The last word (for the moment, anyway) on successors to cyberspace goes to Schuyler Earle. Schuyler is the co-author of Mapping Hacks: Tips and Tools for Electronic Cartography (with Rich Gibson and Jo Walsh) and Google Maps Hacks (with Rich Gibson). Earle, Gibson and Walsh also collaborate on the Mapping Hacks blog.

Schuyler's response splits the difference between arguments (like David Sifry's) that the term cyberspace isn't going to disappear, and suggestions that the it'll survive because its meaning is going to change:

I suspect that the idea of information occupying a location somewhere, as embodied in the word "cyberspace," actually has great and subtle cognitive value. As networked computing devices become increasingly smaller, and spread through our physical environment, however, the notion of "cyberspace" as a "virtual" or alternate reality, will probably dissolve.

In the coming years, we may witness the vast quantity of essentially invisible information on every detail of the world we live in gradually extend /into/ the world, and become visible, in situ. As Jo Walsh puts it, "Information will live where it describes." She dubs this idea the infomesh, perhaps for its both spatially, and computationally, distributed nature.

Clearly, our first glimpses are already emerging through portable computing devices with LCD displays – laptops and PDAs and mobile phones and audio players and such. But, as the infomesh spreads — well, who knows?

Earlier suggestions:

Dan Hunter: Mesh

Cory Doctorow: Chattergoods

James Boyle: None

Kris Pister: UberDustenWissenshaftsVergnugen

Luke Hughes: Reality Online

David Sifry: Cyberspace

Andy Clark: Interactatron

John Seely Brown: The Infomated World

Ross Mayfield: On and Catalink

…plus many others in the Wired article

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