Chaos As Social Order

satellite transmission with the intimacy of home computers, and the standardization of hardware and software with the individualization of preferences in nearly every aspect of the medium.  It is continuous with play space, art space, recreational space, and ceremonial space.  Certainly cyberspace is a medium of communication.  Email is continuous with other communication media such as speaking, singing, dancing, signal fires, drums, letters, messengers, telephones, microwave, and fax.  But email is only a small part of cyberspace.  Impersonal, privately controlled, data transmission and self-stimulating cyberplay are two other major uses which show that cyberspace grows from a need for new kinds of unoppressed living space.  Indeed, the resistance of cyberusers to formal regulation shows how continuous cyberspace is with the traditional individual spaces of play, recreation, and expression.

The changes described above in languages, morals, politics, and human space are not linear, laminar, and sequential.  They are like a quiver of arrows being shot in all directions at once.  The basic attractor of reproduction in a cross-cultural context illuminates this phenomenon because people must continue to speak, dress, marry and so forth in order to survive regardless of the precise ethnic stamp of the language, clothing, or customs.  But if in the process of reproduction, available power increases at an increasing speed and available options multiply more quickly than older options can transform, then the phase space contracts and expands simultaneously with some trajectories dying out and others spanning the new attractor.

The older practices whose enactment connects indigenous power with exogenous power span the new

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