The English term cyberspace came to Castilian as cyberspace. This is the name of the artificial environment that is developed using computer tools.
It can be said that cyberspace is a virtual reality. It is not a physical field, which can be touched, but rather a digital construction developed with computers (computers).
The American writer William Gibson is pointed out as the one who coined the notion of cyberspace. He first used it in a 1981 short story and later helped popularize it through “Neuromancer,” a novel he published in 1984 that won the Philip K. Dick Award, the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award.
It is necessary to add that the term “cyberspace” derives from ” cybernetics “, which was coined by Norbert Wiener in the 1940’s to refer to the study of the analogies between the communication and control systems of machines and living beings.
Today, the concept of cyberspace is often associated with the Internet. Everything that takes place on the Internet, through websites, emails, social networks, etc., does not take place in a specific country, beyond the specific location of the servers and users. Cyberspace, however, is larger than the Internet.
Although some people use the terms “cyberspace” and “Internet” as synonyms, it is more correct to understand them hierarchically: we can think that the Internet is in cyberspace, than the large set of pages and applications that we access from our devices they are housed in this infinite and intangible domain, where future experiences that are not part of the Internet concept will also take place.
Suppose that a person living in Germany establishes a long-distance friendship relationship with another person residing in New Zealand. Both exchange messages, participate in videoconferences and send digital postcards. This link develops in cyberspace: there is no physical meeting, since their geographical locations are very distant, but this does not mean that a virtual link is formed, comparable to that of a traditional friendship.
The legal regulation of cyberspace is often a source of conflict due to the virtual characteristics of this area. The governments are struggling to impose its laws and, thus, the crimes committed in this environment are difficult to prosecute and judge. Despite this issue, many activists defend the independence and autonomy of cyberspace, demanding that state authorities do not exercise controls or commit acts of censorship.
To regulate the use, abuse and management of information that flows through cyberspace, the concept of cyber ethics was developed. Although until not long ago we believed that technology would never surpass our species outside the limits of fiction, things have changed a lot, since machines have come to participate in activities on which our survival depends, such as Prediction and diagnosis systems controlled by artificial intelligence, which is why a set of rules is so necessary.
Cyberspace has been the protagonist of many of the classic moments of cinema and video games of the 80’s and 90’s, when access to the networks had not yet become widespread. While the average human being doesn’t disconnect from the Internet all day today, just a couple of decades ago most people didn’t know what this term meant.
Just as computer-generated graphics and three-dimensional animations had their first moment of fury and left their first viewers speechless, cyberspace also presented itself as part of a futuristic and elusive reality, although in a matter of no time it became the meeting point of most of the world’s population, in their day to day, regardless of their geographical location.
