It is tempting to see cyberspace as having emerged from nowhere over the last 40 years. In fact, however, human beings have been engaged in transcending the 'here and now' of their physical bodies for a long time - seeking to leave messages for others, record events in stone and on papyri and, earlier, in oral traditions. These examples illustrate that many people are involved in the process of transcending the 'here and now' - reed-cutters and collectors, papyri-makers, writers, alphabet-developers, thinkers, organizers, archivists - in fact a whole system comprising people and mechanisms. Their basic characteristic is to move some action or aspect of life from particular individuals and specific machines to a more generalized and impersonal system so that it can be picked up and used by different people and devices at a variety of times and places. Papyri and books meant that people could read what had previously only been passed down in stories, person to person. Recordings of music mean that people can hear concerts performed far away and generations earlier.
Cyberspace is following a similar development in the much broader category of information and knowledge, and moving the knowledge and skills that were only held in people's bodies towards a new system. These times have often been called the 'Information Age' because information and knowledge are made available and usable at a distance from the individual or organization who knew it, created it, or acted it.
So cyberspace is not wholly a new phenomenon. But computers are unlike anything we have ever had, because they can do creative things on their own even when there is no one around to supervise them. A bank might have used telephones to provide phone banking, but cash machines can provide many features of banking without any bank cashiers being involved, and they can run at night. Cyberspace allows businesses to decentralize, perhaps even on an international scale, and yet not lose any control over their diffuse operations. As well as these new ideas, the scale of cyberspace, its pace of growth and its profound effects do present us with challenges, both personal and social, that we have not yet developed the means to handle. Cyberspace seems to have a momentum of its own; it develops without any central control, and new ramifications appear every day. The development of electrical power followed a similar course. First there was small-scale specialized use; then there was a period of explosive growth, enabled by the introduction of local electrical grids; after that point, the growth of new electrical goods, and the growth of the National Grid that powered them, fed off each other; and now it is hard to think of modern life without electricity.
We are now in the explosive-growth phase of cyberspace technology. It will happen with us or without us. Much of the specific content of this chapter will be dated in a few years, or even by the time it is published, but the underlying trend is already clear: cyberspace will become an ever more complex social space, in which more and more people will conduct more and more of their lives. The question is: what kind of cyberspace do we want?