March 17 2008

Text By Greg Fallis

This is it. This is where it began. Cyberspace. Not with the internet, but with the telephone. Something odd happened when communication switched from the telegraph to the telephone. Telegraphic communication had to be synchronized; only one person at a time could send a message. With the telephone people could talk to each other at the same time. They could have a real conversation.

But where was that conversation really taking place? Not at my phone. Not at your phone. It was taking place in some incorporeal interstitial place between our telephones. The conversation was taking place in a location that existed only by implication. Cyberspace.

William Gibson, who coined the term, called cyberspace "a consensual hallucination." That's as good a description as any. Surely to spend time in a place that has no physical existence requires a temporary loosening of the bonds of reality. Cyberspace isn't like Brigadoon; it doesn't come into existence periodically, not even for the lucky.

Still, if you look closely at this photo--if you turn your head, look out of the corner of your eye, squint just right--you can almost, almost...no. No. Now it's gone.