With increasing frequency, cultural representations of Internet call on us to conceive of computer mediated communication in terms of space: more precisely, "cyberspace." This spatiality writes place and distance onto the medium, creating, as it were, a topography that becomes more salient to the user than the underlying configuration of technology. Topography serves as a highly appropriate word within a discussion of how these metaphors "write" space. As J. Hillis Miller uses the term, topographies are performative speech acts that simultaneously map and create a territory (4-5). With Internet, this performative function is even more marked, since no reassuring "ground" rests beneath the writing of place. Miller goes on to note that:
That is not to say that only one virtual topography exists. Rather, we see in government documents, in the media, in scholarly journals, and in popular reports signs of cyberspaces: multiple and competing spatial figurations. Two metaphors, I would argue, have received considerable amount of currency and describe two very different topographies, found even in the banal expressions "Surf the 'Net" and "Cruise the Information Superhighway." These terms reveal two very different figurations of virtual topography: one that is fluid, plane-oriented, and unbounded; the other that is linear, point-oriented, and Cartesian.1 These two figurations of space correspond to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's description of smooth and striated space. The highway metaphor calls to mind a system that facilitates and regulates the flow of traffic from destination to destination. In other words, it striates space by setting up a system where "lines and trajectories tend to be subordinated to points: one goes from one point to another" (Deleuze and Guattari 478). In "surfing" smooth space, however, "the points are subordinated to the trajectory" (Deleuze and Guattari 478). According to Deleuze and Guattari:
On Internet, however, these metaphors do not just organize space; they create a space, or more accurately, they substantiate cyberspace as a virtual topography. A striated "highway" topography determines cyberspace as a system of regulated connections between determined points on dedicated lines; conversely, a smooth "plane" topography "writes" a cyberspace of fluid transit and continual passage. The 1995 Microsoft "Where Do You Want to Go Today" campaign, for example, makes use of both topographies, creating two very different images of "cyberspace." In a Microsoft Office and Mail commercial, a female executive in mid-flight calls upon the services of people in Spokane, Washington, who work with her once she arrives in Spain. "Jane on the plane" cruises from site to site via global information networks in the same way that her plane travels from point A to point B. In contrast, the Microsoft Encarta commercial shows a man researching hang-gliding who soon finds himself gathering information on birds and other "wingéd things," then drifting off on the winds of a monsoon to India, and finally to the Himalayas. Both commercials ask the viewer to conceive of a virtual topography by presenting an image of navigation (asking, "Where do you want to go today?" at the end of the spot), but the space that the Encarta user traverses is significantly different from the space portrayed in the Office ad. The Encarta commercial writes a space that is planar and fluid, whereas in the Office commercial, cyberspace is a highway of sorts connecting terminal points in a simulated world.
In their general discussion of smooth and striated space, Deleuze and Guattari associate these two spatial arrangements with two systems: one that is State-oriented and static, the other nomadic and fluid. Striation allows for state functioning by creating what Michael Menser calls a "gravitational space," which sets up the state as "the central organizational organism" or regulatory body (298). That does not mean that striation attempts to shut down the medium; rather, it allocates and organizes functionalities into productive modes. Striated cyberspace sets out to function as a simulated world that overcomes real space by providing more direct (point to point) contact and therefore greater efficiency. This image forms the core assumption of the White House's National Information Infrastructure (NII) "Agenda For Action," which presents the NII (and for now, Internet) as a surrogate space that replaces the real world by overcoming the real world's limits. In cyberspace "the best schools, teachers, and courses [are] available without regard to geography, distances, resources, or disability. . . .The vast resources of art, literature, and science [are] available everywhere" ("Agenda"). But these resources can only become "available everywhere" once "everywhere" is connected through this striated topography of point-to-point contact. Furthermore, in a striated space, if you are not connected, you are nowhere. By this gravitational principle, then, terminal points can only "signify" once they are allocated to definite positions within a given system.
