The Cyberspace Incrementum: Technology Development for Communicative Abundance

Abstract

This study of the “cyberspace incrementum” adapts Jeanne Fahnestock's argument-oriented theory of rhetorical figuration, applying it to a case in technology development. It identifies a key series argument in the development of a failed cyberspace technology, namely VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language). The analysis describes how differing forms of argumentation helped advance VRML as a project. Interpreting the figure, this article suggests “communicative abundance” as the problematic situation to which VRML responded.

Acknowledgments

I thank the editor and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on this article. I also thank Marilyn Cooper for reading and commenting on an earlier version of this argument.

Notes

¹In his “Hacking Cyberspace,” David Gunkel has provided a helpful outline of 1990s discourse on cyberspace, including in philosophy, geography and architecture, theology and religion, anthropology and cultural studies, communication and media studies, sociology and psychology, political science and women's studies, and art and fiction (806). See also Gunkel (Hacking)

²On cyberspace as a “space,” see, for example, accounts by Helmreich, Logie, and Reynolds. Day's and Nunberg's critical histories of information also discuss this aspect of cyberspace.

³In “Knowledge Consolidation Analysis,” I discuss a similar analytical methodology at length, explaining Fahnestock's theory of figuration, her theoretical and analytical innovations in this area, and the possible application of these innovations to cases in technology development. In this article, I extend this methodology into the interpretation of argumentation involved in technology development.

⁴Many scholars have discussed how communication is involved in making particular forms of technology development seem inevitable, especially in education (see, e.g., Noble; Petraglia; Selfe Technology; Werry). For more general discussions of communication and its role in promoting “inevitable” technological change, see, for example, Haas; Latour; Miller, “Opportunity”; Street; Winner.

⁵The incrementum's quantitative hierarchy (of dimensions) helped to establish its qualitative hierarchy (of network technologies). Such “extrapolation” is a regular feature of double hierarchy arrangements (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 341). In the incrementum, this strategy also suggests VRML as an improvement on and as a successor to World Wide Web technologies. The incrementum's enumeration of dimensions thus did not only help to establish the interface series as plausible; it also suggested ways to value the series' order and to apprehend its future unfolding.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jeremiah Dyehouse

Jeremiah Dyehouse is Assistant Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Rhode Island