John Seely Brown is a former Chief Scientist of Xerox PARC, and coauthor of two recent excellent books: The Social Life of Infomation (with Paul Duguid), and The Only Sustainable Edge (with John Hagel).

John answered the big question in a more philosophical vein than Ross Mayfield:

Cyberspace is an outmoded term. Let's consider as an alternative The Informated World, a world where the virtual and physical boundaries have become blurred and the virtual and physical worlds dance together and enhance each other.

Mark Weiser's vision of ubiquitous computing was a start down this phenomenological path where the concept of 'ready-at-hand' now wondrously crossed the physical/virtual boundary. Ideally, we all sought out a state of being where much like as in Heidegger's story, the blind man sitting feels the handle of the cane but once he starts walking the handle disappears and he feels as if he were directly touching the world.

Likewise, in the informated world, the interface disappears and we feel we can touch the augmented world directly.

Personally, I think this idea of technologies merging with us– not in the sci-fi implants kind of way, but merging through interaction and familiarity, the way a bicycle or really good pen can become an extension or expression of our bodies– is an important one to highlight. In my view, one reason cyberspace made sense for so long was that our interactions with computers supported the idea of The World being separate from The Matrix, with only the monitor joining the two together. Brown points out that as technologies change, the character of our experience with them changes; and thus our sense of the world– and of alternate digital worlds– inevitably changes as well.

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