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"The form of a house or town will always depend on the life to be lived there. This is easier to see in, older, more stable societies than in one such as ours, which has been changing so fast. People still prefer old, familiar forms, even when new ideas may have made them obsolete." (Huxley, 1968)

"Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in."
Robert frost The Death of the Hired Man

What's the best address on the web? How do we define the digital equivalent of Park Lane or Park Avenue? As Wired magazine says in it's February 1998 edition, "the coolest thing about the remake of the '60 classic Lost in Space is the URL www.dangerwillrobinson.com. IRL (In Real Life) the best address has always meant the most exclusive, but here we are looking at a new paradigm. The address that doesn't speak of chandeliers and marble, but of audience recognition, of being in on the joke. Home as cool place.

The concept of home has many differing strands. One of which is as somewhere that you can be located by others. As in the paragraph above, the address you live at can be as defining as any other aspect of your personality, or ones' accruements. In our past, houses were known by name not number, much as people were known by the trade that they followed; hello, bob the butcher. Home is a concept that has become central to our use of digital media, and it's important that we become familiar with some of these implications in the work we create.

Home is generally seen as a secure, comforting, essentially private place, where we escape from the rigors of the outside world. This is opposite to the implicit nature of home pages on the World Wide Web, which we promote to the widest audience possible (It's not just our address that we are giving out of course, but an open invitation to whatever our digital home contains). Home is losing it's relation to a specific geographical location and becoming dynamic and conceptual in basis. Yet this metaphor is used to give a sense of being routed to a particular locale, very much a physical thing. Home pages are where we go to when we get lost. They provide a beginning and a context in which to view. Can we talk about locale and being routed, in the static sense, when we discuss the WWW? Routing of course has other implications in a computer network environment, mainly to do with delivery and navigation of and by bits of this information space.

"In ancient Roman buildings, the focus of activity was the central court or atrium. From here all other rooms were accessible. The hearth was here, and in it a fire constantly burned. It was the duty of the head of the house to see that it burned day and night, for an extinguished fire was synonymous with an extinguished family. No matter how complex a building got the atrium remained the focus of any important business." (Huxley, 1968)

The way we define space and place has been changing since the introduction of the concept of electronic information space in the 1940's. Vannevar Bush is the man credited with the invention of the concept of information space. In his landmark essay 'As We May Think' he introduced the Memex, his machine not only to store information, but also to navigate and organise it. Though Bush's system wasn't entirely electronic as it involved a system based on microfiche, what he did propose was a system for interfacing with information based not on class or species, as in a library system, but on the connections it has to other information.

When we look at the introduction of some early software packages that allowed non-programmers to author within this information space, we find that they fell back onto familiar metaphors. Apple's Hypercard makes strong use of the home concept. The Home Card and the Home Stack are central to the navigational paradigm introduced. They also draw heavily on the concept of security, a fixed base from which to start and a route to navigate.

The idea that home is a secure, safe place or haven from the outside world is for too many people, not a reality that they are familiar with. The home has been a way of hiding many of our private abuses, especially the violent, whether mental or physical. For many it is a place of fear and misery. This is an aspect that doesn't seem to be reflected in the wholesale adoption of 'home', as the basis for this representation of our new space.

The breakup of the family home, and consequently the meltdown of the nuclear family, has been blamed for many of society's problems. The home is seen as our solid base, guiding us on a straight and narrow path through life. As homes collapse, so does our ability to function within society. We turn into criminals, hooligans and wastrels, running riot in the public spaces and causing anguish within the private. At least, that's what many social commentators would have us believe.

Of course, the changing use of the term 'home' is causing us to reassess the relationship between public and private space and what we consider usual or acceptable behaviour. What is a public space? Where in cyberspace is the equivalent of eating your lunch in the park? A very pleasant, public activity, governed by our excepted social conventions. What are our rights of access to our virtual spaces? We need to be aware of who control's our access, (The Webmaster?) setting our electronic permission's to what we may see. This page and this site are restricted to those within our domain newport.ac.uk, another concept that needs to be reassessed.


"Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam, where the deer and the antelope play, where seldom is heard a discouraging word and the skies are not cloudy all day."
Brewster Higley Home on the range

"Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam, and I'll show you a house with a very messy carpet."
The Goodies


The fundamental change in our usage of 'Home' is from one of the place we go to rest and relax, to a place where we begin to engage. Home as interface. In The Telephone Book, Avital Ronell asks, "When does the telephone become what it is? It presupposes the existence of another telephone, somewhere, though it's a totality as apparatus, its singularity, is what we think of when we say 'telephone'". (Ronell 1989) Home pages presuppose the existence of somewhere to go, somewhere to link to. More importantly they suggest a contextual relationship to the destination they're pointing us to. Home as movement. Home is becoming about content, what we are saying, whether we create the words ourselves, or simply point to the words of others.

We still however, cling to the notion of home as memory place. My home contains many items, photographs and documents that trigger memories. Is my home simply a repository for these objects? If I take my belongings to another building I would consider that I had moved home. Digitally of course we need only change the address, the URL. It's the link that changes, the content stay's the same. Home Pages, or at least the better ones, have content that changes regularly. Home measured by the usefulness of it's content, the up-to-dateness of it's links, not an ability to provide memory triggers. A good home doesn't provide shelter but sets you on your way. I nearly said sets you free (but luckily my taste buds rebelled).

Is the concept of home out of date? Do we need to be comforted and provided with a sense of security in information space? Our cars become substitute homes. We leave the static behind while gaining the same sense of security from our ability to keep the world at bay, beyond the tinted glass and central locking. At least they move. Home as traveling machine. We don't need all our creature comforts, merely the ability to travel safely with others, because we can't neglect our passengers. Then there are motorcycles. Speed, maneuverability and a hell of a buzz. Only a helmet for safety and a sense of being out there at the mercy of the elements. Control by the shift of bodyweight. Home as adrenaline rush. We shouldn't neglect our other forms of transport, train, plane, bus, bike, skateboard or whatever. We end up with home as walking. Home as a gentle stroll down to the shops for a paper and a packet of fags. Home as a shuffle down to the Job Centre. Home as a walk by the sea or in the country "where the deer and the antelope play, where seldom is heard a discouraging word and the skies are not cloudy all day."

Can we expect our virtual agents to send us postcard's home, telling us what a nice time they're having and whether the virtual sun is shining? Home is S.W.A.L.K.

By sticking to the home metaphor are we doing ourselves a real disservice? It has certainly been a successful concept during the exponential growth of information space, but has it outgrown it usefulness?

Constructing elaborate spaces, buildings & palaces and presenting them as gifts used to be within the exclusive remit of the wealthy and powerful. However the giving of built space is now available to the technically adept. We create three-dimensional visual representations to conceptualise information space. A new level of Doom for a birthday? Your very own Christmas present world, only a Bryce away. But is it enough, this gift of built space, or are we in danger of forming not only mountains and rivers but a nice healthy god complex to boot? Does visual spectacle make up for the staleness of our current metaphors?

If we are to engage, and I believe that we do need to engage, with information space then where is the interface? Where and how do we join in? There are two questions I would like you to consider; should the home page metaphor remain at the core of our travel into information space and if you think it should, then what should a home page or screen consist of?


Huxley, J. (Ed) (1968) Art & Architecture, London, Aldus Books
Mediamatic spring 1995, Home issue, Vol 8 #2/3
Rheingold, H., (1993) The Virtual Community; Homesteading the Electronic Frontier, Reading Mas., Addison Wesley
Ronell, A. (1989) The Telephone Book. Technology—Schizophrenia—Electric Speech, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press
Wired, February 1998

© 1998 David Topping