http://digitaldigs.disqus.com/enSat, 11 Feb 2006 11:51:29 -0000http://alex-reid.net/2006/02/terminal_cybers.html#comment-1864192166<p>Okay, I went back to the Wired article, and just for the sake of correction, I see the title of the article; however, the part about Gibson did not have him quoted as saying "cyberspace is dead," only that he would use "that word" for his next book -- hence the source of my confusion. What he means by "if I had that word," is sort of ambiguous, especially since "dead" is available to anyone for usage and "cyberspace is dead" is a phrase rather than a word. Hence, my confusion. It's those slippery internets again.</p>c-mSat, 11 Feb 2006 11:51:29 -0000http://alex-reid.net/2006/02/terminal_cybers.html#comment-1864192165<p>Just to say, I didn't hear "dead" in Gibson's comments -- I heard no longer marketable as a concept yet omnipresent all the same. At least not in that Wired article, unless there is another place where he has pronounced it "dead." And perhaps, I would suggest, omnipresent in the persistently same hallucinatory manner as the concept was originally coined. If we do away with the concept -- cyberspace -- that doesn't necessarily end the consensual hallucination -- it only represses the reality or truth that it is hallucinatory and not simply the transmittal of information or that awful renomination "infosphere" or even "the world," as if reality was suddenly directly accessible again or as if we have "matured," as Gershenfeld suggests, from the hallucinations when they are actually still occurring and will forever occur. Getting rid of the concept of "cyberspace" only puts us deeper into that sleep, as it were. Gershenfeld is weirdly suggesting that there are boundaries between reality and virtual reality and as if we are suddenly in control -- "we can interact with them [information technologies] in our world instead of ours" -- when, in truth, we're just falling further and further down that rabbit hole the more "they" are intergrated.</p>c-mSat, 11 Feb 2006 10:24:29 -0000