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Theories of Cybersociety 45
Whilst the term ‘cyberspace’, which first appeared in the prophetic
fiction writing of William Gibson, is most frequently used today inter-
changeably with the Internet, some thinkers have pointed out that it can
be applied in a much wider sense to include a range of technically consti-
tuted environments in which individuals experience a location not
reducible to physical space (see Escobar, 1994; Ostwald, 1997).
By this definition, any medium which encloses human communica-
tion in an electronically generated space could be a form of cyberspace.
A further distinction is also often made to designate that such a space may
be very private or shared by others. For example, a personal music listen-
ing device with headphones, which Sony Corporation first made famous
with the ‘Walkman’, qualifies as a medium of the enclosure of experience. 2
However, it falls short of the conditions necessary for cyberspace in that
it disallows a shared appreciation of the one media ‘event’. The event is
personalized because its ‘performance’ and the environment within
3
which it is consumed are connected by an individual user. Thus, the dis-
tinction being drawn here can be recognized in a range of daily media
habits. Meyrowitz (1985) notes: ‘There is a big difference between listen-
ing to a cassette tape while driving in a car and listening to a radio station,
in that the cassette tape cuts you off from the outside world, while the
radio ties you into it’ (90).
However, the difference between accessing shared media events and
ones that are personally programmed tends to be overlooked by virtual
reality theorists insofar as they are preoccupied with bandwidth as a lead-
ing marker of its definition. In general, virtual realities tend to require
much broader quanta of bandwidth in order to achieve their simulational
properties. Thus, virtual reality is regarded as having found a technologi-
cal home in digital environments. However, just as peronalization is not
an exclusive feature of digital media or a ‘second media age’, neither is
wide bandwidth.
Across the broadcast medium, significant differences exist between the
virtual qualities of media. Consider the difference between television and
cinema. Cinema offers almost double the bandwidth of TV. An average
size television fills 5% of the visual field, whilst the other 95% is occupied
by possible distractions in the room. Cinema engages 10% of the visual
field, with the other 90% blacked out – eliminating distraction. Cinerama
spans 25% of the visual field, whilst virtual screens fill 100% of the visual
field as such screens receive their data from computer-generated images.
But the technology of projection is merely an extension of broadcast
technologies. 4
As I argue in the Introduction to Virtual Politics (Holmes, 1997),
unlike virtual reality, cyberspace does not rely on a deception of the
senses to create the illusion of an integral realism. Rather, it is by the con-
struction of computer-mediated worlds in which (predominantly text-
based) communication can occur that an objectivated reality is established
which does not depend on a common deception of sense-impressions. As
Ostwald argues, ‘the critical component of any definition of cyberspace is