Michael Benedikt, author of Cyberspace: First Steps begins his influential 1994 book with this definition:

"Cyberspace: A word from the pen of William Gibson, science fiction writer, circa 1984 ... A new universe, a parallel universe created and sustained by the world's computers and communication lines ... The tablet become a page become a screen become a world, a virtual world ... A common mental geography, built, in turn, by consensus and revolution, canon and experiment ... Its corridors form wherever electricity runs with intelligence ... The realm of pure information ... Cyberspace as just described does not exist."

The popular-culture philosophies of Marshall McLuhan have embedded themselves deeply within the social consciousness of late-20th century Western culture; his theories have been widely lauded as prescient of the current construction of what has (unfortunately) been called "the information superhighway."

In fact, it has been a popular pastime of the first generation of cyberspace scholars to credit McLuhan for predicting the conceptualization of the Internet with his 1960's writings about electronic media and the path back to his "global village." This is, at best, an exaggeration built with misguided hindsight; for while McLuhan was a visionary regarding the influence certain kinds of electronic media would have upon the ways humans communicate with each other, he cannot be credited for predicting cyberspace technology for two reasons; first, his interpretations of the then-current technology (including television and punch-card computers) is, in hindsight, quite erroneous regarding levels of interactivity, while second — as Benedikt shows — cyberspace itself does not exist.

McLuhan wrote in 1964,

"The telephone: speech without walls. The phonograph: music hall without walls. The photograph: museum without walls. The electric light: space without walls. The movie, radio and TV: classroom without walls. Man the food-gatherer reappears incongruously as information-gatherer. In this role, electronic man is no less a nomad than his Paleolithic ancestors."

Actually, no — in fact, it's quite ludicrous; to do so would "Nostradamus-ize" McLuhan, leaving us to look for ways of interpreting each phrase in terms of some event or invention, nodding sagely at his brilliance each time we make a connection. Certainly, there are times McLuhan does seem quite accurate about the wave of the technological future — but there are many others where he clearly misfires, though often through no fault of his own.

For instance, when Gibson says in 1992 of his cyberpunk followers, "Information wants to be free. That's the slogan of the computer underground," it seems fair to recall that it was McLuhan, 28 years earlier, who wrote, "As automation takes hold, it becomes obvious that information is the crucial commodity, and that solid products are merely incidental to information movement."

Yet, even this may be giving McLuhan too much credit as a visionary; for while he recognizes that "It is a principal aspect of the electric age that it establishes a global network that has much of the character of our central nervous system," even he is not able to foresee the one technological leap that will make this development relatively autonomous — the advent of the personal computer.

The 1984 introduction of the Apple Macintosh has, in just one decade, triggered an explosion of information-sharing and word-processing which has brought PCs into offices, homes and classrooms throughout most of the middle- to upper-class Western world. And perhaps this example does show that McLuhan was right in another respect: the medium — in this case, the PC — is indeed the message. Does the man's inability to predict the specifics of the new medium detract from his "visionary" status?

For a moment, let us compare what virtual reality theorist Marianne Trench has said of William Gibson, "[he] is a visionary . . . an expert only in ideas themselves." Similarly, McLuhan was an architect of ideas, of a possible theoretical framework. He disdained traditional social science methodologies, and offered little empirical support for his ideas beyond the occasional metaphorical investigation of a contemporary pre-literate society. Yet, many of his ideas have withstood the seeming lack of support precisely because people were able to use them for their own purposes in building a future McLuhan did not pretend to accurately predict.

In an odd sense specific passages in McLuhan's writing did offer a prediction about how cyberspace (or whatever we will call this new medium) would be constructed, if not what it would look like. First, in The Gutenberg Galaxy, he wrote of the inevitable uneasiness that exists when a new technology for communication becomes both available and viable:

"An age in rapid transition is one which exists on the frontier between two cultures and between conflicting technologies. Every moment of its consciousness is an act of translation of each of these cultures into the other. Today we live on the frontier between five centuries of mechanism and the new electronics."