As Deleuze and Guattari note, striated spaces of grids, contact, and control are a function of all States, not merely overtly totalitarian structures. In fact, one might argue that much of the desire for a striated virtual topography has its origins in the Enlightenment desire to define natural, political, and ethical laws that would render "the world" comprehensible and controllable. Following this utopian telos brings us, in Baudrillard's words, to a hyperreal moment beyond its own ends: when the ideal model for the world becomes the world itself (3-4). Striated cyberspace promises to outdo the real world by freeing action from the limit(ation)s of real space. Discussions of Internet that assume a striated topography see the medium as not only providing for more efficient commerce, but also "develop[ing] new 'electronic communities' [for sharing] knowledge and experience that can improve the way that [citizens] learn, work, play, and participate in the American Democracy" ("Agenda"). Other utopian conceptions of cyberspace make use of the metaphor of the city or "electronic agorae": points of community stockpile or "collective goods," with an implicit or explicit call for citizenship in a collective (state) body (Rheingold 13). At a further extreme, Internet-as-cyberspace provides the site for virtual realities that can create "societies more decent and free than those mapped onto dirt and concrete and capital" (Dibbell 37). Implicit in each description of a utopic cyberspace is a topography of "lines and trajectories. . .subordinated to points" (Deleuze and Guattari 478). Cyberspace figures as a multitude of interconnected "sites"; thus, the "highway," however poor a metaphor it may be for the technical functioning of Internet communication, accurately captures the topography of user interface: a striated space in which lines connect terminal points.
In representations of smooth cyberspace, however, as in the Encarta ad, "lines of flight" replace points of contact. For Deleuze and Guattari, smooth space sets up a nomadic system of movement (480). Lines become vectors, rather than units of measurement: "a direction and not a dimension or metric determination" (Deleuze and Guattari 478). As opposed to the gravitational space of a striated topography, a smooth topography provides a space of "deterritorialization" in which points "are strictly subordinated to the paths they determine. . . .Every point is a relay and exists only as a relay" (Deleuze and Guattari 380). The most frequent references to a smooth cyberspace concern hypertext applications like Encarta, or more significantly, the World Wide Web (WWW). As Netscape 2.0's ship-wheel logo implies, the smooth topography of the WWW more closely resembles the sea than the highway, giving users "infinite" degrees of freedom. Here we need to rethink "topography" as an opening of terrain to multiple passages, rather than as the mapping of a specific topos.2 Jay Bolter uses similar language to describe the topographic "writing space" of hypertext: "not the writing of a place, but rather the writing with places, spatially realized topics" (25). Instead of allocating virtual space, the WWW distributes and displaces it; it presents a "rhizomatic" 'Net-scape in which "webpages" serve as pointers rather than terminal points. This topography, of course, provides no more accurate a portrayal of the technical functioning of networked communication than striating metaphors, but at the level of user interface, "surfing" accurately depicts this process of distributing oneself across smooth cyberspace.
