Cyberspace, term and technology

Alex Reid, a literature professor at SUNY-Cortland, points out that

cyberspace was coined before the technology it came to designate was invented. The term was meant to estrange, to create a poetic vision of a sublime encounter with information that could only be acheived through flatlining, through a near-death experience. And now after two decades of commodification, cyberspace strikes us as strange once more.

Certainly the point about cyberspace evoking "a poetic vision of a sublime encounter with information" is right on; and the desire for such encounters have been a constant in the history of personal computing and networking, if you believe accounts like John Markoff's What the Dormouse Said (which makes the point that the pioneers of personal computing did a lot of drugs, and in some ways saw the computer as another mind-altering substance) and Theodore Roszak's From Satori to Silicon Valley (also available here). Douglas Engelbart "dreamed of "flying" through a variety of information spaces" even before his research group discovered drugs in the mid-1960s.

But was it "coined before the technology it came to designate was invented"? I suppose it depends on which technologies you think are designated by cyberspace. We're still waiting for the technologies that Gibson describes in Neuromancer. But when the book came out, we had personal computers, the ARPANet, and a few commercial computer services-- some basic pieces, but neither yet well-assembled nor widely distributed.

Technorati Tags: cyberspace, end of cyberspace, science_fiction