Mark Stefik. Internet Dreams: Archetypes, Myths, and Metaphors. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996. xxiv + 412 pp. Bibliography and index. $30.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-262-19373-6; $15.00 (paper), ISBN 0-262-69202-3.
Book review by Tatiana Shabelnik
In Internet Dreams: Archetypes, Myths and Metaphors Mark Stefik collects and comments on magazine and journal articles, conference presentations, original essays, selected technical reports, and other writings on about the Internet and what it means for our future. Stefik, a principal scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, uses four metaphors - digital library, electronic mail, electronic marketplace, and digital world -- to explain the potential of the Net, and shows how these metaphors are connected to ancient myth and archetypes. "Why should one care about metaphors or archetypes or myth," asks Vinton Cerf in foreword to Internet Dreams. Stefikís response is that "the metaphors we use constantly in our everyday language profoundly influence what we do, because they shape our understanding--when we change the metaphors ...we change how we think about things. (xvi) The future of the Internet depends on how we ëdreamí about the Internet. Stefik says that dreams "tap into metaphors we all use to understand our life experiences and convey deep and important messages about where we are going and what we are becoming." (390)
In his book, Stefik criticizes the information superhighway metaphor. He says that "highway metaphors are useful for thinking about connectivity, speed, communications charges, and infrastructure." (xix). Inspite of the popularity of this metaphor, it "carries with it misleading meanings associated with road." (xix). According to Stefik, that the "information highway" metaphor can describe the flow of information, but can not be applied to direct people in how to use the information resources. As an alternative, Stefik suggests other metaphors that would guide the Internetís future:
These metaphors correspond to four "archetypes that have long guided our technological visions and currently figure in our thinking about the future shape of the Internet": keeper of knowledge or conservator (the Digital Library), communicator (Electronic Mail), the trader (Electronic Marketplace), and the adventurer (Digital World). To be more specific, Stefik introduces us to different variations of archetypes. Variations of the archetypal keeper of knowledge include "the keeper of ancient wisdom, the wise old one, the teller of stories in oral traditions, the curator of a museum, the scholar, and the librarian." The variations on communicator archetype are called: a networker, a matchmaker, the whistle blower ("someone who speaks out, calling public attention to a wrong." (xxii). The trader archetype is related to the warrior, farmer, hunter, gather, merchant, the sea trader, the importer, the sales person, the business executive, and the bargain hunter archetypes. "Variations on the adventurer archetypes are the explorer, the ranger, the pathfinder, the mountain man, and the undersea treasure hunter." (xxiii) Stefik emphasizes that "these archetypes with their deep and ancient roots in many cultures, represent what we see in others, but they are also parts of ourselves. This shared experience of cultural archetypes is part of what makes us what we are. Our goal in bringing them to mind is to enliven our imagination, so that we make choices about the information infrastructure we draw on all the richness of the people we are." (xxiii)
Mark Stefik covers each of the metaphors in one section of the book. As a librarian, I find his section on digital libraries the strongest and most informative one. Stefik begins with a description of the digital library metaphor. He notes that "the deep structure of the digital library metaphor lies in our assumptions about libraries and how they work in our lives." He also points out that in order to "use the digital library metaphor to describe and understand the emerging national information infrastructure, we need to distinguish between what is fundamental about libraries and what is changing." He states that the Internet can be more than a regular library. Stefik draws an interesting distinction between traditional and digital libraries. He says that "in the traditional library context, writers write books. In a digital library, many different kinds of "writers" can record digital works. Thus "writings" can include not only text and illustrations, but also music, animations, digital movies, video games, and computer software." (8) The diversity of these materials affects the issues of literacy. Digital literacy is "an underlying assumptions about digital libraries." According to Stefik, the idea of the library itself (traditional library) comes from ancient times. The first mentioning of the idea of digital library dates back to 1945. In the article "As We May Think" Vannevar Bush argues that we need to reinvent the library. This article introduces us to the memex, "a desk-sized piece of furniture [which allows ] annotate documents and connect one idea to another across documents. In Bushís library you can write in the books, leave a trail of interesting places in the books without defacing them, and share annotated documents among colleagues -- perhaps creating new forms of encyclopedias. It is, in effect, a library of hypertext. " (20-21). In his comments on Bushís article, Stefik indicates that "Bushís imagined trails can now be realized by using the ordinary links of hypertext. (21).
