There is a space above and within everything everywhere. As the uses of computer technology and its systems have been a crucial part of our daily life, there is a myth and a belief that there is certainly a space or a different community when using computers to communicate. It can be said that ‘cyberspace’ is a virtual digitized space created by the advanced information technology during the time of using computer networks that we enter into a different arena with the artifacts, practices and relationships revolving around the computing. It is a non physical terrain created by the application of computer networks where we tend to fall and create a ‘second world’ with familiar spatial images and encourages the sense of identification and symmetry among individuals.
The term ‘cyberspace’ was created by the acclaimed cyberpunk science fiction author and novelist William Gibson. Cyberspace according to him, is a ‘consensual hallucination’. It gives a sense that a numbers of computer operators operates through the way in which the data from the computers is abstracted into their human system that creates a different world an illusion in the form of matrix with the bodiless consciousness living in it. The feeling and application of mind is more viable in the cyberspace than the presence of body. Nicole Stenger (1991:53, 58) tells us that ‘cyberspace is like Oz- it is, we get there, but it has no location’; it ‘opens up a space for collective restoration and for peace....our future can only take on a luminous dimension!’.
Internet system, for instance is one of the most prolific term to describe the existence of cyberspace. Online networks in the internet form a cyberspace where operators can operate and communicate with one another (via email, texts, networking channels and sites) with the presence of imagination, emotions, feelings, mind and a cultural approach created in that community.
Like physical space, the cyberspace do have objects like files, mail, messages, graphics, images, videos etc with various modes of inward and outward that plays a vital role to form a ‘consensual hallucination’. Barrie Sherman and Phil Judkins (1992:126-7) illustrate cyberspace as ‘truly the technology of miracles and dreams’.
We can change water into solid, solids to fluid and can create inanimate objects with an own existence of their own. In reality, in the cyberspace we people move in another world where we can invent anything through the significance of our mind. But still it is tough to react on some questions that, does cyberspace exist? If it exists then when and where do we go there? What is our identity in that community and who is the master of it? I feel cyberspace do exist around us where we move in it during the use of computers (for e.g. when we play a video game in a computer, without the notion of cyberspace no one can go through it.
There should be a virtual community alive to go through the process of playing so, that a player can feel the real appearance of a world that mesmerizes him/her. As internet being one of the basic tools it is hard to acknowledge who governs and has the power to control it because the application of internet is so broad and free that may result later the ‘ de-massification’ of the other media.
With its technology, we are now more socially and culturally bounded together initiating to foster a new kind of community with the direction paving towards a new political era of computer-controlled democracy.
As we knew about the ideal presence of cyberspace around us, it is also required to understand the end and its death.
The spaces there created are in the forms of software as its furniture, the graphic and visual presentation, the net, the system control networks and embedded processors that helps to create a social experience, interaction between one another, social support, run business, play games, disseminate information, social learning, participating in discussions and so on. During these days, the significance of reality have been more influenced in the cyberspace as there have been more chambers of its application in the cyberspace. The space created is being folded by another one transparently which results its end. The new technological innovation by the mankind is also one of the reason behind it. With the emergence of real world in the virtual mechanism of cyberspace, there has been more and more existence in it.
References:
Hakken, David. 1999. Cyborgs @ Cyberspace. An Ethnographer Looks to the Future. New York: Routledge.
Smith, Marc A and Kollock, Peter. 2001. Communities in Cyberspace. London: Routledge
Featherstone, Mike and Burrows, Roger.1996. Cyberspace, Cyberbodies, Cyberpunk. London: Sage.
