In William Gibson's classic 1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, he coined the word "cyberspace" as the "consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators" jacked in to the digital network. In this clip from a 1993 Toronto TV program, Gibson tells how he came up with the term:
"Infospace? No. Dataspace? No. What are we gonna call it? Cyberspace? Hmmm."
Watching this video reminds me of the 2006 article that Alex Soojung-Kim Pang and I, when we were both researchers at Institute for the Future, penned for Wired magazine. That was when cyberspace was becoming less like a place that we "go to" and more like a layer on existing reality. So we asked an array of interesting folks to come up with a new term.
"If I had that word, it would be the title of my next book," Gibson told us. "I think cyberspace is past its sell-by, but the probélem is that everything has become an aspect of, well, cyberspace."
Here's the article: 'Cyberpsace' is dead (Wired)
