The explosion of Internet users over the past few years have created questions in the general population on what cyberspace and virtual reality is. Until a few years ago, cyberspace and virtual reality was a topic known to just a few sci-fi fanatics and high level academics in universities. But thanks to Bill Gates (the founder of Microsoft), or Steve Jobs (co-founder of Apple Computers), and others, many people are forced to interact with cyberspace everyday. As a result of this, this class (Psy 409a) will explore the burning question of "What is cyberspace?" and "How does it relate to us?" Or more specifially, "How does cyberspace relate to the mind?"

To answer the question of the connection of people and cyberspace, I turned to Dr. Leon James' page, in his "Cyberpsychology: Principles of Creating Virtual Presence" The following is a summarization of the his paper, concentrating on the relationship between cyberspace and the mind.

Dr. James states that "Cyberspace is the virtual reality created through computers." Dr. James believes that cyberspace is something that is not physical, something that has no physical characteristics. Therefore, cyberspace and the internet are not the same thing. He states that cyberspace is not a physical object. He compares the relation of cyberspace and computers is like that of the mind and the brain. The mind is the home of thoughts and feelings, but does not have an physical characteristics. It cannot be held, or touched or looked at. Even if we cannot see or feel the mind, it exists. Dr. James states that "The brain is needed with in which mind can exist." Just like the mind, cyberspace also has no physical characteristics. It is not physical space. But just like the mind needs the brain, cyberspace needs the hardware (computers, networks, the Internet) to exist. He sees this as the Dualism of a person, and also applies the principle of dualism to cyberspace. Dr. James goes on to state that this is not a cause and effect relationship but a correlational relationship. Two of the similarities of cyberspace to the mind is how it it organized and its interactively. Both the mind and cyberspace is organized by topics. Within each area of similar topics is connected to each other, and therefore is interactive. Cyberspace is also called the world of information.

Virtual reality is also not a physical object. Virtual reality is "created by interactively." It is assumed that he is referring to the hypertext links which are present through out the World Wide Web, a section of the Internet. As put so eloquently by Dr. James, "The act of clicking creates virtual reality." These hyperlinks lead to other pages, files, or multimedia material. As you interact with the web pages, you form virtual reality. Interaction is the key to virtual reality and cyberspace. People with similar interests are all drawn towards the same page, creating virtual communities. Virtual reality is an extension of the mind, and therefore, the computer and cyberspace are also the extension of the mind.

Based on these definition of these principles, Dr. James defines several social phenomenons in cyberspace, including the Communal Mind, the Virtual Community, the Virtual Book, and the relation between Spirituality and Cyberspace. What drives cyberspace is the flow of information. Dr. James describes a communal mind as interaction between minds of different people over cyberspace. This can be best described by a vien diagram. Imagine that each of the circles are a person's mind on cyberspace. Where the circles overlap is where each of the people's minds interact with each other, therefore, creating a communal mind. The communal mind is driven by interests that people share. Virtual communities are formed by creating "virtual reality zones" where people come together for a common purpose in virtual reality in cyberspace. A good example of this is the growth of the online gaming phenomenon. Such Internet services such as Kali allow people to play network games such as Doom, Quake, Warcraft and Diablo, over the Internet. These are multiplayer games, and each player controls their character in that game, allowing take on the characteristics that the game allows. The virtual book concept uses the analogy of a book to describe cyberspace. This concept states that there are thousands of page in cyberspace, and it can be organized by a user into a book by creating organizing it through the use of hypertext. A example of this would be your bookmarks list that you create using your WWW browser or a links page on the Internet. These things act as the Table of Contents for that book.

Three ideas that are new to me...

1. The Virtual Book: I found the virtual book concept as a interesting way of looking at cyberspace. It is true that if you group those pages that you find, you are creating a sort of a book. Whoever visits your page is like reading a book, and you are the author or editor. To expand this idea, anything that you put in cyberspace is the same as publishing a piece of work, leaving the potential for millions of people to read.
2. Virtual Community: Even if this is not a new concept for me, (I have spent some time on Kali playing multiplayer games with people all over the world) I feel that this is going to be a growing trend and an important topic in the future. This will be a growing trend because as technology progresses, it will be easier to create virtual communities, and more people will have access to it.
3. Cyberspace Citizenship: Dr. James states in his article that the Internet is a very complex thing that requires skills that not everyone has. This can be seen by the number of Internet related books that has come out over the past year. Go to the bookstore and over half of the computer section is dominated by books about the Internet. As with anything new, there is a resistance to it, and the resistance to the Internet has been called technophobia. Dr. James states that "Information literacy, computer literacy, and prolonged online experience are not effective in eliminating technophobic attacks or the momentary loss of ability of read instructions or figure out how to do something." I agree fully with this statement, and have seen it first hand. Most of the computer literate people I know have dispensed with reading manuals, and I myself rarely read manuals, help files or the notorious "readme texts." Companies have seen this trend of technophobia and have accommodated the user, getting rid of manuals in their software products, and using more context sensitive help files, reducing the amount of reading required. The stress of cyberspace citizenship will be important to study, and companies should continue the trend to help the user reduce technophobia.

