terminal cyberspace

February 9, 2006

2–3 minutes

There has been some discussion of the Wired article regarding the "end of cyberspace" here and here. I suppose the term is played out, and if William Gibson can pronounce it dead, the rest of us can go with that. However, I think the fact that cyberspace is dead makes it all the more interesting. What does dead mean here anyway? That the term can’t be monetized anymore? That it doesn’t close the deal on the latest dot com vaporware? That there’s some uncomfortable disconnect between cyberspace and our experience of technology? Cool. Sign me up.

Now it is the case that I teach a course titled "Writing in Cyberspace." I didn’t invent the name, but I haven’t taken the opportunity to change the title when I’ve had it. I first taught the course in 2002, and I thought the title was dated then. However, I find something appealing about the blasted futurity it connotes. The term reminds us that futurity has a half-life. Hearing the word cyberspace is like watching The Jetsons or the original Star Trek (huge magnetic tapes roll, lights flash, a whirring sound, then a robotic voice working…working…).

Gibson described his invention of the term as "neologistic spasm." I think of it as a kenning: cybernetics references steering/navigation, so I suppose it is already spatial in a sense. But I also think of Derrida discussing cybernetics as challenging the phonocentric conception of language. Text is spatial. It is simply that cyberspace is not delimited by a horizon. It is haptic. Again, as Gibson writes, cyberspace is "consensual hallucination." This also reminds me of the pharmacological aspect of Derrida and later Ulmer’s approach to writing.

Either way, like Jeff, I am curious over the perceived need to "replace" the term cyberspace. I guess most people use cyberspace interchangeably with the Internet, the Net, the Web, and maybe with Virtual Reality. Obviously that means we already have replacement terms.

The important point here though is 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.

e load

Welcome home, cyberspace.

Technorati Tags: cyberspace, writing

#plaa{position:absolute;clip:rect(467px,auto, auto,467px);}

2 responses to “terminal cyberspace”

c-m

February 11, 2006 at 10:24 am

Just to say, I didn’t hear “dead” in Gibson’s comments — I heard no longer marketable as a concept yet omnipresent all the same. At least not in that Wired article, unless there is another place where he has pronounced it “dead.” And perhaps, I would suggest, omnipresent in the persistently same hallucinatory manner as the concept was originally coined. If we do away with the concept — cyberspace — that doesn’t necessarily end the consensual hallucination — it only represses the reality or truth that it is hallucinatory and not simply the transmittal of information or that awful renomination “infosphere” or even “the world,” as if reality was suddenly directly accessible again or as if we have “matured,” as Gershenfeld suggests, from the hallucinations when they are actually still occurring and will forever occur. Getting rid of the concept of “cyberspace” only puts us deeper into that sleep, as it were. Gershenfeld is weirdly suggesting that there are boundaries between reality and virtual reality and as if we are suddenly in control — “we can interact with them [information technologies] in our world instead of ours” — when, in truth, we’re just falling further and further down that rabbit hole the more “they” are intergrated.

LikeLike

Reply
c-m

February 11, 2006 at 11:51 am

Okay, I went back to the Wired article, and just for the sake of correction, I see the title of the article; however, the part about Gibson did not have him quoted as saying “cyberspace is dead,” only that he would use “that word” for his next book — hence the source of my confusion. What he means by “if I had that word,” is sort of ambiguous, especially since “dead” is available to anyone for usage and “cyberspace is dead” is a phrase rather than a word. Hence, my confusion. It’s those slippery internets again.

LikeLike

Reply

Alex Reid, professor of digital rhetoric, Media & Artificial Intelligence