[Being in information space], the
in-divisible universe, or in another sense,
in-di-visible universe. What do we find there? We
find that the image is intruding itself once
again into the way that we communicate with one
another. We talk about these things as spatial, we
talk about "navigating a net," Netscape
Navigator. And do you know that their next version is
called? Communicator! Now that's what we've always
done ... We talk about going to sites,
we talk about navigating the network, we talk about
information spaces ... but it's not a space that we
can physically inhabit -- for one thing, it's kind of
flat ... it's never around us, only in front of us,
more like the windshield of your car than like a
room. There are things that are going on out there
that are changing all of that, ways of representing
space in a sphere in which you are at the center,
attempts to show us where we really live in flatland.
But these technologies are stationary, the space
moves around you ... can't go outside it -- one point
of view at any given moment. But textual spaces have
never been like that. Where do you go in texts? You
wander miles away, it's not geometric, it's not
rational. As opposed to visual space, textual spaces
are places in which we we envision.
-- Nancy Kaplan
