The Shaman's Mask: Personality and Agency in Cyberspace

Written for the First Conference on Cyberspace, 1990 (unpublished)
by Vernon Reed

Abstract

I am presenting a vision of cyberspace which is very much human 
oriented, a social space where our kind can not only work and play 
in a free and easy manner, but also a space where some of our 
deepest attributes of humanity will be encouraged to flourish and 
develop on new levels.  Penetration by humans into cyberspace will 
require complex and versatile systems for encoding individual 
identity, and I am proposing such a system, based on a concept of 
meta-ornament. This concept incorporates a new cyberspace 
"personality" function, which acts as a mediator between human 
cyberspace participants and the agents which represent them, and 
allows control over local reality, while restricting access to the 
matrix. I will provide a suitable paradigm for human occupation of 
cyberspace, drawn, ironically, from our earliest experiences as a 
sentient species. Finally, I will show how such an animistic 
world-view successfully models human perception of cyberspace, and 
how the role of shaman provides a suitable model for extracting 
information from the kinds of data entities populating cyberspace. 

Cyberspace as social space

Cyberspace must be a space for humans, if it is to be of any use 
or interest, and that means that some provisions must be made for 
the sorts of sign systems that humans use to facilitate social 
intercourse.  In particular, it will be of utmost importance that 
humans occupying this synthetic new frontier be provided with a 
powerful means for conveying a sense of individual identity and 
style, a presence which they can feel at home with.  Such identity 
vectors will largely define the ways in which the patrons of a 
cyberspace system can interact with each other, and with the 
system itself.

The very fact of arbitrarily large numbers of people  interacting 
in these virtual environments  guarantees that complex patterns of 
behavior will emerge, as shown in the pioneering Habitat project 
of Lucasfilms (1). Even though this was a relatively simple 2-D 
environment, running at 300 baud on micros with only 64k of 
memory, many social systems evolved very quickly, as soon as it 
was opened up to the large groups of participants playing at any 
given time.  In particular, such behaviors as thievery and 
religion manifested early on, although not provided for in the 
design of the system.

One very interesting development in Habitat, which will be 
relevant to developing identity as an organizing principle, is the 
evolution of "heads" as a de facto unit of currency.  Bodies in 
Habitat were of a generic nature, but some variation was allowed 
for heads, so that players could express a small degree of 
individuality in visual appearance. There was another level of 
heads, however, which could only be obtained by special 
dispensation from the sysops, and these became prized over any 
other objects in the system, becoming in effect a "gold standard" 
based on rarity and desirability.  I think it is important to note 
that, although low-rez and highly pixelated, these heads were 
nonetheless the identity vectors for the Habitat system, and 
forcing an artificial constraint on variety created a situation 
where "identities" were hoarded, thus reducing the amount of 
possible social interactions.  

If such complex behaviors manifested on such a simple system as 
Habitat, it is certain that multiparticipant 3-D cyberspace 
environments will encourage even more elaborate and convoluted 
social interactions, even if participants are given only the most 
rudimentary puppets with which to represent themselves.  At its 
most basic level such a cyberspace will tend to replicate the 
kinds of social relationships and activities found in the ordinary 
(non-cyberspace) world, with the added plasticity afforded by 
anonymity and the ability to act out without spatial limitations. 
Given more effective means for conveying identity, however, the 
universe of possible social interactions begins to increase 
dramatically, and we enter a new arena for human behavior. For 
instance, augmented emotive capabilities might very well lead to a 
more poetic cast to interpersonal exchanges, and to deeper 
empathy.

Obviously, a great deal of this identity vector function can be 
handled by the kinds of verbal language used in ordinary reality, 
but this will also retain the limitations of such language, such 
as the thousands of mutually unintelligible tongues which divide 
the planet, and the ponderousness of words for conveying subtle 
moods or intent. In addition to verbal cues, we also have at our 
disposal body language cues, which of course take on an entirely 
new meaning in cyberspace, where the kinds of bodies available 
stagger the imagination. I am suggesting that we utilize the very 
special nature of these "bodies" in cyberspace, to create new 
channels for conveying emotions, thoughts and dreams to the others 
we meet there. Jaron Lanier has proposed that verbal (symbolic) 
language will be supplanted in cyberspace by the direct and 
instantaneous manifestation of "objects" which would convey the 
ideas being communicated (2).  This sort of object-oriented 
communication has a direct counterpart, already familiar from 
ordinary reality. Ornament, the augmentation of self, is a feature 
of every human society, and can provide a model for a sign system 
of great complexity, with deep psychological resonances, suitable 
for encoding multiple levels of identity. There is already 
precedence for its evolution into cybernetic modes of function (3 
and 4).