While "surfing" has been the predominant media image associated with smooth topography, in some circles, this image of a smooth cyberspace draws explicitly on the language of Deleuze and Guattari and the rhizome. As Douglas Stanley notes on the Deleuze-Guattari listserv: "Rhizome has become a kind of catchword in 'cyberspace': almost as if Gibson and McLuhan were a little old-hat and hipsters had to find other dinosaures" ("More").3 Likewise, Steve Shaviro quite explicitly claims:
Given the "distance" between these two spatial figurations, it should be no surprise that they often appear as opposing terms to one another. From "within" a State/striated topography, nomad/smooth space appears as a dangerous zone, in need of containment. References to smooth space within striated topographies refer to it as a wild "beyond," or as a frontier waiting for its settlers and pioneers. Services such as CompuServe and America Online, for example, provide Internet access beyond the confines of their closed, regulated domain, but present this "beyond" as an at-your-own-risk wilderness: that which lies outside of community. Much of the concern over pornography on Internet draws on similar language to associate "uncontrolled" and "unregulated" with "dangerous" and "obscene." Gary Bauer of the Family Research Council, for example, evoked images of a perilously "open" cyberspace when calling for legislation that would "eliminate 'cyberspace' as a safe haven for pornographers. . . .by criminalizing 'free' obscenity on the Internet" ("Senate"). Conversely, "within" smooth topographies, striation appears as a resistance to the "natural" openness of smooth space. Robert Adrian, for example, describes the "Information Superhighway" as a restrictive and regulatory construct laid on top of a more open and originative "cyberspace":
If these two competing topographies were simply conflicting figures of speech, then the problem between them would amount to nothing more than a matter of mixed metaphors. Quite the contrary however; as topographies, these descriptions of Internet create and reveal a spatiality, much in the way that topographies in general function as performative speech acts (Miller 4-5). By calling a virtual topography a performative speech act, I am distinguishing between, in Austin's phrase, "doing something rather than simply saying something" with words ("Performative" 235). Deleuze and Guattari carry this point further by describing thes performative (or "illocutionary") acts as "order-words": utteracnes that arrange and order (in both senses) the world (78). These acts are immanent and internal to the expression, yet they have a transformative power (Austin's "illocutionary force") on "bodies"--that which occupies space and time in the world. These acts are therefore "incorporeal transformations" in the sense that the acts are without bodies themselves, yet their transformation occurs on bodies in the world.4 In working through his definition of performative and illocutionary acts, Austin makes a point of emphasizing the importance of a context that will both acknowledge and provide reference for the "force" of an utterance.5 In a similar way, Deleuze and Guattari stress the context or "pragmatic implications" of these acts. They define this social aspect (the context that gives these order-words force) as a "collective assemblage of enunciation": "the set of all incorporeal transformations current in a given society and attributed to the bodies of that society" (80). These variable enunciations, given force by a pragmatic context, order and determine subjectivities and relations; it is thus always a matter of the "pragmatic implications" of these utterances, not merely their "signification" (83). In simplest language, then, these assemblages of enunciation are not merely "figures of speech"; they serve as expressions of possible (and variable) relations within a given pragmatic context.6
To transpose this vocabulary onto our discussion of Internet, then, would be to describe these two topographies as competing assemblages of enunciation within the shared context of computer mediated communication.7 Although these assemblages are variable, they tend to move from expressions of potential ("conditions of possibility") to "determinable relations," at which point the assemblage functions as a "regimes or signs" or a "semiotic machine" (Deleuze and Guattari 83). In terms of virtual topography, the more substantial the space, either smooth or striated, the more determined the sorts of relations that can occur within that space--and the more limited the conditions of possibility. A determined striated topography, then, is "efficient" in capturing smooth space and transforming it into a mode within its regime. For example, in order to maintain its State-oriented ARPANET, the Department of Defense had to find a means of allocating non-governmental communication (mostly discussions about science fiction and interactive fantasy games) within the function of its Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA); rather than shutting down communication, ARPANET administrators permitted (captured) this flow, seeing it as a mode within a larger system of productivity (Rheingold 179-180).France's Minitel system provides a similar example of how a striated topography orders space into determined relations. France's initial plan for "the world's largest infromation utlity" failed to the extent that the French citizens were farily unintersted in the information services offered by the governement (Rheingold 11). In fact, the popularity of the system in France only came about as a result of a "hack" to the system that allowed unauthorized user-to-user communication (Rhiengold 227-228). The State moved to capture this smooth flow by "legitimating" this feature on Minitel; usage surged, but again in unseen directions--Minitel became a popular forum for online sexual encoutners and electronic rendezvous. During this first nationwide swell in popularity, the Minitel system was overwhelmed by the volume of communications--at one point to the level of crashing the system (Rheingold 230). The system was failing not through over-restriction, but through the unregulated (smooth) flow of information that oculd not be brought into a determinable realtion in a striated system. Like the ARPA administrators, however, Minitel succeeded as a system when it learned how to allocate these communications under the function of messageries roses, just one sexual part in a larger, profitable, State-run body.8
