My argument as a FAQ

(For those who don't want to read the various articles in which I lay out this argument, and its various elaborations.)

What is cyberspace?

Cyberspace is a place.

Cyberspace is separate from the everyday world in which our bodies live.

Cyberspace is superior to the everyday world. Information lives in cyberspace, or wants to live there. In cyberspace, information can be free.

As more information migrates to cyberspace, or originates there, older media-- like books-- and information-managing institutions-- like offices and libraries-- will wither.

Why did we believe in it?

It had intellectual origins in science fiction, video games, arcane academic scholarship, and the writings of California futurists. Arguably John Perry Barlow has done more than anyone to make the concept of "cyberspace" appealing.

It became very popular in the 1990s because it made sense of the experience of going online in the PC-and-Internet era. When the Web was new and 28.8 kbs was blazing fast, going online was often like travel: difficult, time-consuming, yet novel and exciting.

The way we interact with PCs reinforces the sense of the computer as portal to a different world. The GUI uses spatial metaphors (e.g., "windows"); PCs are very good at absorbing our attention; and it's hard to interact with computers and with your surroundings. You can either focus on the screen, or the world, but not both.

Why does the concept matter?

Cyberspace is a metaphor we live by, to borrow a phrase from Berkeley anthropologist George Lakoff. Not only have we used it to explain what happens when we go online; it's come to guide our thinking about new work in everything from interface design to copyright law.

The idea of cyberspace as place has had profound implications for copyright and intellectual property law. If cyberspace is a place, one argument goes, then property rights must apply there.

Why is cyberspace coming to an end?

Our experience of interacting with digital information is changing. We're moving to a world in which we (or objects acting on our behalf) are online all the time, everywhere.

Designers and computer scientists are also trying hard to create a new generation of devices and interfaces that don't monopolize our attention, but ride on the edges of our awareness. We'll no longer have to choose between cyberspace and the world; we'll constantly access the first while being fully part of the second.

Because of this, the idea of cyberspace as separate from the real world will collapse.

So if "cyberspace" is no longer relevant, what will we call this new world?

That's the big question, isn't it?

What will life be like in this new world?

That's the other big question, isn't it?

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