Cyberraces, Cyberplaces
Rachel C. Lee, Sau-ling Cynthia Wong · 2013
Why cyberspace? Cyberspace seems an odd name for a communications medium. Unlike news- paper (news + paper) or film, cyberspace does not refer to its content or to the physical materials that constitute it. Unlike cinema, derived from cinematograph, it does not refer to the apparatus that projects it.1 Further, unlike television (tele+ vision; vision from afar), cyberspace does not refer to the type of vision it supposedly enables and, unlike radio, derived from radiotelegraphy, it not does refer to the physical phenomenon (radiation) that enables transmission. Although all these terms-newspaper, film, television, and radio-erase sites of production, cyberspace erases all reference to its content, apparatus, process or form, offering instead a metaphorical mirage, for cyberspace is not spatial. Contrary to common parlance, you do not meet someone in cyberspace. Electronic interchanges, like telephone conversations but unlike face-to-face ones, do not take place within a confined space. Not only are there at least two “originary” places (the sender’s and receiver’s computers), data travels as independent packets between locations and can originate from a local cache rather than the “real” location. At most, one could trace the various packet routes and produce a map of the interchange after the fact.