While these "historic" examples provide a compelling account of State-based striation, perhaps the most common and clearest means by which a striated virtual topography functions as a "regime" is by setting up a determinable relation of interconnected sites. This allocation of space (architectural and otherwise) is what Michael Menser describes as the "organ-izing" principle of the State (295). This principle defines cyberspace as an interdependent whole (or body), while at the same time establishing individual sites as organs or terminal points. On Internet, these organs often appear as architectural units, or more generally, "virtual cities," in that points of entry and exit delimit their structure. For Virilio, as well as Deleuze and Guattari, the state system functions by "a transformation of the world into a city" (Deleuze and Guattari 212). Conversely, on Internet striation transforms the (virtual) city into a world. The city appears as "the striated space par excellence" to the extent that it functions as a definite/defined site (Deleuze and Guattari 481). William Mitchell's City of Bits, for example, returns repeatedly to the determined relation of "the city" as a metaphor for virtual allocative structures. A good portion of his book describes the various forms this new city can take--from simplistic cartological depictions of information sites (such as eWorld's online town hall, shopping plaza, and financial district) to speculations about complex "inhabitable" virtual realities in which physical movements effect the user's environment. Online, he argues, "the solvent of digital information decomposes traditional building types. . . .Then the residue of recombinant fragments yields up mutants" (47). This "recombinant architecture" promises to overcome real world (striated) spatial concerns of distance and access by creating virtual structures to replace them: structures, however, that depend upon allocation, containment, and geometric navigation. Although "inhabitation" in the virtual city "has less to do with parking your bones in architecturally defined space and more with connecting your nervous system to nearby electronic organs," striation and allocation still remain its condition of possibility (Mitchell 30). The allocative regime of the city, real or virtual, depends on this organ-ization of function into modes or discrete locations.
Striation, Deleuze and Guattari note, transforms territory into "land," which awaits allocation as property/proper place (440). Esther Dyson expresses a similar vision of Internet when describing cyberspace as real estate: "an intellectual, legal, artificial environment constructed on top of land (26). But when distributive principles replace allocative principles, "land" deterritorializes; the striated city space gives way to the smooth "field," where inside and outside no longer determine function. In place of the allocative architecture of the virtual city, one finds in smooth cyberspace interactions determined by distributive relations, such as in Lebbeus Woods's conception of freespaces: "a series of interior landscapes joined only by the electronic instrumentation of speed-of-light communications, in ever-changing interactions with one another and with a community of inhabitants created only through the vagaries of dialogue" (286). Woods's description of a network of people, machines, and real-world structures spills out beyond the computer screen. This cyberspace is truly "virtual" in the Deleuzean sense: an indeterminate "heterarchitecture" that changes with the participants who interact with the space:9
Woods and Novak on one hand, as well as Mitchell on the other, use architecture to discuss the conditions of possibility made actual by assemblages of enunciation. In their most determined forms, these assemblages express themselves through user interfaces, which do indeed perform the architectural function of creating (and thus revealing) an "environment." Hypertext applications like Encarta, for example, "reveal" a nomadic information space by providing an interface that allows users to "move" in a non-linear or multilinear fashion. Hypertext interfaces take part in an assemblage governed by the semiotic regime of "the network" or "docuverse": an expanding, altering realm of connected information (Landow 24). In a hypertext,
While hypertext applications like web browsers are capable of substantiating a smooth space in which each "web page" serves as a relay or passage, striating applications such as e-mail, ftp, and telnet create amd reveal a cyberspace of definite sites ands point-to-point contact. In each of these applications, an address serves as a destination or a resting place, not a relay; with ftp and telnet in particular, "arriving" is followed by logging "into" the site, calling to mind again Mitchell's notion of inhabitation in a virtual city. Unlike the rhizomatic struicture that Shaviro and others fins in the hypertextual unfolding of the WWW, these striating applications set up a virtula topography that is noticable organ-ized; more so, this space tends toward heirarchy (or "arborescence"). Online service "chatrooms" provide perhaps the most well-known example of thie heirarchical organization of space, in which discussion topics become discreet topoi.11 Again, this allocative organization of space tends toward the image of the walled-in city, with "rooms" serving as architectural units within a larger, regulated system.
