cyberspace

/suy"beuhr spays'/, n.

1. the realm of electronic communication.

2. See virtual reality.

[1985-90; CYBER(NETIC) + SPACE]

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▪ 1996

by Robert Everett-Green

      Like the Land of Oz, cyberspace was originally the invention of a writer, the science-fiction novelist William Gibson. While Oz remains the domain of a wizard and a little girl from Kansas, however, cyberspace has leapt off the page to become a subject of wide public interest and debate. As both a dream and a reality, it has sparked renewed discussion about the social and economic assumptions underlying our present means of communication, as well as the role of technology in our lives. By the beginning of 1995, there was a growing consensus that cyberspace had become a region that could significantly affect the structure of our economies, the development of our communities, and the protection of our rights as free citizens.

      Gibson's cyberspace, as described in his book Neuromancer (1984) and several later novels, was an artificial environment created by computers. Unlike a motion picture, which presents moving images on a flat surface, a cyberspatial environment would convey realistic detail in three dimensions and to all five senses. It would also allow for a degree of face-to-face intimacy between people in remote places. In one of Gibson's novels, for instance, a woman "meets" a mysterious financier outside a cathedral in Barcelona, Spain, though in fact she is sitting alone in an office in Brussels. Research continues into ways of realizing this type of cyberspatial experience, which has come to be known as virtual reality. By 1994 virtual reality machines had begun to appear in amusement parks and shopping malls, though a full experience of Gibson's vision has so far been frustrated by the crude state of the technology and by the physical disorientation, bordering on nausea, that some machines provoke. Moreover, users of virtual reality devices are usually communicating not with others but only with the computer.

      Cyberspace as a present reality has come to be associated primarily with networks of computers linked through telephone lines. The biggest and most familiar of these, the Internet, was developed in the 1970s to assist U.S. military and academic research. As recently as 1990, the Internet was almost unknown to the general public. By the end of 1995, however, the network had absorbed millions of users with no affiliations to defense institutions or universities. The volume of exchanges between these users, who numbered at least 20 million-30 million in 1995, surpassed 30 terabytes per month, or enough information to fill 30 million books of 700 pages each. For many of those involved in these exchanges—and for millions more who have no experience of computer networks—cyberspace and the Internet have become nearly synonymous terms.

      The Internet is a hybrid medium, combining aspects of the printing press, the telephone, the public bulletin board, and the private letter. It also permits crude radio, and television transmission without the physical plant required by conventional broadcasting. Indeed, some commentators have predicted that the Internet or a successor network will eventually absorb the functions of television, telephone, and conventional publishing. They speak of an "information superhighway," a term coined in 1992 by then senator Al Gore, Jr., to refer to a unified, interactive system of electronic communication. The prospect of such a system, with the capacity to deliver an unprecedented range of informational services to the home, school, or office, has provoked a flurry of strategic alliances between major commercial interests in the telephone, software-programming, and entertainment industries. By 1995 the business world was beginning to regard the largely noncommercial Internet as the electronic equivalent of China: a huge, ever-growing, and virtually untapped market.

      For some commentators, however, the social implications of cyberspace far outstrip its commercial potential. Unlike television, which beams its messages to a passive and isolated audience, the Internet depends upon its users to supply and share content and to act cooperatively to aid its dispersal. Since resource sharing and mutual aid are age-old traits of successful social groupings, some Internet advocates argue that the medium may help repair a social fabric badly weakened by television. They claim that cyberspace encourages the formation of "virtual communities," without hindrance from national or geographic boundaries. They also view the Internet as the harbinger of a renaissance in free speech. Since the network gives everyone the tools to become a publisher, they say, cyberspace offers a potent means of freeing public discourse from the control of private newspaper companies and broadcasters.

      Similarly optimistic predictions have greeted the appearance of every major electronic medium, including the telephone, radio, and television. Often, announcements of the new utopia have proved less correct than the statements of dissenting voices. One of the earliest and most prescient warnings about electronic media was delivered by Fedor Dostoyevsky in his novel The Brothers Karamazov (1879-80). "We are assured that the world is becoming more and more united, is being formed into brotherly communion, by the shortening of distances, by the transmitting of thoughts through the air," he wrote. In the novelist's view, however, the devices responsible for these transmissions would only stimulate "meaningless and foolish desires." Dostoyevsky's novel was published only about four years after Alexander Graham Bell secured his patent on the telephone, which may be regarded as the first instrument of cyberspace.

      More recent critics have warned that electronic networks, far from creating a true global village, will only exaggerate disparities between rich and poor. Users may turn away from their television sets only to withdraw into narrow communion with other residents of their exclusive "cyburbia." Other commentators have warned of the danger lurking in the great potential for violations of civil and privacy rights through the use of computer networks. As citizens perform more social and commercial transactions in cyberspace, it becomes easier to track their spending habits, private interests, and political beliefs. Advocacy groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation have called for vigorous protection of privacy rights in cyberspace. The U.S. government has proposed that a device known as the Clipper Chip be accepted as a standard means for encrypting and decoding messages on the Internet, which would thus protect privacy. Critics observe, however, that the Clipper Chip would feature a "back door" to which the government would retain the only key, allowing it to intercept and decode private messages at will.

      Further debate has surrounded the issue of how existing laws affect cyberspace as a public space. A University of Michigan student who published on the Internet a violent rape fantasy in which he named a fellow classmate as his victim was arrested in 1995 by the FBI on suspicion of using interstate communications to threaten another person with injury or kidnap. The charge was eventually dismissed on the grounds that the student's writing did not constitute a threat to do real harm. Some observers regarded the case as an awkward application of a law designed for other, more private media. Fear of a flood of pornographic material cascading onto the screens of young Internet users gripped many a politician and journalist in 1995, even though pornographic images represented less than one-half of one percent of all images on the Internet. Some U.S. legislators proposed new laws requiring strict screening of unregulated computer networks for pornographic materials—a measure critics contended would be comparable to asking telephone companies to monitor their lines for discussions that may assist criminal activity.

      Perhaps the thorniest legal issue of all is that of copyright, which forbids unauthorized duplication of another's original work. The mere act of viewing a document on the Internet, however, offends against this principle since the document is literally copied to the viewer's screen. If the document is then copied onto a storage device such as a floppy disk, the viewer may alter the document and republish it in a form that may not be readily distinguishable from the work of the original author. Some writers and artists have greeted this situation as a new impetus for collective creativity, but for defenders of intellectual property rights it is a problem of unprecedented scale. Some have suggested that the very notion of copyright, which was unknown before the invention of printing, may not survive the advent of cyberspace.

      The most intriguing aspect of cyberspace, however, may have more to do with the evolving relationship of humankind with its technologies. At the root of Gibson's notion of computer-simulated worlds and electronically assisted experience is the prospect of a meeting of machine and human at a near-organic level. Some commentators have spoken of a coming "bionic convergence" through which we may all someday be fitted with computer implants that shunt messages directly to and from our brains and that may have the capacity to stimulate electronically our creativity or our response to pleasure. At that level of cyberspatial experience, to borrow a phrase from media theorist Marshall McLuhan, "man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world." Whether we shall be content with that status, if indeed it becomes ours, remains to be seen.

Robert Everett-Green is senior features writer and Internet columnist of the Globe and Mail, Toronto.

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