Devices such as computers are the key to the Pandora’s Box that is cyberspace. With the advancement of science and technology comes greater information and greater information leads to the proliferation of a global network society. Technology allows for the obliteration of borders and for globalisation in all spheres e.g. economical, societal, and cultural to occur. This new electronic interdependence recreates the world as a global digital village which decouples information from matter; the extraction of information, processing and sorting it. Although not all people chose to actively connect and interact with this network society, they are still influence, shaped ultimately dominated by the logic, interests and conflicts of this network society.
All of this is gives reason to the homogenisation of time and space and allows for the free flow of information. Scale and speed are the new concepts to be considered, they call for control and coordination. This narrative of network openness and sharing give rise to Cyber-Utopianism.
Cyber-Utopianism is the result of a distributed network which gives the end node (user) control and distributes control to maintain coordination. Prior to this, the distributed information flow was unprecedented in a communication system and in effect now, gives each individual node the ability to broadcast to the entire network. All decision making resides with the ends (nodes) while the middle is as non-specialised as possible, all nodes are equal.
The personal computer is where nodes begin processing. Modems act as the connector between nodes and the people’s internet is born out of the bulletin board system. These frame the cyber-utopia that is the new kind of space beyond borders, the sphere where the free flow of information is embraced.
This sphere is am environment inhabited by knowledge and ideas, whether they are correct or not does not influence that they exist in electronic form. The physical environment that is technology are all portals which allow people to see what’s inside, to put knowledge in, to alter it, and to take knowledge out. Some of these portals are one-way (e.g. television receivers and television transmitters); others are two-way (e.g. telephones, computer modems).
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