Perhaps the current extreme of this sort of striating application are the "text-based virtual realities known as Multi-User Domains (MUDs) or MOOs (MUD, Object-Oriented). Like "chatrooms" on AOL and CompuServe, MOO "community" begins with a password-based logon: a passage through the cybercity gates, so to speak.12 But MOOs carry this medium a step further toward becoming an inhabitable world by encouraging users to "flesh out" this topography by providing written descriptions of themselves (or rather, their "player-object"), their rooms, and their various possessions. Furthermore, the application simulates space by asking users to interact with each other within explicit references to architectural entrances and exits as well as cartological "ways." In a MOO your presence expresses itself in terms of proximity to other players within this "virtual space." In fact, players literally inhabit rooms in the MOO; a player-object stays "inside" the MOO, waiting for its player/user to log on and "awaken" it. All actions occur within this closed, defined system of the MOO "as a whole" (a cybercity), and within the strictures of a hierarchical arrangement of permissions. While the notion of a "text-based virtual reality" may seem bizaare to many, in terms of organization of space, this application substantiates an allocative topography that is no different from the highly legible virtual world described in the White House's "Agenda for Action"; it enacts what Roland Barthes calls "the popular and age old image of the perfect intelligibility of reality" by creating a "model" world in which we can live our virtual lives (24).13 The goal of the application, then, is not to establish a nomadic flow of users and information; quite the opposite, this striating user interface aims at creating a stable, inhabitable world.
Cyberspace, then, reveals itself quite differently depending on whether one is "in" a MOO or "browsing" through websites. In both instances, user interfaces function as part of a regime of signs which, at the level of the user, determines cyberspace. In the same way that World Wide Web browsers attempt to "overflow" location and make individual pages "subordinated to the paths they determine," the gravitational space of the MOO determines a different sort of space, one in which "going" becomes far less important than "arriving" and coming to a rest (Deleuze and Guattari 380). This gravity captures singularities and turns them into modes or parts of the system's own organizing principle. Since the MOO must maintain its hierarchical structure of builder, programmer, and wizard in order to function, one must suspect the ways in which code-level hierarchies of similar applications will eventually undermine the most utopian dreams for egalitarian cyberspace. Although this image of inhabitable cyberspace provides all sorts of opportunities for exploring ontology, and in particular, the assumptions that lead to our understanding of body, presence, and community, the striating desire behind this topography often leads to erasure of these questions, not exploration. This desire for a duplicate world, or rather a more controllable, more "model" world, calls on its residents to legitimate community, make it legible, lawful and "defined," not challenge or destabilize its assumptions.
In the same way that the gravitational space of the MOO tends to reorganize disruption into its own system, one would expect to find in smooth space a tendency to encourage what Deleuze and Guattari describe as a process of deterritorialization. As George Landow notes, this hypertextual docuverse has no center of gravity; the center "exists only as a matter of evanescence" (70). Instead of atoms or organs, the experience of smooth space is one of "morphing": a motion through one point on to the next (Novak, "TransUrban"). Community, therefore, would resemble a nomadic band or pack, in contrast to organ-ized structures like family or citizenry (Deleuze and Guattari 33-36). Kathleen Burnett, for example, sees the current rise in academic online communication as the emergence of a "modest-but growing community of electronic scholars" ("Scholar's"). She locates this burgeoning "scholar's's rhizome" opposite traditional hierarchical academic structures, claiming that hierarchy is "antithetical to the milieu itself," and sees it as a heralding massive change in our understanding of authorship, collaboration, and interaction ("Scholar's"). In this regard, theorists like Shaviro are justified in contrasting the tree hierarchy of topic/topoi-based communities to the rhizomatic community of webpages, in which a proliferation of connections can lead to decentered communications, self-publishing, and the breakdown of textual hierarchy. Unlike striated community's call to legitimate itself, the smooth nomadic community defines itself by its fluidity and its metastable structure.
