Losing Our Senses Online: Investigating How Aesthetics Might Be Used to Ground People in Cyberspace

Fiona Carroll,Margaret Webb,Simon Cropper

doi:10.1109/mts.2018.2857600

Abstract

The term cyberspace was coined by William Gibson, who used it in his book, Neuromancer in 1989. Gibson defines cyberspace as consensual hallucination. Cyberspace also describes the virtual environment of the Internet, alongside its more whimsical portrayal as a global village. The Internet has become ubiquitous, available to anyone with a device and connection, easier to find than clean drinking water in some countries. Beyond being easily and constantly accessible, it is increasingly remolding our social realities, the way we communicate, and the way we behave Certainly, cyberspace is an area of information that does not correspond with the physics of the environment in which our bodies spend time, and when interacting in this environment we become almost desensitized to our physical surroundings. By entering into the world of cyberspace, we change the way we find one another, communicate with one another, participate, interact, and work with one another. Though it has been observed that humans and other animals are remarkable in their ability to navigate through complex, dynamic environments,this statement refers principally to our sensed physical world.

Highlights

“Cyberspace, like the Americas, has been proclaimed the “new world”
Though it has been observed that “humans and other animals are remarkable in their ability to navigate through complex, dynamic environments” [14, pg. 67], this statement refers principally to our sensed physical world. This raises the question of whether we can adapt traditional real-world navigation techniques to fit cyberspace or, more crucially, can cyberspace be designed to fit better with us? Given the new space, and potential dangers, can an active process, requiring mental engagement and attention to the environment one is trying to navigate be nurtured? This paper reports on a preliminary exploratory study that aims to examine the effect of aesthetic elements in a graphical map type problem on how participant’s make sense of and solve the problem of how to navigate from A to Z; a version of the Shortest-path problem in graph theory [13]
We take cues on how to act and behave from the physical environment we are in. This preliminary study focused on aesthetic cues in a map type graphical problem; the researchers were interested in the way that participants engaged and interacted with those cues and the impact they had on solving the navigation problem

Summary

Introduction

“Cyberspace, like the Americas, has been proclaimed the “new world”. A new world is always posed as the correlate and other of an old world. This paper reports on a preliminary exploratory study that aims to examine the effect of aesthetic elements in a graphical map type problem on how participant’s make sense of and solve the problem of how to navigate from A to Z; a version of the Shortest-path problem in graph theory [13]. Against this backdrop, the greater research goal is to pave the way for further studies into how people make sense of their personal navigation through cyberspace. The following section highlights and discusses the results of both the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data

Results and Discussion

28 NA 27 lines 16 different 14 represent 14 points 11 letters 11 routes 11 roads

Conclusion