The mythic power of ornament

Persons in the "civilized" world are accustomed to thinking about 
ornament as mere decoration, or as a display of wealth, status or 
intellectual sophistication.  While these modes are certainly 
valid, there is  another aspect to ornament with roots going all 
the way back into the prehistoric mists of our spiritual 
awakening. This ornament has power to connect with deep levels of 
psychological insight about relations between man and nature, but 
only certain "uncivilized savages" have retained the keys to 
unlock this power, and to these people ornament becomes a complex 
sign system, not just decoration.

To the hunter/gatherers of the Pleistocene, the whole world was 
alive with spirits, and knowledge and power could be literally 
plucked from a tree or pulled from a stone, by the application of 
the correct magic formula or ritual (5).  In this animistic 
universe, the underlying organizing principles could be revealed 
to shamans, persons willing to undertake the necessary hardships 
and attain a state of superawareness.  These principles would 
typically be manifested as aspects of the real world, "familiars" 
or "totems", which would encode elemental truths in a form 
accessible to the shaman.  If a shaman had an eagle for a 
"familiar", for instance, then in a very real sense the eagle was 
a port into the system architecture for that shaman, and invoking 
the eagle would allow communication with the sysops, not normally 
allowed to ordinary humans.  Obviously then, the various rituals 
for invoking the eagle, in this example, would be of great 
importance to this shaman, and it would be reasonable to think 
that wearing parts of the eagle, whether feathers, talons or 
whatever, would help impart some of the eagle's powers. By wearing 
a ritually correct mask, a shaman could even actually become 
(identify completely with) his familiar, and partake directly of 
the power and knowledge thus accessed. This is powerful medicine, 
indeed, with interesting implications for cyberspace.

We can see then, how, at least on one level, ornament evolved from 
this process of accreting aspects of one's "familiar" on to one's 
own body as a form of identification.  Equally powerful 
associations are created by the actual physical modifications of 
the body required in the initiation rites of many animistic 
societies.  These scarifications, tattoos, bindings and 
deformations all have significance on a mythic plane of 
experience, and serve to ground the human in this larger realm, 
while at the same time conveying important social information 
about group affiliations, social status, etc.  The absolute 
modifications of the body involved in such practices carry the 
concept of ornament into a realm where correspondences with 
cyberspace representations of humans begin to make sense.

Ornament, the augmentation of self-image, is not necessarily the 
trivial matter that contemporary societies make it to be, and its 
mythic nature provides great opportunity for coding multiple 
levels of meaning and reference.  We have here a highly evolved 
communication paradigm, suitable for introducing personality into 
cyberspace. 

Cyberspace as spirit space

The aspect of cyberspace that most sets it apart from ordinary 
reality is the fact that it is, in a very real sense, alive.  It 
is "inhabited", as William Bricken so aptly puts it (6), or in the 
even more evocative words of Randal Walser, it is "haunted" (7).  
Since all objects in cyberspace represent data entities of some 
kind, including those objects representing human participants, 
then it is possible to think of these cyberspace objects in 
structured programing terms, where each data entity is interpreted  
through nested and branching levels of reference.  In this 
scenario, performing certain operations on a cyberspace object 
will allow access to other cyberspace objects, which in turn allow 
access to still others, in a complex web of interrelated data 
transactions. 

The "meaning" or "significance" of a cyberspace object lies in the 
configuration of this web of relationships, and is flexible, as 
the same object queried along different paths can lead to widely 
divergent references.  Likewise, cyberspace entities are 
constructed in a fashion akin to holography, in that each contains 
within it a copy or map of the entire system, the so-called 
Indra's Net paradigm.  This means that any object can then become 
a port into the overall system structure, by simply querying that 
object in the appropriate fashion, and then following the web of 
relationships down into deeper levels of system integration.  The 
paths followed in this web do not necessarily have to return again 
to the original object, i.e. it is possible to go through a portal 
and return through it to a different place. These intricate 
connections allow for coding extremely complex characteristics, 
including even intent and motivation, into data objects in a 
cyberspace system, making them "alive" in a way that we are not 
accustomed to thinking about objects, since the advent of 
Cartesian dualism.

