Cyberspace is a fictional sensory environment with a traceable history. It is formally defined, much like the Euclidean space which Wyndham Lewis feared losing, and which Marshall McLuhan announced obsolete thirty years later.
Its origins lie in the mid-1960s with the programming language Simula which standardized the now-ubiquitous object-oriented approach toward computer programming. Combined with the file-systems of magnetic data storage devices and graphic user interfaces, cyberspace has become synonymous with computing and media as a whole. Examinations of cyberspace emphasize the fantastic and unreal nature of the medium, but seldom puncture through to the realities of computing itself.
The applied methods of Marshall McLuhan promise great exploratory and explanatory power in today’s media environment if, and only if, the precise nature of digital technology as machines and as media can be acknowledged in a way commensurate to all various perceptions of them. Unlike analogue media, whose inner-workings are discrete, computing devices employ the universal Turing Machine concept which renders their operations evasive of straightforward explanation. Modern media literacy absolutely demands some basic form of full-stack computer literacy, without any permissible exceptions or objections. The alternative is control over the programmable, invisible environment being ceded to an arbitrary, self-selected few who are granted the power of technical determination over the many. Continue reading at clintonthegeek
