From Interface to Cyberspace
Michael Henry Heim · Oxford University Press eBooks · 1994
The chapter outlines humanity's dependency and marriage to machines. The marriage began with appliance. Applied technology filled our lives with familiar routines. So embedded are machines to our way of living that we seldom notice them until they breakdown. Appliance gave way to interface. Interface is a phenomenon when two sources of information come face-to-face. This change is made possible by advances in technology such as the development of computer where a human sits in front of it and creates an interactive relationship with it. The human gives input, while the computer enhances and modifies the human's thinking power. Finally, the chapter moves on to the concept of cyberspace, an artificial or represented world that is made up of information that our system produces and that we feed back into the system. The issue the chapter asks is about how humans figure in cyberspace. It asks: what is the human's significance in the virtual landscape designed by software programs?