We can begin to see some parallels here between the "haunted" 
nature of cyberspace and the animistic viewpoint of our "savage" 
forebears.  In both cases the underlying structure of reality is 
accessible by querying ordinary objects, as these objects are seen 
as microcosms of the larger world.  Likewise, in both situations 
the individual observer has great latitude in defining the nature 
of reality, by choosing the particular paths to follow in the web 
of revealed relationships.  This navigation of Indra's Net is the 
very essence of the shamanistic experience, and a suitable model 
for cyberspace navigation, as well.  An individual's local reality 
will depend on the paths of context and meaning chosen.

The participant as prime mover

One of the main lessons of quantum physics is the impossibility of 
completely defining any system without referring to the conscious 
observer of that system, since the very act of observation imposes 
constraints and forces choices.  I believe that a similar case can 
be made for the primacy of conscious participants in cyberspace, 
since even to simply observe is to participate, and participation 
is the defining quality for humans in cyberspace.  I shall use 
this term, "participant", to signify a human patron, who is 
accessing the cyberspace system to achieve some end.

Classical Gibsonian cyberspace is a consensual hallucination, 
meaning that it is being created "on the fly" by the individual 
participants, all of whom have the power to control reality 
locally, with this power diminishing in a steep gradient leading 
away from the individual cyberdeck and into the matrix, where all 
these inputs are integrated as the current state of global 
cyberspace reality. This is a suitable model for a buildable 
cyberspace, as it avoids the problem of having an omniscient and 
omnipotent sysop, an impossibility in any case, due to the extreme 
complexity of such a system.  In this consensual system, each 
participant will apply such transformation rules as deemed 
desirable, in order to arrive at a level of system revelation 
suitable for the task at hand, be that communication, work, play 
or whatever. Within that individual's sphere of influence, 
cyberspace will respond in an appropriate manner, meaning every 
participant will have power to shape the very nature of the 
"reality" of local cyberspace, and to influence the status of the 
whole system to at least some degree.

We have, in this model, the potential for the kind of cooperative 
creation dreamed of by every utopian idealist, but so seldom 
encountered in real human society, where demands of self interest 
always seem to dominate in the end.  The trick here is to harness 
the self-serving impulses of people, since that seems to be a 
universal human trait. By giving participants a large degree of 
control over local reality, system designers will be empowering 
people through the same means so often perceived as rendering us 
helpless in the wake of the technological maelstrom.  This control 
over local nodes must be real, as cyberspace has to have an impact 
on participants' lives, and not be just some giant 3-D videogame.  
Given such real power to effect change, the individual 
participants are certain to involve themselves wholeheartedly and 
with great creative zeal, producing results that would be entirely 
impossible to predict.  

We are talking here about the fine line between democracy and 
anarchy, and I think that cyberspace will come down on the side of 
anarchy, but with some necessary controls built in to prevent 
system meltdown. The challenge will be to create suitable paths 
for allowing  creative initiatives to propagate back from 
individual nodes into the matrix, without creating the opportunity 
for any node to hijack the system, and I believe that is possible. 
Whatever filtering mechanism is devised, it will have the kind of 
holographic or Indra's Net quality mentioned earlier, encoding 
part of the entire system into each local node, and each node into 
the entire system, so that a careful listener can "hear the 
ocean's roar" of all the other participants while connected.  The 
primary experience, though, will be of acting in a situation-space 
of one's own device, and for one's own private purposes.

An interesting and thorny question emerges here about mapping 
effects onto actions not normally associated with those effects, 
and who decides such mapping.  Perhaps it might be desirable to 
map some office filing functions onto, say, birdwatching or 
knitting, in order to reduce the boredom inherent in such dull, 
repetitive work. The possibility exists, likewise, for privileged 
persons in proprietary cyberspace systems to map results onto a 
participant's actions, which might be objectionable if the 
participant knew about it.  For instance, participants playing a 
complicated game in cyberspace might actually be cracking security 
codes or building designer drugs, without being aware of doing so. 
This problem  bears thinking about, as there is potential for 
great harm, as well as great good, in this slippery new reality.

If the participant is to be the driving force in cyberspace, then 
it will be important to design the system in ways which allow 
those human participants (and AIs as well, although I limit myself 
to humans here) access to really effective cyberspace agents.  
What constitutes an effective agent will vary greatly, of course, 
depending on the global and local parameters of the cyberspace 
system, and the task at hand, but I maintain that one important 
feature that must be present is a sense of "being there", of 
really inhabiting the agent in a visceral way.

