The public hypersphere, however, is not limited to publishing or the European café culture, not even to the Internet but includes the larger part of human relations, mediated or not.
It encompasses both voluntary participation as well as involuntary, through mass surveillance: "The electronic traces we leave constantly write our autobiographies ... [The public hypersphere is] a gas that fills the entire available space, it is 'the place that doesn't exist'."
Mathematicians talk about hyperspheres when they want to describe a sphere of higher dimensionality, where normal geometric rules don't apply – here, the shortest path between two points is not necessarily a straight line.
All these new phenomena "contribute in building a ubiquitous medium, hypercomplex and fractal, that everyone, nolens volens, partake in designing, directing and using ..."[4] Lévy has also written about the transformation of the public sphere in his book Cyberdémocratie (2002).
[5] In German, the word Hyperöffentlichkeit has been used by sociologist Udo Thiedeke in his characterization of Howard Rheingold's ideas concerning the virtual community,[6] that is a high degree of participation and interactivity.