Cyberspace

Cyberspace, a metaphoric abstraction used in philosophy and computing, is a (virtual) reality which represents the Noosphere/World 2 both "inside" computers and "on" computer networks.

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The word "cyberspace" (a portmanteau of cybernetics and space) was coined by William Gibson, the Canadian science fiction writer, in 1982 in his novelette "Burning Chrome" in Omni magazine and was subsequently popularized in his novel Neuromancer. "Meatspace" is a term coined later as an opposite of "cyberspace".

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While cyberspace should not be confused with the real Internet, the term is often used simply to refer to objects and identities that exist largely within the computing network itself, so that a web site, for example, might be metaphorically said to "exist in cyberspace." According to this interpretation, events taking place on the Internet are not therefore happening in the countries where the participants or the servers are physically located, but "in cyberspace". This becomes a reasonable viewpoint once distributed services (e.g. Freenet) become widespread, and the physical identity and location of the participants become impossible to determine due to anonymous or pseudonymous communication. The laws of any particular nation state would therefore not apply.

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Besides aiding the layman's suspension of disbelief in fictional works, the success of this rather ambitously ambiguous metaphor is in large part due to the splintering of the profession of Computer Programmer into various specialized vocations. As John Ippolito put it:

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"These days there is no reason to expect a video editor to know HTML, a web designer to know perl, a database programmer to understand packet switching.

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So to introduce his readers to cyberspace ?the global fabric that supposedly knits toghether all these seperate threads? Gibson fell back on something our culture had prepared everyone to understand: a chase sequence through an imagined space. It would seem, therefore, that the metaphor of cyberspace is not merely a narrative of convenience but a practical necessity".

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As well as being a concept used in philosophy and computing, cyberspace has been commonly used in popular culture, for example

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• The anime Digimon is set in a version of cyberspace called the "Digital World". The Digital World is a parallel universe made up of data from the Internet. Similar to cyberspace, except that people could physically enter this world instead of merely using a computer.
• In the math mystery cartoon Cyberchase, the action takes place in Cyberspace, managed by the benevolent ruler, Motherboard. It is used as a conceit to allow storylines to take place in virtual worlds -- cybersites -- on any theme and where specific math concepts can be best explored.
• In the movie Tron, a programmer was transferred to the program world, where programs were personalities, resembling the forms of their creators.
• The idea of "the matrix" in the movie The Matrix resembles a complex form of cyberspace where people are "jacked in" from the real world, and can create anything and do anything they want in this cyber world.

Although cyberspace is a common idea it can mean several different types of virtual reality. In the rest of this article we will explore a few, starting with the simplest and then increasing its complexity one after another until reaching the logical extremity.

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Cyberspace: Cyberspace As a Metaphor: Text-Based Internet-Surfing ►



 

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