While reading Benjamin Woolley's essay, "Cyberspace", I found that Woolley did his best to define the term cyberspace. He didn't exactly pinpoint what it stood for, but he used examples that in whole, gave us a picture and an idea what cyberspace could be and mean in 1992.

I believe the main point that Woolley hits on are the words by Marshall McLuhan who coined the describing of cyberspace as a global village. Cyberspace is one. We’re like this little society running about and interacting with one another and exchanging ideas and stories. And in this little village, we could basically live 90% of our life in it if we choose to. We could order books with one simple click of the mouse. Join a company that’ll ship movies to us. Download all the music to your heart (and wallet's) content. We could even have our food delivered to us (and I’m not only talking about take-out or Pizza Hut). This little global village is one little busy little thing, but it does something else that, to me, is probably one of the most important functions. It connects us. We could extend pass our borders and achieve conversations with those who live in countries we only viewed on maps or saw in programs or films. To talk to those and see how growing and maturing in their homeland differs from and are similar to our own lives. And maybe you don’t even have to go outside your country borders, but your own state. This global village has made it so much easier to communicate with others that may be a minute away or twenty hours away. And as Mark Poster said, "time and space no longer restrict the exchange of information" (p. 6). Indeed, it has.

I found that the in-class discussion expanded upon the science/computer comparison much better than the original text. I have to admit that once Woolley slipped into the discussion of science, I couldn’t completely grasp what he was trying to achieve by bringing forth such a topic. By listening to the class discussion take apart that and really drill upon the computer/human comparison, I finally felt like I fully understood. The talks and the essay made me truly see that humans and computers aren’t that much different. For example, how each of the viruses (AIDS for humans and computer viruses for – well, computers, lol) come to and how they spread. Another example Woolley used was when Wes Thomas stated that "he had unleashed the world’s first media virus" (p. 9) that would take effect on the 13th of October. The media flung the story so far and wide that mostly everyone was horrified of this so-called ‘media virus’ that didn’t even cause much damage. We could use this example also for whenever a new disease pops up in civilization and the media makes a tremendous deal over it when in fact, it's a disease that mostly no one would contract or isn't as dangerouos as once reported.

But for the most part, the in-class online discussion brought things to home base. It felt different talking about Woolley and how we each differently viewed what he thought of cyberspace. Even though in the end we discovered our own definition of what cyberspace could mean, it was relaxing to discuss what we thought in our own way. And maybe that was so because most of us are currently working with anonymous masks (well, at least for today). The atmosphere felt more relaxed to work in because we, for the most part, didn’t know who exactly we were talking to. I feel as though ideas could be expressed much more freely that way and it felt that way in the particular chat room I was in. After ideas were floated around, we determined that Woolley meant cyberspace to be a virtual civilization with its own rules, community, and natural order. By reviewing and rereading certain parts of Woolley’s "Cyberspace", this appears to be true.