Kenneth Farrall Note: this document is a public draft and is continually revised. For the latest version be sure to view online copy at http://www.asc.upenn.edu/usr/kfarrall/7orders/7orders.html. This is a working, 7-order model of cyberspace I use to inform my own research into effects of electronic communications technologies such as the Internet and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) as well as my exploration of web graph sociology with Annenberg School Dean Michael X. Delli Carpini. The orders fit within conceptual, physical and logical hierarchies, feedback against one another, and are mutually interdependent. But they are made of different stuff, have different essences and operate under different constraints. The model is related to, but differs substantially from, other multi-order communication models including the OSI 7-layer model, Lawrence Lessig's four modes of government regulation (norms, market, law and architecture), and Jochai Benkler's three layers of information environments (physical infrastructure, logical infrastructure, content). Individual order names and their definitions are still evolving and may change dramatically over time. The diagram to the right is evolving as well. It does not currently illustrate the level of interaction and overlap between the orders. Third order binary data, for example, can be stored in electromagnetic (1st order) form on a physical (second order) disk. Applications such as the World Wide Web exist primarily in the code of 3rd order cyberspace but must ultimately include such physical aspects of the applications interface as the keyboard, mouse and computer monitor. The model emerges from the assumption that cyberspace is a fundamentally new social space with different laws and different social dynamics. The Internet is not simply another medium, but the first widely adopted instance of cyberspace. Earlier forms of electronic communications, such as the telegraph and the telephone, had no electronic medium of storage. The connecting of transmission, processing, and storage within a single medium, the Internet, enabled a place where digital objects across a wide range of abstractions and ontologies persist, interact and evolve. This model helps to make it clear that RFID and the Internet are both instances of cyberspace with different constraints. Both systems enable the storage, transmission and processing of digital objects within a persistent space. RFID applications have fewer limitations within the physical order than Internet applications, which usually require direct human manipulation of a small number of input devices. Instead, input can be generated via direct interaction between the electronic order (radio waves) and physical order objects. The result in such a shift in application interface constraints will be an explosion in the third order data space. As RFID technology begins to be implemented globally, human decisions regarding RFID and higher orders of cyberspace will create important path dependencies and will ultimately determine the nature of RFID-enabled society that evolves over the next several decades. 0. The Ideal Order The ideal order is perhaps the most fundamental and least understood of the seven orders. Ideal cyberspace can be understood, in part, as cyberspace without the constraining limitations of the higher orders. The physical order evolves toward, but never reach the kind of limitless data storage, infinite processing and bandwidth capacity inherent in the ideal order of cyberspace. The ideal order allows for objects or laws whose existence is non-local and transcends the necessity of specific physical instances (the laws of mathematics or the platonic solids, for example). Virtual objects stored in the higher orders of cyberspace have varying degrees of non-locality, but, because of their ultimate dependence on the physical and electronic orders, are never completely non-local. 1. The Electronic Order The emergence of cyberspace was foreshadowed, but not fully manifested, with the emergence of the telegraph and the telephone. For the first time, electricity was manipulated with physical apparatus to send and receive a limited range of human symbolic communication in real time from point to point across the globe. Numerous communication scholars including Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan and James Carey have noted that the use of electricity to mediate human communication collapses physical space. Yet the telegraph represents the linking of only two of the three primary orders of cyberspace. When a telegraph message was transmitted, the received message was printed on paper, a physical medium, leaving the message in the same material symbol space as the book. The electronic medium in this case merely enabled the transmitting, not the storage of the message. When the Internet emerged, it was the first communication technology to enable the persistent storage of the message in an electronic form that would remain accessible to the nodes of the communication system. 