Surviving the Cyber/Location Nexus

What happens when the once-unanchored world of cyberspace collides with geolocation? Christopher Tucker looks at the effects on art, privacy, security and more

By Christopher Tucker

December 23, 2009 —

When the science fiction author William Gibson popularized the term "cyberspace" in the early 1980s, it was a reference to an other-worldly domain, a parallel universe, embedded in a context of networked computing in which people's real world lives had become inextricably linked. In these intertwined universes, Gibson had envisioned a domain in which nefarious actors could harness the cyber-domain to manipulate, harm and even destroy economic, social, and cultural value that has been either created or stored within cyberspace.

Surely, in some important respects, we have seen Gibson's vision come to pass. Our society's dependence on cyber-infrastructure, and the extent to which every-day people have become beings embedded in (and reliant on) networked computing and communication, has raised the issue of cyber-security to a Presidential priority. In the first several months of the Obama Administration, we have seen the Leader of the Free World make a top priority of the need to protect what Gibson, some 30 years ago, presciently painted as dominant threads in the fabric of our civilization's future.

Something happened to the modern world, contemporaneously with this cyber-transformation, that was not a part of Gibson's original vision, but which he brought to the center of his most recent novel—Spook Country. This something is the location-enablement of every-day life. The vision animating this novel was of the cyber domain conveying digital content over and into the complex and urban terrain constituting the real world, requiring a mastery of Global Positioning System (GPS) technologies, wearable human-computer interfaces, and their marriage with content generated in virtual worlds of the cyber domain.

Also see When Everything's Networked by Fred Hapgood

Gibson's story operates at what I like to call the cyber/location nexus. He artfully wove several location-enabled story lines together, which not only emphasized the extent to which his original vision of the cyber-domain has come to pass, but which also shined a light on how real world location can be the anchor for cyber content and cyber experiences. In the reverse, Gibson also showed how events in the real world, through location-enabled technologies, can be tracked and monitored in cyber-space. This melding of the two worlds, that of the cyber domain and the real world (where geospatial location matters), not only made for great science fiction and great intrigue, but it also marked an historic inflection point at which the cyber domain and the real, geospatial world were understood to converge in popular culture.

The Dual Revolutions Fueling the Nexus

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