But as Deleuze and Guattari point out at the end of A Thousand Plateaus, "never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us" (500). Burnett's description of a "scholar's rhizome," along with numerous other visions of a liberatory cybernetic space that enacts "open" theory, provide in many ways an equally determinate regime of signs. In the same way that the semiotic machine of a striated topography must continually attempt to bring singularities into the gravitational pull of the State, smooth topographies must continually move to overflow all attempts to make the field "productive." A truly rhizomatic space cannot fall into heirarchical organizations of information such as, to use the "sholar's rhizome" as an example, peer reviewed journals. At its smoothest, then, one could not even talk of a "signal to noise" ratio of information, since nomadic deterritorialization would level any attempt to extract the "productive" as a mode from the general flow of signals from point to point. A determined smoothness, therefore, yields its own sort of "death sentence": an "absolute" flight either away from the real or toward annihilation (Deleuze and Guattari 110). While the gravitational space of a determined striated topography functions as a "black hole," a determined smooth topography presents its own inescapable space: a formless, blank wall upon which nothing can be written (Deleuze and Guattari 166-168).
In either topography, then, a problem emerges to the extent that cyberspace becomes determined as being one topography or the other. Instead, one finds these competing assemblages of enunciation creating and revealing mixed topographies.14 Any account of computer mediated communication that seriously engages the conception of "cyberspace," then, would have to come to terms with the mixing of these two topographies. This vision of computer mediated communication occurs in Hakim Bey's account of "the Net" and "the Web," in which piratic, nomadic smooth space constantly erupts from within the striated space of legitimated government and business activities, like Mandlebrot peninsulas "hidden within the map" (112). Likewise, the conditions of possibility determined by a smooth regime are not immune to striating forces. Martin Rosenberg, co-designer of the RHIZOME writing application, notes that even the apparently "smooth" multiple, nonlinear linkages of a hypertext cannot escape from the striating "geometic ideological construct" underlying its rhizomatic appearances (287). And as Alluquere Stone notes, even at its literary origins in Neuromancer, "cyberspace" involves this mixture between the "grid" of information set out in Cartesian space, and the "smoothing" nomadic effect of the hacker "cowboys" whom roam this space (Benedikt 104).15 Unlike descriptions of cyberspace that take part in determined smooth or striated regimes, each of these approaches foregrounds a crucial aspect in the discussion of virtual topographies: that is, the importance of examining the mixtures of these topographies and the passages that occur between these two limits.
The challenge in understanding virtual topographies, then, involves a recognition of the mixture of these two assemblages, as well as an awareness of the attempt of each to deny this mixture. Either determination of cyberspace as smooth or striated topography involves a system of overcoding and a homogenization of space as either "purely" nomadic or state oriented: what Shawn Wilbur called in one online discussion the "will to smooth or striate" ("Smooth"). He notes:
Perhaps, then, it would be more accurate to refer to Internet not as
cyberspace, but rather, as the pragmatic context for both enunciations
of cyberspace. Within this online context, one will find both productions
of space playing for their own substantiation. However, one would also
expect to find tendencies of each topography in the other: the smooth irrupting
in the striated, the striated capturing the smooth. No matter how "rhizomatic"
the WWW becomes, striated features will emerge to capture fields and make
them productive. Likewise, MOOs and online communities will constantly
experience the destabilizing emergence "pirate utopias" within their virtual
city walls. In navigating topographies in which striation determines an
organ-ized space, one would have to recognize the enunciation of this gravity
and search for that which provides an escape velocity from this closed
system. Likewise, in smooth topographies, one would expect to find a nomadic
regime at work, as well as an inescapable pull toward striation and production.
