Dr. Puay Tang's (Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex) paper "Multimedia Products and Services: A Need for 'Cybercops'?" was available, but unfortunately the author was unable to attend due to illness. David Albury, a freelance writer, also withdrew from the conference.

The following report is the reading of the conference by Dan Hill, Manchester Institute for Popular Culture, Manchester Metropolitan University. The opinions expressed are my own - queries regarding individual papers should be addressed to the corresponding authors.

"The Governance of Cyberspace" conference was held on 2 spectacularly beautiful spring days in the excellent new Open Learning Technology Centre at the University of Teesside in Middlesbrough. I arrived half-expecting an audience bearing chirping 'personal digital assistants', chattering laptops and ringing mobile phones. However, no PDA's, only one laptop was in occasionally distracting evidence and the only mobile phone belonged to the press officer. There was significant media interest in the conference with BBC Radio 5 Live and television as well as printed press occasionally swooping on an unsuspecting speaker.

One aspect of technology was surprisingly absent however as only 4 of the papers included the author's email number and there were no references to World Wide Web homepages or any other digital media presentations (although Brian Loader, the conference organiser stated an intention to add the papers to the University of Teesside's web homepages. The location is http://www.Tees.ac.uk/tcs).

The conference speakers and attendees consisted of an intentionally cross-diciplinary mix of academics, writers and practitioners. Brian Loader, introducing the conference, pointed to the omnipresent metaphor of networks as the 'glue' between the various disciplines represented - public administration; psychology; literature; computer science; cultural, social and political theory; economics; medicine; and organisational theory, amongst others. He stated that the much of the rationale behind the conference was due to the growing realisation that cyberspace was a public space not entirely detached from the 'real world' and therefore issues of control, regulation and government may need to be considered in detail. He also emphasised the public access issue in reminding the conference that cyberspace is currently inhabited by a privileged minority. However, this did not preclude the opportunity for attempting to think about possible futures for cyberspace and society, particularly from alternative visions of the future such as cyberpunk literature, which may present a fresh perspective on 'now'. Similarly, people's feelings about their current reality may influence their feelings or fears about the future.

The composition of the conference attendees reflected the current gender bias in this area, with no more than a handful of women present. The format of the conference was pairs of speakers presenting a 30-40 minute paper in turn and then jointly fielding questions from the audience. This usually worked well enough, although it presented difficulties when the papers were not closely related.

The first speaker was Paul H.A. Frissen, Professor of Public Administration at Tilburg University, The Netherlands. His paper "The Virtual State: Postmodernization, Informatization and Public Administration", was an unashamedly postmodern perspective on changing aspects of public administration due to information and communications technologies (ICTs). Acknowledging the differing political perspective between the Netherlands and the UK, he indicated how ICT embodies significant contemporary cultural and organisational changes of decentralisation; fragmentation; deterritorialisation; smaller, better connected organisations; horizontal rather than vertical structures; increased emphasis on aesthetics and style; with time, space and scale less significant as organisational factors - fluidity, flexibility and scope increasingly important. Ambiguous and negative aspects of ICTs were also discussed.

Frissen gave examples of how ICT could have a revolutionary impact on the traditional legitimacy of the organisational pattern of politics and public administration. Public administration has always been involved in information and communications, but ICT will expand its capabilities and responsibilities in this area to the extent that information services becomes its primary duty. Frissen's fundamental assertion was that, as facilitated by ICTs, the "core of politics may become an aesthetic of styles, to be enacted in various fragments of public and private lives" - a postmodern reading that saw ICT as resulting in neither utopia or dystopia, but always as revolutionary.

The second speaker was Stephen C. Mooney, from the Department of Information Systems at the London School of Economics. His paper, "The Cyberstate", was written from a self-declared "pre-modernist" angle, in stark contrast to Paul Frissen's postmodern style, with declared empiricist rationalist intentions and precise attention to definitions. His thesis was that ICTs are principally undermining the foundation, power and authority of the nation-state leading to a fragmentation into smaller geopolitical units. He saw the nation-state as being transformed into "a large property management company or theme park" (which he saw as positive), and economic power transferred to a "cyberstate" - a conglomeration of commercial 'objects'. Laissez-faire capitalism and a pure free market was seen as a suitable mechanism for implementing equitable technological change - he posited that relative changes mean cheaper commodities across generations, comparing 'poor' to 'poor' across successive generation, as opposed to comparing 'poor' to 'rich' in the same generation.

In the Q&A, the conference appeared to be more receptive to Frissen's ideas than Mooney's generally due to the latter's faith in the market to provide and also his strictly polarised definitions, which tended to negate the grey, fuzzy areas of political culture which Frissen found interesting.

