Читать книгу The Digital Big Bang - Phil Quade - Страница 54

The circuit layer of the model depicts the literal pathways that communications take to make their way from one place to another within cyberspace. Taken together with the geography and people layers of the unfolding model, this layer represents the sum total of what would have once been referred to as the telecommunications domain.

Long before the advent of the computers, sophisticated software, and ubiquitous wireless devices that power today's Internet, the telecommunications domain offered a simple and reliable means for a given communication to be sent and received across far-flung stretches of the earth. In that day and age, the flow of communications was still directly and manually controlled by human beings. A person would literally choose whether, when, and how a message would be sent by dialing a phone, faxing a message, or keying a microphone to initiate a communication. The communication would then flow from one location to its destination along a generally straight line, often a dedicated path (or link), and would be immediately received by the intended recipient on the other end. In effect, the communication would be manually pushed from one location to another and would be at risk of disclosure to a third party only during the time it was in transit. Before and after the transmission, the communication would reside in a sanctuary of sorts: In a person's mind, in a desk drawer, or if need be, in a safe.

As the Internet began to spread its web using these same methods of communication and as the means of transmission, storage, and presentation to communicants around the world increased exponentially in variety, scope, and scale, the telecommunications domain was transformed in several important ways.

First, decisions about when and how communications would flow across the spaces between two communicants were delegated to computers embedded with increasing regularity in communication and storage devices.

Second, communications were stored for later retrieval by intended recipients or as “on the web” resources for the sender. Some readers may recall that the initial novelty of email was less in the fact that it connected two people living great distances from each other than in the fact that it allowed people to communicate without both having to be “on line” at the same time. The communication would simply wait for the intended recipient to request access to the stored communication—forever, if necessary.

Finally, the richness of communications steadily increased to the point that a given communication began to represent more than a simple reflection of thoughts or values held outside the domain. The communication, in transit or stored, began to be valuable in its own right, often as a unique representation of thoughts, wealth, and treasure. Financial transfers, cash accounts, corporate secrets, and pictures are now all stored, often with no backup in the physical world, in cyberspace. Gone are the days when colored rectangles of paper, printed stock certificates, and passbooks served as the primary means to represent financial assets (it is likely that the term passbook, in wide use throughout the 1970s, is completely unknown to those born thereafter). Passbooks have been replaced by ones and zeros that are stored, traded, earned, and lost in cyberspace alone.