The dream of cyberspace

There's no commonly-accepted and used definition of cyberspace. "Cyberspace" is more like "rock and roll" or "liberalism": just as music lovers can argue at length about where the boundaries of rock end and jazz and country begin, and the scope of political movements is always up for negotiation, people who spend lots of time online have somewhat different notions of what cyberspace means.

Their flexibility doesn't keep such terms from still being used, and useful. But it does present a challenge for historians, because it obliges them to map how the meanings of terms change over time. There are some sources you can use to begin to fix these meanings: the dictionary is an obvious source, as are canonical texts that either introduce terms or are regarded as important in shaping their use. You can also intuit meanings from examples of popular use in newspaper articles, fiction, sermons, television, discussion boards, etc., etc.. The reader comments and suggestions for post-cyberspace terms are yet another set of primary materials for mapping the meaning of cyberspace.

Historically, if you look at writings that have tried to describe what cyberspace is, what it's relationship is to the real world, and what impact its growth will have, you see the same variety. But there are two key properties that many different authors have ascribed to cyberspace:

1. Cyberspace is separate from the real world.
2. Cyberspace is better than the real world.

The first is pretty self-explanatory: the second gets expressed in a couple ways.

For one thing, cyberspace lets information be free of the surly bonds of books, magazines, wax tablets, stone tablets, ink, and all other forms of atoms. In cyberspace, information can streak around in its Platonic state, unbound by the constraints of materiality.

Information used to be inscribed in material things, and things have to exist in places. To access and create more information, therefore, people also had to be in particular places. Cyberspace upended that entire equation. Information was now immaterial, which meant it could be everywhere at once-- or perhaps more accurately, accessible everywhere at once. If information could be accessible anywhere, then people didn't need to be in offices; they could work together remotely.

Finally, if people could work together remotely, they could also begin to break free of the bounds and prejudices that had kept them from cooperating in the past. The Internet served as a filter for preconceived social ideas; what remained when you went online was not your ethnic or gender or religious identity, but your intellectual identity. As the classic New Yorker cartoon put it, on the Internet, nobody knows your a dog.

But did the fact that the Internet-- or digital information-- lacked materiality (a connection to physical things), geography (a location in the physical world), and sociability (a community that defines what information means and why it matters) really make it better?

I argue that in each case the answer at first seems to be yes, but quickly turns into no. I'll start laying out my argument over the next couple days.

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