I'm in London for the next several days, and probably will be posting quite erratically, if at all. However, I've still got at least four more responses to the Wired magazine query to post. Back after I return to the States.
Luke Hughes is research director of the Accenture Labs in Palo Alto, California. His answer to the big question draws upon work that he and his team have been doing for the last couple years:
Reality Online is the observation that we may in the future go online not to go online but rather to surf physical reality. It will seem as archaic as being excited about 'plugging into the electric grid' would be to our children to get excited about going 'online'. Rather it will be a utility by which we strangely enough get efficiently to "reality"... to our supply chains via RFID, to our forests and pipelines by Smart Dust, to our children and nannies via webcams, to our friends and relatives via camera phones and eventually video phones.
Technologically it's part of a general trend, first we had the Internet (Web), then ubiquitous computing where internet reached out into phyiscal world (our phones, PDAs, cars)... now the reverse is happening. Based on sensors in such devices as well as new sensors (RFID systems, Smart Dust, etc.), we can bring a digital copy of the physical world online that will have two distinctive qualities: more real time, and more detail.
Earlier suggestions:
David Sifry: Cyberspace
Andy Clark: Interactatron
John Seely Brown: The Infomated World
Ross Mayfield: On and Catalink
...plus many others in the Wired article
Technorati Tags: culture, cyberspace, language, pervasive computing, RFID, ubicomp
David Sifry is best-known as founder of Technorati, one of the flagship social software services. However, David has been in high tech for a couple decades, as CTO of a couple other companies. This is his answer to the big question:
I take a contrarian view to your question: I like and still use the word Cyberspace, and I think that there's no need for a new word.
The reason for this is the shared definition and vision that the word represents. First off, cyberspace gets the metaphor right - we're describing a new dimension, a spatial dimension. Rather than being the immersive VR-based world that Gibson originally envisioned, cyberspace is now a semi-transparent stream that is layered over our meatspace lives. It is an enhancement to our physical existence, an augmentation, not a retreat from it.
Cyberspace is not modal. It is ever-present, and we intersect and interact through the increasing number of tools and devices (dare I say implants at some point in the future) that is enhancing and enabling a new form of consciousness. I'm not talking about EST or transcendental meditation here, I'm talking about a sharpened awareness of our surroundings and the global events and people that shape our lives, all around us, that we ourselves participate in, both explicitly, and implicitly. As we live our daily lives, cyberspace itself is changed, even if we ourselves aren't aware of the changes, like small shifts in the earth's magnetic field when we simply move from one place to another.
Earlier suggestions:
Andy Clark: Interactatron
John Seely Brown: The Infomated World
Ross Mayfield: On and Catalink
...plus many others in the Wired article
Technorati Tags: culture, cyberspace, language, social software
Andy Clark probably has the coolest, and certainly longest-lived, title of any of the people David Pescovitz and I talked to: he holds the Chair in Logic and Metaphysics at Edinburgh University, in Scotland.
Andy first caught my eye when I happened upon his wonderful book, Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence. (He's also written a ton of other stuff.) It makes the argument that this ability of humans to merge with technologies is one of the things that makes us human: that we are, in other words, natural-born cyborgs. (I interviewed Andy a couple years ago about his book.)
Here's his take on the big question:
Recall, if you will, the Orgasmatron from Woody Allen's movie Sleeper. "Orgasmatron" was a delightfully clumsy word. It immediately conveyed the right idea, then stuck in your head like a permanent thorn.
With this role model in mind, I suggest that the new word for that multi-layered space in which people, things, and computational and communicative overlays conspire to create a richer place to be should be The Interactatron. All there is, all reality ever was, is a space of interaction possibilities of various shapes and kinds.
Cyberspace made sense when our electronic outreach was distinctive and confined, was mainly about word and picture based interactions. But those limits are passing fast. We reach and are reached at in so many different ways. It's one big machine out there, and interactions, brute-physical, social, intellectual and artistic, are what its about.
So.... There we are....
To me, the really big question Andy's nomination, and his earlier work, raises is this. Natural-Born Cyborgs does a great job of showing how much cognitive flexibility we have when it comes to adapting our brains to use certain tools, and how that flexibility can affect such fundamental (and even apparently biological and physical) things as our sense of our own bodies. What happens when cognitive flexibility meets not eyeglasses or hand-held tools, but information-charged versions of physical devices? or combinations of technologies that let you see information in spaces?
Sherry Turkle made a name for herself documenting the evolution of The Second Self (a self that was quite dependent on the sense of computers constituting a separate geography in which we could do things like create new personas). Will there be a comparable-- or even more powerful-- story to tell about the fate of the self in the post-cyberspace age?
Technorati Tags: culture, cyberspace, cyborg, language
John Seely Brown is a former Chief Scientist of Xerox PARC, and coauthor of two recent excellent books: The Social Life of Infomation (with Paul Duguid), and The Only Sustainable Edge (with John Hagel).
John answered the big question in a more philosophical vein than Ross Mayfield:
Cyberspace is an outmoded term. Let's consider as an alternative The Informated World, a world where the virtual and physical boundaries have become blurred and the virtual and physical worlds dance together and enhance each other.
Mark Weiser's vision of ubiquitous computing was a start down this phenomenological path where the concept of 'ready-at-hand' now wondrously crossed the physical/virtual boundary. Ideally, we all sought out a state of being where much like as in Heidegger's story, the blind man sitting feels the handle of the cane but once he starts walking the handle disappears and he feels as if he were directly touching the world.
Likewise, in the informated world, the interface disappears and we feel we can touch the augmented world directly.
Personally, I think this idea of technologies merging with us-- not in the sci-fi implants kind of way, but merging through interaction and familiarity, the way a bicycle or really good pen can become an extension or expression of our bodies-- is an important one to highlight. In my view, one reason cyberspace made sense for so long was that our interactions with computers supported the idea of The World being separate from The Matrix, with only the monitor joining the two together. Brown points out that as technologies change, the character of our experience with them changes; and thus our sense of the world-- and of alternate digital worlds-- inevitably changes as well.
Technorati Tags: culture, cyberspace, cyborg, language, ubicomp
Gene Becker comments on replacement for cyberspace. Gene's a very smart guy, and funny, too. On Steve Jurveton's "augmented reality:"
Huh? Okay, so it's a cyberspace (oops!) tag team smackdown pitting us Borg against The Architect and the Tessier-Ashpool cores? Whoa.
Technorati Tags: cyberspace, pervasive computing, ubicomp
The online version of the Wired article leaves off my last name!
Now I know why the Legos are looking so smug....
[To the tune of Snoop Dogg, "Who Am I (What's My Name)?," from the album "Doggystyle".]
Technorati Tags: cyberspace
Cyberspace is a "metaphor we live by," born two decades ago at the intersection of computers, networks, ideas, and experience. It has reflected our experiences with information technology, and also shaped the way we think about new technologies and the challenges they present. It had been a vivid and useful metaphor for decades; but in a rapidly-emerging world of mobile, always-on information devices (and eventually cybernetic implants, prosthetics, and swarm intelligence), the rules that define the relationship between information, places, and daily life are going to be rewritten. As the Internet becomes more pervasive-- as it moves off desktops and screen and becomes embedded in things, spaces, and minds-- cyberspace will disappear.
This blog is about what happens next. It's about the end of cyberspace, but more important, about what new possibilities will emerge as new technologies, interfaces, use practices, games, legal theory, regulation, and culture adjust-- and eventually dissolve-- the boundaries between the virtual and physical worlds.
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang is an historian of science and futurist.
Part of the Corante Innovation Hub.
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