Page 79 - Cyberculture and New Media

70 On the Way to the Cyber-Arab-Culture
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intelligence, mobile connectivity to the Internet, the continuous exponential
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growth in the capacity of computers, smart agents and virtual reality.
“Cyberspace” is the term that encompasses most of these technologies. It is
one of the most significant technological developments of the late twentieth
century.
In his 1984 science fiction novel Neuromancer, William Gibson
describes cyberspace in the following often-cited passage:

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. Unthinkable complexity.
Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters
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and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.

Since Gibson published Neuromancer the word cyberspace has
become common parlance. The term is used synonymously with other
phrases such as cyberia, virtual space, virtual worlds, dataspace, the digital
domain, the electronic realm, the information sphere, virtual reality, computer
networking, and the Internet. In Neuromancer, cyberspace is a “dataspace,” a
vast “world in the wires” known as “the matrix,” where transnational
companies trade in information in a visual, Cartesian and electronic space.
Here data reside in colourful architectural forms in a space where the
imagination enters and interacts. Neuromancer paints a dystopian picture of
the near future, where the urban fabric is in decay, technology and
information are power, and humans and machines merge to become one.
Since Gibson’s novel, the word cyberspace has generally been used to
describe emerging computer-mediated communications and virtual reality
technologies. Both these cyberspatial technologies allow people to interact
with other people or with computer-simulated worlds. These technologies fit
with Gibson’s description of a consensual hallucination because there are
well known consensual protocols or rules, and because the medium of
interaction loosely simulates real-world interaction. However, the emerging
technologies do more than just electronically simulate traditional forms of
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communication; they also provide new means of interaction.

New technologies alter the structure of our interests: the
things we think about. They alter the character of our
symbols: the things we think with. And they alter the nature
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of community: the arena in which thoughts develop.