"Science-fiction writing today presents situations that enable us to perceive the potential of new technologies. Formerly, the problem was to invent new forms of labor-saving. Today, the reverse is the problem. Now we have to adjust, not to invent. We have to find the environments in which it will be possible to live with our new inventions. Big Business has learned to tap the s-f writer."

Trench says of the man whose first novel, Neuromancer, won every conceivable award in the world of fiction, "When William Gibson's visions were published, they struck sparks in the real world. Scientists and hackers had found a future they couldn't wait to build . . . Never before had science fiction literature determined the way people thought and talked."

Of course, this is quite wrong; one need only examine the effect the works of HG Wells had on the sciences of the first part of the 20th century to construct a viable counterstatement to Trench's sweeping endorsement of Gibson. Nonetheless, whether he was the first to affect society in such a way matters little when weighed against the fact that, inarguably he did have a profound effect.

Indeed, it is remarkable to hear, on the one hand, a technician for NASA/Ames research describe Gibson's world as "something genuinely worth shooting for," while at the same time hearing Timothy Leary explain that its power was in the fact that it "gave hackers and technophiles an identity and a set of ennobling myths"

Oddly, Gibson wrote his first several novels, including Neuromancer, on a manual typewriter; the distance from technology, he says, "gave This reconfirms McLuhan's ideas about the role of the artist in the cultural struggle between technologies, which he expounds upon in The Medium is the Massage:

"The poet, the artist, the sleuth — whoever sharpens our perception tends to be antisocial; rarely"well-adjusted, he cannot go along with currents and trends. A strange bond often exists among anti-social types in their power to see environments as they really are. This need to interface, to confront environments with a certain antisocial power, is manifest in the famous story The Emperor's New Clothes. Well-adjusted courtiers, having vested interests, saw the Emperor as beautifully appointed. The antisocial brat, unaccustomed to the old environment, clearly saw that the Emperor ain't got nothin' on. The new environment was clearly visible to him. "

But for the science fiction author, as Gibson is fond of saying — and as McLuhan has pointed out above — "Life imitates art." And so, scientists and phrackers alike adopt the words and concepts of Gibson's novel as a vocabulary with which they can talk about, and tools with which they can build the future. Words like "cyberspace" and "netsurfing" came to popular usage through Gibson's novels, as did "ICE", "jacking in", "neural implants," and larger concepts like net consciousness, virtual interaction and "the matrix." All of these concepts have become part of the publicly conscious effort to construct "cyberspace" itself.

Here, while acknowledging the correctness of Benedikt's claim that cyberspace, does not exist, I am using the word in its colloquially-accepted sense: cyberspace is the electronic space in which people currently interact, largely through text, on the Internet and related information processors. "Architects of cyberspace" range from the professional technicians at NASA/Ames to the individual who constructs a home page for herself on the World Wide Web.

And here, finally, is where a McLuhanesque framework will allow us to see what is happening in this attempted construction, and how and why these new tools of communication, as yet, elude accurate description. The architects of "cyberspace" are, like their early-print-age ancestors such as Francis Bacon and Thomas More, constructing a new way of seeing the world through a process of trial and error. They are attempting to enhance what McLuhan calls the interiorization of a new communications technology, and by no means is it a smooth transition.

So we hear myriad definitions of "cyberspace," ranging from Benedikt's pessimism to the playfulness of Michael Heim in The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality, "Cyberspace is Platonism as a working product . . . a total electronic environment in which people can interact with data."

But what does it mean to "interact with data"? (No Star Trek references, please!) Is Heim suggesting a cyberspace where the humans and the data intermingle as equals? While this may sound faithful to Gibson's fiction, it is probably wildly (and pessimistically) inaccurate. Heim's working definition of cyberspace likely means something much closer to this: people using data in order to interact with other people. The data is not anthropomorphized, in some Wintermute-like Gibsonian sense, but functions simply as a tool for people to interact with each other.

It is this concept of virtual space functioning as a "tool" that is most important to a discussion of how McLuhanesque terminology can be used to delineate what is happening in communications technology. As Clark, Hart-Davidson and I have shown elsewhere, borrowing from Scott Consigny's examination of Aristotelian and Ciceronian topoi, "any technological artifact . . . can be seen as both a tool — something functional or working in the world; and as a realm — a reconceptualized worldview with the theory/technology foregrounded." This dichotomy echoes strongly a McLuhanesque description of the "interiorizing" of technology.

