You would probably be interested in our Principia Cybernetica Symposium on
"Theories and Metaphors of Cyberspace" (Vienna, April 1996), which
addresses exactly the topic you describe here. See:
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/cybspasy.html
>Affiliations:
> [I am sorry, I do not understand the term 'Affiliation'.
> My dictionary only explains the verb 'affiliate' as
> 'to bring or receive into close connection as a member...'
> so I guess this means the organizations where I am working.
> If this is a wrong assumption please tell me so.]
You are right, that's what it means
>How did you hear about PCP?
> I have found PCP after I have searched for Information
> Services regarding Complexity using one of the major
> Search Engines of the WWW
This is exactly the way I would like people to find out about PCP: not
because of us making active publicity, sending around leaflets and
announcements, but because of us providing interesting content on the web,
which will be found automatically by other people with the same interests,
who enter the appropriate keywords in a search engine (e.g. Lycos
http://query4.lycos.cs.cmu.edu/lycos-form.html). I notice that more and
more PRNCYB-L subscribers mention this as the way they got into contact
with PCP. Soon, I won't have to put effort in making publicity any more ;-)
I use the occasion to remind other PCP participants that these search
engines are really efficient for finding all possible things on the Web,
that PCP stuff is well-represented in the indexes they use, and that you
are guaranteed to find PCP nodes if you just type in a a combination of
keywords such as "complexity", "cybernetics", "philosophy", "evolution",
etc. In fact I found it difficult to find anything else but PCP nodes when
entering combinations of terms like these (I had to give a negative weight
to terms such as "Principia" and "Cybernetica" to let other web pages come
up). This shows that within our subject domain, we are definitely the
dominant web server around. I would be curious to hear other people's
experiences in this domain.
________________________________________________________________________
Dr. Francis Heylighen, Systems Researcher fheyligh@vnet3.vub.ac.be
PESP, Free University of Brussels, Pleinlaan 2, B-1050 Brussels, Belgium
Tel +32-2-6292525; Fax +32-2-6292489; http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HEYL.html