Cyberspace

History of the Term

Early uses of the term cyberspace referred primarily to immersive, multi-person, three-dimensional virtual-reality systems. In such systems, complex technological interfaces enable the computer to create feedback for the user, creating the illusion that the user is moving through and interacting with an artificial environment. For instance, in virtual-reality games—one of the more common applications of virtual-reality technology—users don interface equipment, usually consisting of a helmet and a glove. The helmet projects three-dimensional visuals, while the glove enables the user to navigate (flying by pointing, for instance) and to pick up and manipulate virtual objects. Cyberspace was originally envisioned as a virtual reality similar to this, in which many people could simultaneously interact with the system and with each other.

More recently, however, the term has become so broadly used within popular culture that it now applies to nearly any form of computer-mediated communication. Cyberspace refers metaphorically to social and informational connections created by computers. People are said to be “in cyberspace” when they engage in such activities as browsing the World Wide Web, writing email, chatting with others through text online, etc. (Some have suggested that we are also in cyberspace when we talk on the phone, since a computer-mediated connection enables a conversation occurring in a non-physical “space.”)

The prefix “cyber,” as mentioned earlier, comes from the word cybernetics. Norman Weiner created the modern definition of cybernetics in 1948 as “the science of control and communication in the animal and the machine.” While Weiner is often credited with coining the term, the word cybernetics (from a similar Greek term meaning “steersmanship,” or to steer or govern) appeared prior to his usage, and most notably was used in the 1830s by the French physicist André-Marie Ampère to describe the science of government. Modern cybernetic theory has been particularly concerned with artificial intelligence (computer programs that think and are self-aware) and with communication and control interfaces between humans and computers.

William Gibson coined the term cyberspace in his 1984 novel Neuromancer. (The term actually appears briefly in his earlier short story Burning Chrome, but in that story Gibson mainly uses the term “matrix” to refer to what he eventually calls cyberspace in the trilogy of novels that begins with Neuromancer.) Gibson envisioned a virtual realm, accessed through direct brain-to-computer connections, in which users could navigate among quasi-physical graphical representations of computer data. Gibson's cyberspace was generated through some unspecified interaction between multiple overlapping and interconnected computer programs and the many computer users connecting to them. One significant difference between Gibson's cyberspace and existing virtual reality and similar programs is that in a virtual reality program, every graphical representation must be programmed and projected to the human user. Gibson's cyberspace was spontaneously generated through the direct brain connections to the computers. At one point, Gibson describes it as “a consensual hallucination.”

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