This is a condensed version of Chapter 2 for IT-literate people who don't want the bother of skipping things. It is not the text of the book.
In this chapter we explain some of the basic concepts of cyberspace (so most of it is skippable by someone already deeply immersed in cyberspace). In looking at the technology we can begin to see that it is not something separate from the rest of our lives, but is already intrinsically woven into the fabric of our society: the ways we live and the way we think. Digital communications have thrown open new worlds of experience, virtual worlds in which we are dealing with new forms of reality. Digital information has characteristics which change the way we think, for instance, our sense of space - geographical location is no longer important - and our notions of truth. We conclude that the sheer scale of cyberspace, its impact and growth, present us with challenges which we need to understand in order to tackle them.
One of the litmus tests of whether something is in cyberspace is whether its location counts. If you were to ask, for example, 'Where is this digital object that I am using?', the answer would often come 'I don't know and it doesn't matter.'
Cyberspace is far from the first example of the way in which a technological change can have profound personal and social impact. To give an historical example, railways were seen as 'just machinery' until people realized that you no longer needed lots of local factories; instead you could have one centralized factory, and transport the goods it made by rail. That in turn led to more railways, and greater opportunity to centralize the production of goods, and to decide where they were located. The railway system was more than the mechanics of the railway, and more than the mechanisms of running a railway. It transformed the notion of distance. Cyberspace is having a similar transforming effect, and it is happening right before our eyes.
Digitization affects what we think of as a 'thing' We are used to thinking of money, for example, as having some physical form that is very difficult to copy; now money takes electronic form and banks take enormous care not to duplicate it by accident. We are used to thinking of a book as something with physical form, consisting of a certain number of original, identical copies; now, an electronic document may be altered on a daily basis by its author, and may be read or copied at any moment.
From the human perspective, a virtual world becomes virtual reality when we cannot tell or are no longer concerned about the difference between it and reality. Long ago, when a lion jumped out at you, you wouldn't stop and think whether it was a picture or not - you'd run, or pray, or probably both! If something looked like a lion, it was a lion, and your survival would have depended on your never pausing to worry about the difference. Now images in virtual reality hit our senses as if they were real. Provided we don't look beyond the edge of the screen, the images landing on our retinas are very close to real images. In other words, virtual reality is real as far as our emotional reactions and our instant responses are concerned. The power of this virtual reality is enormous. People can be trained to fly aircraft without any of the physical dangers of flying (or firing missiles at the wrong targets); and at the other end of the spectrum, cyberspace can create sexual fantasies that are 'real' without any of the responsibilities required in reality. There are commercial products to support each of these applications. Many fear that people will immerse themselves in false models of the world, intentionally or otherwise, when what is needed is action in society and the environment to sustain life.
t 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?