Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Successors to cyberspace
As I recently noted, my colleague David Pescovitz and I wrote a short piece for Wired titled ""Cyberspace" is Dead." In it, we asked a number of people what terms they think should replace cyberspace. Wired published half a dozen of the responses, but we had a number of very interesting others, from some thoughtful and knowledgeable people. Here are the rest.
You can also follow the story at the End of Cyberspace blog.
Ross Mayfield is the founder and CEO of Socialtext, an enterprise social software company based in Palo Alto:
On
When kids use the Net, they are either On, using it as a conduit for social interaction, or Off, a way of not being present. We need to retain Off as a right.
Catalink
This is my shot at branding it, but all the good names are taken. Cata implies both action and memory. Linking is a social act.One that contributes to the structure of the web that we all contribute to, a vote for attention that could be ranks, but also an anchor through text or tag that provides context and meaning. As you link, you are connected, anywhere, anytime with anyone you so choose. This choice is important as we need to retain the right to de-link. When you link enough people, it is a catalyst for wonderful things.
John Seely Brown is a former Chief Scientist of Xerox PARC, and coauthor of two recent excellent books: The Social Life of Infomation (with Paul Duguid), and The Only Sustainable Edge (with John Hagel).
Cyberspace is an outmoded term. Let's consider as an alternative The Informated World, a world where the virtual and physical boundaries have become blurred and the virtual and physical worlds dance together and enhance each other.
Mark Weiser's vision of ubiquitous computing was a start down this phenomenological path where the concept of 'ready-at-hand' now wondrously crossed the physical/virtual boundary. Ideally, we all sought out a state of being where much like as in Heidegger's story, the blind man sitting feels the handle of the cane but once he starts walking the handle disappears and he feels as if he were directly touching the world.
Likewise, in the informated world, the interface disappears and we feel we can touch the augmented world directly.
Andy Clark probably holds the Chair in Logic and Metaphysics at Edinburgh University, in Scotland.
Recall, if you will, the Orgasmatron from Woody Allen's movie Sleeper. "Orgasmatron" was a delightfully clumsy word. It immediately conveyed the right idea, then stuck in your head like a permanent thorn.
With this role model in mind, I suggest that the new word for that multi-layered space in which people, things, and computational and communicative overlays conspire to create a richer place to be should be The Interactatron. All there is, all reality ever was, is a space of interaction possibilities of various shapes and kinds.
Cyberspace made sense when our electronic outreach was distinctive and confined, was mainly about word and picture based interactions. But those limits are passing fast. We reach and are reached at in so many different ways. It's one big machine out there, and interactions, brute-physical, social, intellectual and artistic, are what its about.
David Sifry is best-known as founder of Technorati, one of the flagship social software services.
I take a contrarian view to your question: I like and still use the word Cyberspace, and I think that there's no need for a new word.
The reason for this is the shared definition and vision that the word represents. First off, cyberspace gets the metaphor right - we're describing a new dimension, a spatial dimension. Rather than being the immersive VR-based world that Gibson originally envisioned, cyberspace is now a semi-transparent stream that is layered over our meatspace lives. It is an enhancement to our physical existence, an augmentation, not a retreat from it.
Cyberspace is not modal. It is ever-present, and we intersect and interact through the increasing number of tools and devices (dare I say implants at some point in the future) that is enhancing and enabling a new form of consciousness. I'm not talking about EST or transcendental meditation here, I'm talking about a sharpened awareness of our surroundings and the global events and people that shape our lives, all around us, that we ourselves participate in, both explicitly, and implicitly. As we live our daily lives, cyberspace itself is changed, even if we ourselves aren't aware of the changes, like small shifts in the earth's magnetic field when we simply move from one place to another.
Luke Hughes is research director of the Accenture Labs in Palo Alto, California.
Reality Online is the observation that we may in the future go online not to go online but rather to surf physical reality. It will seem as archaic as being excited about 'plugging into the electric grid' would be to our children to get excited about going 'online'. Rather it will be a utility by which we strangely enough get efficiently to "reality"... to our supply chains via RFID, to our forests and pipelines by Smart Dust, to our children and nannies via webcams, to our friends and relatives via camera phones and eventually video phones.
Technologically it's part of a general trend, first we had the Internet (Web), then ubiquitous computing where internet reached out into phyiscal world (our phones, PDAs, cars)... now the reverse is happening. Based on sensors in such devices as well as new sensors (RFID systems, Smart Dust, etc.), we can bring a digital copy of the physical world online that will have two distinctive qualities: more real time, and more detail.
Kris Pister is an engineering professor at U.C. Berkeley, and is best-known for his work on smart dust. He's also founder and CTO of Dust Networks.
Luke Hughes from Accenture calls it Reality Online, which I like because it emphasizes that this isn't about imposing computers on our view of the world, but rather imposing or presenting the world on/to the computers. You and I still do what we normally do, and the world becomes a lot smarter about how it interacts with us, not the other way around.
[I'd also suggest] uberDustenWissenshaftsVergnugen, which mean, more or less, "everywhere dust scholarship amusement."
James Boyle is William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law and Faculty Co-Director of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School, in Durham, North Carolina.
The Matrix, the metaverse, the right click universe? The answer, I think, is a boring one.
None.
We won't have a word for it precisely because it will be pervasive, and we won't have novel, technologically accurate words even for its component experiences, because language does not work that way (thank goodness).
We will talk about getting online long after the lines have disappeared, and e-mailing long after most people have forgotten mail was ever sent another way.
Cory Doctorow is a science fiction writer, co-editor of Boing Boing, activist, and tech guy.
Chattergoods.
Cyberspace is the "place of the mind." The world of intelligent, networked, self-optimizing, plentiful objects is a world where everything around us is continually negotiating its place and role: advertising service-queues, determining available RF spectrum to occupy, negotiating to share load, storage, and functions. Chattergoods are goods that converse with one another, all the time, the network chatter of the physical environment.
Dan Hunter is a professor legal studies in the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and a contributor of Terra Nova, an excellent group blog on online games.
I'm not sure that the words cyberspace or the net will ever be replaced, because they're such neat tags for the range of social practises that have emerged as a consequence of this new era in electronic connectedness. But if I had to nominate a word it would be mesh. I think that the future of the net is in ubiquitous connectivity: which will mean that we will always be online and our physical environment and our online environments will mesh in a seamless way.
We will be in a virtual world as we walk around in the physical world, and all sorts of extensions will come to seem natural: being able to check out ownership records of that building there; having a virtual "emergency call" button available on our sunglasses a la William Gibson's Virtual Light; sitting in a park in downtown Philly, but exploring the Louvre in Paris; and so on.
My kids won't ever see a disjunction between the virtual and the "real", because they will have meshed long before they are aware that anyone ever thought of cyberspace as a place separate from their lives.
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