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Mapping Cyberspace Onto Actual Space

I have the sense that when around an iPhone user, I'm already in the presence of someone with nascent superiority––one who has jumped the evolutionary bell curve via network and become exponentially more functional than me and my thrashed-out Razr. I see the owners recording a random snippet of Salsa Muzak in a Mexican restaurant and identifying the track, Twittering their activities in media res, locating a bakery in Manhattan (not by only it's proximity, but by the customer-reviewed quality of it's cupcakes), and otherwise doing things that would have seemed God-like ten years ago, and I get the polymer meat-scintering smell of, well, proto-transhumanism.

This is hyperbole is, of course, fueled by resentment at my own inability to afford a search engine in my pocket coupled with a late night movie geek's dread of all futures dystopian. In a recent Atlantic Monthly article, Bruce Sterling described the iPhone as a Digital Age analogue to the Leatherman Multi-Tool. Like a Leatherman, it aspires to be an all-in-one item––an Ultimate Object––co-opting every possible application and device into its shiny, black carapace.

However, at the moment it is a sloppy beta-generation gizmo––an amalgam of widgetry so wonderful that, like a Leatherman, no one can really get their head around its complete usefulness. Like the Google search engine itself, the new GPhone's open source potential gifts itself prematurely into the hands of hominids whose basal ganglia fused in the 20th century. I mean, does anyone really take advantage of the fullest possibilities of Google?

The new smartphones seem like an overture to the emerging promises of Mobile Augmented Reality Applications, wireless nomadism, and RFID-tagged geolocative "spimes," set to enfold complex aspects of our material world into an interconnected digital Pangea.

If science fiction is any barometer of the changing nature of tomorrow, there's been some fundamental shift in the concepts and shape of the formless, yet omniscient, digital realm.

In 1990's, philosophers, writers, and theorists glommed onto the word "cyberspace" as a way of conceptualizing and giving shape to formless, disparate, yet encroaching developments in telecommunications and digital technologies. The word was coined in the early 1980's by William Gibson to describe the VR network connecting the world of his seminal novel Neuromancer. Read more …