Page - 14 - in Cyborg Mind - What Brain–Computer and Mind–Cyberspace Interfaces Mean for Cyberneuroethics

14 • Cyborg Mind through, among other things, exchanging ideas, sharing information, provid- ing social support, conducting business, directing actions, creating artistic media, playing games and engaging in political discussion. But while cyber- space should not be confused with the Internet, the term has slowly been transformed to reflect anything associated with online communication. A website, for example, may be said to exist in cyberspace, which is a space that cannot actually be characterised. Cyberspace thus represents the flow of digi- tal data through the network of interconnected computers and is not ‘real’ in any three-dimensional sense, since it is impossible to spatially locate it as a tangible object. In this way, the term never really reflected a spatial concept as such, but rather described a network. Moreover, since cyberspace is the site of computer-mediated communication, in which online relationships and alternative forms of online identity are enacted, it is not just the place where communication takes place, but is also a social destination.19 In other words, the concept of cyberspace does not simply refer to the content being presented, but also to the possibility for a person to use different sites, with feedback loops between the user and the rest of the system, enabling new developments for the user. The American science fiction author Bruce Sterling explains: Cyberspace is the ‘place’ where a telephone conversation appears to occur. Not inside your actual phone, the plastic device on your desk. Not inside the other person’s phone, in some other city. The place between the phones . . . this elec- trical ‘space’ . . . has flung itself open like a gigantic jack-in-the-box . . . This dark electric netherworld has become a vast flowering electronic landscape. Since the 1960s, the world of the telephone has cross-bred itself with comput- ers and television, and though there is still no substance to cyberspace, nothing you can handle, it has a strange kind of physicality now. It makes good sense today to talk of cyberspace as a place all its own.20 Popular examples of persons being able to enter into cyberspace include the 1982 American science fiction film Tron, written and directed by the U.S. film director Steven Lisberger and based on a story by Lisberger and U.S. author Bonnie MacBird. In this film a computer programmer is transported inside the software world of a mainframe computer, where he interacts with various programs in his attempt to escape and get back out. Another example is the 1999 film entitled The Matrix, directed by the American Wachowski siblings, which depicts a dystopian future where real- ity, as perceived by most humans, is actually a simulated reality called the Matrix created by sentient machines to subdue the human population. This is done in order to use their bodies’ heat and electrical activity as a source of energy. This open access edition has been made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched. Not for resale.