At this moment in history, Western culture exists within the realm of the written word; the tools of writing are so ingrained in our consciousness, says McLuhan, that the way we see, the way we draw, the way we do math, the very way we exist is affected by the linearity imposed on our (sub)consciousness by our societal literacy. Writing has been interiorized by our society. It was not always so; before Gutenberg's press allowed for mass-production of print, the phonetic alphabet itself was a specialized tool available only to manuscripters and clerics. But how do we know when we have moved to this interiorization, have moved from seeing a type of literacy as a tool to existing within it as a realm? McLuhan has claimed that we might accomplish this only with complete hindsight, often the hindsight of many generations.

And there is the problem facing the first generation of cyberpunks; since the totality of (post)modern culture has not yet interiorized virtual technology, we cannot define, much less critique the "realm" of cyberspace. In fact, if cyberspace does not exist — at least not in ways we can yet talk about sensibly - then, hell! What's the point of talking about it at all?

Well, cyberspace is being created — or perhaps it is being discovered; likely, it is a combination of the two approaches — regardless, it is in the process of being interiorized.

Here is where Consigny's useful distinction between "tool" and "realm" serves as a mediator. If we view the Gibsonian terminology as tools "functioning in the world" allowing for an approach to the realm — or "reconceptualized worldview," — then the supposed architects of cyberspace are charged, quite appropriately, with both tasks — creation and discovery. When the tools are interiorized — and as McLuhan warns, this can take multiple generations — then the realm becomes a reality.

Fortunately, the visions (tools) Gibson has provided may make the transition a bit quicker; the author said himself, "I'm always a little amazed when I run into people who feel that technology is something that's outside of the individual, that one can either accept or reject. That's true in a sense, but at this stage of the game we ARE technology." Dr. Brenda Laurel, a self-professed computer theorist, agrees as she chides those hesitant to interiorize the new realm; it's something she claims we've been doing since prehistoric times:

"Tools . . . we say, oh my god, . . . it's not my arm, it's a hammer! Does that mean I've lost power to the hammer, or does it mean that I can build a cathedral? . . . the question isn't whether or not the medium is intrinsically evil or scary, but the question is whether or not we have a culture and a society and a group of artists who can rise to the occasion of using it in a way that enhances us."

Compare this, momentarily, with McLuhan's statement in Understanding Media, "Any invention or technology is an extension or self-amputation of our physical bodies, and such extension also demands new ratios or new equilibriums among the other organs and extensions of the body." If Barlow and McLuhan are both correct, then existence in cyberspace is theoretically impossible; for if we do indeed subtract our consciousness completely from our physical senses ("have our everything amputated"), then we have no ability remaining to adjust other ratios.

So . . . according to Benedikt, cyberspace does not exist; and according to a logical combination of McLuhan and Barlow, if it did we couldn't go there anyway — at least, according to the linear, print-bound rules of logic which we have interiorized culturally for more than half a millenia. We may see in an artist's fancy "something worth shooting for," but what's the point if it is indeed an impossible dream? The answer — for me, anyway — came, ironically enough, via electronic mail.

As part of an ongoing discussion amongst members of a collaborative group discussing computers and writing, I wrote recently that I found Benedikt's somewhat pessimistic realism refreshing in a field where most definitions of cyberspace are filled with wild fancy; it was nice, I thought, to hear an author claim the realm did not exist. Immediately, Hart-Davidson responded:

"Are you saying that Gibson's *very* romantic (and I mean that in its fullest epistemological sense) vision of "cyberspace" doesn't exist? Granted. But guess what...that ain't what we're waiting for either. I once saw a show on PBS where this guy was standing out in front of his recently demolished house. A tornado hit it. Anyway, he says "we didn't even hear it comin'. Somebody tole us that they sounded like a train a' comin', but we didn't hear no train..." Lesson: not all tornadoes sound like trains."