Cyberspace
Definition
Cyberspace is the notional space in which electronic communication occurs — a spatial metaphor for a set of arrangements that have no location, and one that has shaped how networked technology has been imagined, described, regulated and built.
Origin
The word was coined by William Gibson in the short story "Burning Chrome," published in Omni in July 1982, and given its famous definition in Neuromancer (1984):
- "Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data."
Gibson has been consistently and cheerfully clear that he had almost no idea what he meant. He has described the word as "evocative and essentially meaningless," invented because it looked good on the page, and has said he wrote Neuromancer on a manual typewriter with no real understanding of how computers worked. The most influential term in the history of network culture was a piece of prosody.
What the Metaphor Did
The spatial framing had consequences that were not obvious at the time.
It implied a place one goes to. If cyberspace is somewhere, then using a network is travel, and there is a here and a there. This produced the two-worlds model — real life versus online — which dominated a decade of writing and is now generally regarded as the field's most persistent error. See Place: The Networking of Public Space and digital anthropology on the correction.
It implied dimension and navigation. Michael Benedikt's Cyberspace: First Steps (MIT Press, 1991) took this seriously, assembling architects and computer scientists to work out what a space with no gravity, materials or permanence would require: axes, scale, orientation, transit. Marcos Novak's "liquid architecture" comes from that volume. What was actually built was a document format with links, and then a feed — spatial in neither the architectural nor the navigational sense.
It implied a jurisdiction. If cyberspace is territory, it can be sovereign. John Perry Barlow's "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" (Davos, 1996) makes the claim explicitly: "Governments of the Industrial World... you have no sovereignty where we gather." The rhetorical force of that document depends entirely on the spatial metaphor, and its subsequent failure is a demonstration of the metaphor's limits — the cables, the data centres and the people all turned out to be in jurisdictions after all.
It carried the frontier. "Electronic frontier," "homesteading," "settlers," "the wild west of the internet." See the frontier thesis and Blais on what that borrowing brings with it.
Decline of the Term
"Cyberspace" fell out of ordinary use through the 2000s, for a reason worth noting: the metaphor stopped being needed once the network stopped being somewhere one visited. A person is not in cyberspace; they are in a room, with a device, doing several things at once. The word survives mainly in military and policy usage — "cyberspace operations," "the cyber domain" — where the territorial framing remains institutionally convenient.
Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology
Cyberspace is this field's best case study in the power of a metaphor to determine what gets built. A term invented for its sound organised a decade of architecture, law, art and political rhetoric — and the assumptions it smuggled in, particularly that there are two worlds and that one of them is elsewhere, took twenty years to dislodge and are not gone.