Mark Whine, from the Board of Directors of British Jews, presented a paper entitled "The Far Right on the Internet", which documented the use of the Internet and other examples of digital media by Neo-nazis in order to spread race-hate material. The paper focussed on the reasons behind this fascist utilisation of ICTs (such as lack of legislation, ease of communication, enormous growth particularly via a young, impressionable audience, ease of interactivity) and proceeded to describe in detail examples of use by North American and European fascist organisations. The media exploited range from Bulletin Board Systems (BBS), electronic mailing lists, World-Wide Web (WWW) sites, and on-line services such as GEnie and Prodigy, to Usenet newsgroups and racist computer games. Mark Whine then discussed potential legislative solutions to these problems such as enforcing Britain's Computer Misuse Act 1995 and Part III of the Public Order Act 1986 and the USA's planned Communications Decency Act, whilst acknowledging that the First Amendment to the US Constitution exacerbates the problem of banning or curbing hate expression, as does the lack of domestic or international case-law in this area.

The Q & A session was largely concerned with the notion of the technology being just a tool - perhaps inherently innocent. Indeed, the same technology has been effectively used by anti-fascist organisations (e.g. using neo-Nazi contact lists for counter-intelligence purposes). Other discussions centred on the problems for implementing national laws within a medium which increasingly ignores the physical location of data, though with no lawyers present, the discussions were largely rhetorical.

Simon Baddely's wide-ranging and eclectic paper, "Governmentality" (building on the concepts of Michel Foucault), initially presented a series of common themes - networks, democracy, individualism, hype, freedom, fragmentation, virus, emancipation, revolution - from diverse arenas such as public administration, direct marketing, politics, cognitive psychology, architecture, law and television drama. The paper then moved on to discuss the implications of a de-centred and distributed digitally-mediated world view on a syntactical level (the misuse of the ill-defined pronoun 'we' (as in "we will all be working from home...")), a semantic level (updated concepts of the 'individual'), and a theoretical level (cyberspace accompanying and amplifying individuation, isolation, disassociation, reflexivity).

Baddely then related a series of personal entries from a journal he kept whilst tentatively dipping his toe into the Net, and subsequently immersing himself in it. Seafaring metaphors were used to describe the experience of venturing into the unchartered waters of the World Wide Web. A catholic range of literary (Coleridge to Joyce to Gibson) and theoretical (Nietzsche to Foucault to Sadie Plant) references evoke the author's personal reflections on the nature of cyberspace, culminating in metaphysical notions of the "zero-user interface" of advanced virtual reality in which no external frame of reference can provide rules for fragmented notions of the individual, and of responsibilities for citizens based on Foucault's theories of governmentality.

Gwyneth Jones is a freelance science-fiction writer. Her paper, "The Neuroscience of Cyberspace: New metaphors for the Self and its Boundaries", also examined the notion of the self in cyberspace. Crossing disciplinary boundaries at will, she focussed on artificial intelligence theory and cyberpunk science fiction. The work of Pat Cadigan and William Gibson was dissected and played against theories of neuro-pyschology, cognitive science and the immune system. Again the metaphor of distributed networks found another representation. Another metaphor seemed to draw popular approval: "... I regard my Internet suppliers as a new breed of garage mechanics. They despise me because I'm ignorant, they're mildly rude to me because I'm a girl. If I put my cybernaut's vehicle into their hands for repair or improvement, I strongly suspect that they'll do the work - wrong - in ten minutes, and charge me for a week's labour. Information wants to be free?"

Her paper concluded that whilst cyberpunk fiction is not as radical as it noisily demands, that the "mind of cyberspace is still male and privileged", it is reflecting subtle changes in 'real life' (biological, de-centred modes of thought, diversities) that are genuinely "novel and transforming".

Ralph Schroeder's paper, "Virtual Worlds and the Social Realities of Cyberspace", comprised of a summation of recent advances in virtual reality (VR) technology in order to understand its relation to social life. After discussing different sociological approaches to technology - technological determinism versus social or cultural construction, drawing from Agassi and Weber - Schroeder described how VR technology is moving in two directions: the low-cost unsophisticated entertainment games market; and the high-cost, specialised markets such as medical research or training for hazardous environments. On closer analysis, the principle difference is not the interface type (head-mounted displays and data gloves), but the ability to explore, modify and create information-rich virtual environments. The social relations of VR were discussed in relation to video games, increasing time spent in technologically-mediated environments, interactivity and convergence. Future research is likely to focus on both the capabilities of VR compared to other ICT tools, and the application - as either consumer electronics or specialised tool. Schroeder also mentioned that he thinks the public desire for 'interactivity' may be overrated.

Questions focussed on the 'inclusive' nature of VR's head-mounted devices and 'body suits' and whether the technology will move into 'exterior' interaction with 3-D projected 'holographic' images. The problems of meaningful interaction with these images were discussed. At this point also, one questioner noted that the conference in general appeared to be uneasy about making predictions of any kind.

Continue report on DAY TWO ...