I Come From Cyberspace

"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding…"

- William Gibson, Neuromancer, 1984 

The word ‘cyberspace’ was coined by writer William Gibson in his 1982 sci-fi short story ‘Burning Chrome’, and came into popular usage when it was used by him in his 1984 book "Neuromancer", and it has been said that it was only because of it that "cyberspace" became the widely-used term for the world wide web in the 1990s. In this book, which is said to be an epitome of the ‘cyberpunk’ genre of literature, Gibson paints a picture of cyberspace as a frightening, dystopian world. Cyberspace seems to teeter on the verge between utopia and dystopia.

When considering what this "cyberspace" place actually looks like, some may think of numbers, as in the Wachowski’s 1999 sci-fi cyberpunk classic The Matrix, which depicts a dystopian future in which most peoples’ perceived reality is in fact a simulation known as ‘the matrix’. The Matrix draws on William Gibson’s use of the word in his book Neuromancer.

Though the idea of cyberspace came about before the internet, there’s no doubt that it is now very much tied up with the online world. The cyberspace described by William Gibson in Neuromancer was a frightening and dangerous world, in which there were no laws, and no politicians to protect you and the individual in cyberspace was vulnerable - which perhaps you may debate is what happens online, as nothing is stopping you from posting whatever you want to the world, leaving you vulnerable to the consequences of your browsing and posting.