Dec 18, 2020
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The World of Cyberspace
Growing up in a digitalised world we’ve always been taught that what we do on the internet leaves a footprint in cyberspace. To be honest though, up until a few years ago I didn’t know exactly what cyberspace was, if it was even real. The simplest definition of cyberspace is that it’s, “The online world of computer networks and the internet,” (Merriam-Webster, 2016). Now whilst this isn’t a physical world, considering it literally contains most people’s lives, it has to be real in a sense. William Gibson’s quirky novel, ‘Burning Chrome’, perfectly depicts this. Following the lives of Bobby and Jack, friends that hack systems and softwares for a living, they give a glimpse to cyberspace through their computer that they personify as Chrome and her doorway into the other world. The narrator, Jack, can convince any reader that cyberspace is as real as the world we walk on when he describes it, “Bodiless, we swerve into Chrome’s castle of ice... Somewhere we have bodies, very far away, in the crowded loft roof with steel and glass. Somewhere we have microseconds, maybe time left to pull out,” (Gibson, 1982).
When I was 12, and went to see the new film Tron, it was just another children’s action film, but now I realise it’s about way more than that. It is portraying cyberspace in a physical sense. It also depicts the criminals of cyberspace, better known as cyberpunks, just like Bobby and Jack. Cyberpunk is classified as science-fiction with an abundance of high technology and questionable morality (NeonDystopia, 2015). Cyberpunks also relates to what we now know as hackers, which in recent years have started to carry quite a negative connotation to themselves. This is mostly due to the media, and the fact that only the criminal hackers are the ones that make headlines. For example, Hillary Clinton’s private emails being published to the world and most recently, and discussed in my previous blog post, the Census being hacked and shut down (link here). On a day to day basis, I think most of us see cyberpunks just by a mere random hacking our Facebook account.
However, for a cyberpunk to be a cyberpunk they first need something they can hack into that’s already being controlled. This is where cybernetics comes in. Cybernetics is the study of communication, command and control with the origins of the term coming from the Greek word ‘kybernetes’ which means, ‘the art of steering,’ (Pangaro, 2013). In today’s world, this basically means that we store knowledge into machines, this is then applied to the real world, therefore the world gains some form of intelligence, it then uses feedback and information to put into its process of cybernetics (Pangaro, 2013). For example, Griffith University has a system that obtains knowledge (professors, lecturers, tutors), that is then passed on to the real world to obtain intelligence (students). From this the system gains feedback (surveys, discussion, etc.) so that it can then process this into its system. It’s amazing how relatable cybernetics can be to the real world. And this is only from what I understand of the concept as I wasn’t able to make my tutorial! Whatever the case, it is becoming abundantly clear that there is a lot more to the world of technology than I initially thought.
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