Personality and agency

In a truly social cyberspace, participants will be required to 
interact with each other on the same kinds of sophisticated levels 
as encountered in the ordinary world, and hopefully to even go 
beyond that, creating new roles for the ongoing human drama.  To 
achieve this goal, they must be able to encode, in a transmissible 
form, their physical, cognitive and emotive states, and be able to 
receive such coded states from others.   In other words, the 
agents representing the humans in cyberspace should, ideally, be 
as individual as their human controllers, a situation which would 
seem to present an overbearing computational and bandwidth strain 
on the system. However, such strain can be made a non-issue by 
performing all customized agent configurations at the local nodes 
and passing only higher level interactions between nodes, a 
process which would also serve to filter local control out of the 
matrix.

What I am proposing here is that each cyberspace agent should be 
informed by a "personality", determined by the "face" its human 
controller wants to show in the cyberspace environment, and which 
will convey large amounts of complex information about the agent 
and its controller. This information should be conveyed 
intuitively or subliminally, in the same way that we often like 
(or don't like) someone just from being around them.  
Personalities are much like an expert-system-type distillation of 
the human participant's experiences, motivations and desires, and 
are ordered both hierarchically and "hypermedia fashion", so that 
other personalities can query on more than one level at once. This 
mutual querying of personalities will be the main form of social 
intercourse for cyberspace agents and their human controllers, and 
will proceed on a non-verbal level, through the direct 
manifestation of data objects in the appropriate ports. Such 
personalities can be thought of as highly evolved forms of meta-
ornament, which can carry the concept of individual identity into 
new social arenas, where forms of communication will evolve that 
we cannot guess at now. 

Personalities will set up individualized fields of reference for 
all data transactions and will serve as buffers in a cyberspace 
crowded with competing entities, preventing overloading of an 
agent's processing capacities in the face of manifold choices. A 
personality can even be made to function as an autonomous 
controller of the agent at times when the human has no desire to 
participate, reporting back at a later time on state changes 
encountered while running on "auto-pilot".  Such a disembodied 
agent, running around free of its human controller, would be a 
convincing definition of "astral travel".  Just pour your being 
into a cybernetic personality and turn it loose in the system, see 
what it brings back!

This brings up the question of just how autonomous can these 
personalities be.  Can they mutiny, refuse to report back to the 
human participant, take over the system?  Since I am proposing a 
cyberspace which is human oriented,I believe that they should be 
kept tightly bound to the participant's needs and wishes, and not 
be allowed to mutate on their own, but it is easy to imagine 
situations where that would not be the case. Perhaps such 
scenarios might provide useful models for schizophrenia or 
religious rapture.

Having installed these faithful personalities into cyberspace 
agents, it becomes very important to feed back to the human 
participant sufficient data to allow a feeling of embodiment in 
the agent.  Otherwise, much of the reason for going into 
cyberspace in the first place is lost. So, while the cyberspace 
agent which represents the participant may bear little 
relationship to human form (it could be a crustacean or a robot),  
the personality informing the agent must be able to translate 
between modes, so that the participant can feel at home in the 
agent, a tall order indeed, if the agent is something far from 
ordinary human experience.

Representation of such far-field sensory and motor experiences 
must be accomplished by mapping onto the sensorium available, 
following the principles, such as they are, of synesthesia.  The 
mechanics of this implementation lie beyond the scope of this 
paper, but should be able to draw on a large body of research from 
sense remapping in blind and deaf persons, and studies of body-
image.  I do believe it will be possible to provide convincing 
embodiment in some wildly divergent cyberspace agents, through the 
employment of personalities constructed according to synesthetic 
principles.

It is important to distinguish here between the personality and 
the agent:  a personality is conceived as a customized and highly 
specific high-level user interface. It will employ sophisticated 
neuro/muscular sensor and feedback technologies to track real-time 
changes in the participant's actions, plus appropriate algorithms 
to capture state changes in the agent.  Personalities are 
optimized off-line by downloading multifaceted hyperfiles of 
information about the participant's capabilities and weaknesses, 
desires, motivations and goals, plus constantly updated 
collections of perceptual, intellectual and motor skills. This 
database forms the matrix for interpreting the real-time data and 
control information which is passed through to the agent. It is a 
very complex data entity in its own right and has many 
characteristics of an AI, including, as mentioned, the capability 
for limited autonomous activity.  A personality resides in the 
participant's local node, providing interfacing and filtering 
operations with the matrix.

