The Digital Big Bang. Phil Quade

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The Digital Big Bang - Phil Quade


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it is stored or routed through technologies and routes that are wholly within the users' field of view.

      Experience in the geography layer also informs a sense of who is responsible for what. Cyberspace cannot ignore the reality that laws, policies, and treaties that govern human affairs are almost always tied to geography. This reality becomes particularly challenging when trying to sort out which laws pertain to property that is shared across countries or, more significantly, what jurisdiction pertains to an activity that crosses space and time in milliseconds, only to take a different route seconds later.

      The People Layer

      The top layer reflects the fact that people are an integral component of cyberspace. Indeed, people (rather than technology) explain the dynamic, ever-changing nature of cyberspace as users employ its various capabilities in ways that depart from, and even confound, the expectations of component, software, and system designers.

      The Circuit Layer

      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.

      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.

      The Control Logic Layer

      The control logic layer represents the logic embedded in the billions of devices, computers, and other smart components comprising the physical infrastructure of cyberspace. While the spread and ubiquitous presence of this logic make it impossible to literally observe a physical manifestation of this layer, its effect is no less real and is, more importantly, essential to an understanding of the behaviors of cyberspace's fundamental properties. Indeed, the extraordinary efficiency of cyberspace in routing, storing, correlating, and rerouting increasingly massive and complex flows of information is almost wholly dependent on the delegation of these tasks to the logic embedded in this layer.

      The Device Layer

      The device layer completes the model. This is perhaps the most visible component of cyberspace, since devices connect users to the services available within and from cyberspace. They include personal computing devices, smartphones, desktops, tablets, and navigation units—an ever increasing and diverse mix of hardware, software, and ubiquitous apps. Their role is to capture, present, and manipulate information according to the user's preferences and the designer's specifications. Importantly, the latter of these two influences is not always evident, as these devices capture


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