The act of entering cyberspace was, along with the entering of outer space, one of the most profound experiences of the twentieth century. In 1969, humans landed first ‘on’ the moon (July), and then ‘in’ cyberspace (September) with the connection of the first two nodes of the internet. Today the mountains of the Moon remain neglected and unexplored, but cyberspace has evolved into a deeply familiar habitat whose geography has been shaped by those who built and used it. This talk explores the evolution of the landscape of cyberspace from its creation as an unpopulated wilderness through its exploration, colonisation, cultivation, settlement and growth, and offers some predictions for the future of this most exotic place. Sue Thomas is Professor of New Media at the Institute of Creative Technologies in the Faculty of Art, Design and Humanities. She has written several books including the novel 'Correspondence', short-listed for the 1992 Arthur C Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, and most recently the 2004 non-fiction cyberspace travelogue 'Hello World: travels in virtuality'. She has written about computers and the internet since the 1980s and is now working on 'Nature and Cyberspace: Stories, Memes and Metaphors', a study of the relationships between cyberspace and the natural world, forthcoming with Bloomsbury Academic. She co-directs the influential Transliteracy Research Group and the DMU Transdisciplinary Group, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. www.technobiophilia.com

1. The Future of Cyberspace www.technobiophilia.com
@suethomas
Professor Sue Thomas
Professorial Lecture, De Montfort University, 26 April 2012
#technobiophilia

3. What is this place?

4. Electricity
“Is it a fact -- or have I
dreamt it -- that, by
means of electricity, the
world of matter has
become a great nerve,
vibrating thousands of
miles in a breathless
point of time?”
(Nathaniel Hawthorne,The House
of Seven Gables. 1851)

5. The Domain of Cyberspace
Internet of Things
1999
Materiality
World Wide Web
1984
Software
Arpanet/Internet
1969
Hardware

6. The Internet of Things

7. Ninja block

8. Going organic

10. lo

11. Biophilia
“The innate tendency
to focus on life and
lifelike processes’
Edward O Wilson
1984

12. Cyberspace
• A consensual
hallucination...
• Unthinkable
complexity. Lines of
light ranged in the
nonspace of the mind,
clusters and
constellations of data.
Like city lights,
receding... Gibson 1984

14. Terrain

15. Frontier
“Your legal concepts of
property, expression,
identity, movement,
and context do not
apply to us. They are
all based on matter,
and there is no matter
here.” Barlow 1996

16. Farming
“Topsoil grows at a rate
of an inch every 100
years. You can grow
fabulous plants
quickly in that soil, but
the soil itself is a
product of slow time.”
O’Reilly 2000

17. Bugs
“the wolf spider is active
at night and catches its
prey by pursuit rather
than by creating a web
and waiting. The Lycos
search engine emulates
this by skipping from
server to server
gathering documents
as it goes.”

18. The Stories
• Creation, Birth, Parenthood
• Wilderness, Frontier, Camping, Navigation
• Physicality, Flora, Fauna, Body
• Settlements, Farms, Gardens, Tools
• Mind, Spirituality, Buddhism, Shamanism

19. But what does it mean?

20. Biophilia
“The innate tendency
to focus on life and
lifelike processes’
Edward O Wilson
1984

21. Bjork
Biophilia ‘app album’
Bjork, 2011
Voiceover, Sir David
Attenborough

22. Biophilia Research
Experimental Psychology (Kaplans)
Social Ecology (Kellert)
Behavioural Science (Ulrich)
Biology (Wilson)
Zoology (Orians)

23. How biophilia soothes us

24. Directed Attention
• Without directed attention you may be
rash, uncooperative and less competent
• But too much directed attention leads to
DAF – Directed Attention Fatigue.
Symptoms include aggression,
intolerance, and insensitivity to social
cues. Such people have also been found
to be less likely to help someone in need.

25. Resting Directed Attention
• “Increasing specialisation has meant that
each of us spends longer hours pursuing a
single activity, as opposed to the variety of
tasks pursued by our ancestors. Such
persistence requires discipline, which
depends heavily on directed attention.”
• The solution is to find ways to rest your
directed attention with the use of
restorative settings

26. Nearby Nature
promises a continuation of the world beyond what is
immediately perceived

27. Nearby Nature Screensavers?

28. Being Away
in which the setting is physically or conceptually different
from one’s usual environment

29. Soft Fascination
A setting which evokes mental processes which engage
attention effortlessly but still leave room for reflection

30. Drifting in the stream

31. Interval Shifts

32. So where are we?
• We (unconsciously) brought nature into
cyberspace as it evolved
• The reason may lie in biophilia
• Biophilia seems to influence the way we
inhabit cyberspace. It makes us feel more
comfortable.
• In a technological environment, this could
be reshaped as technobiophilia

33. Technobiophilia (2013)
The innate tendency to
focus on life and
lifelike processes as
they appear in
technology

34. So what lies ahead?

35. Bionanoprotonics?
Digital devices from
bacteria & DNA Transistors from protons

36. The Singularity?
“I set the date for the
Singularity - representing a
profound and disruptive
transformation in human
capability - as 2045.
Technical progress will be
so fast that unenhanced
human intelligence will be
unable to follow it Kurzweil
2005

37. Gaia?
• It may be that one role
we play is as the senses
and nervous system for
Gaia.
• The earth is more than
just a home, it's a living
system and we are part of
it.
James Lovelock

38. Hylozoic Architecture

39. The Future of Cyberspace www.technobiophilia.com
@suethomas
Professor Sue Thomas
Professorial Lecture, De Montfort University, 26 April 2012
#technobiophilia

40. Links from the talk
• The Internet of Things IBM http://youtu.be/sfEbMV295Kk
• Ninja Blocks http://ninjablocks.com/
• Biophilia, Bjork, promo video http://youtu.be/o8AELvVUFLw iPhone
app: http://bitly.com/biophiliaapp
• Net Smart, 2012, Rheingold, H. http://rheingold.com/netsmart/ Book:
http://amzn.to/JvxufB
• Scientists create computing building blocks from bacteria and DNA,
Imperial College News Release, 18 Oct 2011 http://bit.ly/JvxH2e
• Breakthrough: proton-based chips that communicate directly with
living things, Angelica, A., Kurzweil Blog, 21 Sept 2011
http://bit.ly/JvxOuJ
• Hylozoic Ground at the Venice Biennale 2010, Philip Beesley
http://youtu.be/v86B9Nz_LVU

41. Sample Biophilia Bibliography
I’ve found the following helpful in beginning to understand biophilia:
• Kaplan, R., & Kaplan, S. (1989). The Experience of Nature. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
• Kellert, S. R., Heerwagen, J. H., & Mador, M. L. (2008). Biophilic Design.
Hoboken: John Wiley.
• Kellert, S. R., & Wilson, E. O. (1993). The Biophilia Hypothesis. Washington
DC: Island Press.
• Orians, G. (1986). An ecological and evolutionary approach to landscape
aesthetics. In E. Penning-Rowsell, & D. Lowenthal, Landscape meanings
and values (pp. 3-22). London: Allen & Unwin.
• Ullrich, R. (1984). View through a window may influence recovery from
surgery. Science 27 April Vol. 224 no. 4647 , 420-421.
• Wilson, E. O. (1984). Biophilia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press