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Cyberspace is an interconnected digital environment. It is a type of virtual world popularized with the rise of the Internet. The term entered popular culture from science fiction and the arts but is now used by technology strategists, security professionals, governments, military and industry leaders and entrepreneurs to describe the domain of the global technology environment, commonly defined as standing for the global network of interdependent information technology infrastructures, telecommunications networks and computer processing systems. Others consider cyberspace to be just a notional environment in which communication over occurs. The word became popular in the 1990s when the use of the Internet, networking, and digital communication were all growing dramatically; the term cyberspace was able to represent the many new ideas and phenomena that were emerging. As a social experience, individuals can interact, exchange ideas, share information, provide social support, conduct business, direct actions, create artistic media, play games, engage in political discussion, and so on, using this global network. Cyberspace users are sometimes referred to as cybernauts.
The term cyberspace has become a conventional means to describe anything associated with general computing, the Internet and the diverse Cyberculture. The U.S. government recognizes the interdependent network of information technology infrastructures and cyber-physical systems operating across this medium as part of the US national critical infrastructure. Amongst individuals on cyberspace, there is believed to be a code of shared rules and ethics mutually beneficial for all to follow, referred to as cyberethics. Many view the right to privacy as most important to a functional code of cyberethics.Richard A. Spinello, "Cyberethics: Morality and Law in Cyberspace" Such moral responsibilities go hand in hand when working online with global networks, specifically when opinions are involved with online social experiences.
According to Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer, cyberspace is defined more by the social interactions involved rather than its technical implementation.Morningstar, Chip and F. Randall Farmer. The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat. The New Media Reader. Ed. Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort: The MIT Press, 2003. 664-667. Print In their view, the computational medium in cyberspace is an augmentation of the communication channel between real people; the core characteristic of cyberspace is that it offers an environment that consists of many participants with the ability to affect and influence each other. They derive this concept from the observation that people seek richness, complexity, and depth within a virtual world.
Atelier Cyberspace worked at a time when the Internet did not exist and computers were more or less off-limit to artists and creative engagement. In a 2015 interview with Scandinavian art magazine Kunstkritikk, Carsten Hoff recollects that although Atelier Cyberspace did try to implement computers, they had no interest in the virtual space as such:
In the same interview, Hoff continues:
The works of Atelier Cyberspace were originally shown at a number of Copenhagen venues and have later been exhibited at The National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen as part of the exhibition "What's Happening?"
The term cyberspace first appeared in fiction in the 1980s in the work of cyberpunk science fiction author William Gibson, first in his 1982 short story "Burning Chrome" and later in his 1984 novel Neuromancer. In the next few years, the word became prominently identified with online computer networks. The portion of Neuromancer cited in this respect is usually the following:
Now widely used, the term has since been criticized by Gibson, who commented on the origin of the term in the 2000 documentary No Maps for These Territories:
As Barlow and the EFF continued public education efforts to promote the idea of "digital rights", the term was increasingly used during the Internet boom.
In 1989, Autodesk, an American multinational corporation that focuses on 2D and 3D design software, developed a virtual design system called Cyberspace.Andrew Pollack, New York Times, "For Artificial Reality, Wear A Computer," April 10, 1989
The most recent draft definition is the following:
The Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States Department of Defense define cyberspace as one of five interdependent domains, the remaining four being land, air, maritime, and space. See United States Cyber Command
Firstly, cyberspace describes the flow of digital data through the network of interconnected computers: it is at once not "real"since one could not spatially locate it as a tangible objectand clearly "real" in its effects. There have been several attempts to create a concise model about how cyberspace works since it is not a physical thing that can be looked at. Secondly, cyberspace is the site of computer-mediated communication (CMC), in which online relationships and alternative forms of online identity are enacted, raising important questions about the social psychology of Internet use, the relationship between "online" and "offline" forms of life and interaction, and the relationship between the "real" and the virtual. Cyberspace draws attention to remediation of culture through new media technologies: it is not just a communication tool, but a social destination, and is culturally significant in its own right. Finally, cyberspace can be seen as providing new opportunities to reshape society and culture through "hidden" identities, or it can be seen as borderless communication and culture.
The "space" in cyberspace has more in common with the abstract, mathematical meanings of the term (see space) than physical space. It does not have the duality of positive and negative volume (while in physical space, for example, a room has the negative volume of usable space delineated by positive volume of walls, Internet users cannot enter the screen and explore the unknown part of the Internet as an extension of the space they are in), but spatial meaning can be attributed to the relationship between different Web page (of books as well as ), considering the unturned pages to be somewhere "out there." The concept of cyberspace, therefore, refers not to the content being presented to the surfer, but rather to the possibility of surfing among different sites, with feedback between the user and the rest of the system creating the potential to always encounter something unknown or unexpected.
differ from text-based communication in that on-screen images are meant to be figures that actually occupy a space and the animation shows the movement of those figures. Images are supposed to form the positive volume that delineates the empty space. A game adopts the cyberspace metaphor by engaging more players in the game, and then figuratively representing them on the screen as avatars. Games do not have to stop at the avatar-player level, but current implementations aiming for more immersive playing space (i.e. Laser tag) take the form of augmented reality rather than cyberspace, fully immersive virtual realities remaining impractical.
Although the more radical consequences of the global communication network predicted by some cyberspace proponents (i.e. the diminishing of state influence envisioned by John Perry BarlowJohn Perry Barlow, "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" , February 8, 1996) failed to materialize and the word lost some of its novelty appeal, it remains current . FindLaw Legal News site , Tech and IP: Cyberspace section, retrieved November 14, 2006.
Some virtual communities explicitly refer to the concept of cyberspacefor example, Linden Lab calling their customers "Residents" of all such communities can be positioned "in cyberspace" for explanatory and comparative purposes (as did Sterling in The Hacker Crackdown, followed by many journalists), integrating the metaphor into a wider cyberculture.
The metaphor has been useful in helping a new generation of thought leaders to reason through new military strategies around the world, led largely by the US Department of Defense (DoD).Cyber Conflict Studies Association, CCSA The use of cyberspace as a metaphor has had its limits, however, especially in areas where the metaphor becomes confused with physical infrastructure. It has also been critiqued as being unhelpful for falsely employing a spatial metaphor to describe what is inherently a network.
Visual arts have a tradition, stretching back to antiquity, of artifacts meant to fool the eye and be mistaken for reality. This questioning of reality occasionally led some philosophers and especially theologiansRanging across history, from the interference of depictions of newly died in the Great Dreaming of Australian aboriginal ancestors; East Roman/Byzantine iconoclasm movements in the 8th and 8th c. CE; in Islam, Sunni and other exegetes from the 9th century onward; in Judaism, Joseph Karo's Shulkhan Arukh (Code of Jewish Law: Venice, 1563); and, in the Bahai faith, the concerns of Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Bahá'í Faith (1921–57). to distrust art as deceiving people into entering a world which was not real (see Aniconism). The artistic challenge was resurrected with increasing ambition as art became more and more realistic with the invention of photography, film (see Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat), and immersive computer simulations.
Some contemporary philosophers and scientists (e.g. David Deutsch in The Fabric of Reality) employ virtual reality in various thought experiments. For example, Philip Zhai in Get Real: A Philosophical Adventure in Virtual Reality connects cyberspace to the Platonic tradition:
Note that this brain-in-a-vat argument conflates cyberspace with reality, while the more common descriptions of cyberspace contrast it with the "real world".
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