The term ‘cyberspace’ was first coined by William Gibson in his 1982 short story ‘Burning Chrome’ to refer to a computer generated virtual reality. However, the term became popular in 1984, after its use in Gibson’s novel Neuromancer. Etymologically, cyberspace is a compound word and the origin of the first term ‘cyber’ comes from the Greek word kybernetes, which means pilot, governor, and ruler. The root ‘cyber’ is also related to ‘cyborg’, a term that describes a human-machine synthesis resulted by connecting the human body in advanced high-tech devices.
According to Gibson, cyberspace is the name of a real non-space world, which is characterised by the ability for virtual presence of, and interaction between, people through ‘icons, waypoints and artificial realities’. The Gibsonian cyberspace is an urban ‘thin’ space (Kneale, 1999), dealing with urban experiences and problems such as crime, social exclusion and poverty. It mirrors socio-economic conflicts and geographical divisions that occur in enormously enlarged and highly polarised cities, in which speed and movements over the virtual world of cyberspace are the key metaphors for new spatial experiences. Gibson himself recognises that, by his imaginative stories, he did not predict the widespread use of computer networks like Internet around the globe, but he simply used actual technological developments to make sense of the imagined and futuristic worlds described in his novels (Gibson, 1996).