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Occasionally, a writer will provide a historical definition, tracing the evolution of a term from its first use to its adoption into other languages to its shifting meanings over the centuries. Such a strategy can be a rich addition to an essay, bringing surprising depth and resonance to the definition of a concept. In this example on the future uses of cyberspace and its potential impact on the economy, Philip Elmer-DeWitt provides a historical definition of the term cyberspace:

It started, as the big ideas in technology often do, with a science-fiction writer. William Gibson, a young expatriate American living in Canada, was wandering past the video arcades on Vancouver’s Granville Street in the early 1980s when something about the way the players were hunched over their glowing screens struck him as odd. “I could see in the physical intensity of their postures how rapt the kids were,” he says. “It was like a feedback loop, with photons coming off the screens into the kids’ eyes, neurons moving through their bodies and electrons moving through the video game. These kids clearly believed in the space the games projected.”

That image haunted Gibson. He didn’t know much about video games or computers—he wrote his breakthrough novel Neuromancer (1984) on an ancient manual typewriter—but he knew people who did. And as near as he could tell, everybody who worked much with the machines eventually came to accept, almost as an article of faith, the reality of that imaginary realm. “They develop a belief that there’s some kind of actual space behind the screen,” he says. “Some place that you can’t see but you know is there.”

Gibson called that place “cyberspace,” and used it as the setting for his early novels and short stories. In his fiction, cyberspace is a computer-generated landscape that characters enter by “jacking in”—sometimes by plugging electrodes directly into sockets implanted in the brain. What they see when they get there is a three-dimensional representation of all the information stored in “every computer in the human system”—great warehouses and skyscrapers of data. He describes it in a key passage in Neuromancer as a place of “unthinkable complexity,” with “lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding. . . .”

In the years since, there have been other names given to that shadowy space where our computer data reside: the Net, the Web, the Cloud, the Matrix, the Metaverse, the Datasphere, the Electronic Frontier, the information superhighway. But Gibson’s coinage may prove the most enduring. By 1989 it had been borrowed by the online community to describe not some science-fiction fantasy but today’s increasingly interconnected computer systems—especially the millions of computers jacked into the Internet.

— PHILIP ELMER-DEWITT, “Welcome to Cyberspace”

The historical definition serves Elmer-DeWitt’s larger purpose in writing this essay: to help readers acquire a deeper understanding of the new technologies that continue to profoundly affect the ways in which we live our lives.

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