Coordinate

1.Many scholars have discussed the Internet in geographical terms, formulating the interaction between individuals via networks as a "space" where imaginary or composed personae encounter one another via various media and interact. William Gibson coined the phrase "cyberspace" in his 1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer. In the novel, he portrays a immersive graphical interface for encountering data, computers, and other users in the Matrix on the Net. In critical scholarship, the most obvious and pervasive critical work employing geographic metaphors is Howard Rheingold's The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Writers like Turkle, Dibbell, Day have also used geographical terms to "localize" the formation of communities on the Internet. Gunkel (2000) critiques many of these metaphors by Hacking Cyberspace in his book with that title.

2.Early-80s metaphors of spatiality in computing (the Macintosh GUI, Neuromancer, Tron) are interesting and compelling, but they have little to do with the practical realities of Internet communication in 2004. Twenty years after Neuromancer, the "killer app" of the Internet is still email (Barrett). Cyberspace still shows up in popular culture (The Matrix, 13th Floor, eXistenZ), but when it came to virtual reality, Jaron Lanier points out that he ultimately didn't pull it off (qtd. in Cave, part 2). The only arena where graphical virtual space is becoming common and mainstream is in massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) and other online gaming systems. Otherwise, text is the status quo: email, chat, and Web, on a variety of platforms and devices, including laptops, PDAs, and cellphones. Though text-based virtual worlds exist as well (MUDs, MOOs, other MU*s), virtual reality is neither a practical option nor a common goal for the general Web user. Day, Crump, and Rickly rightly comment that cyberspace is neither an eternally approaching technoUtopian future nor a yawning technototalitarian pit about to swallow civilization. It is radical and exciting and ordinary. In his "One Half a Manifesto," Lanier himself identifies a lovely global flowering of computer culture already in place, arising for the most independently of the technological elites. That global flowering is the ordinary-ness Day, Crump and Rickly talk about and that even Rheingold tracks in his latest book on mobile phone and text-chat technology, Smart Mobs.

3.Opportunities for community afforded by the Internet are, indeed, rather ordinary, but this ordinary-ness is vital to the ways designers must interact with users to build websites. Spatial metaphors like "cyberspace" are problematic not only in the ethnocentric limitations Gunkel (2000) identifies. Such metaphors also overly mystify technology and confuse users. Dilger (date) suggests that these problems are due, in part, to the consistent usage but irregular implementation of spatial metaphors and spatial structures in the graphical user interfaces (GUIs) most computers use today. Spatiality creeps into all things related to the Internet, whether it be the modes of developing communities or the modes of reading and interacting with content. Unfortunately, that spatiality is not consistent. This inconsistency perplexes new users struggling to understand what is happening via the Web, i.e.

1. the display of a file consisting of
1. textual content,
2. instructions for display,
3. information about locations of other similar or related files,
4. and instructions for simultaneous display of other files, usually images,
2. stored on a remote computer (server)
3. but downloaded to the user's computer
4. through a network connection.

the spatial sense which appears on the Web -- with navigation bars, "back" and "forward" buttons, and those ubiquitous folder tabs -- is almost never found in file-management or file-transfer applications [...]. In fact, the diverse methodologies for using space on the Web seldom appear outside of the browser itself. (Dilger, Ease)

4.We need to put these disparities in perspective as we educate and train users and as we design websites. But we also have to keep in mind the cultural contexts of our users. Some of them are used to reading maps. Others are more comfortable using the surrounding street signs and landmarks. Still others will ask for directions. Designers need to facilitate similar options for computer users.

5.In the spirit of that facility, I offer, then, a compass rose to this site. The following set of guidelines are to help users know "which way is up" and how to navigate the site. (As I typed the preceding paragraph I struggled not to use "navigate" or "move through," but even the word "site" is problematic, and this sense of charting or plotting a course has existed since the first commercial Web browser was released, Netscape Navigator. Even the vocabulary of the HTML specification reinscribes spatiality, using terms like "domain" and "Universal Resource Locator." I will use no more spacial metaphors as I explain the function and cues of the visuals in the site.)