A proposal!

I wrote about this on my MySpace blog, but I'll do it here, too.

You may have read this article, "Cyberspace is dead." Apparently the term is well past its expiration date; well, fine by me. I never really liked it anyway. I don't mind it now only because I'm so used to hearing it.

So all these eggheads are trying to come up with a new term for whatever we should call the electronic space we find ourselves in. As the article states, "Twenty years after William Gibson coined the term 'cyberspace' in his novel Neuromancer, we live in a world of smart objects, always-on devices, and perpetually open information channels. The Internet feels less like an alternate world that we 'go to' and more like just another layer of life."

They list several alternates, but unsurprisingly I don't like any of their suggestions. "Infosphere" is the least bad. Except there's nothing really spherical about it. And it's four damn syllables - way too long. "The World" is less awkward, except it's not really descriptive at all. So I have decided on my own term.

I call the stuff around us, the electronic interconnectedness of all things, the i-ther. It's the same concept as the ether, which a very few of you might remember as a somewhat archaic english word. Only now, it is the internet-ether. The I-ether. The ither.

I seriously do like this word - it's better than the alternates, at least. I think I'll start using it.