Dan Hunter is a professor legal studies in the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. His article on cyberspace as place and the growth of a digital anti-commons does a terrific job of showing how the concept of cyberspace has been used to underwrite, rather than undermine, the imposition of property rights in the digital realm.

Dan is also a contributor of Terra Nova, an excellent group blog on online games. "I'm not sure that the words cyberspace or the net will ever be replaced," he wrote in response to the big question, "because they're such neat tags for the range of social practises that have emerged as a consequence of this new era in electronic connectedness."

But if I had to nominate a word it would be mesh. I think that the future of the net is in ubiquitous connectivity: which will mean that we will always be online and our physical environment and our online environments will mesh in a seamless way.

We will be in a virtual world as we walk around in the physical world, and all sorts of extensions will come to seem natural: being able to check out ownership records of that building there; having a virtual "emergency call" button available on our sunglasses a la William Gibson's Virtual Light; sitting in a park in downtown Philly, but exploring the Louvre in Paris; and so on.

My kids won't ever see a disjunction between the virtual and the "real", because they will have meshed long before they are aware that anyone ever thought of cyberspace as a place separate from their lives.

Earlier suggestions:

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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