Cyberspace

Cyberspace is a context of human interaction constituted in and by digital signal flows. To interact with other people and machines in this digital environment, people must express their ideas in written words, codes, and graphic images without the use of gestures, contact, and physical presence. Thus, cyberspace is best understood as a virtual space or environment.

The term cyberspace is derived from a combination of cybernetics and space, with the former being the comparative study of computer operations and the human nervous system (a term coined in 1948 by Norbert Wiener). The term cyberspace can be traced to the science fiction writings of William Gibson, whose Burning Chrome, Neuromancer, and other “cyberpunk” novels popularized the idea of computer-mediated communication (CMC). Although Wiener believed that familiar patterns of human communication should serve as the model for CMC, Gibson and subsequent authors envisioned CMC as a radical form of new communication, thought, and experience. The motif of novelty has inspired far-flung speculation by novelists, artists, politicians, and social scientists, who have drawn on metaphors from architecture, space exploration, and the settlement of the American frontier to indicate innovation and unknown potentialities.

In a nonfictional sense, the origins of cyberspace date back to the 1960s when the U.S. Department of Defense funded the development of the first network of spatially dispersed computers. That network (ARPANET) started with 4 computers in 1969 and expanded to 18 computers concentrated on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts over the next 2 years. A robust network that would function even if random nodes and links were removed or out of service was made possible by the technique of packet switching, which broke up digital messages into packets and sent each of these separately, and by the transmission control protocol/Internet protocol (TCP/IP), which facilitated the interconnection of computers running at different speeds and sending different-sized packets of[Page 84] digital information. Through the efforts of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and state and local governments, a high-speed data transmission “backbone” for the United States was created by the early 1990s. Outside the United States, pioneering efforts began shortly after ARPANET and led to functioning networks by the 1970s and 1980s and a European Internet backbone by the 1990s. Local area networks (LANs) operating in workplaces and community access networks installed in certain towns and cities were connected to the Internet during the 1990s. The 1990s also brought the diffusion of the personal computer to the general population in the United States, and Internet service providers such as America Online developed consumer-oriented network content and services. The original uses for computer networks—military command and research—were quickly supplemented by gossip and debate and later by advertising, commerce, and entertainment. Because the diffusion of computer networking is now beginning to reach elites in the poor countries and the poor in wealthy countries, the network is incorporating an increasing range of devices, encoding systems, and types of social interaction.

Geographic discussions of cyberspace have challenged claims of “cyberenthusiasts” that (a) geographic space has been transcended through technology and (b) social relations in cyberspace will be radically different from those in physical space. Geographers take a critical position toward these ideas based on geography's interest in the material world and human– environment relations. People continue to occupy space, consume resources, engage in production and consumption, and enact the roles of embodied identities (displaying aspects of ethnicity, age, gender, and sexuality) no matter how much they “occupy” cyberspace. Space, place, distance, location, and embodied identity continue to be essential to social life.

...