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Theories of Cybersociety 49
This capacity enables also the possibility of sophisticated reciprocity
in a way which displaces modes of reciprocity in face-to-face, institution-
ally extended (where a third person becomes an agent of reciprocity) and
electronically extended relations. In making possible more abstract modes
of interchange than these other modes, digital reciprocity engenders the
paradoxical quality of returning to the historically more unmediated of
these modes – the face-to-face as its ideal model – whilst materially annulling
this mode as a cultural ground (see the discussion of ‘re-tribalization’ in
7
the work of McLuhan below). The distinctive features of optical fibre,
which underpins this capacity, are advertised in its potential for com-
puter, voice, graphics and video services, a more extensive host of media
which can guarantee more ‘convincing’ high-fidelity realism to the user.
Such complexity had never been available to analogue forms of electrical
transmission, in a way which could be connected up in instantaneous,
high-speed and multi-data networking. The instantaneousness of the
reciprocity alone is one specific feature which makes possible the metaphori-
cal reconstruction of intersubjective realism – hence the tendency to
conflate ‘cyberspace’ with ‘virtual’ culture.
The production of what are essentially broadband kinds of interactive
environments is qualitatively different from the networks of interchange
based on the electric current alone. This is so because the time-worlds and
space-worlds – the electronically reified environments – that optical fibre
enables are more than merely metaphorical extensions of intersubjective
relations but have the potential to replace and redefine the complexity of
communication systems. Digitally platformed network communication
cannot, like ‘the media’ (remediated or otherwise) that we explored in the
previous chapter, be conceived as a continuation of a system of speech by
other means or even a pretence of the same, in the sense that it enables
constitutively new kinds of interaction that are arguably historically
unique. In particular, the digital nature of this communication places it
beyond the function of extension which analogue technologies are able to
serve (see a longer discussion of this below).
Electrical-analogue time-worlds have never been adequate for the
construction of intersubjective simulation systems. It is only by appropri-
ating the quality of the speed of light, combined with the capacity to convey com-
plexity, that so-called ‘real-time’ and near-instantaneous reciprocity are
made possible in extended form. 8
These kinds of technical capacities are also, it is said, remaking the
form and content of technologies traditionally associated with broadcast,
like television. For example, Sherry Turkle (1995) argues that in the ‘age of
the Internet’, television genres have become much more hyperactive in
ways which resemble the random travelling which occurs in cyberspace:
‘quick cuts, rapid transitions, changing camera angles, all heighten stimu-
lation through editing’ (238), a hyperactive style epitomized by MTV –
9
television’s answer to multi-media. This change in tolerance towards a