Looking back on what Generation 4a (G4a for short, this is the students of the previous semester, Fall of 1996) said on the topic of cyberpsychology and the mind, most seemed to agree that the relationship between cyberspace and the mind have to do with dualism and the process that the mind is connected to cyberspace is through the computer. To further expand this idea of dualism, some people break dualism up into three sections, the affective, the cognitive, and the sensory-motor areas of the mind. The affective is the emotional contents of the mind or cyberspace. The cognitive is the reasoning or thinking process of the mind and cyberspace. The sensory-motor area is where you use your senses to gather information and react to them physically.

What Ginger Andrews says...
Andrews says that one similarity of cyberspace and the mind is that they are infinite. She also agrees on the theory of dualism, and emphasizes the aspect of the non-physical or spiritual side. She also states that "The virtual reality of cyberspace is a realm of the mind and the spirit. This is because we shed our bodily cloak and experience this world though the mind."

What Ross Tanaka says...
Tanaka starts off by saying that "Cyberspace is created by the minds of humans." He states that cyberspace is created by the mind so it is part of the mind. He also states that cyberspace receives the input of many people, therefore bringing up the idea of the communal mind. He goes on to compare the similarities of cyberspace and the mind. He starts off by stating that both the mind and cyberspace has no physical shape or form. They both are in virtual reality. Both the mind and cyberspace can be divided into three sections, the affective, the cognitive, and the sensory-motor areas. Finally, he compares how similar the mind and cyberspace organize information. He states that the mind organizes information by similarities or contextual cues. He states that the search engines, hotlink directories and bookmarks are similarly organized.

What Jill Umetsu says...
Umetsu states that "Cyber-space is a way of communicating with others through your computer." She states that the only physical piece is the computer. Umetsu says that this is similar to the way the mind works because of the fact that thoughts and feelings exist in the mind but manifest themselves physically, thorough your senses. Then she goes on to state that this is the principle of dualism. She states that one thing can "physically exist but not be physically present." She describes this as the spiritual aspect of the dualism. She also states the the affective, the cognitive, and the sensory-motor areas of the mind.

My working hypothesis for the connection between cyberspace and the mind is quite different from what everyone else says. Before taking this class, I have been using the Internet for over a year and a half. I have come up with a theory that is far less complicated than all that I have come across. It has changed very little from before I have taken this class.

I feel that a easier way to describe cyberspace is the extension of media. We are all familiar with media. The buzz word for the ninties is mutimedia, which means the bringing together of several media together in one platform, for example, bringing together sound, pictures, text, and full motion video to one platform. We interact with media everyday, from the music that we listen to, to the newspapers, magazines, and books that we read, the telephone that we use, to the TV that we watch everyday. Cyberspace is no different from any of these. What cyberspace does is elevate all of these forms of media to a new height of convenience, power, versatility, and interactively. In a way, cyberspace is the extension of the mind, because it feeds the mind new information, and therefore, expanding its horizons, maybe infinitely or to the limits of your Internet connection. But this is just the same as reading the newspaper expands your horizon, or watching the evening news gives you new information. Cyberspace just made the old ways of information more versatile. Therefore, the way cyberspace relates to the mind the same way traditional media relates to the mind.

Right now, cyberspace is more like the extension of text, with the current speed that it is running. You read a web page, newsgroup, or email, and then you are able to react to it. You either agree with what you read, disagree, or some other reaction. Your actions are based on your reaction. In cyberspace, you can click on the "BACK" button if you disagree, and if you really disagree, you can send a nasty email message to that person. If you agree, you click on a link that takes you to other pages that have similar ideas. It is just like reading a newspaper or magazine. If you agree with the article that you read, you will continue to read other articles in that magazine. If you disagree, you either throw the magazine away, tear it up, or burn it. If you really disagree, then you send the editor a nasty letter. Cyberspace and the old text method is basically just the same thing. In a way, this is like the affective, the cognitive, and the sensory-motor areas of a person's mind.