Agents, on the other hand, are functions of the matrix, and can be 
thought of as embodiment tools for interacting with the data 
objects present in cyberspace, including the "space" itself. They 
are facilitators, defined for those areas of cyberspace required 
to complete the task at hand, and are generic in nature, thus 
requiring minimum bandwidth for transmission.  A participant can 
pick and choose from available menus of such agents, and then 
inform the chosen agent with the information and capability 
configurations in his/her personality. Having done so, the 
participant should be able to inhabit that agent on a visceral 
level, and use it to "be" in the cyberspace environment.

The shaman's mask

Having created these personalities and attached them to agents in 
cyberspace, what, then, does it mean to us as humans to "be" in 
that environment, and how can we benefit and grow from the 
experience?  The key to this question lies in the "haunted" nature 
of cyberspace.

The everyday world that we live in constantly reinforces the 
illusion that mind, body and spirit are separate, through its 
unyielding insistence that we obey physical laws which forbid us, 
for instance, to walk through walls or levitate. Until relatively 
recent times, every advance in knowledge could be counted on to 
ever more firmly disassociate us from the kind of magical sense of 
oneness and involvement that our distant forbears knew, and we 
accepted this as truth.  Current scientific theories, in fields as 
diverse as physics and biology, now contradict this dualistic 
world-view, of course. However, these theories are often expressed 
in abstract terms, which have real meaning to only those 
conditioned by years of training to think in such terms, and to 
the vast majority of people, the world still appears divided 
between matter and mind/spirit, with little intercourse between 
the two.  

This obsession with separateness and hierarchies puts us at a real 
disadvantage in an age when the world is truly shrinking.  Indeed, 
many of our most grievous social and environmental problems can be 
traced to an inability to perceive our actions as caught in an 
intricate web, rather than rolling on steel rails.  "Paradigm 
shift" is one of the most overused of phrases, but that is 
precisely what is needed.  We need to recapture the sense of being 
in and part of a world brimming with magical potentials, an 
animistic universe where trees talk and stones dance, where 
meaning is the very substance of creation.

I propose that cyberspace is such a place, and that the experience 
of "being" there will have profound effects on the way people 
think and act.  As presented earlier, there are some compelling 
correspondences between the object-oriented nature of cyberspace 
entities and the mythic reality experienced by animistic cultures.  
These correspondences are strong enough to provide a suitable base 
for mapping experience in the cyberspace realm onto the level of 
mythic reality, where "familiars" and "totems" can guide and 
inform.  Such correspondences are not really metaphor, either, but 
more like the same phenomena, viewed from a different vantage 
point; this is generally the case for cyberspace mappings of 
"other world" phenomena.  I think such a mythic interpretation of 
cyberspace experience will enable and encourage new roles for 
human interaction, grounded in a larger psychic plane of increased 
possibilities.

The primary experience of a human participant in cyberspace will 
be that of querying objects and relationships through personality-
mediated actions of various agents. Such querying might take the 
form of physical action, such as moving tokens in a space, or it 
might involve the unfolding of nested levels of reference through 
mutation of apparent form, or by warping of the space itself.  
Whatever its form, any such transaction will involve the 
transmission of information from the cyberspace environment to the 
participant's own cerebral processor, and back again.  The most 
obvious way to model this process, of course, would be with 
Shannon's ubiquitous information theory, and that will work (8) 
(Fig. 1).  I want to suggest an alternate paradigm, though, which 
utilizes capabilities and methodologies long discredited by 
"civilized" humanity.

Our ancestors in paleolithic times (and even currently in some 
places) also obtained knowledge by querying the objects in their 
universe.  All aspects of the world, and all entities in it, were 
perceived as being pervaded by spirits, and these spirits could 
bestow power or impart knowledge to those persons who possessed 
the proper keys for querying. Such animistic perceptions are 
wholly natural to people living in the bosom of the earth and 
attuned to the cycles of birth and death, summer and winter, day 
and night, and I do not make any claims about "noble savages". I 
am only saying that perhaps they  achieved a modality for 
information processing that can serve us in good stead in the 
equally "haunted" universe, which is cyberspace.

Although it is true that such societies perceived spirits in all 
aspects of the world, that is not to say that it was easy to get 
these spirits to talk, beyond the most rudimentary level.  Indeed, 
a great deal of symbolic leverage was called for, requiring the 
services of a person with very specialized communication skills, 
the shaman.  This shaman was a person who would undertake  
strenuous and dangerous physical and psychological privations, the 
aim of which was to achieve a state of superawareness beyond the 
scope of ordinary human capabilities, and which would allow 
him/her to perceive the underlying order beneath the busy surface 
of the world.  Such a person might query a stone or a waterfall, 
and be transported into a realm of mythic reality where those 
objects branched into the tribe's future hunting prospects or the 
chance of rain.  To these people, this process was just as real as 
cyberspace is to you or me, and the shaman held great power.

