A Brief History of Cyberspace

Huansheng Ning

• Publisher: Auerbach Publications
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000552928
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

With the widespread growth of the Internet, a new space – cyberspace – has appeared and has rapidly been integrated into every facet of life and work. It has effectively become the fourth basic living space for human beings. Although cyberspace has become a topic of increasing widespread concern, it is still difficult to understand cyberspace well because of its many definitions, vast and varied content, and differences with other similar spaces.

A Brief History of Cyberspace attempts to establish a complete knowledge system about the evolution and history of cyberspace and cyber-enabled spaces (i.e., cyber-enabled physical space, cyber-enabled social space, and cyber-enabled thinking space). By providing a comprehensive overview, this book aims to help readers understand the history of cyberspace and lays a solid foundation for researchers and learners who are interested in cyberspace.

The book has three main objectives:

• To provide a comprehensive understanding of the development of cyberspace, ranging from its origin, evolutions, and research status to open issues and future challenges, as well as related hot topics in industry and academia.

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• To examine cyber life, cyber syndrome, and health in addition to cyber-enabled spaces designed for better living.

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• To describe cyberspace governance from the perspective of the individual, society, and national and international levels in order to promote a more profound and reasonable direction to the development of cyberspace.

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Consisting of 16 chapters, the book is divided into three parts.

Chapter 1 introduces the origins and basic concept of cyberspace, cyber philosophy, and cyber logic to help readers have a general understanding of cyberspace.

Chapters 2 through 7 discuss a wide variety of topics related to human behavior, psychology, and health to help people better adapt to cyberspace.

Chapters 8 through 16 present the history of cyberspace governance and various social and culture aspects of cyberspace. Each chapter concludes with a discussion of future development.

Chapter 1 Cyberspace, Cyber Philosophy, and Cyberlogic

DOI: 10.1201/9781003257387-1

1.1 Introduction

This chapter introduces cyberspace and the most basic concepts related to it, including the three traditional spaces, cyber science, cyber philosophy, and cyberlogic, and lays the foundation for the following chapters.

1.2 The Definition of Cyberspace

The term “cyberspace” comes from the word “cybernetics”, which is originally derived from the Ancient Greek “kybernētēs” and means steersman, governor, pilot, or rudder. Specifically, the term initially appeared in the artwork Atelier Cyberspace, co-created by Danish artist Susanne Ussing and architect Carsten Hoff in the late 1960s. In this work, cyberspace referred to a series of installations and images called “sensory spaces”, representing the open physical space that could sense and adapt to various behaviors or changes of human beings and other materials in space.¹ In the 1980s, American author William Gibson published a series of cyberpunk science fiction, including Burning Chrome (1982) and Neuromancer (1984). The term “cyberspace” was first defined as a concept concerning the digital world created by computers. Specifically, it was described as “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators” and “a graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system” [1,2]. The term “cyberspace” was then widely used in various novels, arts, films, and television works. It became popular as a synonym of computer networks and the Internet during the 1990s.

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberspace

Different definitions of cyberspace can be found in diverse artistic works, scientific literatures, and official governmental sources. There is still no generally accepted definition due to people’s different understandings and use purposes. In artistic works, cyberspace is usually used as a metaphor to represent a notional or virtual world created by computers and related infrastructure. It is a disembodied space, but people can do anything they do in the real world in cyberspace without the limitation of time and space, such as communicating, interacting, playing, shopping, learning, and working. For example, in the movie The Matrix, cyberspace was described as an imaginary world that looked like a normal real world but controlled by a computer and artificial intelligence (AI) system. Human beings could exist in cyberspace by connecting using hardware equipment. They played different roles in both the real world and cyberspace and met their various needs by switching between the two spaces. Inversely, scientific literatures and official governmental sources emphasized more the constitution and functionality of cyberspace. The term “cyberspace” is generally utilized as a generic terminology on computer and communication technologies, which is conceptualized as a digital world with which people can interact. For example, in DoD Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms of the U.S. (2017), cyberspace was defined as “a global domain within the information environment consisting of the interdependent network of information technology infrastructures and resident data, including the Internet, telecommunication networks, computer systems, and embedded processors and controllers”.²

2 https://www.jcs.mil/Portals/36/Documents/Doctrine/pubs/dictionary.pdf

1.3 The History of Cyberspace

Technically, the development of cyberspace could track back to the birth of the world’s first computer in 1946. As the commercialization and mass production of computers in the 1950s, cyberspace gradually walked into people’s daily life and production. In this case, connecting distributed computers and realizing mutual communication became the major concern to share the information and resources. Thus, the first experimental network, Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), was built by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in 1969. It realized the information exchange between distributed computers, which was regarded as the original prototype of the Internet.

