Digital Delights

"The eversion of cyberspace, or the shift in perception it metaphorically describes, has actually been going on for some time, now. When Gibson coined the term cyberspace in 1982–1984, it was a metaphor for the global information network, but in the decade that followed, it made a material difference in technology and culture, and in the perceived relation between the two. Now, as Gibson and others have recently noted, the term has started to fade like an old photograph, to sound increasingly archaic.2 In a Twitter exchange on November 27, 2011, @scottdot asked “Who the hell says ‘cyber’-anything anymore?” and in a few minutes Gibson himself (@GreatDismal) responded: “I have said that myself, many times.” The notable exceptions, perhaps significantly enough, are uses of the term by the military and governments, as in cyber-attack and cyber-warfare, and in the analogous case of cyber-bullying. In all of these cases, one might imagine that there’s a resistance to acknowledging the (frightening) breakdown of the distinction, the penetration of what had been conceived of as separate worlds."

About a book in progress by Steven E. Jones.