ABSTRACT
The term cyberspace has been a key metaphor in both academic analyses of cultural change and wider popular discourse for around two decades. The coupling of Norbert Weiner’s cybernetics with a notion of space has provided the most pervasive representation of “where” electronic data is and what our relations with it are. Its etymology of “steering” or “navigating,” translated into “surfing” and “mapping,” has shaped research agendas and precipitated new ways of thinking about what “culture” is. At this key site for theorizing cultural change in recent years, debates about what is happening and what is at stake have often cleaved into utopian and dystopian narrative clusters (Hand and Sandywell 2002). In this essay I want to trace the fate of cyberspace as a metaphor for conceptualizing the relations between electronic media technologies and culture in its broadest sense. Rather than debating the various merits and pitfalls of internet-related research, I will point to how the term cyberspace itself has morphed and what the implications are for theorizing the relations that constitute the internet and associated technologies. There are substantial changes in the nature of electronic and digital media alongside epistemological and methodological problems of cyber-research. It would be a Herculean and somewhat unwieldy task to review the entire spectrum of cyberspace research here. I have condensed much of this material into what I see as three largely heuristic variants, each of which has been periodically dominant: cyberspace as an immaterial cultural autonomy, as a central myth of Western culture, and as turned inside out, becoming the “materiality of cultural practice.”