In 1975, ARPANET was transformed from an experimental network into a commercial network. The computer network with the ideas of resource sharing, decentralized control, packet switching, and network communication was formed as the increasing scale of ARPANET. However, communication could only occur between computers within the same network in that period. To achieve intercommunication between different computer networks, ARPA started a new project called “internetwork” (Internet in short) to support the research on network interconnection in academia and industry. The term “Internet” has been used to denote the interconnected computer network until today. The project promoted the emergence of TCP/IP protocol, which made the Internet an open system and contributed to the fast development of it. In the early 1980s, some organizations began to build the national Wide Area Network (WAN). Hereinto, the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) gradually replaced ARPANET to become the backbone of the Internet. In 1989, ARPANET disbanded, and NSFNET was connected to Military Network (MILNET) that was separated from ARPANET for military applications. By 1990, ARPANET withdrew from the stage of history after completing its historical mission. The Internet also shifted from military to civilian use.

Commercial organizations began to have access to the Internet. In 1992, IBM, MCI, and MERIT in the U.S. jointly set up Advanced Network Services (ANS) cooperation and built the ANSNET, which became another backbone of the Internet. The intervention of enterprises also resulted in a new process of commercialization of the Internet. In 1995, NSFNET was terminated and entirely replaced by the commercialized Internet. So far, the Internet has become an international network covering different countries and various fields. Cyberspace, in a conventional sense, was formed with the development of the Internet. It metaphorically refers to everything that exists within the communication network itself, including objects, identities, activities, etc. The term “cyberspace” was even used as a synonym for the Internet or a symbolic and figurative space that exists within the scope of the Internet for a long time.

According to the recent draft definitions, conventional cyberspace consists of the following aspects: (a) the basic physical infrastructures, such as computers, mobile devices, servers, and routers, which allow the connection between technology and communication system networks; (b) computer systems and various supporting software for guaranteeing its functionality and connectivity; (c) networks between distributed computers and the networks of networks; (d) resident data and information as well as related activities such as storage, transmission, exchange, processing, and sharing.³ In addition, cyberspace has features of virtualization, interactivity, and time-space ambiguity. Despite the infrastructure and elements involved in traditional physical, social, and thinking (PST) spaces, cyberspace in this stage was still relatively independent of the three traditional spaces. It is largely limited to the Internet that only deals with the interconnections between entities existing in the digital/information space.

3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberspace

Considering the separation of physical and telecommunication infrastructures among different fields, the Cyber-Physical System (CPS) was proposed to deal with the integration of computation, communication, and physical system. CPS enabled the connections of physical devices, machines, and objects to cyberspace and further realized the networking of physical space by the combination and coordination of computing and physical resources. As people’s increasing demands of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), the idea of ubiquitous interconnection attracted wide attention, thereby contributing to the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT extended the clients of cyberspace to things in physical space, including traditional and limited devices (e.g., computers, servers, printers, and cameras), ordinary objects in our daily life (e.g., various electric appliances, commodities, and vehicles), animals, and human beings. Based on new generation ICTs such as sensor and infrared technology, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), Global Positioning System (GPS), and embedded technology, IoT has realized the interconnections between things and things as well as things and humans to achieve more intelligent, efficient, and safe management and services.

The ubiquitous connection of IoT significantly promoted the interconnection among humans in cyberspace. Accordingly, the attributes and complex social issues of humans were also mapped and connected to cyberspace, such as personal information, social relationships (e.g., affiliation, family, friend, and employment relationships), social rights, obligation, and duty. The increasing concerns of human-oriented applications generated the emergence of the Internet of People (IoP),⁴ which allowed people to communicate and interact with each other without the restrictions of time and space. Besides, the Social Internet of Things (SIoT) developed as the integration of IoT with social aspects such as social community, organization, activity, phenomenon, and rule [3,4]. The generation of Cyber-Physical-Social (CPS) space has given rise to several novel human-oriented technologies, such as social computing, social network, and collective intelligence, su...