Since then, it has been applied to a variety of contexts ranging from product names, to conference titles, and terms of science fiction art.
The 'datasphere' as a concept was popularized by the media theorist, writer and advocate of cyberpunk culture and open-source solutions to social problems, Douglas Rushkoff, in the 1980s.
[1][2] Rushkoff's conceptualization, centered in media theory, was deployed to explain how 'media viruses' – ideas that capture public attention – rapidly spread.
[3] Updegrove (2004) conceptualizes the Personal Data Sphere (PDS), with a nod back to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's 1925 concept of a 'Noosphere' "layer of consciousness surrounding the globe, comprising all human thought and culture".
[3] Updegrove's PDS resonates with contemporary concepts such as MiData, Vendor Relationship Management, and Personal Data Stores.
As part of its research work, the Center has developed a cartography of the datasphere,[10] where there is not only a focus on regional approaches to the digital space, data flows, logical and physical routes, and social networks, but also to the power distribution across geographies.
Governance efforts are nowadays focusing on leveraging free data flows while ensuring the protection of different human groups.
At the same time, it stops short of detailed specification of datasets, human groups or norms, and leaves open the question of how the interaction of these should be governed.
[6] Moreover, the Center for Clinical and Translational Science from the University of Kentucky launched its web-based application for researchers to explore de-identified patient data, which they called the DataSphere.
[16] The concept was also adopted by researchers mapping livestock population with data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Statistical Database (FAOSTAT).
Seagate, an American data storage company, has framed its approach towards "advancing a more sustainable datasphere",[19] by which they seek to power their global footprint with 100% renewable energy by 2030 and to achieve carbon neutrality by 2040.
Although this emerged as a science fiction concept, the metaverse is nowadays real thanks to the developments of different private and big tech companies, as well as other actors.
The existence and increasing use of metaverse spaces has been highly criticized, and people around the world have expressed their concerns about governance within the datasphere, as well as access to it.
For instance, the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction defines the datasphere as "the notional environment in which digital data is stored; esp.
Hyperion by Simmons described the datasphere as a construct delight: "I called up information almost constantly, living in a frenzy of full interface".
[29] In The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection by Dozois, the author talked about the datasphere of Dione, which was "crawling with agents".
[33] In Numenera, the datasphere is described as: Finally, a GitHub repository named 'data-sphere' provides code that allows a user to view data visualizations in Virtual Reality.