By surfing along the sites of Microsoft and Mozilla, I slowly began to realize that each site was a bit different from the last. For example, they use the technique of mapping and architecture differently.

As Matt pointed out to our group, Mozilla has links from win its site that actually links the user outside the realms of Mozilla. Some particular links actually lead you to external links that give reviews (all positive of course) of the site, but (as this connects to the relative centrality) each of those external links have a link at the bottom of each article that links back to Mozilla.

But with Microsoft, everything is centered on and around the site. By trying the experiment of seeing if one could truly find the website of Mozilla in the search engine, it was a very difficult find (in which I didn’t, uh, find). Almost every article that appeared was to be found within the Microsoft site. The site lacked a relative centrality.

Also with architecture, both sites differed.

Mozilla appeared to have a more movable atmosphere. The user got to travel outside the site and move freely. You can move unrestricted around Microsoft, but everything is contained around the site itself. It gave of a more static feel.

Mozilla also, at least in my opinion had a more user friendly interaction process than Microsoft. It had web forums one could visit and get almost instant feedback if you ran into a technical issue. Microsoft, even though it had support, made the user feel as though they were traveling down the road less traveled.

Both sites appeared to have their moments of publicity when they went users to register if wanting to use their web forums. The user is then identified as an anonymous individual, but now has a name attached to them.

Once more, both sites remained completely visible with the aspect of showing all what they offered up front on their respected homepages. They also had enclosure.

I found that wikipedia mostly differed from Heim and Woolley by the way wikipedia explained certain terms. Unlike Woolley, the wiki gave a seemingly full definition of what cyberspace actually was (even though with terms like 'metaphoric abstraction', it leaves it somewhat opened to interpretation). Woolley instead spent most of his time dancing around the term and not dishing out a definition. He somehow managed to write an interesting and intricate essay about cyberspace without telling the reader what it actually was.

Through reading the work by Michael Heim, I felt as though I had a stronger grasp of what exactly virtual reality was. His indepth examples (the three "I"s, CAVE, HMD's, etc) made me truly see what virtual reality was. The piece posted at wikipedia was a well and articulated article, but it lacked the flow and explanation that Heim filled his essay with.

Also, I find myself trusting Heim and Woolley's essays much more than wikipedia. With Heim and Woolley, it was finalized. It was sent off to the editor, published and placed upon a shelf in a small colorful bookstore. Whatever ideas expressed by Heim and Woolley can not be changed. It's finalized in those glossy pages (unless they write another essay and update their thoughts). Unlike in wikipedia, sometimes one individual can change what is stated on the page. Even though on some wikis, only members of that particular group could edit its content, lets face it: it's the Internet. And if you're skilled enough in the ever popular and loving hacking business, you too can make a page state: "Virtual reality was created by Orlando Bloom. It took him three days in the kitchen to do so. (the extra day was needed when he stopped to try and figure out the age old question of how many licks it really took to get to the center of that darn Tootsie Pop. The Wise Owl didn't answer his phone call.)"

One of the topics broached by Michael Heim that gave me great interest was the topic of immersion. I find the ability of somehow transporting yourself into a new virtual world exciting.

I'm not a giant music fan, but the example Heim uses with the music was interesting. Shutting oneself down so all you have to hear is the music live and bright in ear and darkness of night behind closed eyes, to the point of positioning yourself until you feel as though you're expriencing a live concert. I never experienced such a feeling, so I decided to sit down Tuesday night and see if I too could get completely wrapped like a finely made quilt in the A Mighty Wind soundtrack.

And it happened.

I could see Mitch and Mickey engrossed in their telling tale of "The Ballad Of Bobby And June", the New Main Street Singers laughing it up in their rendition of "Never Did No Wanderin'" and feel and see the somberness of the Folksmen as they belted out "Skeletons Of Quinto". For once in my fleeting music listenting life, I felt the music and it was an incredible experience.

The only real time I find myself fully immersed in something, it's usually in the form of a novel. The novel to me had a much stronger affect of immersion than film and television. Stephen King can make me envision Castle Discordia. Jonathan Safran Foer could focus my attention to the lively imaginary so alive in his works.

The idea of creating this virtual reality world where we could completely hide ourselves in it, is an interesting idea. Imagine being able to feel as though one is walking on the moon without paying a bucketload of money? Or to instantly transport yourself to a field upon field of sunflowers that stretch so tall that they look as though they touch the amazingly azure sky?

With improvements on HMDs and simulators and CAVEs - the world of virtual reality might just become a reality. And yet, in the end, it could become a disaster if it's mishandled. A video game with too real effects could perhaps warp the thought of someone to the point of them inflicting violence upon someone else. (But yet, if the individual - who is of a mature mind and could distinguish right from wrong - would want to take shooting practice upon an innocent person, then perhaps they shouldn't be near any violent videogames. Or anyone for that matter.) It's hard to judge the dangers of a product and it's effect on different individuals. Hopefully when virtual reality reaches its ultimate greatness, we could all experience it to it's greatest effect.

