Читать книгу The Digital Big Bang - Phil Quade - Страница 50

Mention the term cyberspace in any otherwise polite conversation and the mind's eye of the listener immediately conjures up a jumbled mess of technology, wires, people, and communications racing across time and space or stored in vast arrays of storage devices. The resulting rat's nest of technology, people, and procedures then offers such a complicated and undistinguished landscape that, within the context of the conversation, further use of the word cyber could mean anything, and often does. It is important, then, to tease out the constituent parts of cyberspace to describe their characteristics, their contribution to the overall effect, and their relationship to each other. This, in turn, will yield a taxonomy or roadmap that allows focused discussions about discrete aspects of cyberspace that can be considered in the context of the whole.

This section attempts to describe, in context, discrete facets of cyberspace along the following lines: Physical geography, communications pathways, controlling logic and storage, devices, and people. It's important to note that cyberspace is not actually built this way, any more than a human being grows from embryo to adult according to the taxonomy laid out in Gray's Anatomy. But the understanding of the unique characteristics of cyberspace and how it is likely to operate under various scenarios is the goal here, not a description of how to build it anew.