Answer:
ESSAYS
CYBERSPACE AS/AND SPACE
Julie E. Cohen
The appropriate role of place and space-based metaphors for the In ternet and its constituent nodes and networks is hotly contested. This Essay seeks to provoke critical reflection on the implications of place and space based theories of cyberspace for the ongoing production of networked space more generally. It argues, first, that adherents of the "cyberspace" metaphor have been insufficiently sensitive to the ways in which theories of cyberspace as space themselves function as acts of social construction. Specifically, the leading theories all have deployed the metaphoric construct of cyberspace to situate cyberspace, explicitly or implicitly, as separate space. This denies all of the ways in which cyberspace operates as both extension and evolution of everyday spatial practice. Next, it argues that critics of the "cyberspace" met aphor have confused two senses of space and two senses of metaphor. The cyberspace metaphor does not refer to abstract, Cartesian space, but instead expresses an experienced spatiality mediated by embodied human cognition. Cyberspace in this sense is relative, mutable, and constituted via the interac tions among practice, conceptualization, and representation. The insights drawn from this exercise suggest a very different way of understanding both the spatiality of cyberspace and its architectural and regulatory challenges. In particular, they suggest closer attention to three ongoing shifts: the emer gence of a new sense of social space, which I call networked space; the inter penetration of embodied, formerly bounded space by networked space; and the ways in which these developments alter, instantiate, and disrupt geographies of power.
INTRODUCTION
The appropriate role of metaphor in cyberlaw, and particularly of place and space-based metaphors for the Internet and its constituent nodes and networks, is hotly contested. The "cyberspace" metaphor, which originated in science fiction, first migrated into legal discourse via the work of academic commentators who advanced unabashedly excep tionalist arguments about the nature and appropriate legal treatment of
* Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center. Internet: [email protected]. edu. Thanks to Ann Bartow, Barton Beebe, Dan Burk, Jean Camp, Rick Camell, Kevin Collins, Ken Farrall, Michael Froomkin, Oscar Gandy, Jerry Kang, Sonia Katyal, Orin Kerr, Michael Madison, David McGowan, Naomi Mezey, Martha Minow, John Mikhail, Deirdre Mulligan, Tom Nachbar, Frank Pasquale, David Post, Matt Ratto, Saskia Sassen, Paul Schwartz, Rebecca Tushnet, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Molly van Houweling, Phil Weiser, Tim Zick, participants in the 2004 Penn-Temple-Wharton Colloquium and the 2005 Berkman Cybercamp, and participants in faculty workshops at Fordham Law School and Georgetown University Law Center for their helpful comments on earlier drafts, and to Robert Dowers and Matthew Windsor for research
