The metaphor has had several sources. Science fiction and video games offered some of the earliest articulations of the idea of computers and networks as places. Arguments for and against the regulation of online speech and commerce both appealed to the notion of the Internet as a place. Software developers instantiated the metaphor of computers as places in the design of graphical user interfaces, Web browsers, and massive multiplayer online games. Finally, the social and psychological experience of using personal computers, usually in computer labs, workplaces, or home offices, reinforced the sense of the Internet as separate from real life: going online required tuning out the real world.

However, the underlying geographical assumption in the concept of ‘cyberspace’ is that computing environments are necessarily distinct from physical reality. Inspired partly by the notion of ‘virtual reality’, many commentators on computing in the recent past perceived an inexorable path towards ‘immersive’ computing in which users inhabit the same ‘space’ as their data rather than data inhabiting users’ spaces. The development of ‘pervasive computing’ (also known as ‘ubiquitous computing’) has revealed alternatives to immersive computing. Cyberspace is still a valid geographical concept, but its relation with ‘real’ (physical and social) space is complex.

Pervasive computing technologies like flexible displays, smart dust, sensors, and wireless offer an alternative to immersion. The experience of using devices designed to be socially unobtrusive, to require little of a user's attention, and to operate anywhere will change the experience of being online. Users capable of accessing the Internet anywhere will discover "real space" information-- information about the places that they are, accessed in that space-- that complements "real time" information. Rather than requiring users to focus exclusively on either the digital or physical, new devices will allow users to attend to both simultaneously.

A comparison can be made with ‘virtual reality’. (In the popular imagination, cyberspace and virtual reality are closely enmeshed.) When the concept was popularised in the early 1990s, commentators imagined that, as more applications were found for virtual reality technology, we would spend less time in real-space and more time in ‘virtual’ space. It was assumed that as virtual spaces grew in sophistication, they would also become increasingly divorced from ‘reality’ – that virtual spaces would provide an alternative space to inhabit. Though the technology has developed apace, we have not seen the emergence of totally immersive alternate realities to the extent that was predicted. ‘Augmented reality’, which maps digital media to the physical world, has proved to be more useful than fully immersive virtual reality.

Similarly, cyberspace is not as distinct from ‘real’ space as it was imagined it would be. Geographically, it is not a separate world or a new frontier, but rather a layer atop (or beneath?) the everyday world. We inhabit both cyberspace and physical space at the same time.

• Personal computers disrupt the social networks and contexts that contribute to the effective use of information. The development of new devices will let users access digital information without disrupting social interactions.

• Designers of Web services, dot coms, and Internet-enabled devices have assumed, explicitly or (much more often) implicitly, that users would access their content on desktops. As the number of mobile users grows, designers will have to change their practices.

• Some of the biggest impacts on the end of cyberspace will come in legal thinking. In the early 2000s, much of the discussion of the application of copyright and intellectual property online depended on the notion of cyberspace as a place. The disappearance of the metaphor of the Internet as a place will force legal theorists to rethink these arguments.

• Mobile devices like cell phones and Web-enabled PDAs, especially in Asia and Europe, have already become leading-- if not primary-- devices for young people to access the Internet.

• Emerging mobile and pervasive computing technologies.

• The use of language, particularly by youth, describing their online interactions.

• Pervasive computing technologies: flexible displays, smart dust, sensors, and wireless.

• Geocaching (GPS-enabled treasure hunts) [link]
• Yellow Arrow [link]
• The Flickr Geotagging group [link]

Institutions pursuing smart dust:

• Berkeley Sensor & Actuator Center (research on micro- and nano-scale sensors) [link]
• Carnegie Mellon's MEMS Laboratory

Also

• HP Network Research [link]
• Open University of Catalonia [link]
• University of Southampton [link]

• John Perry Barlow, "The Economy of Ideas," Wired 2.03 (March 1994), 84-90, 126-129. [link]
• Michael Benedikt, ed., Cyberspace: First Steps (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991).
• Esther Dyson, "Intellectual Value," Wired 3.07 (August 1995), 136-141, 181-185. [link]
• F. Randall Farmer, "Cyberspace: Getting There From Here," unpublished essay and lecture, 1989. [link]
• Dan Hunter, "Cyberspace as Place, and the Tragedy of the Digital Anticommons," California Law Review 91 (November 2002). [link]
• David R. Johnson and David G. Post, "Law And Borders--The Rise of Law in Cyberspace," Stanford Law Review 48 (1996). [link]
• Jonathan Koppell, "No 'There' There," The Atlantic Monthly (August 2000). [link]
• Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1994).
• Fred Turner, "Cyberspace as the New Frontier?: The Shifting Landscape of Work in the Network Society," CSPR 2001. [link]
• New to the Web conference 2000 [link]
• Esther Dyson on the End of Cyberspace [link]
• The End of Cyberspace Blog [link]
• Foresight Cyber Trust and Crime Prevention Project, especially Technology Forward Look and Pervasive Dependable Systems papers [link]
• Possible new Google services [link]
• Manuel Castells, The Internet Galaxy, 2001, OUP ISBN 0-19-924153-8 [link]
• Wi-Fi Set to Rewire Social Rules [link]
• IFTF Blog on End of Cyberspace [link]

Ambient Displays at the Human-Computer Interface