Reflections on Cyber_Reader Word Cloud

I’m especially curious about the arrangement of this word cloud because of the sheer number of articles that Cyber_Reader covers; rather than grouping texts thematically, the book races through some 34 articles, most edited down to a small handful of pages, and similarly races chronologically through most of the twentieth century. Generally speaking, I’m not surprised by the big words in play: artificial and human, body and machine, etc. Much of the book is devoted to exploring and deconstructing these binary systems. “Cyberspace” and “space” are two more big ones, and a lot of this emphasis follows from Gibson’s work, as does a good deal of other material on cyberspace/cybercultures.

Given Spiller’s own disciplinary orientation in (digital) architecture, I expected “architecture” to be more prominent in the cloud. But part of this architectural emphasis is also contained in terms like “space” and “environment.” What’s also interesting is the comparative smallness of “identity.” There’s a pretty noticeable shift in the book in that the later writings start to address identity more explicitly, whereas the early articles from writers like Babbage are more concerned with articulating things like machine operations and less concerned with individual human subjectivity. My theory is that identity starts to pick up steam through the course of the book, but the lack of early emphasis relegates it to a smaller role in the cloud.

The rhizome has also become a prominent theme in my readings, and the cloud extends that idea with “replication” and “multiplicity.” The spin that this particular book applies, though, seems to be one of anxiety: anxiety over the potentially infinite replication of objects through nanotechnology, for instance, as overwhelming and ultimately destructive. The numerous arguments about the multiplicity of identities also confront the same problems of desire, fluidity, and anxiety, as we consider how to locate distributed selves and distributed performances in cyberspace.