01. How does Wooley define cyberspace?

Woolley really doesn't define cyberspace. He instead uses examples of what cyberspace could be. For example, he uses Marshall McLuhan's 'global village' and uses several scientic comparisons to the human body to make the reader try to understand what cyberspace could be.

01b. What does he identify as its defining features?

Cyberspace acts like a global village and its ability to connect people even though they may live hundreds of miles away from each other. Like Mark Poster commented, "time and space no longer restrict the exchange of information."

01c. How does it function? What does it do? How is it different from the physical world?

The ability to connect hundreds of people is by way of the network. It's different from the physical world because unlike in 'reality', you can't see the person who you are communicating with. You can't view their facial structure and see their emotions with the comments you may make to them. The physical world constricts us from going into the virtual world.

02. What do Wooley's discussions of: the global village; genes and viruses; and the stock market have to do with cyberspace? What point does he make with each example? How do these three points work together to support his overall discussion of cyberspace?

With the global village, it connects everyone who is within a network to each other. As viruses affect the human body, it too can affect cyberspace. It's like the comparision with AIDS. If you aren't careful with what you share your hardware to, you can contract a disease. For cyberspace (and your computer), it's a virus. The stock market relies heavily on computers. When the prices fell, it "triggered systems programmed to sell shares that passed a praticular price threshold" (13). With this now in effect, it kept tumbling out of control to the point of having a helping hand in causing the stock market to crash in 1987.

03. After reading this essay: what do you know? How did you respond to what the article said? What do you not understand?

I now know that cyberspace is a really complicated environment to work through. I never before compared cyberspace to the human body, and with Woolley doing the comparisons, it made me realize that cyberspace and the human body have a lot in common - and that particular information shocked me.

04. What kind of writing will be suited to this place Wooley describes? How will it be different from writing in the material world?

I'm supposing the writing without the LOLs, and brbs and other acronyms. It's kinda like the writing of today's world without the shortcuts.

In the material world, we mostly don't use those particular acronyms when discussing our point of views. Unless we're writing to a friend, we have to keep a 'professional' mode of writing when presenting our works.


I think me brain may have exploded from Woolley.

While reading Benjamin Woolley's essay, "Cyberspace", I found that Woolley did his best to define the term cyberspace. He didn't exactly pinpoint what it stood for, but he used examples that in whole, gave us a picture and an idea what cyberspace could be and mean in 1992.

I believe the main point that Woolley hits on are the words by Marshall McLuhan who coined the describing of cyberspace as a global village. Cyberspace is one. We’re like this little society running about and interacting with one another and exchanging ideas and stories. And in this little village, we could basically live 90% of our life in it if we choose to. We could order books with one simple click of the mouse. Join a company that’ll ship movies to us. Download all the music to your heart (and wallet's) content. We could even have our food delivered to us (and I’m not only talking about take-out or Pizza Hut). This little global village is one little busy little thing, but it does something else that, to me, is probably one of the most important functions. It connects us. We could extend pass our borders and achieve conversations with those who live in countries we only viewed on maps or saw in programs or films. To talk to those and see how growing and maturing in their homeland differs from and are similar to our own lives. And maybe you don’t even have to go outside your country borders, but your own state. This global village has made it so much easier to communicate with others that may be a minute away or twenty hours away. And as Mark Poster said, "time and space no longer restrict the exchange of information" (p. 6). Indeed, it has.

I found that the in-class discussion expanded upon the science/computer comparison much better than the original text. I have to admit that once Woolley slipped into the discussion of science, I couldn’t completely grasp what he was trying to achieve by bringing forth such a topic. By listening to the class discussion take apart that and really drill upon the computer/human comparison, I finally felt like I fully understood. The talks and the essay made me truly see that humans and computers aren’t that much different. For example, how each of the viruses (AIDS for humans and computer viruses for – well, computers, lol) come to and how they spread. Another example Woolley used was when Wes Thomas stated that "he had unleashed the world’s first media virus" (p. 9) that would take effect on the 13th of October. The media flung the story so far and wide that mostly everyone was horrified of this so-called ‘media virus’ that didn’t even cause much damage. We could use this example also for whenever a new disease pops up in civilization and the media makes a tremendous deal over it when in fact, it's a disease that mostly no one would contract or isn't as dangerouos as once reported.

But for the most part, the in-class online discussion brought things to home base. It felt different talking about Woolley and how we each differently viewed what he thought of cyberspace. Even though in the end we discovered our own definition of what cyberspace could mean, it was relaxing to discuss what we thought in our own way. And maybe that was so because most of us are currently working with anonymous masks (well, at least for today). The atmosphere felt more relaxed to work in because we, for the most part, didn’t know who exactly we were talking to. I feel as though ideas could be expressed much more freely that way and it felt that way in the particular chat room I was in. After ideas were floated around, we determined that Woolley meant cyberspace to be a virtual civilization with its own rules, community, and natural order. By reviewing and rereading certain parts of Woolley’s "Cyberspace", this appears to be true.