ABSTRACT
This chapter embarks upon an exploration of what recent technical and popular discourses have called "the new world of cyberspace". It investigates the legacy, logic, and consequences of this complex metaphor that appears to connect cyberspace to the Columbian voyages of discovery and the larger network of European expansionism. The employment of the metaphor "new world" in order to designate and explain advances in communication and information technology does not commence with cyberspace or the Internet. The majority of publications employing the metaphor of the "new world" in order to explain and describe cyberspace do so uncritically. In beginning to determine cyberspace in accordance with a particular conception of reality, Michael Benedikt perpetuates a trope of European expansionism that justifies its ethnocentrism by naturalizing and universalizing its own epistemology. Commercialism is also the promise of the would-be nonfictional cyberspace. Also, alternative descriptions and conceptualizations of cyberspace, like the "information superhighway" and "the virtual community", are no less metaphoric or problematic.
