The death of cyberspace

Dion Hinchcliffe writes about "J. LeRoy's recent observation that Web 2.0 will finally kill the concept of cyberspace as a viable ongoing concern." And, he goes on,

...he's probably right.

One of the key aspects of Web 2.0 is that it connects people so they can effortlessly participate in fluid conversations and dynamic information sharing. At the same time, computing devices are giving people permapresence on the Web through PDAs, phones, digital cameras, and a slew of other emerging devices.

Before now, you had to consciously go to cyberspace by sitting at a PC and looking at it through a window, in essence going to a place where you primarily observed and gathered knowledge. Not any more.

These days the boundaries between reality and cyberspace are becoming increasingly blurred and the activities on the Web are becoming more two way and integrated with reality, with the canonical example being the hypothetical Taxi button on a cellphone. With going into cyberspace no longer being a discrete step (folks are more and more always there now) and with the primary activity often being to interact with other folks transparently, and you have a folding of cyberspace so severe that it just disappears into the ether.

This extrapolation makes a lot of sense. After all, we've been longing for that always-on portal without perhaps realising that once we are always on, we are at the same time giving up the frisson of  that step he describes. However much I want it to happen, I will also mourn that loss, just as I still mourn the sound of the dial-up modem doing its musical hardware handshaking thing down the phone line.

Are we really coming close to attending the funeral of cyberspace? I hardly dare think it...

The whole post is well worth a read, and includes a useful diagram too.
 

Comments

[David Brake]

Whenever I hear "Web 2.0" I reach for my revolver...

It is a term being used with no precision to mean essentially "any new network application or service which is new and I like". We need to arrive at a consensus about what it means (and what it doesn't!)

[Sue Thomas]

David, please post on this!

[Simon mills]

I think of all the continuing coverage I've read regarding Web 2.0 that of Andrew Orlowski on The Register seems the clearest and most illuminating:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/07/six_things_about_the_bubble/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/21/web_two_point_nought_poll/

[Jim Benson (J LeRoy)]

David and Sue,

I posted a few times over the last several weeks about the hype of Web 2.0, what it's goals are, why it's a useful term, why it's a pointless term, etc.

I'd hate to think that the good things of the Web 2.0 concept would be tossed away because some folks are a bit overexcited.

As for the line about missing the dial-up experience... I too miss the days of my TRS-80 and my 300 baud modem. Then upgrading to the 1200 baud and being amazed as the text went by and I could barely read fast enough. And everything was green then. The colour of nature, the colour of (US) money.

Ahh

[Simon mills]

"Cyberspace is the `place` where a telephone conversation appears to occur. Not inside your actual phone, the plastic device on your desk. Not inside the other person's phone, in some other city. _The_place_between_ the phones. The indefinate place _out_there_, where the two of you, human beings, actually meet and communicate."
Bruce Sterling -The Hacker Crackdown

OK it may all come down to definitions of Cyberspace but in what way is Web 2.0 going to kill Cyberpace in Sterlings definition? We may change our relationship to it or have some new experiences of it but kill it?

[Sue Thomas]

Jim, this discussion is very important to me because I've just started researching a book about cyberspace as a natural space. I hope it hasn't disappeared before I've finished, or it will turn into a history book!

And Simon, I think you're right. I guess what Sterling describes here is what I have described as virtuality rather than cyberspace but the two are almost interchangeable in some situations. After all cyberspace is what we make of it in our heads - Gibson's old 'consensual hallucination'. Although in my paper Virtuality and Air http://www.mti.dmu.ac.uk/~sthomas/docs/VirtualityandAir.pdf earlier this year I felt as if I had come a long way to a personal understanding of cyberspace, even if it meant nothing to anyone else.

I have been thinking over a new metaphor for Web 2.0 and will post it later this weekend if I decide it's worth sharing.

[Jim Benson]

Simon and Sue,

Cyberspace according to Sterling's definition is not the cyberspace of common definition. Sterling's definition is actually what is coming now. Asynchronous, non-linear, conversations (like this one). Conversations that require no set appliance to access them. Previously we needed the PC to access cyberspace. Now we can get there in our cars, while walking down the road, or anyplace else - through a variety of mechanisms.

This new always-on world is qualitatively different than what came before - but is built firmly on its foundation.

So I don't think the cyberspace that Sue is writing about will disappear -- I think it is evolving. The new entity is as different from and a similar to what came before as was homo sapien to homo erectus.

I'd very much like to see your metaphor, Sue.

[Sue Thomas]

Jim, my metaphor is here http://writing.typepad.com/digital_life/2005/10/web_20_as_stone.html but I've since reconsidered - see my comment on that post for why.

I agree with you that cyberspace as we know it probably won't disappear, because in the end it's more of a construct of the virtual imagination than anything else.