The main characteristic of cyberspace is that it involves communication, in many new forms. Asking what sort of communication happens in cyberspace is rather like asking what a road is. The word 'road' covers mountain tracks to motorways, and the so-called 'information superhighway' has many facets, too. The essential thing to grasp is not whether something is a mountain track, road or railway, but the general concept of each being part of a travel and transport system.
This is the worldwide network of 'telephone wires' that enable one person to access or receive digital information from another. The wires (and radio links and other sorts of links) make networks that connect computers together. The Internet is the network of networks. Everything on it agrees on a basic protocol (rather as car drivers agree to drive on the same side of the road). The point of the protocol is that all the computers can communicate with each other, and in the best case things shouldn't get lost.
The Internet is growing extraordinarily fast. Between 1970 and 1981 computer networks grew 'modestly' at 20-30 per cent per year. Then all these separate networks were connected to form an 'inter-network', and the Internet was born. Since 1983 the Internet has, on average, more than doubled in size every year. Anything that doubles every year gets very, very large: in 1981 around 200 computers were attached to a typical big network; at the end of 1998, more than 20,000,000 were connected to the Internet.
Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are the companies that connect you to the Internet. Your computer makes a dial-up connection to the ISP, using an ordinary telephone line. The ISP has a direct connection to the Internet itself, and it makes the link between your dial-up connection and the net (via a computer, of course). There are many ISPs in Britain, and they advertise in the daily papers.
Electronic mail (email) is the computer version of mail. Just as anyone with a road might get postal mail, anyone connected to the Internet can get email. There are several subtle differences about email: because computers are involved, the relation between senders and recipients is changed. For example, it is possible to send anonymous email easily; whether this technical facility is used for whistle-blowing, secret ballots, unanswerable libel or blackmail depends on how people choose to use it.
An important characteristic of email is that - once you get used to it - it feels as easy to use as a telephone, but it does not rely on the other person's being there just at the right time. Nor is it real-time: as with letter-writing, but contrary to the case with a phone call, we can pause to think what to say. Indeed, the fact that we 'put things into' cyberspace, and later on we or someone else 'take things out', is part of why we think of cyberspace as a 'space' at all. It contains things, which is what places or spaces do.
Like a letter, an email is a one-way communication. We do not get the nods and grunts that give us feedback in our spoken communication. People tend to think carefully about what they write in a letter, but the immediacy of email makes it surprisingly easy to dash off a message that causes unintentional offence. Experienced cybernauts write their messages with care.
Amnesty International has found email of invaluable assistance in communicating without having all its mail monitored, particularly in the early days of the Internet. Now it is used to send many messages to relevant government departments about injustices. Email is effective for these purposes because it is easy to use and so many people use it to draw attention to injustices - and politicians take note of the numbers of messages they receive.
Bulletin boards (BBSs) are the cyberspace equivalent of noticeboards. People can post notices and reply to notices, either using the bulletin board or by using email. Because the Internet is so large, it supports thousands of bulletin boards. Almost every human interest is covered by bulletin boards - and if your particular interest isn't there, it is quite easy to create a new one. One possible use of a bulletin board is to share experience between people suffering from rare medical disorders; in this way, you may find the other three people in the world with the same condition and exchange advice. Another use of a bulletin board is to be a collection point for information, say for some environmental cause. In contrast to the World Wide Web, which is more like a giant magazine, bulletin boards are sustained by the conversations of the people using them.
The World Wide Web made the Internet truly popular, because it made it very easy for the Internet to embrace pictures and sound. Although originally invented to help scientists, the web enabled the Internet to support entertainment and advertising on a huge, popular scale. The web is rather like a worldwide magazine, where anyone can contribute pages. There are pages 'written' on behalf of Swedish hamsters, and there are pages written by governments. There are pages with live TV images of volcanoes, and there are pages with ancient documents from the world's great museums.
Much of this information is provided by governments, universities or companies. But much is also provided by individuals: the web makes it extremely easy to publish material yourself, from photos of your new baby to instructions on how to build a Roman catapult or a home-made bomb. Historically, it has been the big players that have originated, or at least mediated, most publications. They have been the producers and we have been the consumers. We can all be worldwide producers now, and that is something new.
Of all of the ways of accessing cyberspace, browsers are (at least at the moment) the most visible. A browser is the program that runs on your computer, and allows you access to the web. It lets you read web pages and follow links they contain, sends and receives email, reads and contributes to bulletin boards, and so on. It is, figuratively, your window on the web. Indeed, people may use their computer for nothing else but running a browser.
These are programs that make a sort of index of web pages. The best known build this index by reading all the web pages they can find, and extracting key words or phrases from them. They have to run on very large servers (computers permanently attached to the Internet which provide services to other computers) because the web is enormous, so even an index of the web is very large indeed. You talk to a search engine using (naturally) your browser. You type the words you want to find, say 'Swedish hamster', into a little box, and press a button; your words are sent to the server, which looks them up in its index, and turns the results into a new web page, especially for you; this new web page is sent back to your computer and displayed by your browser.
By using search engines, the cyberspace version of telephone directories, we can find web pages based on what they contain, and not only by their cyberspace 'addresses'. If you want to find a Swedish hamster, you don't need to know it by name - as you would if you used a telephone directory service. You can find it by its description. Interestingly, search engines are one of the rapidly changing areas of cyberspace: they are too good for their own good! A search for hamsters will find you more hamsters than you could possibly cope with.