The Invisible Highway

I know a few worlds but not well enough the cyber one. Frankly, I haven’t put much effort into learning about something that is almost invisible and also touches so many angles. Perhaps it was a coincidence, but yesterday I read in the morning paper that a boy next door to me had received a four-year prison sentence for cybercrime. Indeed, cyberspace was closer to my doorstep than I thought. So, I too could become a victim of a built world full of highways for information flows. My search began with this feeling: What does this mean and where does it come from?

The word “cyber” comes from the Greek word “kubernétēs” meaning helmsman, governor, pilot or rudder. In the cyber domain, a (cyber) system can be a computer network or a human body. Cybernetics is about communication and how information circulates in a system. So far, this is the best definition I have found. And that is due to the help of a journalist who is a language historian and has written a good story about the cyber preposition − which entered common parlance around the 1990s. His name is Ewoud Sanders, who has also researched the origins of “cyber”.

He wrote:“The wave of cyber words now inundating us dates back to an invention by the American science ction writer, William Gibson. In 1982, in a short story entitled ‘Omni’, Gibson cast the word cyberspace for an imaginary, interactive world created by computers. In 1984, he used it again, this time in the book ‘Neuromancer’, which became a bestseller. Interestingly, Gibson was unaware that the fantasy he described of spatially separated individuals interacting through computers, had already been realised by then. Also of great interest to this story is the name of the American mathematician Norbert Wiener. In 1948, he wrote a book entitled ‘Cybernetics’. Meanwhile, more than 200 words have emerged with cyber in it, but the growth has now slowed down.”

And now I only hope, dear reader, that my limited knowledge has given you the motivation and drive to read even more about “Cyber”. Especially after coming face to face in the next few pages of our HQ #106 about how this cyber world has also been invading the meetings industry.

By Marcel A.M. Vissers, HQ's editor-in-chief
marcel@meetingmediagroup.com