The attempt at a purity through either systematic approach to virtual topography
denies that cyberspace hovers between these two regimes. This mixing provides
crossings for both systems that keep cyberspace always "virtual," always
in the act of becoming: real, yet never completely determined.
3. The Deleuze-Guattari list is part of the Spoon Collective of theory-related discussion lists, housed at the University of Virginia. To subscribe, send an email message reading "subscribe deleuze-guattari" to majordomo@lists.village.virginia.edu.
4 . In A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), Brian Massumi quite simply defines this somewhat awkward term "incorporeal transformation" as an "event" or encounter in which "nothing touched you, yet you have been transformed" (28). This event is "enveloped" in language, but its "nondiscursive force" creates a felt change in the world (29-30).
5. For a more complete discussion of speech acts and "illocutionary force," see Austin's How to Do Things With Words (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1975), and in particular, Lecture IX, pp 109-120.
6. For further clarification of Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of performatives and incorporeal transformation, see "November 20, 1923--Postulates of Linguistics," 75-110. See also Massumi, "Force," 10-46.
7.Guattari in later writing has addressed how computer-mediated communication can "not merely convey representational contents, but also contribute to the fabrication of new assemblages of enunciation, individual and collective" (19). See "Regimes, Pathways, Subjects" (Incorporations, New York: Zone, 1992) for a discussion of machines, assemblages of enunciation, and the production of subjectivities.
8. For a complete history of Minitel, see Rhiengold's "Telematique and Messageries Roses" in The Virtual Community (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1993), 220-240.
9 . Although the computer industry uses "virtual" to mean "not real, but real enough," for Deleuze, following Bergson, "virtual" implies real potential, standing in opposition to the "actual," an act of determination. In this regard, the "virtual" is always real, but not yet actual. See Deleuze and Guattari, 94-99.
10. In a critique of Mitchell's City of Bits, Novak makes specific reference to Mitchell's tendency to envision a striated, closed architecture for cyberspace. He writes:
11 . Internet USENET groups function along similiar lines in that discussion "groups" form by way of heirarchical/topical branchings. As Allucquere Rosanne Stone notes, this "tree-structured conference" arrangement of shared writing space (what I would call a striated topography) served as the basis for the earliest online communities. See Benedikt, Cyberspace: First Steps (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992) 89.
12 . Many of these communities exist within the walls of standards and protocols. Violation of these standards can result in a form of "shunning" by the community, or worse: true ostracism, in which the player is removed from the database and ceases to exist. See, for example, Dibbell's "A Rape in Cyberspace," Village Voice 21 Dec. 1993: 36-42.
13. This striating image of cyberspace as a model or simulatory world occurs in the media, interestingly enough, both as a positive and a negative aspect of Internet. It provides ground for Microsoft's "Where do you want to go today?" campaign, but it also provides the context for Volkswagen's skeptical "Are you real-ly free" spots.
14 . Although the "regime of signs" denies this mixture, Deleuze and Guattari assert that neither smooth nor striated space exists as a stable entity. Instead, "smooth space is constantly being translated, traversed into a striated space; striated space is constantly being reversed, returned to a smooth space" (474).
15 . Recent online developments accentuate both the attempt to determine cyberspace as a given topography, as well as the mixed nature of these enunciations. Apple announced early in 1996 that it would close its online community, eWorld, and move it services to the WWW: an apparent victory for smooth space. During the same period, however, Netscape was releasing version 2.0 of its application, calling it a (striating) navigator and discouraging all references to it as a (nomadic) browser.
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