CYBERSPACE

   An item of sf TERMINOLOGY introduced by William GIBSON in his novel NEUROMANCER (1984). He takes quite an old sf idea, also much discussed by scientists, in imagining a NEAR FUTURE era in which the human brain and nervous system (biological) can interface directly with the global information network (electrical) by jacking neurally implanted electrodes directly into a networked COMPUTER (or "cyberdeck"). The network then entered by the human mind is perceived by it, Gibson tells us, as if it were an actual territory, almost a landscape, the "consensual hallucination that was the matrix". This is cyberspace. Gibson goes on to imagine that cyberspace might contain not only human minds but also human or godlike simulacra, artefacts of the system created, perhaps accidentally, by AIs. The term "cyberspace" has since been used by other writers. It refers in fact to an imaginary but not wholly impossible special case of VIRTUAL REALITY, which is in our contemporary world a more commonly used term for machine-generated scenarios perceived, in varying degrees, as "real" by those who watch or "enter" them.

   PN

   See also: GODS AND DEMONS.

   The word "Cyberspace" has become ubiquitous. It was first coined by William Gibson in his 1984 novel, Neuromancer. But the concept of cyberspace - that an electronic interface exists between the human nervous system and a computer - has its roots in cybernetics, a term coined in the early 1940s by mathematician Norbert Wiener.In 1948, Wiener published a paper titled "Cybernetics: Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine." In it he discusses the relationship between statistics, information theory, electronics, and the brain.Almost thirty-five years later, Wiener's ideas inspired the vision of cyberspace. From that vision came "cyberpunk:" - a literary style that has affected lifestyles..And what will happen in Cyberspace will most likely change the way we humans communicate in the future.