When you hear the term “cyberspace” maybe you imagine a neon virtual reality like Gibson’s “Matrix”, or maybe you think of something simpler like an online social network. Either way most people’s idea of what cyberspace is involves computer networks but what cyberspace is goes back much further and is far older than the term itself.
I once read in a copy of Mondo 2000 that cyberspace is the place where telephone conversation takes place (if you happen to know the origin of this statement please let me know!). At the time this blew my mind, because I was squarely in the Gibsonesque camp when it came to my vision of cyberspace.
It’s worth pointing out that when I read this the closest I came to experiencing Gibson’s Matrix was either my own home-brewed Apple II-based VR rig and/or a handful of dial-up BBS’s.
Since then I’ve thought a lot about the relationship between the physical world and this is other dimension we call cyberspace, and how the experience of cyberspace has impacted human life, health and civilization.
Humans experience the world through our senses. We call this sensory input “the physical world”. This qualification wasn’t really necissary until fairly recently in human history when we began to replace the input to these senses with sense data from somewhere other than our physical location. At first this data was “natural” data from another time or place; live sound broadcast over great distances via radio, or recorded sound from natural sources in the past. Later we found ways to generate sense data that never existed in the natural world at all, creating a connection to a synthetic world.
These transmissions, recordings and synthesized experiences are the building blocks for cyberspace, but to become a “place” it must be inhabited (“if a tree falls in the woods…”); therefore cyberspace involves a communication aspect as well.
Which brings us back to the telephone. A telephone call might be the simplest form of cyberspace. It provides the senses with data from another dimension, it can be inhabited by multiple people and it exists outside of the physical world. The final aspect that makes it distinctly cybernetic is the fact that it is facilitated electronically, differentiating it from supernatural alternate realities or dimensions.
The creation of the first telephone is disputed but the earliest electronic audio telephone dates back to around 1860. However this isn’t humanity’s first form of electronic communication. For that we might go back to 1830’s and the Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph. But does the telegraph create a cyberspace?
Telegraph communications differ from the telephone in one key way which I think matters when it comes to cyberspace: duplex. A telegraph communication (like many radio communications) happens in one direction at a time: one person sends a message, the other receives; then the process repeats in reverse. The telephone on the other hand is duplex: everyone connected can speak and listen at the same time. The one-way nature of telegraph communications does not map to any natural form of human interaction in the physical world and as such does not transport the consciousness out of the physical world the way full-duplex conversation can. Because it is transactional it does not create a “space”, and I think because of this, it’s disqualified as a way to create cyberspace.
These qualifications rule-out other one-way media that replaces sensory input with time or location-shifted sense data. While a movie or a record can replace input from the physical world, they do not create a space that can be inhabited and shared by multiple people without “falling-back” to communicate through the physical dimension.
With this view of cyberspace who was humanity’s first cybernaut? This is a hotly debated topic that I won’t try to answer here. What we can say is that humanity’s first exploration into cyberspace dates back to at least 1876.
The telephone evolved quickly but did not yield many advancements in terms of enriching the experience of cyberspace after the introduction of the conference call in the 1950’s. There were several flirtations with adding a visual dimension to the telephone experience but few were commonly available until the early 1990’s. By this time the more commonly-understood form of computer-mediated cyberspace had been operational for decades.