Cyberspace: Alternate Realities in Philosophy and Art

Cyberspace
Cyberspace is "the notional environment in which communication over computer networks occurs." The
word became popular in the 1990s when the uses of the Internet, networking, and digital communication.
The parent term of cyberspace is "cybernetics", derived from the Ancient Greek kybernētēs, steersman,
governor, pilot, or rudder.
As a social experience, individuals can interact, exchange ideas, share information, provide social
support, conduct business, direct actions, create artistic media, play games, engage in political discussion,
and so on, using this global network. They are sometimes referred to as cybernauts.
The term cyberspace has become a conventional means to describe anything associated with

the Internet and the diverse Internet culture.
The United States government recognizes the interconnected information technology and the
interdependent network of information technology infrastructures operating across this medium as part of
the US national critical infrastructure. Amongst individuals on cyberspace, there is believed to be a
code of shared rules and ethics mutually beneficial for all to follow, referred to as cyberethics.
According to Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer, cyberspace is defined more by the social
interactions involved rather than its technical implementation. In their view, the computational
medium in cyberspace is an augmentation of the communication channel between real people. They
derive this concept from the observation that people seek richness, complexity, and depth within a virtual
world.
Alternate realities in philosophy and art

Predating computers
A forerunner of the modern ideas of cyberspace is the Cartesian notion that people might be deceived
by an evil demon that feeds them a false reality. This argument is the direct predecessor of modern ideas
of a brain in a vat and many popular conceptions of cyberspace take Descartes's ideas as their starting
point.
Visual arts have a tradition, stretching back to antiquity, of artifacts meant to fool the eye and be
mistaken for reality. The artistic challenge was resurrected with increasing ambition as art became more
and more realistic with the invention of photography, film, and immersive computer simulations.
Philosophy
American counterculture exponents like William S. Burroughs and Timothy Leary were among the first
to extoll the potential of computers and computer networks for individual empowerment.
Some contemporary philosophers and scientists employ virtual reality in various thought experiments. For
example Philip Zhai in Get Real: A Philosophical Adventure in Virtual Reality connects cyberspace to the
platonic tradition:
Let us imagine a nation in which everyone is hooked up to a network of VR infrastructure. They
have been so hooked up since they left their mother's wombs. Immersed in cyberspace and
maintaining their life by teleoperation, they have never imagined that life could be any different
from that. The first person that thinks of the possibility of an alternative world like ours would be
ridiculed by the majority of these citizens, just like the few enlightened ones in Plato's allegory of
the cave.
Note that this brain-in-a-vat argument conflates cyberspace with reality, while the more common
descriptions of cyberspace contrast it with the "real world".
Cyberspace as an Internet metaphor

…cyberspace is the site of …the relationship between "online" and "offline" forms of life and
interaction, and the relationship between the "real" and the virtual. Cyberspace draws attention to
remediation of culture through new media technologies: it is not just a communication tool but a social
destination, and is culturally significant in its own right. Finally, cyberspace can be seen as providing
new opportunities to reshape society and culture through "hidden" identities, or it can be seen as
borderless communication and culture.
The "space " in cyberspace has more in common with the abstract, mathematical meanings of the term
than physical space. It does not have the duality of positive and negative volume (while in physical space
for example a room has the negative volume of usable space delineated by positive volume of walls,
Internet users cannot enter the screen and explore the unknown part of the Internet as an extension of the
space they are in), but spatial meaning can be attributed to the relationship between different pages.
The concept of cyberspace therefore refers not to the content being presented to the surfer, but rather to
the possibility of surfing among different sites, with feedback loops between the user and the rest of
the system creating the potential to always encounter something unknown or unexpected.
Videogames differ from text-based communication in that on-screen images are meant to be figures that
actually occupy a space and the animation shows the movement of those figures. Images are supposed to
form the positive volume that delineates the empty space. A game adopts the cyberspace metaphor by
engaging more players in the game, and then figuratively representing them on the screen as avatars.
Games do not have to stop at the avatar-player level, but current implementations aiming for
more immersive playing space take the form of augmented reality.
Some virtual communities explicitly refer to the concept of cyberspace, calling their customers
"Residents" of Second Life, while all such communities can be positioned "in cyberspace" for
explanatory and comparative purposes, integrating the metaphor into a wider cyber-culture.

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Cyberspace

The term cyberspace has become a conventional means to describe anything associated with

Alternate realities in philosophy and art

Cyberspace as an Internet metaphor

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