The Birth and Death of Cyberspace

The topic of this week’s lecture was “The Birth and Death of Cyberspace.” This began by looking into the origins of the term cyberspace. William Gibson defines cyberspace as, “A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts. A graphical representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the non-space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data.”



One theorist who examines Gibson’s theory is Jari Peltola. Peltola says that Cyberspace “Is made of information, offering great power to those who can manipulate information.” One major search engine that has information on what people search for is Google. So in this blog I will be exploring an answer to the question, how does Jari Peltola’s theories relate to the way Google uses our information?
Jari Peltola states that, “Cyberspace is often conceptualised as a matrix, a place constructed out of information.” In this statement Peltola is saying that the internet is made up of lots of information. The most popular search engine is Google; therefore Google has the information of every search that people type into it. This enables them to store information on the interests that certain people use. Google state in their privacy policy that once you have registered with them they will use your information “For certain services, such as our advertising programs, we also request credit card or other payment account information, which we maintain in encrypted form on secure servers. We may combine the information that you submit under your account with information from other Google services or third parties, in order to provide you with a better experience and to improve the quality of our services. For certain services, we may give you the opportunity to opt out of combining such information.”
This shows that Peltola’s theory of Cyberspace being “made of information, offering great power to those who can manipulate information,” to be fairly accurate. This is because the information that Google stores can be used to help advertise things that you have shown a previous interest in. Google can also give the information to third parties who can try to get you invest in things that you might be interested in. This shows Jari Peltola’s theories do relate to the way Google uses our information.

This is a link to Google’s Privacy Policy it shows what they do with the information they receive.
http://www.google.co.uk/privacypolicy.html