What media transmits to a person is information. This is not physical information, but the information that your mind processes, along with thoughts, feelings and dreams. This goes along with the idea of Dr. James theory that cyberspace is a vitual world that is made up of information. Information is different from data. Data is physical, such as the the thing that travels through your cable hookup that leads to your television or the thing that is stored on your computer. The manifestaion of that data in a form that allows the mind to interpert or make meaning of all of that data is called information. Just like how the newspaper or the 6:00 news gives you information, cyberspace gives you information. This information you recieved from media, you analyize it and see how it relates to you. Where does this anaylsis take place? It does not take place in a physical place. It takes place in the mind. It is that cyberspace is just more efficent in transmitting that information. Books, television, magazines, etc also convey information to the mind, therefore are also in the same catagory as cyberspace. Cyberspace is just a more efficent way of transmitting information to the mind.

Reactions from others: When I discussed my hypothesis with other people, some in this class, and others, who are knowledgeable in computers and cyberspace, agree with my hypothesis. They state that it is easy to understand and they are able to relate to this explanation.

To see what others were saying about these topics, I used several search engines. Using the Netscape homepage search page as a homebase, I used Webcrawler, AltaVista, Infoseek, and Excite to search for webpages and newsgroups. The results were less than encouraging. In Excite, the search word "Cyberpsychology" turned up mostly UH generational curriculum pages. Of the pages that turned up, these seemed to be the most relevant.

Dr. John Suler of Rider University has a web site called The Psychology of Cyberspace in which there is a collection of articles on the psychology of cyberspace. He describes cyberspace as a "psychological space," or a "transitional space, that is an extension of the individual intrapsychic world." An evidence that people see cyberspace as a psychological space is that people use "place" word to describe cyberspace. Cyberspace is somewhere people "cruise" or "surf," and words such as "worlds," "domains," or "rooms" are used. People often describe their computers as an extension of their minds or personalities. Dr. Suler even has an article comparing cyberspace to a dream, (Cyberspace - Cyberspace as Dream World). In this article, Dr. Suler also goes into the aspects of avatars.

A Resource Site for Analysis of Virtual Communities by Storm A. King. Mr. King had several interesting things on his page, including a list of essays that he wrote and a links page to Online journals that have to do with psychology. Some of the papers that he had included on his webpage are "Is the Internet Addictive or Are Addicts using the Internet?," "Impersonal Nature of Interpersonal Cyberspace Relations," and "The Psychology of Cyberspace."

My hypothesis: I feel that the best way to describe cyberspace is the extension of the current media forms. Through the use of computers and hypertext, we have given the traditional forms of media new life, giving it capabilities that it never had before. Thanks to hypertext, one can access pages and files that relate to the topic that you are reading about with a click of a mouse. This opens up many possibilities and is a hundred times more useful, and you have access to more information than ever before. Cyberspace, like all media, is like a extension of the mind, because of the fact that it expands your horizons because it presents information to you. I feel that this is adequate enough.

Evidence: My working hypothesis may differ in some points with Dr. James' hypothesis, especially on the point where relating cyberspace to media. But other points of mine are similar to Dr. James'. Both of us think that cyberspace is the extension of the mind. Also, my hypothesis fits in with some of Dr. James' other theories on Virtual Communities, and the Virtual Book. As for the views of G4, I feel that my views are compatible with their views. Their main statement is that the mind is split into three sections, the affective, the cognitive, and the sensory-motor. My views can also relate to those three areas.

The Future: I feel that in the future, cyberspace will continue to develop. The connections will continue to get faster, and because of the speed increase, text will not be the only means of communication. Soon video, and sound will be common place in cyberspace. I also feel that cyberspace will become more and more of a common thing every person's life. It maybe as common as the television, or telephone. Some people may speculate that it is a "new type of human evolution" but I have to disagree with that. Evolution also means that something new will replace something that has become obsolete. Cyberspace will accommodate all of the old media and increase its usefulness. Some people feared that when television was introduced in the 1950's that radio will disappear. But people still listen to the radio in the 1990's. They both coexist with each other. So will cyberspace. As for the spiritual aspect of cyberspace, some may take it that seriously to elevate it as a religion but, I disagree. Dr. James states that "clicking is a spiritual act." It is like saying that when you channel surf, you are performing a spiritual act.