cyberspace

Noun

cyberspace (countable and uncountable, plural cyberspaces)

1. A world of information accessed through the Internet.
2. (broadly, dated) The Internet as a whole.
   • Meanwhile, the pioneers of the computer-mediated communication networks collectively referred to as cyberspace are not willing to wait. Employing whatever tools they can find, they are constantly pushing the techno-cultural envelope. Life in cyberspace is often conducted in primitive, frontier...1993 March, Mitch Kapor, “Where Is the Digital Highway Really Heading?”, in Wired Magazine
   • However, some have accused cyberspace of provoking a dangerous collapse in the old order of civilised society. The shift in the balance of power online has given rise to a more powerful concern: the rise of the uncivil web.2012 April 19, Josh Halliday, “Free speech haven or lawless cesspool – can the internet be civilised?”, in The Guardian

   Synonyms:

   cloud, digital highway, Infobahn, information highway, information superhighway, Internet, Intertubes, interweb, Net, series of tubes

3. A three-dimensional representation of virtual space in a computer network.
   • I knew every chip in Bobby's simulator by heart; it looked like your workaday Ono-Sendai VII, the ‘Cyberspace Seven’, but I'd rebuilt it so many times that you'd have had a hard time finding a square millimetre of factory circuitry in all that silicon.1982 July, William Gibson, “Burning Chrome”, in Omni, volume 4, number 10, page 72
   • Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged...1984, William Gibson, Neuromancer (Sprawl; book 1), New York, N.Y.: Ace Books, →ISBN, page 51