got eight minutes. Okay. Well answer some questions then you You're kind of imagining a Real-world old-style Cartographic representation of you know sort of relative internet freedom per by country Right and you raise a very important point one that I forgot to really underline in my talk, which is that? Yeah on this jellyfish map you you don't see Any potential barriers to connection do you only see the connections you don't see the blockages Yeah, that's a cool idea Questions Yeah, that's a really cool idea I left to talk to you after and find out where I can access that to have a look at it sounds like a really interesting sort of Political project similar to that hobo dire, you know turning the world upside down They're saying well, you know, let's let's point out the fact that English is the dominantly spoken language online and that You know the United States gets the most of the most of the news coverage bad English. Yeah Any more questions? Yeah in the back. All right. Well, if there's no other questions I look forward to talking to you guys one-on-one after the after the presentation. Thanks very much