Cyberspace

History and Dimensions

Cyberspace should preferably not be confused with the Internet, although often the terms are used interchangeably. Electronic networks predate the Internet. Large firms, such as airline companies, started to establish electronic data interchange systems as early as the 1960s. In 1982, France pioneered the Minitel system. Although rudimentary by today standards, it was the first electronic network open to a large public.

Research on the Internet (for “inter-networks”) started in the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the U.S. Department of Defense. ARPANET, created in 1969, was the first packetswitching network. In the 1970s, Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn created a new protocol for computer interconnection, TCP-IP (transfer control protocol, Internet protocol), officially adopted on January 1, 1983. Another important step, in 1991, was the creation of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher in the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva. The Web, which makes it possible to navigate between documents present on computers through hyperlinks, is the fundamental framework of cyberspace.

The growth and pervasiveness of cyberspace since the late 1990s was fuelled by the digital convergence of different media. Electronic devices, such as computers, television sets, cameras, and [Page 647]mobile telephones, can share data through portable supports or networks. Moreover, a single device, such as a telephone handset, has now “multimedia” capabilities: The user may take photos, watch TV, navigate the Web, and connect to sites and applications where he or she can read newspapers, send e-mail, do shopping, play online games, and so on.

Figure 1 Growth of Internet domain names (in thousands)

Source: Created by author, based on data from Internet Systems Consortium. (2008). The ISC domain survey. Retrieved May 10, 2008, from http://www.isc.org/solutions/survey.

Cyberspace features a hybrid nature. On the one hand, it is dependent on material infrastructures (servers, fiber-optic cables) rooted in real geographic space. Location has therefore an actual effect on cyberspace accessibility. For example, the distance between a given house and the nearest telephone exchange has a full impact on the available DSL bandwidth. A country such as India is subject to a permanent telecommunications bottleneck due to its poor infrastructure. Cyberspace is therefore characterized by a digital divide. Urbanized regions in developed countries have high densities of networks, servers, computers, and cyberspace navigators. Peripheral regions, especially in the poorest countries, are less visible in cyberspace.

...