Cyberspace
[3] 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.
The term cyberspace first appeared in the visual arts in the late 1960s, when Danish artist Susanne Ussing (1940–1998) and her partner architect Carsten Hoff (b.
Under this name the two made a series of installations and images entitled "sensory spaces" that were based on the principle of open systems adaptable to various influences, such as human movement and the behaviour of new materials.
We felt that there was a need to loosen up the rigid confines of urban planning, giving back the gift of creativity to individual human beings and allowing them to shape and design their houses or dwellings themselves – instead of having some clever architect pop up, telling you how you should live.
We had this idea that sophisticated software might enable us to mimic the way in which nature creates products – where things that belong to the same family can take different forms.
A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system.
The term cyberspace started to become a de facto synonym for the Internet, and later the World Wide Web, during the 1990s, especially in academic circles[14] and activist communities.
Author Bruce Sterling, who popularized this meaning,[15] credits John Perry Barlow as the first to use it to refer to "the present-day nexus of computer and telecommunications networks".
Barlow describes it thus in his essay to announce the formation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (note the spatial metaphor) in June 1990:[16] In this silent world, all conversation is typed.
It extends across that immense region of electron states, microwaves, magnetic fields, light pulses and thought which sci-fi writer William Gibson named Cyberspace.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 of the late 1990s.
[19][20] The most recent draft definition is the following: Cyberspace is a global and dynamic domain (subject to constant change) characterized by the combined use of electrons and the electromagnetic spectrum, whose purpose is to create, store, modify, exchange, share, and extract, use, eliminate information and disrupt physical resources.
To cyberspace, a domain without a hierarchical ordering principle, we can, therefore, extend the definition of international politics coined by Kenneth Waltz: as being "with no system of law enforceable."
[22]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.
[...] in the past twenty years, this electrical "space," which was once thin and dark and one-dimensional—little more than a narrow speaking-tube, stretching from phone to phone—has flung itself open like a gigantic jack-in-the-box.
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 loops between the user and the rest of the system creating the potential to always encounter something unknown or unexpected.
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 Barlow[27]) failed to materialize and the word lost some of its novelty appeal, it remains current as of 2006[update].
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).
[24] A forerunner of the modern ideas of cyberspace is the Cartesian notion that people might be deceived by an evil demon that feeds them a false reality.
This questioning of reality occasionally led some philosophers and especially theologians[30] 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.
For example, Philip Zhai in Get Real: A Philosophical Adventure in Virtual Reality connects cyberspace to the Platonic tradition: Let us imagine a nation in which everyone is hooked up to a network of VR infrastructure.
The technological convergence of the mass media is the result of a long adaptation process of their communicative resources to the evolutionary changes of each historical moment.
Forwards, arise instant ways of communication, interaction and possible quick access to information, in which we are no longer mere senders, but also producers, reproducers, co-workers and providers.
In this giant relationships web, we mutually absorb each other's beliefs, customs, values, laws and habits, cultural legacies perpetuated by a physical-virtual dynamics in constant metamorphosis (ibidem).
Although artists working with other media have expressed interest in the concept, such as Roy Ascott, "cyberspace" in digital art is mostly used as a synonym for immersive virtual reality and remains more discussed than enacted.
Such advisors are loath to ask any penetrating questions about the wealth and activities of their clients, since the average fees criminals pay them to launder their money can be as much as 20 percent.