The key point here is the methods employed by these persons to 
navigate the spirit world.  Typically, initiation as a shaman 
would include the manifestation of a "familiar", some creature or 
object from the ordinary world which would be imbued with the 
energy to make the state transition from that world to the spirit 
realm.  Such familiars could impart power to the shaman by 
association, by the wearing of actual or symbolic parts of the 
familiar, as mentioned in the earlier discourse about ornament.  A 
more powerful invocation of the familiar involves the ritual 
application of a mask, which symbolically identifies the wearer 
with the source of mythic power.  Wearing such a mask places the 
shaman in that state of superawareness where the spirit aspects of 
the everyday world are knowable and manipulable; it is an 
instrumentality for accessing the Indra's Net of nested and 
branching references.

This, then, is what I propose as a central paradigm for data 
entity querying in cyberspace. The shaman's mask is like the 
personality which mediates between the human participant and the 
cyberspace agent, and application of such personalities will allow 
participants to access the complex levels of meaning and reference 
inherent in cyberspace entities (Fig. 2).  Personalities function 
as conduits between types of reality, and as alter egos. I 
maintain that operating in this mode will feel very natural to 
cybernauts, instilling a feeling of fully living in the "world" 
which might even, ironically, surpass that encountered in the 
ordinary world, with its historical baggage of dualism and 
alienation.  The last book in Gibson's trilogy had just such a 
character, whose body was on a life-support system while his mind 
roamed the matrix.

One factor differentiates cyberspace greatly from the sort of 
shamanism under discussion, and that is the issue of general 
empowerment.  Cyberspace does not require that participants 
undergo any special regimen to achieve these powers, indeed such 
abilities are literally built into the system architecture, as a 
necessary outcome of its data structure.  This means that all 
participants will be shamans, although some will choose to pursue 
this path farther than others, and all participants will share in 
this visceral feeling of deep involvement in the world.  If this 
feeling can be made to transfer into the ordinary physical world, 
then we may witness the emergence of a new, more empathetic 
culture, based on respect for the realities which sustain us.

Conclusion

The creation and occupation of cyberspace is destined to be one of 
the most significant migrations in the long history of our 
species, with consequences for our future evolution equaled only 
by the concomitant occupation of outer space.  We stand at the 
door of a shiny new reality, where almost anything is possible, so 
it is very important to get a proper perspective upon entering.  

I propose that an animistic world-view, formulated during the 
earliest period of human consciousness, can provide an appropriate 
framework for acting in and interpreting cyberspace.  Such a 
viewpoint sees the world as being pervaded by spirits, which can 
be summoned and queried by shamans, or persons possessing the keys 
to the system architecture.  I suggest that this concept is 
isomorphic with the concept of cyberspace as a "live" space 
populated with data entities, which can likewise be summoned and 
queried by persons able to navigate the intricate webs of 
reference such objects unfold.

The main difference between these systems is empowerment: 
cyberspace makes every participant a shaman, with power to shape 
local reality, placing great emphasis on individual identity.  The 
powerful and versatile personality function, which I have derived, 
encodes such identity into cyberspace agents, while serving to 
isolate local nodes from the global matrix. Use of these 
personalities can enable the evolution of sophisticated new forms 
of social interaction in the haunted realm of cyberspace.

References

(1) Morningstar, Chip and Randall Farmer; American Information 
Exchange Corporation: Lecture at the First Conference on 
Cyberspace; 1990, Austin TX

(2) Lanier, Jaron; VPL Laboratories: Lecture at the National 
Computer Graphics Conference; 1990, Anaheim CA

(3) Reed, Vernon: "Cybernetic Jewelry: Ornament for the 
Information Age"; The Visual Computer, Vol. 4 (1988)

(4) Reed, Vernon: "Beyond Hardware: Jewelry for a Brave New 
World"; Ornament, Vol. 10, #4 (1987)

(5) Campbell, Joseph: The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology; 1969, 
Penguin Books, NYC NY

(6) Bricken, William; Human Interface Technology Laboratory, U of 
Washington: Lecture at the National Computer Graphics Conference; 
1990, Anaheim CA

(7) Walser, Randal; Autodesk: Lecture at the National Computer 
Graphics Conference; 1990, Anaheim CA

(8) Shannon, Claude and Warren Weaver: The Mathematical Theory of 
Communication; 1949, U of Illinois Press, Urbana IL



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