Cyberspace

Cyberspace. Everyone knows what it means; no one has a clear definition.  Like the blind men trying to describe an elephant, the “official” definitions vary widely.  I argue that cyberspace is a psychological phenomena not a technological one:  Cyberspace is a metaphysical realm; the place our minds go when we interact with others using the global communications network.   

The important distinction between that definition and the myriad others is that it is not about the infrastructure, the equipment, the way we interact with the internet, or the information we interact with.  It is about what happens inside our minds when we interact with the ICT system.

To see what I mean, let’s start with cell phones.   The detrimental effect of cell phone usage on reaction time while driving is well documented.   Talking on a cell phone while driving increases perception response time by about .36 seconds – about the same amount of time as DUI.   While the effects is thoroughly documented, there is scant attention paid to why.  To explore what is happening during these conversations, try this thought experiment.  The next time you  have an involved phone conversation, take a break and take note of where your mind is.  How much of it is devoted to your immediate surroundings, how much to the conversation itself?  Where were you mentally?  Did you feel your attention shift into and out of your surroundings at the onset and end of the conversation?

Unlike talking to a passenger in the car, where you both share the same experimental environment, talking on a phone puts you and another person in the same mental space.   If you've ever had a phone conversation while driving, and found yourself at your destination without fully remembering for how you got there, you know exactly what I mean.

Video is another good example.  When you watch TV or play video games, at some point your attention is completely inside the screen.  Regardless of the size of the screen, you are attuned to the information, not the environment of the delivery device.  Watching and becoming immersed in video on a cell phone demonstrates this effect.    

Video games, chat channels, web surfing are all examples.  They take you out of your surroundings to some other place.  This is not dissimilar to the celebrated effect books have of taking the reader to far off realms.   The effect of immersing ones attention is a fundamental part of being human: reading, meditation, theatre are as old as history.  What differentiates cyberspace is that it is external, two way and ubiquitous.  It isn't really possible to be half immersed in a book from the moment one wakes until the moment one sleeps, unlike cyberspace, where smart phones and augmented reality are making constant partial immersion a fact of life.

While the definition of cyberspace as a metaphysical realm,   the place our minds go when we interact with others using the global communications network, may differ from most , the concept is not completely new.  Science Fiction Author Bruce Sterling once wrote:

Cyberspace is the "place" where a telephone conversation appears to occur. Not inside your actual phone, the plastic device on your desk. Not inside the other person's phone, in some other city. The place between the phones. [...] in the past twenty years, this electrical "space," which was once thin and dark and one-dimensional—little more than a narrow speaking-tube, stretching from phone to phone—has flung itself open like a gigantic jack-in-the-box. Light has flooded upon it, the eerie light of the glowing computer screen. This dark electric netherworld has become a vast flowering electronic landscape. Since the 1960s, the world of the telephone has cross-bred itself with computers and television, and though there is still no substance to cyberspace, nothing you can handle, it has a strange kind of physicality now. It makes good sense today to talk of cyberspace as a place all its own.