Jim Benson speculates that the strength of cultural norms as guides to online behavior in the early days of electronic communities contributed to the sense of the Internet as a place-- and that the growth of technological replacements for those norms means that "the original culture of the location known as Cyberspace has drifted away."
Are there still pockets of well behaved Netizens? Certainly. But they don't inhabit the entire area of Cyberspace. They are zoned and permitted. Or worse, located in walled, gated communities that rely on exclusivity and barriers to entry to ensure their smooth operations....
So, another way that Cyberspace may be dead is in its assumption that all of Cyberspace is Cyberspace. What we may now have a platform that has a great many Cyberspaces. The web points to the Cyberspaces, but the whole may be something very different.
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