Stefik sees the core values and archetypes of the digital library metaphor in cultural preservation. Talking about digital libraries, Stefik refers to the myth of Keeper of Knowledge -- Prometheus and other fire bringers. Knowledge (fire) "is at first secret and is either discovered by a human being or stolen from the gods. As knowledge had to be kept safe for the people, early societies preserved it in their rituals and oral traditions, memorizing the myths and stories and passing them along from generation to generation." (4) Preservation of knowledge is one of the oldest functions of the library. Although some of the essays in Internet Dreams defend libraries as physical (not virtual) places, Stefik emphasizes electronic organization and dissemination of knowledge. In his Epilogue (390) he says that "computers and networks can greatly augment the efforts of traditional libraries to preserve human knowledge. They can help libraries realize universal access, so that anyone can get any digital works at any time from anywhere. Networks can also diminish the importance of physical separation and, with digital property rights, let libraries loan out digital works and have them returned automatically." (390-391) Stefik points out that in order to implement these functions, the library needs support from the information infrastructure. The current bandwidth in the National Information Infrastructure (NII) may not be sufficient to support some of these digital worlds.
The next section of Stefik's book deals with electronic mail, how it is used today and how these uses affect people and their organizations. It also describes the archetype of the communicator. I did not find this collection of excerpts as informative or new in content as the previous one. Stefik starts with the communicator archetypes -- Greek mythologyís Hermes, and his Roman mythological counterpart Mercury. According to Stefik, Hermes and Mercury are often associated with e-mail and communication. The electronic mail metaphor, according to Stefik, can help people understand why "e-mail seems to break down our assumptions about regular mail." (114) E-mail not only increases the speed of communication but also serves as a social place. Through e-mail people engage in common interests, form groups over vast distances into virtual communities, chat, gossip, etc. According to Stefik, "the electronic mail metaphor is not so much a guide to what the communication infrastructure could be like as an example of what computer networks are already like." (120)
The third section of the book - The Electronic Marketplace Metaphor: Selling Goods and Services on the I-Way - deals with the electronic marketplace and its importance to today's economy. Stefik tells us that the articles in this section "describe some of the steps being taken to develop commerce on the network. The first article, an excerpt from the home page of CommerceNet, outlines its goals in the form of a scenario. The next article discusses changes in the structure of business organizations that occur as they decentralize and become internally market-oriented by using an information infrastructure. The third article chronicles the firsthand experiences of an on-line entrepreneur trying to sell books on the Internet. The last article describes an approach to protecting copyrighted digital property in a way that could remove some of the key barriers to on-line commerce." (185). Stefik selected the electronic marketplace metaphor to show how it fits with the human "hunter-trickster" archetype. With the development of marketplace on the Internet, Stefik indicates a shift in the very nature of business. Older businesses (hierarchical business organizations) are better represented by the "warrior' archetypes and "tend to resemble patriarchal organization" (179), while newer businesses (such as virtual corporations in which speed and adaptability are very vital to success) have qualities that are closer to the trickster" archetype. Stefik says that "old archetypes never disappear completely, although their relevance waxes or wanes with social conditions." (178)
I should mention that this section of the book is somewhat stronger than the e-mail one. I particularly liked Stefik's article "Letting Loose the Light: Igniting Commerce in Electronic Publication." This article "draws on those stories, on our understanding of the marketplace and on the history of intellectual property during the French Revolution." (253) In his article Stefik clarifies that "Letting loose the light refers to spreading knowledge in the world, typically in written form." (220) Stefik comments on the issue of digital copyright, and proposes a trusted system model. He says that "there appears to be a clear, inherent conflict between representing works digitally and honoring the commercial and intellectual property interests of creators and publishers. -- The seeming conflict between digital publishing and commerce is merely a consequence of the way computer system has been designed to date." (221) Stefik's "trusted system" would have only three access methods: view, print, and copy. "A trusted system would always record the fee whenever the work is copied." (226) Thus the advantage of such system is that author gets the payment.
The final section "The Digital Worlds Metaphor: The I-Way As a Gateway to Experience" is about digital worlds and digital experiences "ranging from total immersion in virtual reality for games to digital augmentation of the business world with GroupWare." (394) This section includes articles on MUDs, MOOs, rape in cyberspace, Colab project ("one of several projects studying collaboration and supporting technology at Xerox PARC" (329)) and other. People can have new identities which can break down communication barriers found in the real world, as shown in the articles on "mudding." In this section we learn about collaborations formed for research purposes where people can use a virtual library and laboratory to make their project time and cost effective.
Mark Stefik concludes that we can use metaphors to inspire our thinking about Internet. As he points out, the information infrastructure we choose also is a choice of which we want to be as a society. Therefore, we need to make sure to include all properties of the four metaphors discussed (addressability, interactivity, low transmission cost, means of managing digital property) in our infrastructure, if we want information technology to fulfill our dreams of a better future. In Mark Stefik's words, "In shaping what the Information Infrastructure will become, we are also choosing what we want to be" (p. xxiv).
Internet Dreams would be a good textbook for courses dealing with the sociology of the Internet. Some articles have historical and cultural depth. This book also would fit well on a reading list for one of the Internet courses in School of Library and Information Science. I should mention, in the library where I borrowed this book (LSU), is classified under the subject - Library Science (according to the Library of Congress (LC) Classification System). Internet Dreams would make a good choice for graduate students and faculty concerned with technologies, and its impact on social change.