Of the readings that were read and discussed this week, the article that impacted me the greatest was Lessig’s piece “the Law of the Horse: What Cyberlaw Might Teach.” Lessig focused from the very beginning of the article on the differences and distinctions between reality and cyberspace, and from that comparison began to extrapolate the issue of regulations within cyberspace. Although some of his distinctions may seem relatively obvious—for example, in real space, children are prevented from buying porn because of their age that is self-authenticated by their outward appearance, whereas in cyberspace, there is no self-authentication method currently in place that proves the age of a particular individual—they are helpful to the discussion of regulations in cyberspace because they ground the discussion with empirical facts and events rather than the discussion floating into the abstract. In addition, Lessig’s inclusion of the “modalities of regulation” and its application to cyberspace allowed me to think of cyberspace as a more manageable space instead of the “orderly anarchy” as Froomkin described it to be or the utterly independent space that is free of “the tyrannies [the Industrial World] seeks to impose” on cyberspace as Barlow ardently declared. We can discuss the relevance of the Bill of Rights to regulating cyberspace for as long as we desire, but we need discussions that include talks of the representations of reality, structure, and construction of cyberspace in order to create cyberspace regulation policy.

A question that I had about the Lessig reading was a theory question that can be applied to other issues in the readings. Lessig wrote of restricted access of adult material from children, but what does he mean when he uses the term “adult?” What does this term theoretically encompass? In addition, when we use the term “cyberspace” what does this term encompass? Is everything that is not face-to-face interaction considered to be cyberspace interactions, or is there a tighter line that we can draw to determine the end and beginning of cyberspace?