By Rabbi Dr.Moshe Dror
After all of these blogs, you might be curious as to what is Cyber Or?
I would like to suggest how I am using these two terms and what I mean by them.
CYBER:
Cyber is a shortened version of Cyberspace which is a metaphor used in computing and philosophy and sociology that describes all of the many aspects of computing technologies, internet, web, digital, communication networking, and anything else that will come along in this vast area.
The word “ cyberspace” is a combination of cybernetics and space. For a more extensive description of cyberspace see the article in Wikipedia.
The term was coined by the Canadian / American science fiction writer who defined its cyberpunk sub-genre, in 1982 in his novelette “Burning Chrome” in Omni magazine. But it was through the use in Gibson’s novel of 1984-“Neuromancer” that it became widely used and has become the jargon term for all of the many aspects of the information technologies.
“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 in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.”
The idea of cyberspace as a “space” is new in all of human history. As Bruce Sterling explains:
“…Since the 1960’s, the world of the telephone has cross-bred itself with computers and television. And though there is no substance to cyberspace, nothing that you can handle, it has a strange kind of physicality now. It makes good sense to talk of cyberspace as a place all its own.”
Now, add to the list of computers, TV, telephony all of the new gadgets that are being added to our high tech world on a nearly daily basis.
Before cyberspace became a technological possibility, many philosophers have suggested that the possibility of some sort of “virtual” reality that is analogous to cyberspace might actually exist. Plato, in his allegory of the cave developed a sort of conceptual reality, might be considered in this context. Descartes had similar suggestions. In a more modern context, such thinkers as William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Timothy Leary, Les Levine, and Robert Wilson among numerous others explored the interface of the nature of evolution, time, space, mind and consciousness.
The story goes that while William Gibson was wandering around a video games arcade in Vancouver, Canada during the early 1980’s he was fascinated by the way that the players were hunched over the glowing screens. Gibson was haunted by that image. He knew very little about video games or computers, but he knew people who knew more and as far as he could tell, everyone who worked or played with these video games began to accept the reality of these spaces.
The term cyber is borrowed from the word “cybernetics” which was coined by the renowned mathematician Norbert Wiener in 1948 at MIT. He took the word from the classical Greek-“kybernitos” which refers to the steersman of a boat- the person who holds the rudder. Cybernetics basically is the correlation of electronic control mechanisms with the human nervous system.
Cyberspace is a completely new and different kind of intellectual and by extension a spiritual aspect of our human environment. It is part of the cultural evolution of humanity. One of the most significant aspects of cyberspace is the change in the rate of change of how it is affecting our lives. We are dealing with a bio-electronic-photonic frontier whose rate of expansion will always exceed our ability to explore it.
We will deal with the vast dimensions and various aspects of cyberspace and cyberia extensively in these blogs.
OR:
Or is the Hebrew word for LIGHT.
There are many aspects to our understandings of light and the many manifestations of different forms of light. So Too there are many aspects of the Jewish understanding of Or in its numerous guises.
The rest of these blogs will explicate, probe, explore and play with these interfaces and interactions of cyberia and Or for the next century.
