What is Cyberspace?
“Cyberspace” is a term coined by William Gibson in his fantasy novel Neuromancer to describe the “world” of computers, and the society that gathers around them. Gibson’s fantasy of a world of connected computers has moved into a present reality in the form of the Internet. In cyberspace people “exist” in the ether–you meet them electronically, in disembodied, faceless form. Within this new form of social interaction.
Cyberspace refers to the nonphysical environment created by joined computers interoperating on a network. In cyberspace, computer operators interact in ways similar to the real world, except cyberspace interaction does not require physical movement beyond typing. Information can be exchanged in real time or delayed time, and people can shop, share, explore, research, work or play. The Internet forms the largest cyberspace environment, housing many sub-environments within it. These include the World Wide Web (Web), USENET newsgroups and Internet Relay Chat (IRC). The Web is the most popular destination, consisting of millions of websites where a visitor can find virtually anything. He or she can also create a personal site to host information, pictures, movies, music or interactive forums. Web forums allow people to have conversations in a bulletin-board-style interface. Interested parties respond to one another by posting comments to topics. The forums are public and are a very popular
Unlike most computer terms, “cyberspace” does not have a standard, objective definition. Instead, it is used to describe the virtual world of computers. For example, an object in cyberspace refers to a block of data floating around a computer system or network. With the advent of the Internet, cyberspace now extends to the global network of computers. So, after sending an e-mail to your friend, you could say you sent the message to her through cyberspace. However, use this term sparingly, as it is a popular newbie term and is well overused.
In a recent issue of the Computer Law & Security Report [1], Bernard Zajac suggested that readers might want to peruse some of the “cyberpunk” novels-in particular the works of William Gibson-in order to gain an insight into the organisation and behaviour of hackers. While wholly commending the incitement to read Gibson’s work, we feel that this view understates the breadth of vision of the cyberpunk genre and could mislead, because the “console men” and “keyboard cowboys” of Gibson’s works are not really the same people as the hackers of today. We thought it might therefore be both entertaining and stimulating to provide readers with an overview of the world of cyberspace and to draw attention to some elements of the works where we feel that there are indeed some points worth further analysis and discussion. Is it possible that, like Arthur C. Clarke’s much vaunted prediction of the communication satellite [2], Gibson has produced works which are not so much science fiction as informe