2. The Physical Order Prior to the emergence of cyberspace in the mid twentieth century, the physical order of communication comprised real-time-space communication and the physical storage of human cultural expression. Oral cultures lived in the moment and in their local space. Human symbolic interaction emerged out of real-time interaction bound by location. A dance. A song. (See Goody, 1968; Ong, 1982.) Humanity quickly learned to extend social communication in time and space via the "storing" of their symbolic expressions in physical media. Examples of physically stored cultural expression and representation include a cave painting, a sculpture, a photograph, a scroll, a map on a napkin or a book. The ultimate medium for all these forms of expression was matter, physical atoms. As human culture evolved over time, the grand, dynamic multidimensional exchange of ideas and information via material symbolic expressions such as the newspaper, the letter, the sculpture, and the skyscraper was ultimately constrained by the laws of physical matter. The physical order of cyberspace includes the hardware, copper wires, radio transmitters and other physical objects that mediate electronic communication. These physical order objects are ultimately subject to the same limitations as the physical order cultural objects, but in their interaction with the electronic order they enable a space of cultural expression and interaction which transcends those limits. 3. The Binary Data Space Order Cyberspace does not merely collapse space, it creates a bifurcation in social space -- specifically, a bifurcation in the medium of social symbol. Digital objects (symbols encoding a wide range of presentational and discursive abstraction) can be stored, manipulated, and exchanged, enabling the emergence of a parallel persistent space of human symbolic communication with an entirely different set of rules. These are the rules of bits instead of the rules of atoms. Rules of logic and association 4. The Protocol Order The protocol order, which sits just above the data space, provides formal rules, logical architecture, that facilitate the exchange, storage and processing of symbolic expression. The most common example of a cyberspace protocol is TCP/IP, which encodes specific requirements for data exchange on the Internet. TCP/IP is a global protocol for the Internet which all exchanges of data objects within the Internet must follow. Other protocols may exist for more specific applications. An example of a more bounded protocol would be the P3P privacy protection protocol for the World Wide Web application. In new forms of technology such as RFID, protocols often take different forms and may compete until decisions are made to standardize. The protocol for RFID systems has not completely stabilized, though the market appears to be moving toward the Electronic Product Code (ECP), the US DOD is committed to a different standard. The Electronic Product Code protocol includes standards for electronic tags (ETAGS), Object Name Service (ONS), and the Physical Markup Language (PML). 5. The Application Order The application order is built on top of and bounded by protocols that are established in the 4th order. Applications on the Internet are all bounded by the constraints of the TCP/IP protocol. Individual applications, such as e-mail, the Web, instant messaging and IP telephony, place further constraints on the exchange of digital objects so that they can achieve specific informational goals. The email application, for example, places constraints on the objects within the binary data space that it will display and exchange (email messages and their embedded multimedia objects). A key component of the application order is the interface, which enables access to and manipulation of data . Any application designed for the Internet today is ultimately constrained by the physical order keyboard and display monitor. Although the interfaces that one sees on the personal computer screen when using instant messaging or the web are different to some degree, they are all ultimately driven by the manipulation of a physical keyboard and mouse via visual feedback from the monitor. The RFID application order is considerably different in quality from applications developed for the Internet. The application interface is not as significantly bounded by the physical order because access to data is primarily mediated via the first order of cyberspace, the electromagnetic radio wave. RFID represents a shift in cyberspatial interface from the space-bound physical interface of the keyboard and monitor toward the non-local electronic interface of the tag reader beam. Further, protocol development is at its very early stages compared to the Internet. 6. The Symbolic Network Order Sixth order cyberspace emerges as users make use of fifth order applications, creating persistent, growing logical networks that signify associations between people and ideas. These "trailmarkers," like hyperlinks in the World Wide Web or an instant messaging buddy list, can be formally described using graph theory, as sets of nodes connected by directed edges. One of the primary acts within the symbolic network is the association, or linking of two data objects. When data involving the details of a specific transaction are linked to the data identifying a specific individual, higher order information results that can be used by private institutions to classify, sort and predict the behavior of the individual. Data mining, for example, involves the association of superficially unconnected data into patterns to generate useful information about a market or consumers. Whether or not 6th order symbolic associations are made between data objects is determined by a number of constraints in different cyberspatial orders. First, for data to be linked in cyberspace it must exist in the third order. Data regarding human activities that is not digitally stored and recorded passes into virtual space where it is irretrievable. As Nissenbaum (1998), Lyon (2003) and others have noted, the rise of digitization and electronic network surveillance has meant that a wide range of social data that used to pass unnoticed into virtual space now persists in cyberspace where it may be subsequently encoded into symbolic networks. Return to Kenneth Farrall's home page |
