The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace:
History of the Space from Dante to the Internet
Margaret Wertheim
W.W. Norton & Co.
(256 pp. $23.95)

Is there anyone these days who thinks of cyberspace as "a potentially utopian realm"? In the mid-Nineties, pundits were talking about the Internet as "the most transforming technological event since the capture of fire," a "wiring [of] human and artificial minds into one planetary soul." But by now, three years after Margaret Wertheim began work on The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet, most people probably think about the Internet, insofar as they think about it at all, as just another way to do nothing much that's new--to shop, to invest, to look for sex.

Wertheim, a science journalist, sets out to deflate the boosterish rhetoric of breathless Harper's essays and Wired columns, whose claims about the Internet as a new spiritual realm she regards as deluded. But for her, too, cyberspace represents a watershed in the relationship between human beings and the universe, an entirely new "space" in which it is possible to exist apart from the physical world. Her own grandiose claims end up undermining her authority as a critic: The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace participates as avidly as any cyber-guru in mythmaking about the virtual world.

Wertheim begins by sketch-ing a broad cultural history of the concept of space in Western thought, tracing how conceptions of spatial reality were gradually stripped of their spiritual dimensions and reduced to the purely material--until the revolutionary advent of cyberspace, which opened up what she sees as an actual new "space" that transcends the physical. It offers not only new ways for people to interact and for communities to form, she says, but also a tempting--if ultimately illusory--hope of salvation for the spiritually bereft.

In medieval consciousness, Wertheim explains, interest in the nature of physical space was overshadowed by fascination with a spiritual realm that was considered equally real. Her discussion of this duality centers on Dante's Divine Comedy, but she also alludes to popular accounts of journeys to purgatory (a condition of the soul) through hidden passageways in the Earth, and to theological attempts to assign geographic locations to heaven and hell and to reconcile the transcendent nature of heaven with the belief in the eventual physical resurrection of the faithful at the end of time. These examples illustrate the uncanny and seemingly paradoxical way that material and spiritual realities coexisted in medieval Christian thinking about space.

This thinking gave way, beginning in the Renaissance, and then, with gathering speed, in the seventeenth century, to a purely material understanding among scientists of a spatial reality that was three-dimensional and properly defined by mathematics. Although Wertheim's account is repetitious and highly simplified, its wide-ranging evidence of how perceptions of spatial reality changed over time is compelling. She links the development of perspective in painting from Giotto on, for example, with the challenge to Aristotelian metaphysics that led to the birth of the notion of "space" itself in the Renaissance. In a way that's hard to comprehend now, Aristotle held that only objects had depth and volume, i.e., that there was no such thing as a void, a view later reinforced by the Christian idea of a universe fully created--without voids--by God. Accordingly, before the development of perspective, objects and figures might be painted to imply depth, but the space surrounding them remained "flat." It was around the same time that philosophers and scientists be-gan to observe the world empirically that painters began to depict a geometrically ordered perspective space.

As Wertheim approaches the present, though, her story becomes foggier. In order to set up a central claim of her book--that cyberspace truly is a new kind of space, and a radical departure from the starkly materialistic nature of contemporary experience--she must first establish the emptiness of the present moment. And to do that, she relies on her earlier connections between scientific and broader cultural developments to suggest an inevitable and sweeping parallel between materialistic nineteenth- and twentieth-century science and modern culture generally. For just about everybody in the present, she implies, reality is devoid of the kind of nuance and complexity that spiritual space provided in the Middle Ages; we find ourselves literally "lost in space." In this context, cyberspace, as a whole new way to explore the immaterial aspects of experience, becomes both an unprecedent-ed means of shaping our own reality and an all too alluring magnet for the spiritual longings of the public and the religious rhetoric of zealots.

But throughout the book, Wertheim herself has undermined this view of an existentially horrific, purely material present ready to be revolutionized by cyberspace. Calling cyberspace a "new space for the mind [my emphasis]," she inadvertently reminds the reader that at every turn in her history, there have been "spaces," irreducible to physical laws, indeed often unfixed by location, created by what could loosely be called "imagination," or even just "consciousness," of which the development of cyberspace is just the latest example. She finds few other ways of describing books and art, in fact, than as kinds of virtual reality--because they make "you feel as if you really are there." The Dante who inhabits the Divine Comedy she calls a "virtual Dante"; Giotto's interior of the Arena Chapel in Padua is a "hyper-linked virtual reality," because you can look at one panel and then look at any other panel you please.

In this backwards way, Wertheim shows that cyberspace partakes of (and doubtless extends) this same immaterial realm of mental space. It is as old as culture, and never went away, regardless of changing scientific or theological beliefs. In addition, the principal technological feature that underpins cyberspace's ability to exponentially extend the reach of this mental space--to "unleash" you into the Internet, where your "physical location can no longer be fixed in physical space," as Wertheim writes--is the transmission of data through the air and over wires: a technology more plausibly dated to the rise of earlier space-conquering inventions like the telephone and the radio.

Proust, in Remembrance of Things Past, evoked the way the telephone initially seemed to shatter space and disturb one's experience of presence and absence. The narrator, on a visit to the provinces, listens to the authentic yet disembodied voice of his grandmother in Paris, "invisible but present." Proust goes on to describe the connection's abrupt termination, already aware of the "illusoriness in the appearance of the most tender proximity" and the fact that his physical distance from his grandmother and the cold workings of the telephonic system are intrinsic to the reality of this disjunctive experience. Proust's scene provides what Wertheim, in her reductive account of cyberspace's impact on the modern era, does not: a rich sense of the lived context, both physical and mental, in which this encounter with such a "ghostly world" takes place.

Wertheim excitedly describes online activities like discussion groups and elaborate role-playing scenarios, but she seems oblivious to the fact that such activities take place within complicated--and often troubled--lives. "For an increasing number of America's youth, cyberspace seems a more appealing place than the reality of their middle-class lives," she observes with an unsettling note of approval.

Instead of utopian communities and digitized immortality, most Internet-related talk these days is about Internet-related IPOs on the stock market. Whatever cyberspace is or can be, it's been easily absorbed by capitalism (a point that might have enriched Wertheim's discussion of how people view their world today).

And speaking of hype, the thesis that cyberspace is some unprecedented kind of "space," at least when formulated as loosely as it is here, just seems like a notion created to sell books about cyberspace. If the promoters of the telegraph--or even Dante--were to come back today, they might decide that there's not so much new under the sun.

Jonathan Taylor is a Brooklyn-based writer.